DRUMHELLER, ALTA.— Nestled in the badlands of southern Alberta sits Canada’s dinosaur town.

Every summer, tourists flock to Drumheller and the surrounding valley, the resting place for thousands if not millions of fossils, a fraction of which are on display at the internationally renowned Royal Tyrrell Museum.

The theme is unmistakable, as soon as you get there.

There’s the 25-metre-tall T-Rex statue outside the town’s information centre, which visitors can climb for a view of the badlands. There are dino figures on top of buildings, peeking out of windows and painted on the side of shops.

Even with Drumheller’s claim to fame, some residents are worried about the town’s future.

On a recent cold February day, many of the businesses downtown were closed — not just tourist shops, but cafés and bakeries, old and new.

Nick Sereda, co-owner of the Valley Brewing micro brewery, said it’s a common sight.

“There are a few businesses that just open up for the summer, take their advantage of the tourists and then they close the rest of the year,” he said.

“And that doesn’t really let a community thrive, right?”

Like many Alberta communities, Drumheller was built on coal and blossomed during the height of the industry.

In the 1940s, the town’s population was about 20,000, before the province started switching over to oil and gas, according to Jay Russell, curator at the Atlas Coal Mine, a former mine turned national historic site.

Now that population is about 8,000. Its median age is creeping up, from 38.4 in 2001, according to Statistics Canada, to 41.9 in 2016, while the province’s sits at 36.7.

And while dinosaurs draw a deluge of tourists each year, Drumheller is trying to pull in a different and more elusive group: not summer visitors, but millennials who might live there and help the efforts underway to transform the community.

Saved from extinction

Drumheller has been an energy town since its inception, and “coal was king” until the Atlas Coal Mine shut down.

“That’s what brought people here,” said Russell, adding that, like many Alberta towns, Drumheller’s whole story can be characterized by the boom-and-bust cycle of energy.

In the mid-1900s, Alberta began transitioning to oil, and Drumheller’s population began to shrink, said Russell. He said the town’s survival in those days hinged on the penitentiary, which opened up in 1967 and immediately hired about 400 people.

“That really saved Drumheller from extinction,” said Russell.

Drumheller was already a popular destination for tourists interested in fossils, but the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s opening in September 1985 “kind of opened up the floodgates of opportunity” and made Drumheller the town it is today, said Russell.

Oil and gas has always been a big employer in the town, he said, but never the “golden egg” that tourism continues to be.

However, with tourism for less than half the year. Russell said he thinks many businesses struggle to take advantage of the deluge of people in the summer, He gets the sense some residents are in denial about its identity as a tourist town.

Lisa Making, the Tyrrell museum’s exhibits and communications director, said that when it first opened, Drumheller wasn’t equipped to handle the rush of tourists.

Now, she said, the museum and the town have a kind of “symbiotic relationship.” But the museum itself has also been affected by the decline of oil and gas. Attendance went down as many of the museum’s visitors, the majority of which come from Alberta, found themselves with less money to spend.

Numbers have gone up a bit in recent years, noticeably in 2017. But Making said she agrees there needs to be more of a push for tourists to discover the whole valley, and not just its fossilized population.

A ‘sleepy town’

Eric Dahl moved to Drumheller in 1984 when he was 14 years old, almost exactly a year before the Royal Tyrrell Museum opened. His family’s house was in downtown Drumheller, in an historic area.

At that time, Drumheller was in the middle of a transformation, said Dahl. It was a “sleepy town,” recovering from the downturn of coal. The penitentiary and agriculture were its two biggest population draws, he said.

That is, until the museum opened. The difference was astounding, said Dahl: “Boom …Drumheller is a tourist destination.”

The next summer, the same “sleepy town” was filled with tourists from around the world.

“It was absolutely packed,” said Dahl. “For people that were born and raised here … it was kind of a shock to the system.”

Jamie Worman has deep ties to Drumheller. His father was one of the original guards when the penitentiary first opened. He remembers finishing high school in 2002, when many of his fellow graduates had jobs waiting for them in the oil and gas industry. The restaurants and bars in downtown Drumheller were full many evenings of the week.

“It’d be shoulder to shoulder,” he said — a mix of locals and visiting workers. “I enjoyed it.”

He said the energy industry kept people visiting the town year-round. He said the recent downturn of that industry led to a more dramatic ebb and flow of people throughout the year.

According to data from Statistics Canada, over the years the number of people moving to Drumheller has slowed: the 2016 census showed 485 migrants in the past year, compared to 1,070 in 2001, when oil and gas was a bigger employer. The Camrose-Drumheller region was one of the highest contributors to Alberta’s GDP in 2006, according to a government report.

After the decline, Worman said it became clear Alberta would never return to the glory days of oil and gas. And neither would Drumheller.

“Now we rely very heavily on the tourism industry and we rely very heavily on locals supporting locals to keep everybody afloat.”

It’s been more than 30 years since the museum opened. But the town is, in many ways, still sleepy. Dahl said shops in Drumheller would take advantage of the tourist rush but then go back to business as usual in the winter, resulting in a lot of short-lived businesses.

