On the land, vast tracts of farmland in huge fields surround different-sized farms and ranches. Large grain elevators rise above the houses and barns. Each ranch is paralleled or surrounded by a row of trees. What little tree life there is seems mainly restricted to small poplars and shrubs, with large hardwoods rising around houses and barns. It seems a natural irony that as in the arctic and still thousands of kilometers south the forces of wind and storm are an obviously dominating factor in how people build their homes.
Roads criss-cross the farmland in all directions in a grid fashion.
Everything is linear, whether it is roads, fences, telephone poles and even trees and shrubs are often formulated in straight lines. About half way through our leg, Heidi and I stopped at a place called Horseshoe Canyon. What has occurred here and in much of the area around Drumheller is over millions of years the Red Deer River and its surrounding watersheds have cut through the sandstone and local soils creating a unique canyonlands which reveals many layers, many dating back millions and millions of years. Revealed in these layers is a black band which in early days and apparently still today is mined as coal. As well in these layers has been discovered dinosaur bones and fossils dating back millions of years.