Writing on Stone Provincial Park

Last week, I joined two members of the Canmore Camera Club for a return trip to the Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southeast Alberta. I had been there two years ago and made a note to return.

Writing-on-Stone is one of the largest areas of protected prairie in the Alberta park system, and serves as both a nature preserve and protection for many First Nations rock carvings and paintings. The park is sacred to the Blackfoot and many other aboriginal tribes.

On 6 July 2019, Writing-on-Stone / Áísínai’pi was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Writing-on-Stone Park contains the greatest concentration of rock art on the North American Great Plains. There are over 50 petroglyph sites and thousands of works. Today’s first picture displays one of the rock carvings for which the park is named. It’s faint, but believe me it’s there!

The park comprises 17.80 square kilometres (6.87 sq mi) of coulee and prairie habitat, and is home to a diverse variety of plants and animals. The sandstone outcrops in the park belong to the Milk River Formation which was deposited along the edge of a large inland sea about 84 million years ago. Meltwater from the retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age carved the present Milk River valley. Water, ice and wind eroded the sandstone to produce the hoodoos and cliffs that are part of the park today.

This next photograph shows the nature of the terrain at a bend in the Milk River, which bisects the park.

I took this next picture from the east end of the park in the early morning, showing grasslands intermingled with the hoodoos.

This scene was taken from an elevated viewpoint, looking across the Milk River, toward West Butte and the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana. My eye was drawn to the coulee running into the Milk River.

Later in the day, we returned to the viewpoint for a picture of the sunset.

Later still, we went out among the boulders and hoodoos to take pictures of the Milky Way. I first became aware of Writing-on-Stone two years ago when I was looking for dark sites for astrophotography. This area caught my attention as the darkest area in the province south of Edmonton, a great locale for photographing the Milky Way.

I spent two great days, evenings and nights in the area photographing an abundance of scenic views. I’ve included a small sampling of the many photos I took in today’s post.

My thanks to my fellow Canmore Camera Club members, Harv Emter and Kevin McCormick for initiating the trip and making it a truly memorable experience.

In my next post, I ‘ll share some pictures taken along the way on our journey to the park and back home.