Drumheller: Dinosaurs, Hoodoos and the Royal Tyrrell

Drumheller is the badlands town ninety minutes northeast of Calgary, and the reason to come is a museum that stays open until 9 p.m. in summer: the Royal Tyrrell, adult admission $25, walking distance from a fossil bed that’s produced some of the best-known dinosaur skeletons on the planet. Most day-trippers see the museum and the giant dinosaur statue downtown and leave. The valley holds a working suspension bridge, a free cable ferry and a canyon with its own county-run gate too, and none of them need more than a short detour off the main loop.

Not just a detour from Calgary

The town itself is small - 7,909 people at the last census, down slightly since 2016 while much of small-town Alberta grew - and it sits on the floor of the Red Deer River valley, which is why the drive in surprises people: flat prairie for an hour, then the road drops and the badlands open up underneath you without much warning.

Highway 9 gets you here from Calgary in about ninety minutes on a good day, flat and straightforward the whole way, with Beiseker roughly at the halfway mark. There’s no meaningful transit link - this is a drive-in town, and everything below assumes a car.

Royal Tyrrell Museum, and the evening-hours trick

The museum’s own summer hours are the detail that reshapes a Drumheller day: from 15 May to 31 August it stays open until 9 p.m., with last entry at 7:30. Almost every tour bus and day-trip crowd clears out by late afternoon, which means you can walk the hoodoos in the golden late light and still take the galleries at 7 p.m. with the building nearly to yourself. Outside that window, from September through mid-May, it runs Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Mondays except holiday Mondays.

Admission is $25 for an adult, $16 for a senior (free during Seniors’ Week, 1-7 June), $12 for a youth 7-17, and 6-and-unders go in free on a ticket that’s still required. A family of two adults plus kids 7-17 pays $55. Between 19 June and 7 September 2026, under-18s are free and 18-24s pay a reduced $12.50 with photo ID, under the same Canada Strong Pass window that covers Parks Canada sites nationwide. Book ahead: most discount categories need a pre-purchased, timed ticket rather than a walk-up one.

One warning worth repeating because it still catches people: royaltyrrell.com is not the museum. It’s a parked domain sitting on the near-identical name. Book and check hours through tyrrellmuseum.com instead.

The World’s Largest Dinosaur, honestly assessed

Downtown, not out on a highway shoulder, stands “Tyra” - a fibreglass-and-steel T. rex model 86 feet (25 m) tall, with 106 stairs climbing up through the inside to a viewing platform in the open mouth. It’s frankly a roadside gimmick, and it’s also become the town’s most-photographed landmark since it opened in October 2000, so treat it as the fifteen-minute stop it is rather than a rival to the museum.

Climbing costs $5 a person, with a $15 family rate and kids under 5 free. Where this article won’t pretend to certainty is the hours: the operator’s own page shows what reads like two different schedules layered on top of each other, one running daily to 9 p.m. in season and another showing a Thursday-to-Monday pattern with Tuesday and Wednesday closed. What is confirmed without ambiguity is a maintenance closure from 25 September to 20 October 2026, weekdays shut, open weekends only, with the gift shop and visitor centre still running 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily through that stretch. Check the live hours on worldslargestdinosaur.com before you plan around it.

Hoodoos, a canyon and a bridge that reopened in 2024

The Hoodoos - technically the Willow Creek Hoodoos - sit about fifteen minutes east of town on Highway 10: a free roadside pull-off with a short interpretive loop among sandstone pillars capped by harder rock, the shape everyone pictures when they think “badlands.” Climbing on them is against the law here, not just bad manners - they’re protected under Alberta’s Historical Resources Act, with fines that can reach $50,000.

Horseshoe Canyon, the other direction on Highway 9 toward Calgary, is county land rather than a park in the usual sense - Kneehill County runs it, not the town or Parks Canada, and a seasonal parking fee of around $2 has applied since the county introduced pay parking in 2021, collected by card or tap from mid-May to just after the September long weekend. Two viewpoints look down into the canyon’s eroded arms, and a trail drops in if you want more than the overlook; bring water and sun protection, since there’s little shade once you’re below the rim.

Near the hamlet of Rosedale, about 9 km out, the Star Mine Suspension Bridge - most locals still call it the Rosedale Suspension Bridge - is a genuine piece of coal-mining history: built in 1931 to carry Star Coal Mine workers over the Red Deer River after years of rowboats and a rickety 1919 cable car, then rebuilt by the province in 1958 after the mine itself closed. It sat closed for almost four years while a deteriorated support was repaired, and only reopened to the public in January 2024 - worth mentioning because older guides and blog posts still describe it as shut.

The ferry, and the rest of the two trails

Drumheller’s tourism board signs two loop drives, the Dinosaur Trail and the Hoodoo Trail, and each has one stop that doesn’t fit neatly under a heading above. On the Dinosaur Trail, about 24 km northwest, the Bleriot Ferry carries cars free across the Red Deer River - a small cable ferry that’s run since 1913, one of the last of its kind left in Alberta, taking about seven minutes and roughly 13 mid-size vehicles a crossing. It’s reported to run from May through October, roughly 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., though that’s worth a live check rather than a fixed promise this far from the museum’s own published pages.

On the Hoodoo Trail side, past the Hoodoos toward East Coulee, the Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site is worth the extra half hour if the badlands’ industrial past interests you as much as the fossils do: adult admission is $16.95, with an optional 25-minute train ride, a 45-minute processing-plant tour or a 75-minute mine-portal hike sold separately.

Getting here, and getting around

There’s no train, no scheduled bus and no local transit system to speak of, so the trip only works with a car - your own, a rental picked up in Calgary, or a guided day-tour bus that does the driving for you. Once you’re in Drumheller, the town itself is walkable, but the Hoodoos, Horseshoe Canyon, the suspension bridge and the ferry are all short drives apart rather than a single loop you can do on foot.

If the 9 p.m. museum closing time is the plan, think hard about the drive home. Ninety minutes back to Calgary after an evening at the galleries is a long way to go on tired eyes, and a room in town turns that same evening into a relaxed one instead of a race against a Highway 9 speed trap in the dark.

One day, or two

One day covers the essentials: the museum in the morning or the golden-hour evening slot, the dinosaur statue downtown, and either the Hoodoos or Horseshoe Canyon on the way in or out, depending on which side of town you’re driving from.

Two days lets you do both loops properly - Dinosaur Trail one day with the Bleriot Ferry crossing, Hoodoo Trail the next with the suspension bridge and, if you’re curious, the Atlas Coal Mine - and it means you can take the museum in the evening without immediately getting back in the car. For a town this size, that second day buys a surprising amount of badlands.

Read also

• The province around it, and the rest of the badlands region: Alberta travel guide
• Where most Drumheller trips start: things to do in Calgary
• Combining more than one Parks Canada stop nearby: Parks Canada Discovery Pass
• Every city we cover: the cities hub