Vacations & Visitors

The 2023 holiday season is now just a memory. Many folks might have already travelled or booked a warmer climate vacation this new year. I have made trips to southern locations over the years – always between November and March. I have found Medicine Hat weather between April and October to be quite reasonable (for the most part), with not much winter to deal with. We are fortunate to live in “Canada’s Sunniest City”. Environment Canada has done the math; 2,544 hours, averaging 330 sunny days per year. (Yuma, Arizona claims to be the sunniest city in the world – 4, 015 sunny hours per year.) Our long, hot summer days and winters interrupted by warming chinook winds make this city a comfortable place to live, work and play. Any summer travels I have taken usually don’t see me going any further south than Montana. Our region is truly amazing for a Canadian climate. Southern Alberta is a gateway to the Canadian Badlands. In my eight years working in the visitor services sector, one of the most asked questions was, “Why is this the badlands?” Most locals understand the area around Drumheller is what we know to be the heart of the badlands. Driving into Alberta from the east, on the Trans-Canada highway, there is a sign welcoming you to the Canadian Badlands but there are no hoodoos to be seen around here. East from Drumheller, to the Saskatchewan border, south to the US border, then southeast to the Cypress Hills are random layers of sedimentary rock – home to the largest deposits of dinosaur bones in the world. The multicolored canyons and wind carved hoodoos are truly a sight to behold. Early French explorers cursed the steep-sloped flat-topped mountains and deep winding gullies as “bad lands to cross” hence the badlands region as we know it today. Many visitors to our area have never heard the terms “hoodoo” or “coulee”. There were always reference pages and photos available to explain these wonky local phenomena. One more interesting ask was directions to the “Badlands Guardian”. A geomorphological land feature was discovered in 2005 by someone in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan using Google Earth. Until satellite images were readily available, this so-called “face” is just a valley eroded into the clay banks. The television series, “Ancient Aliens” has literally put this formation on the map. What most of us find more of a nuisance on the prairies, who knew gophers could be a tourist attraction? I was surprised to learn our typical prairie gopher is not found in Australia. An Australian visitor ran around, chasing gophers to photograph as he had never seen or heard of these creatures before. The reference binder had a couple of pages on the Richardson ground squirrel and I certainly became more aware of how interesting they really are. Seeing my city and region through the eyes of a visitor has made me appreciate what we have even more. I believe we are all ambassadors. Each of us has local knowledge to share.