An Alberta road-trip means touring the Rockies, right? But wait… if you limit yourself to the Rockies, you’re missing out on some seriously quirky and unique stuff!! How about some fancy-dressed gophers? A Star Trek town? The world’s largest whatever? Or a jumping buffalo site? Also, in the news… Cuthbert poses for his first ever professional photo-shoot (yup!!!). Here’s our latest from western Canada, still waiting-out the ‘rona virus palaver…
Ghost Valley
Through the magic of inter-webbery, we recently met Ashley and Richard Giordano (Desk to Glory). Ash and Richard are Canadian overlanders doing their ‘rona virus stay-cation in Calgary and kindly went out with us to find some awesome spots for off-roading with Cuthbert in the Ghost River Valley. Y’know… those off-the-beaten-track places that locals sensibly don’t advertise to us ‘johnny-foreigner-overlanders’ and rightly keep to themselves 😉.
Ashley is a travel writer and wanted to do a feature on Cuthbert for the Overland Journal, whilst Richard is a professional photographer taking some amazing shots of Cuthbert to go with it. Cuthbert posed like a little star for his first professional photo shoot. You’ll have to wait to read the article when it’s published in the Overland Journal, but in the meantime, you can see Richard’s amazing photos on his website.
Fancy (World Famous) Gophers
So… the Alberta road trip quirky stuff! First, the village of Torrington where they decided in 1996 to create a series of dioramas depicting scenes of village life. Yeah… and? Well… here’s the thing… these dioramas feature a load of stuffed and dressed-up gophers. Yup, you read that right! At the ‘World Famous Gopher Hole Museum’ each gopher is dressed in his own little tailor-made outfit, ready for his starring, albeit static, role. There’s a priest, a duck-hunter, a firefighter, a beautician… all of life is reflected there!
Yes, it must be said, the gophers are more than just a teeny bit bizarre. And yes, there are surely more conventional ways to attract visitors to a village. But these little chaps are absolutely fabulous; the attention to detail and the humour is wonderful. In a normal (non-Covid) year, the museum receives visitors from all over the world. It’s definitely one of the quirkiest, most fun small attractions we have seen on our travels.
And in case you’re not satisfied with viewing the ‘gopheramas’ (that’s our own made up name!) try spotting the various water-hydrants that have been cunningly disguised as gophers around the village. The likeness is uncanny, you’ll have trouble spotting them 😂🤣😂
Vulcan
In Alberta there is the ’quirky’, and then there is (in the cheesiest and best possible way) the ‘downright bizarre’. The small town of Vulcan, Alberta was originally named after the Roman god of fire. But when the creators of the original Start Trek tv series churlishly stole the name to be the home planet of Mr Spock, the good people of Vulcan, Alberta spotted an opportunity for a fun association.
There are various Star Trek themed attractions for the delight of Trekkies and for the general amusement of everyone else: the Starship Enterprise sits proudly on a plinth at the entrance to the town and the visitor centre is a museum to the whole Star Trek story, where true Trekkies can dress-up in costumes for photos in front of Star Trek scenery (an opportunity which we… errr… politely declined). There is a bronze bust and hand-print of Spock actor Leonard Nimoy from his visit to the town in 2010, plus other little Trekkie details all over town, such as murals of the characters, themed street names/signs, and Starship Enterprise shaped streetlights. It has to be seen to be believed. ‘Live long and prosper’ people!! 🖖
Jumping Buffalos
Some places don’t need fiction for a bizarre story. There’s an attraction in southern Alberta going by the fabulous name of ‘Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump’. Here, fact is as quirky as fantasy!
On an Alberta road-trip it’s noticeable that every now and then, the gently rolling hills are rudely interrupted by a steep-sided river valley escarpment. Coming across these small canyons would have been a bit of a bugger back in the days of crossing the continent with horse-drawn wagons or laying a railroad. But the First Nation people took advantage of the landscape as an ingenious aid to buffalo hunting.
These smart guys realised that rather than the tedious struggle they usually faced to hunt and kill a buffalo, all they had to do was shoo a whole herd in the general direction of the cliffs and they would career over the edge en masse to their doom. Job done. Must have been a bit like getting the fast food of their time!
The ‘Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo-Jump’ site (Canada Parks’ national heritage interpretive centre) was closed for Covid so we had a wasted journey to that particular site ☹. But all was not quite lost. With a bit of Googling and map searching, it’s not hard to find other sites where the buffalo-jump-thing happened, e.g. Dry Buffalo Jump Park. You can look at the landscapes and imagine for yourself, the tactics of shooing the buffalos over the edges of the beautiful escarpments.
World’s Largest…
Canada just loves a ‘World’s Largest’. There are sooo many, particularly in Alberta. We drove-on past the World’s Large Golf Tee (didn’t really feel the desperate need to stop for that one) but one that we absolutely couldn’t resist was the whacky World’s Largest Dinosaur in Drumheller. The whole area is famous for its paleontology, fossils and bones so the giant dinosaur thing does kind of make sense here. We reckoned the only way to show the scale of Mr Dino was to get a photo next to Cuthbert. See… it really is big!
There are lots of other ‘World’s Largest…’ that we have missed in Alberta, so you might care to check out such bizarreties as the World’s Largest Easter Egg, Oil Lamp, Sausage, Mallard Duck, Mushroom or Pyrogy… I kid you not! They are all there to admire!
What else?
If all that isn’t enough to get you onto an Alberta road-trip, how about this tiny church near Drumheller? It doesn’t claim to be the World’s Smallest (so presumably there is a smaller one somewhere in the world) but its claim to fame is that it has accommodated over 10,000 worshippers, six at a time. Must’ve taken a while 🤔
A tiny church… and an overlanding rock
Or an overlanding rock? Slap-bang in the middle of a random field near Okotoks is a huuuge piece of rock, just sitting there, looking at bit ‘Billy-no-mates’. Turns out, this rock was one of the earliest overlanders! A few hundred-thousand years ago he decided he wasn’t happy in the northern Rockies. So he hit the road (so to speak) on a glacier and travelled down here to the southern rolling hills. He’s now known as the ‘Okotoks Erratic’. Why ‘erratic’? It’s a geology thing, apparently.
We have spent quite a bit of time in the hip town of Canmore which is a very cool place if you like quirky art, and rabbits. Yes, Canmore rabbits… the bunny variety. Apparently over 30 years ago some resident with a grudge released 12 domestic pets into the community. They bred, well… like rabbits… and there are now an estimated 1,500-2,000 rabbits running ‘wild’ around town. They’re cute but controversial… one man’s ‘cute’ is another man’s ‘garden-chomper’ 😐🐰.
Fall now
After salvaging the second-half of the ‘rona virus summer, we’ve been lucky to see a fair chunk of western Canada. The beauty has been marred only occasionally by the enormous smoke clouds drifting up from the horrendous forest fires just to the south in USA. Covid has obviously changed our 2020 plans significantly and like most people, we are certainly not where we thought we might be in October 2020. But, as some famous person or other once said… ‘we are where we are’. And an Alberta road trip in the autumn is darn good thing to do. The autumn colours around us are spectacular and we’ve had many gloriously sunny warm days. In Banff we even managed to launch our Boaty McBoatface for one final voyage of 2020. And the ski-season is on the horizon… 😎