“There’s a beautiful downtown core with hundred-year-old brick buildings — they’re sitting idle.”

But if Dahl and others have anything to say, that will change.

Big plans

Mayor Heather Colberg, who was born and raised in Drumheller, won the election in late 2017 and came in swinging, rewriting bylaws so that businesses along the tourism corridor had to obey certain standards when it comes to upkeep of things like signs and lawns.

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The town has also created more financial incentives for businesses to get started or improve their storefronts. These are small steps, maybe, but business owners say they’ve made a big difference.

Janet Grabner is one of the local business owners who has taken advantage of the new incentives available, She and her husband John Dahm operate a pottery studio in East Coulee near the coal mine that sells clay replicas of hoodoos and fossil-encrusted mugs. Grabner said she got a storefront grant to build a wheelchair ramp and deck for her studio and replace the front door.

“They are really trying to get people to improve the looks of their place and … make people want to stay in the valley,” she said.

The idea, said Colberg, is to get tourists to stop in Drumheller on their way through to the museum or the coal mine.

The town also brought in an economic development manager, who was hired in April 2019. Sean Wallace moved to Drumheller for the job, fresh from a similar position in Tisdale, Sask.

Many of the business incentives are his doing. Wallace said Drumheller needs to look beyond its past — coal, oil and gas — but also beyond its current strength of tourism. He wants to see the town diversify, and he said the town has a lot of potential for multiple industries.

For example, this year Drumheller saw a lot of filming for a variety of projects including the new Ghostbusters movie. It’s also home to at least four music festivals, including a heavy metal festival, and also boasts motocross events.

But Wallace said he wants to attract companies and events that aren’t seasonal as well, and it’s not just about getting tourists to stay a little longer. Wallace wants to attract a younger workforce, which of course means tech. And Drumheller has a not-so-secret weapon.

About five years ago, Drumheller was selected by Telus to be outfitted with fibre-optic technology, meaning the sleepy little town already has the infrastructure for speedy Internet. This is useful for businesses, such as the bitcoin mining facility that opened in 2018, but also for those who want to work from home, said Wallace.

‘We have to change’

Sharon Mathieu, who opened Black Mountain Roasters with Nathan Moore in 2019, said friends warned her the business wouldn’t last. After tourism season, they said, there would be no local support and their coffers would dry up.

But that’s not what happened, said Mathieu. Moore added that the café has been busy enough all winter long to support the business.

Moore said they’ve done their best to become part of the community — not just focusing on tourists, but locals. They’ve held consistent hours throughout the winter and welcome every customer like a longtime friend, with smiles and jokes.

Jeremy MacKenzie moved to Drumheller in 2016. He and his girlfriend, Sonia Linn, are both business owners downtown.

MacKenzie said it’s often the town’s longtime residents who are the most stubborn when it comes to change. But while he loves the tourist rush in the summer, he knows Drumheller can’t thrive without something more.

Now, after several years of work, MacKenzie said he’s seeing even the most stubborn of attitudes start to turn.

“It’s a challenge, there’s no doubt,” he said. But he doesn’t want to see Drumheller get left in the dust.

“There’s a rural part of Alberta that is getting left behind,” he said. “We have to change.”

MacKenzie said he doesn’t take a single day in the valley for granted, and in the summer he doesn’t take the town’s visitors for granted, either.

“For those of us that take a lot of pride in Drumheller, it gives us an ability to showcase it a little bit,” he said.

MacKenzie calls himself a vocal supporter of Drumheller’s diversification, and hopes it could become a beacon for other towns in Alberta struggling with their own transitions.

“There’s always skepticism,” he said. “(But) it’s starting to turn a bit.”

‘Kicking and screaming’

Kristyne DeMott, one of the newer faces on the town council, did not intend on staying in Drumheller. Like many young people growing up in a small town, DeMott planned to leave after high school and build a career in the big city. And that’s what she did, making a name for herself designing high-end homes in Calgary.

But after the oil and gas industry dipped, DeMott found herself without a job. It was then that she returned, “kicking and screaming,” to Drumheller to work in her parents’ flooring store. What she thought would be a short stay turned into the next chapter of DeMott’s life.

“It was this community that picked me up when I was at the lowest part of my life,” said DeMott, who ran for town council and is now heading the brand-new millennial committee tasked with trying to attract more people to Drumheller.

One of the committee members is Nick Sereda, co-owner of Drumheller’s first craft brewery. Valley Brewing opened in August 2019 and was an immediate success in Drumheller and beyond.

The brewery’s beers are all named after various parts of the valley’s history, from coal to fossils and more.

“We really try and push the history of the valley,” said Sereda. “Each beer has a story.”

Sereda, who also owns a skate and snowboard shop next door to the brewery, said he believes Drumheller has more to offer than only the museum.

“There’s so many tourists that come to town and they just come for the museum and that’s it, but Drumheller. … We know how much it has to offer.”

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