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Drumheller
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Places
- Hits: 1350
On the whirlwind tour of Calgary with the daughter, "If you had a father for 8 hours, where would you like to go?" I ask, and she wanted to revisit Drumheller, go searching for dinosaurs in the badlands, relive better memories of her youth, and so after the 7 hour haul from Nelson to Calgary I picked her up from school and we went onward to Drumheller.
It's been a few years, changed a lot, a lot of new twee museums and amusements designed to capitalize on the tourist dollars, the audio/visual museum (??), dunno, a Star Trek museum, which doesn't make sense unless you think of that episode with Captain Kirk and the Gorn, and then it does, and all sorts of other fleeting attractions caught from the corner of our eyes. I'd stop, but our time is limited, we fill up at McDonalds, visit Dollorama for drinks, and then head off into the canyons...
A beautiful day. Not too hot, big Cumulus clouds building in the background, perfect for this...
Walking, a thousand little dead-end canyons to explore, our first real find:
Which, if you look close, is a piece of quartzite boulder napped into the shape of a hide scraper. A native artifact.
Big, the base (bottom) would fill the palm of your hand, the edges obviously shaped: most boulders in these canyons are complete, and better artifacts are found made from better materials, and with clearly better workmanship, but the napping on the edges, several flakes broken off, suggest this was made with purpose. It's a prize.
(Note: That said, I'm pretty bad at mis-identifying things as "Native artifacts" ... and it's very possible this isn't...but, it seems a little too convenient that nature would have napped this boulder several times to produce this flake, hard enough to find a single broken boulder, let alone one that's been broken and broken again. I vote artifact.)
And from here onto other finds:
Dinosaur bone in soil...
Dinosaur vertebrae (left), leg and claw (Right).
***
As always we find dozens of bones, but that's not why were here, it's a competition to find the best skull, get naming rights on a new species, and in our few hours we find nothing we can interest the museum in, but there's always a thousand more canyons to lead us on, and the day is ending too soon, we're just beginning and we have to get back to Calgary for dinner with the boy, I could spend weeks out here, and she's giving me to believe she could too, endless little dead-ends to explore, countless eroding discoveries, and the thought of having to be back to work by tomorrow are killing me, but I'll be back next year with a week or two to kill and then we'll be finding it all...
Summer
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 1413
And now, the Starbelly festival just passed, the summer's in full swing. The unending cycle of shit service, worse food that shows up cold and late, of tourists tired of high prices and disappointing selections, and I can only take their side. And there's no place to go. There are other restaurants, sure, but out here they all work the same formula, and to dine out is to resign yourself, admit defeat, you can't light the campfire, there's a fire ban, you just can't be bothered, and we're here to exploit you...
I feel guilty every time someone fucking tips, I feel their unexpressed disappointment, don't blame them, not a bit, and if there was someplace, anywhere to go that didn't capitalize on this, that could do a good job, valued a good job, I'd be outta here tomorrow, but there isn't, I know people in almost all the restaurants and it's the same shit over and over again. Lousy management, lousy staff, there's nobody out here that could come to a reasonable definition of "Hospitality", although there's plenty who'd try, and I bide my time...
7, maybe 10 or 12 weeks tops to go. Then? Anywhere but here.
The Party
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 744
And, fully staffed now with the weekly turnover of transients, there's a party on the loading dock, all the new hires and the survivors from last year, precious few survivors, but the new hires don't know that, some, just here for a couple of weeks to get a check before moving on to the coast, others trying to lay down longer term plans, think that this might be their dream job, that they can stick it out here, the old-timers don't think to tell them, warn them, we need them here to lighten our own load but we all know, come fall, that 90% of us will be unemployed, and we're all hoping it's them that stay and not us...meanwhile, it's a beautiful summer night and they're all drunk on the loading dock, another 6 weeks left to the party...
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