Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies (13 page)

T
he ride from Wayne was tough: very hot and sultry, the sun beating down to the point where the tarmac looked as if it was
melting. A good night’s sleep had done nothing to alleviate our fatigue and all the aches and pains. After a couple of hours’
riding that sweating blacktop, we arrived in the town of Drumheller. In 1910, Colonel Samuel Drumheller had sunk the first
mine shaft in the region here, which led to it eventually becoming the foremost coal-producing region in western Canada.

But Drumheller has another claim to fame. It just happens to be the dinosaur capital of the world, with the Royal Tyrrell
Museum of Palaeontology housing the largest collection of fossilised bones in North America. You know you’re in dinosaur country
because as you roll into town you’re greeted by a massive T. rex with all its teeth bared, towering above the tourist information
office. Actually, T. rex and his friends are everywhere, with plaster dinosaurs jutting above shops selling fossils all the
way down Main Street. We decided that we ought
to drop by the museum and see if we could learn a little more about why this area was so important to palaeontologists.

Parking the bikes outside, we went to the desk and told them we were making a documentary about the extreme frontiers of Canada.
There could be nothing more extreme than dinosaur country, so could they help us learn a little more? Of course they could!
They were more than keen, and introduced us to the museum curator, François. He was a young guy – in fact he looked just out
of university – but he was a researcher and palaeontologist and the top dinosaur man at the museum. We asked him why the area
was so important, and he explained that only a mile north of the museum was a location known as the Albertosaurus bonebed –
a layer of rock where the fossilised bones of thirteen Albertosaurus dinosaurs had been found. He showed us a scene they’d
built to represent the landscape the dinosaurs would have roamed, complete with life-size models of these massive animals.
They were awesome; each walked on its hind legs and had tiny little front legs and a huge head with rows of massive teeth –
to me they looked a lot like T. rex.

When I mentioned that, François took me to another exhibit, the complete skeleton of an actual T. rex, intact and still in
the rock. I was gobsmacked when he told me it had been found right here in Alberta. Some of the bones had been so badly damaged
that they’d had to re-create them so they could show the skeleton. The pelvis, for example, was fabricated, and so was the
head, although they did have the real head housed in a cool, dark place deep in the bowels of the museum. The rest of what
I was looking at was real, though: the ribs, most of the legs and the tail. It looked huge to me, but François told me this
was actually one of the smallest skeletons of a T. rex ever recovered. He described the way the bones were laid in the rock
as a
typical death pose for a meat-eating dinosaur, the head tipped back and the tail curled up.

He told me they were making new finds all the time; only the other day they had discovered an ancestor of the Triceratops
that was eleven metres long. Apparently they were a rare find this far north; François believed there had been some environmental
issues that made it more difficult for them to survive up here. When I was a young boy, Triceratops was my absolute favourite
dinosaur, and I was wondering if there was any way we could go and see the dig for ourselves. Casting a glance at Russ, I
knew he was thinking the same thing. We’d bide our time and wait for the right moment, see if François was up for it.

We wandered the halls, drinking it all in. I paused at one glass case where a dinosaur fossil lay curled on its side – Gorgosaurus,
François told me, a distant relative of T. rex. This specimen had been found in an ancient river deposit, and François thought
it was the currents that had curled the bones into the awkward position. It must’ve been preserved very quickly after it died,
because all the bones were still connected, which is rare in any dinosaur fossil anywhere.

François became quite animated, telling me how much easier it is to put together a picture of what an animal would’ve looked
like when you find a complete skeleton in one hit rather than bone by bone. I could tell he loved his job.
I’d
love his job – researching, making finds, putting on displays like this for the public. I could really get into that.

He took me to the prep lab, where the magic actually takes place. This was the really interesting stuff. God, I was in my
element – the aches and pains of the rodeo, the tiredness all gone. I was like a kid in a sweet shop. A bunch of technicians
were perched at various benches, working on new fossils that had just been brought in. They wore masks over their faces and
were picking at the bones like surgeons, with massive cylindrical vacuum hoses suspended overhead to suck away the dust. François
said they were peeling the fossils from the rock: painstaking work, because it’s so easy to damage the bone as you’re doing
it.

