Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park is a provincial park in Central Alberta, Canada, located about 103 km (64 mi) southeast of Red Deer and 16 km (9.9 mi) east of Trochu. The park is situated along the Red Deer River and features badlands topography. Its name derives from the large plateau in the middle of the park, 200 m (660 ft) above the Red Deer River, which has never been developed by humans and retains virgin prairie grasses.
The park is situated at an elevation ranging from of 720 m (2,360 ft) to 875 m (2,871 ft) and has a surface of 34.5 km2 (13.3 sq mi).
The park is the site of an ancient buffalo jump, where Cree native people drove bison over the cliffs in large numbers to provide for their tribes. The hills also contain unique flora and fauna that are not found this far east of the Rocky Mountains in as large numbers as at Dry Island. The park contains the most important Albertosaurus bone bed in the world, which was first discovered by Barnum Brown in 1910 and rediscovered by Dr. Phil Currie in 1997. The bone bed excavation was halted at the end of August, 2005. Dr. Currie left the Royal Tyrrell Museum in October 2005 to become the Canada Research Chair with the Biological Sciences Department at the University of Alberta. Under university auspices, excavation at the bone bed has continued in the summers of 2006, 2007 and 2008.
Read more about Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park: Activities
Famous quotes containing the words dry, island, buffalo, jump, provincial and/or park:
“A too-fluent green
Suggested malice in the dry machine
Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.
Who then beheld the figures of the clouds
Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“As I started with her out of the city warmly enveloped in buffalo furs, I could not but think how nice it would be to drive on and on, so that nobody should ever catch us.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The limits of prudence: one cannot jump out of a burning building gradually.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Therefore awake! make haste, I say,
And let us, without staying,
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the Park a-maying!”
—Unknown. Sister, Awake! (L. 9–12)