It seemed the journey would never be over. The bus rolled on and on, over the rises and through the troughs of the limitless prairie. Then, abruptly, it stopped, without any change of scene to alert us that our destination was near, we had arrived. There we were on the edge of a precipice looking down on a welter of peaks and pinnacles. Had I been asked, I would have been at a loss to describe the strange vista confronting me. Only as an adult am I able to put names to the wild confusion of shapes and forms. For as far as the eye could see, delicate spires, jutting knobs, rounded haystacks, giant hoodoo toadstools, knife-edged divides, grassy plateaus, steep-walled canyons, and the slotted gashed of coulees tumbled the land down to the deeply incised river valley below.

I was surprised. I had expectations about the nature of hills. One thing I was quite certain of was that one did not look down upon hills. Yet, here I was, doing just that. Puzzled by this apparent contradiction, I was relieved to learn that I had not been misled about dragons. They were definitely here, only they were called "dinosaurs." All day, I expected to meet a dinosaur head on, as we rounded the curves of hiking trails. But it wasn't until evening, as we were boarding the bus to go home, that I caught sight of one. As I glanced back across the hills, wrapped now in the soft purples of waning light, I saw the huge body of a dinosaur outlined in the dying rays of the sun. He was at rest, his heavy limbs folded under him. His long neck curved gracefully over his shoulder and his head was eased down upon his massive back. With a happy shiver, I jumped aboard the bus. Like the fairy tale princesses I read about, I had traveled through bad lands, the domain of this great and fearsome beast, and regained the safety of a familiar haven.

That little girl and her day in the badlands are long in the past. But perhaps the gist of the landscape's appeal is captured in this initial response to it. It is austere and somewhat harsh. Lacking the flattering effects of vegetation, its rocky forms are reduced to their fundamental nature, much like the unfleshed dinosaur skeletons they entomb. The landscape may not be beautiful in the conventional sense. What it offers, instead, is a depth of dramatic distinction which is mysterious and many-faceted. It is unexpected. It challenges the imagination with hints of other worlds and other times."

- Renie Gross, Dinosaur Country: Unearthing the Alberta Badlands