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Explorer

Past stories Living off-the-grid New Brunswick's Saint John River Ontario's Bruce Trail Canadian Ski Marathon Elk Island National Park Rallying for rallysport Montreal - Circus city Beluga Bytes Dawson - a musical adventure Bald Eagle Confederation Trail Boning up on the badlands Ukkusiksalik National Park Geocaching Discover Cypress Hills Saint Joseph's Oratory A walk through Stanley Park Sudbury's science centre Acadia continues Toronto's underground world

Badlands come by their name honestly. The word is thought to have originated on the north-western Great Plains, where early French explorers encountered "les mauvaises terres à traverser" — quite literally, "bad lands to cross."

Badlands offer spectacular landscapes: a mixture of steeped-sloped mesas and buttes, deep, winding gullies and coulees, and bizarrely shaped hoodoos. They form when weak sedimentary rock (such as shale, siltstone or sandstone) is exposed to erosion by wind and rain. Badlands are especially prevalent in arid or semi-arid areas where storms are short and torrential, producing rapid runoff and high rates of erosion — often several millimetres a year.

While badlands are scattered throughout Canada's prairies, Alberta is home to some Canada's largest and most impressive examples. They're especially common in the river valleys of southern Alberta, where badlands flank some 300 kilometres of the Red Deer River. Dinosaur Provincial Park, near Drumheller, offers some of the area's most spectacular sights, now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Alberta's badlands were formed by a combination of glacier movement, meltwater and precipitation. Seventy-five million years ago (in what's called the late Cretaceous period) the area was a marsh bordering the Bearpaw Sea — a vast body of water that extended from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. This sea receded 68 million years ago, leaving a thick layer of sediment that now forms the base of the hoodoos seen in Dinosaur Provincial Park. During the last ice age (15,000 years ago) Alberta's badlands were flat and covered by a massive sheet of ice, hundreds of metres thick. This ice began to retreat, producing glacial meltwaters that carved out the landscape. Today, the erosion process continues with rain and wind.