Grasslands National Park: landscape and origins
Grasslands protects a piece of Canada’s mixed-grass prairie, a landscape that has disappeared under the plough elsewhere.
The shape of the land dates from the last Ice Age. More than 10,000 years ago the ice melted in two lobes; because the northern lobe was higher, meltwater flowed south and was stopped by the southern lobe. Along the ice margin a river carved into the ground: today’s Frenchman River valley. The runoff created coulees, buttes and creeks. The Frenchman River flows south and belongs to the Missouri watershed.
Water defines the land, or more precisely its absence. Little precipitation creates the conditions for prairie. Typical are blue grama, needle-and-thread grass, the prickly pear cactus, which only breathes at night, and the gumbo evening primrose, whose flowers change colour within a day. A hallmark of this ecosystem is that no single species dominates.
The East Block holds the Rock Creek badlands and the Wood Mountain uplands. Here the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary is exposed, a thin white layer in the ground that separates the age of the dinosaurs from the age of the mammals. The fossils go back 60 to 80 million years; only recently a new species of ancient bird, Brodavis americanus, was described from here.
The park is young and not yet complete. From 1963 conservationists campaigned for a protected area; in 1981 Canada and Saskatchewan signed the founding agreement, in 1988 a revised version, and on 19 February 2001 Grasslands was officially proclaimed a national park. The planned area covers about 900 square kilometres (347 sq mi), and about 80 per cent has been purchased so far, only from owners willing to sell.
The park in numbers
- Proclaimed
- 19 February 2001
- First agreement
- 19 June 1981
- Planned area
- about 900 km² (347 sq mi) in two blocks
- Acquired so far
- about 80 per cent
- Protected area
- over 729 km² (281 sq mi)
- Distance between blocks
- 166 km (103 mi), about 2 hours
- Dark sky preserve
- since 2009
- Bison
- 400 to 500, since December 2005
- Prairie dogs
- about 25 colonies, 17,000–23,000 animals
- Tipi rings
- over 20,000
- Ecotour
- 20 km (12 mi), 7 stops
- Badlands Parkway
- 11 km (6.8 mi), 6 viewpoints
