In Alberta on our third day of travel

The guard at the border had a term for Alberta: "the Texas of Canada." Meaning (we thought) oil, cattle, wide-open spaces. We had a beautiful day, full of sun and puffy clouds, driving across high meadows and pastures dotted with oil rigs, gravel operations, cattle, and hay fields. We passed the site of the Frank Slide, where half a mountain sheared off in 1903, sending tons of boulders down on a mining town.

At the entrance to Alberta’s World Heritage Site.

The day's highlight was Head-Smashed-In, a world heritage site where every fall for some 4000 years, Indians frightened a herd of bison off a cliff top, provisioning themselves for the winter. The ingenuity of people on foot, with tools of stone and wood, to make cairns in rows to funnel the animals toward the unseen cliff, scaring them with the smell of wolf skins, taking advantage of their poor vision and tendency to herd together....a work of genius and bravery. Then they got horses and rifles, and that was the end of the Buffalo Jump.

The Visitor Center. Go inside and up to the top and out, to see the long edge of the cliff. Behind me is the valley of the Oldman River, where people camped and preserved the meat, sinew, hides, bones, and every single bit of each animal. The scale here is big.

Buffalo running left to right, chased by men in wolf skins, couldn’t save themselves by the time they saw the danger. The fall is about 20’.

When I posted this on Facebook, I got a comment that it was too cruel to celebrate. But we thought the intelligence of humans really showed here, with nothing but their cleverness, cooperation, and a bunch of rocks and branches, to bring down animals weighing half a ton or more, and make a life in truly wilderness.

Nancy on Saturday, May 13.