I’d seen the smallest T. rex, and in another room François showed me the complete skeleton of one of the largest ever discovered;
this massive meat-eating machine was twelve metres from head to tail, almost forty feet in old money. That’s longer than a
house is tall. Standing so close, I could feel a little shiver running down my neck; it’s the size of these things that really
gets the blood pumping. He also showed me the bones of another Gorgosaurus in the same death pose as the T. rex, and explained
that originally it was thought that the bones were found like that because of the way the muscles withered and the ligaments
shortened as the creature decomposed. Recently, however, scientists have started to believe that it’s more to do with how
they died, why they died, some kind of brain infection kicking in after the trauma, a shortage of oxygen that caused the skeleton
to buckle that way. Mammals don’t do that; it’s only ever found in reptiles, apparently. It was fascinating stuff.

You forget just how long the dinosaurs were around for. For example, I had no idea that T. rex and Brontosaurus lived seventy-five
million years apart. Did you know that? You watch
Jurassic Park
and they’re all there together, but in reality there were millions of years between them. As much time separates us from
T. rex as separates T. rex from those massive sauropods, the plant-eaters like Brachiosaurus.

We went into the workroom where they were taking apart the massive plaster casts that they encase the fossilised rock in so
it can be transported back to the lab. I looked at one where the layers of burlap in the plaster had been peeled back; I could
see rock complete with a set of teeth embedded in it. The tools the technicians use are pretty varied: scalpel blades, silk
paint-brushes, toothbrushes and dental picks. They use glue to fuse the bones together as they start to prise them from the
rock, because that way they don’t crack and break off. It was fascinating to watch how they applied the glue with a syringe
that allowed it to go into tiny cracks to shore up any damage before it actually happened.

I spoke to one of the technicians, Donna, who told me it’s like a detective story. You find the fossilised rock in the field
and think it’s probably one thing, but as you start to work the fossil loose, to piece the bones together, you change your
mind again and again, and by the time you’ve completed the task you’ve got something you had no idea about when you started
out. A real journey of discovery; I loved that. It takes years to figure out what something is, to get it from its fossilised
state into something you can identify for certain. There was an egg on display that had taken nine months to get from the
rock to the point where they could put it on show. I thought that was pretty cool – a gestation period before it was brought
back to life. Donna said that what blew her away was the fact that each time she did this, she was the first person ever to
handle that particular artefact.

I commented that it must be a dream to work there. ‘It is,’ François replied. ‘This is one of the best facilities of its kind
in the world; all we have to do is cross the parking lot and we’re in the Badlands and the fossils are literally everywhere.’

‘Are they?’ I looked again at Russ. ‘Any chance we could see that for ourselves, François?’

It wasn’t quite just across the parking lot; François fetched his truck and we started driving north. He was taking us to
Horse Thief Canyon (those damn cowboys again), where apparently just walking through the valleys you could find bones poking
out of the rock.

The museum vehicle was another great truck, by the way: a beaten-up Ford 250 twin cab, in white with accompanying rust. The
view ahead was stunning: a series of flat-topped cliffs where the rock was exposed in overlapping layers. This place was only
seventy-one million years old, which was quite a bit younger than the area where they found the fossils we’d been looking
at in the museum.

Standing on the hilltop, I could see the canyon below stretching for mile after mile, with layers and layers of rock apparent
in the fractured hillside. This was where François and his colleagues came to play. He referred to the formation as a 3D exposure
of the rocks, with each layer representing a different period in history. The layers were of various colours: white where
rivers had flowed, for example, and black where coal had carbonised in the kind of swamps where the dinosaurs of the period
liked to forage. The history of the earth was right there before our very eyes.

