Everything That Happened Here

Welcome to Grasslands National Park.

Here we have the killdeer badlands, and that's what makes us special.

And that's what we'll be kind of getting into a little bit today, because this is where we find all kinds of cool pieces of history, both human and dinosaur.

So we are going to be going back 70 million years in the next 60 minutes.

In this Canadian National Park in which I'm standing, there is history spanning back 70 million years.

That's as far back as the Cretaceous period.

And while you can probably say that of most places in the world, here in what's called the East Block of Grasslands National Park, the other half of the park about two hours' drive away is called, perhaps predictably, the West Block, you can actually see the history before your very eyes.

From pre-human to early indigenous peoples to ranchers and nowadays, travellers like me looking for a national park to escape the crowds.

And so I began... with my interpretive guide Rose at the beginning, with a hike that promised a speedy, cliff-note-style history of the area.

This Badland area would have looked quite different than it does today.

It wouldn't be this quite arid desert, but in fact, 70 million years ago, it was actually completely underwater.

So this right here is kind of the last stage of the western interior seaway.

So at one point, almost all of kind of western North America was all underwater.

By about 67 million years ago, a lot of that seaway has really dried up, and we're now looking at kind of this marshy, coal, swamp kind of area.

So looking out here, it wouldn't have been looking like this.

It would have been quite a bit more water than we have today, but also you would have seen huge palm trees, ferns, and of course our dinosaurs wandering around here.

Looking out at the Badlands now, it's a sprawling collection of domes of island-like peaks, rising dramatically upwards from the miles of prairie land that surrounds it.

Known as buttes, these hills are devoid of the green carpet of vegetation typical of this area, and instead are a visually shocking layer cake of clay and rock, raging in colour from grey to black, beige to white.

They got their name as Badlands long ago, so called by farmers and ranchers as well as indigenous people as nothing would grow on them.

But their striped geological makeup is what hides a hidden lesson in history for those who take the time to look.

It's kind of, I like to call it earth being a storyteller.

So as time goes on, these layers of sediment accumulate on the earth's surface, creating almost like an invisible clock where every layer of sediment is kind of capturing a different moment in time.

So the land today actually shows us how the earth was made.

It also contains a clear line, literally, that's visible to the naked eye, which demarks the exact moment the dinosaurs roaming here were made extinct, discovered in the 1980s.

It was this line in the sediment column that looks almost like an Oreo cookie.