small town alberta

Would you drive an hour and half to see this?

Not just this mind, there’s plenty of others (and there’s more on my flickr site)

All part of the fun of the fair at the “World Famous Torrington Gopher Hole Museum”. It’s world famous so I’m assuming you’ve all heard of it. Apparently if you are a member of PETA then you’ve definitely heard about it and, surprise surprise, you don’t like it. Turns out it was their outrage that made the museum world famous. It seems that Torrington, Alberta, was looking for a tourist attraction and somehow or other the gopher museum idea came up. Wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall at that council meeting? Anyway they went with it and now Torrington has gone big on gophers in as many ways as possible.

Seems to work as it lured me and my friend Meg from work out there. Torrington however wasn’t our only goal. It turns out that small town Alberta has many delights in those parts. We were only 1 hour away from the Big Valley Creation Science Museum so how could miss out on that?

The museum itself looks like a modest house on the main street, admittedly one with a dinosaur sculpture on the wall and dinosaur footprints in the garden. The interior has clearly seen quite a lot of investment and is certainly well thought-out. You could even say it seemed quite intelligently designed (boom boom!). Things seemed somewhat less convincing when you stopped to read what it said however. Quite a lot of effort had gone in to building a model ark and explaining the “eye-witness” accounts of its dimensions. They also provided useful answers to some of those awkward logistical questions that may have been causing you to doubt the veracity of the ark and flood story. Did Noah take dinosaurs on board? Obviously yes – he took two of everything. But this is using the old noggin… he took baby dinosaurs! A lot more convenient than a full size diplodocus it turns out. I shall now think of them not so much as juveniles but as handy travel-sized sauropods. You were probably also concerned that the lions on board would have eaten the sheep. Again the answer is baby lions, baby sheep. Baby lions not nearly as fierce it turns out. Plus nobody was really eating anything as when animals get stressed they hibernate thus decreasing the need for provisions or for Shem, Ham and Japheth to be constantly mucking out the velociraptors.

If that wasn’t enough they produced a reproduction of an illuminated scroll from Lambeth Palace showing Henry III’s direct patrilineal descent from Adam and Eve. Luckily it didn’t dwell on the awkward questions of the incestuous relations of Seth and his other brothers and sisters. I’m sure things were different in them days.

Attention was given to the age of the earth and the nonsense about millions and billions of years. If you can turn a teddy bear into calcium carbonate in a matter of years by leaving it in a appropriate stream then whose to say you can’t knock out some granite or a nice mica-schist given a century or two. Well the world’s geologists I would think but that’s by the by. Another area they dealt with was depictions of dinosaurs in prehistoric and medieval art. Turns out there’s a perfect stegasaurus carving in a Cambodian temple while our very own Carlisle Cathedral seems to have a depiction of two brontosaurii knecking. The attitude being “If you draw it, you saw it”. I look forward to a unicorn skeleton turning up.

Anyway I didn’t get involved in any heated debates, the man on the door was very friendly, he left us alone and he seemed at peace with himself and that’s what it’s all about eh?

Big Valley had some other interesting, if more conventional, sights as well. They have preserved their grain elevator as a silent landmark on the prairie skyline and that was interesting to see as well as some of the railway memorabilia they had on display.

Walking back to the car we met Ralph the Wonder Camper. Ralph had driven up from California on his Harley. He had a trailer strapped to the back from which he could deploy the most extraordinarily sophisticated camping set-up. Sleeping for 6, a separate shower block, hot water on tap, a larder, dining table, DVD player, Coleman stove, oven and even air conditioning for those 100 degree days in the desert. It was most impressive.