As we made our way down the slopes, we started to look for bones. I was following François, all of us on our hands and knees
in the heat. I wasn’t sure I could tell the difference between a stone and a fossil, no matter how many bones he said there
were around here. It was exciting, though; I was on the
hunt for dinosaurs. Finally François picked up something and passed it to me. ‘That’s a piece of dinosaur bone, Charley,’
he said. ‘Can you see all the little pores in it?’

I could see the tiny marks in the stone, but if he hadn’t told me, I would just have assumed it was rock. It was amazing to
be holding part of an animal that had roamed what would have been swamp land seventy million years previously. François passed
me another piece with lichen growing on it. Lichen likes calcium, and even in seventy-million-year-old bones there is calcium.

A little further on, we found another piece of bone embedded in the rock. This one was much larger, and I was really excited
now. Donna gave me a brush so I could get rid of the dust that was coating it, then François and I scraped away the rock and
dirt. I imagined unearthing this piece and then another and another until we had put together an entire skeleton. They told
me it was a piece of broken tooth from one of the duck-billed dinosaurs, and I took a moment to sit back on my heels and gaze
across the valley, thinking about that. This morning we had been in a mine, and now here I was with the curator of the Royal
Tyrrell Museum, scraping dirt from the tooth of a dinosaur.

Talk about extremes: we’d begun our journey dipping a piece of twenty-thousand-year-old ice into our drinks, and here I was
excavating seventy-one-million-year-old bones.

When I got back on the bike again that afternoon, I started thinking over all the experiences we’d had since landing at Cape
Spear: the Vikings, the
Titanic
, diving the wrecks at Tobermory and riding off-road. I thought about paddling the Bloodvein and
spending time in a First Nations sweat lodge. And now I’d been on a dig with the Royal Tyrrell.

Calgary was ahead, and having done one rodeo, we were arriving just in time for the world-famous Stampede. Back in Drumheller,
we’d mentioned that we were headed this way, and they’d told us about a woman who would be taking part in what they called
the ‘extreme cowboy’ competition. I wasn’t sure what that was exactly, but apparently it’s a mad competition, and, being into
mad competitions, I was hoping to find her and persuade her to show me a few tricks. Well, to be honest, I wasn’t sure I was
hoping for anything other than a hot bath and a glass of Sancerre, but Russ had other ideas.

We parked the bikes outside the arena in Calgary. As we made our way towards it, I could smell horses and cow shit. I cast
my eye across rows and rows of livestock pens with lines of trucks backed up against them. Beyond the arena was downtown Calgary,
with its skyscrapers and the Olympic Plaza. Up until the late 1960s, the downtown area was low-rise, but with the Arab oil
embargo of 1973, Canada’s oil became that much more important and buildings started to fly up.

The woman we were hoping to meet was Kateri Cowley, who worked her father Stan’s ranch, not far from here. We asked for her
at the gate and were told she was in the arena practising for the parade, so we made our way inside past the stock pens and
the trucks. I’d been here before briefly with Ewan on
Long Way Round
, but we’d never really got this close. Up ahead a couple of cowboys were sitting on their horses, and beyond them a whole
crowd of people were gathered.

They were rehearsing for the opening ceremony, galloping up and down the length of the dusty arena. We saw Kateri canter past
wearing a green shirt and a black hat. Eventually she rode
up to say hello. She told us they were practising for the grand entry to what she called ‘the greatest outdoor show on earth’.
It sounded amazing, and it wasn’t just for one night; the Stampede would go on for two weeks, and every night the grand entry
would be the same, with a parade and fireworks – the whole nine yards.

Kateri told me that the extreme cowboy thing I’d heard about was actually what was known as the Cowboy Up challenge, where
the rider has to showcase a variety of skills. If you’ve ever been on a ranch, you’ll know the last thing you want anyone
to say to you is ‘cowboy up’, because it means you’re whining and not up to the task. Although it was the Cow
boy
Up challenge, Kateri was very much a cow
girl
, and she liked to be referred to that way.