Medicine wheels, hoodoos and jet boats
Bar Diamond Guest Ranch offers a cowboy experience with plenty of activities
BINDLOSS, ALTA.— Carol Hern asks me to close my eyes and hold out my arm, then resist while she tries to push my arm down. Each time she pushes, I resist.
Then she asks me to step forward over the rocky terrain. She pushes, and my arm falls limply to my side. I’m resisting with all my strength, and sneak a peek to see she’s holding my arm down with only two fingers.
“It happens every time,” she says, and laughs. When I look down, I see I’m standing just outside the markings of an ancient medicine wheel, made of stones forming a circle and extending into rays. Hern is using kinesiology to demonstrate the “energy” felt within the circle, which appears to dissipate immediately upon exiting the circle.
Here, on 13,760 hectares of ranch land in the Alberta Badlands, are two medicine wheels and a vision quest site, estimated to be 5,000 years old. These are the only twin medicine wheels discovered in North America, making this a particularly significant spiritual site for the Blackfoot who once roamed these plains.
It’s easy to see why this land is considered sacred (after all, the arms don’t lie): the medicine wheels overlook the U-shaped river valley below, where two rivers meet at the curve of the U. The land, covered in sagebrush and prairie grass, stretches as far as the eye can see.
Even today, there are no signs of modern-day life to spoil the view.
Avisit to these sites is just one of the activities on tap for visitors to Bar Diamond Guest Ranch, run by Hern and her husband Jim. There are plenty of dude ranches in North America for city slickers seeking to swap their suits for cowboy hats, but this ranch offers something a little bit different: the Badlands.
Alberta’s Badlands are perhaps best known for their eerie moonscapes and dinosaur bones in Drumheller Valley, but they extend all the way along the Red Deer River Valley to the Saskatchewan border.
French-Canadian explorers named the region “Badlands,” or “les mauvaises terres” in 1743 to describe this arid land of canyons, coulees and gullies.
The land, though, isn’t exactly “bad.” It’s full of dinosaur fossils and medicine wheels. But it is isolated, offering a true escape from city life.
“When you go to a campground, it’s just like a city — you’re out in nature, but there’s still people around you,” Carol says. “If you come here, you’re with nobody else.”
The next-door neighbours are literally miles away. As they like to say at the ranch, the nearest neon is a fiveday ride on a good horse.
While medicine wheels have been around for thousands of years, Bar Diamond Guest Ranch was established in 1896.
Carol and Jim met at a country rodeo back when Jim competed professionally. They settled at the ranch with their three kids, farming and raising cattle, and more recently started running a guest ranch.
While visitors can take part in traditional ranching activities, such as cattle branding, a typical three-day experience includes a visit to the medicine-wheel sites, a jet-boat ride among hoodoos and a chance to meet the locals during a visit to nearby prairie towns. There also is ATVing, hiking, canoeing, fishing and birdwatching, as well as horseback riding along old wagon trails.
Jay, the couple’s oldest son, works on the farm and serves as jet-boat captain, having navigated the South Saskatchewan River more than 300 times. It’s a good way to see the Badlands’ hoodoos — rock formations formed over thousands of years — along with remnants of old stone homes pioneers built along the banks in the mid-1800s.
Jay takes me out on the river and for the most part we have it to ourselves, soaking up the otherworldly landscape of hoodoos without hordes of tourists and selfie sticks. We pass a few hunters staking out elk that make their way down the coulees to the riverbank at night.
The hunters aren’t from around here; they don’t know the river like Jay. They assume the centre of the river is deepest. It isn’t, and they’re stuck. Looks like they won’t get their elk after all.
Later, on the drive back to the ranch in pitch blackness — there are no street lights here, only the light from the truck’s headlights — I spot what I think is a deer. After all, I’ve seen about two dozen deer and antelope over the course of a single day.
It turns out to be an elusive elk. It doesn’t run; it just hangs out, minding its own business on the side of the road. And, like the medicine wheels, is a reminder this land is special.