October 26, 2026 Adam Bouma

A Thanksgiving at the University of Alberta Mattheis Research Ranch

A Thanksgiving weekend at the University of Alberta’s Mattheis Research Ranch, with a side trip to the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park.

For Thanksgiving, my Mom came to Edmonton and we travelled down to the Mattheis Research Ranch to visit my extended family. I have been hearing about this ranch for the last 9 years, since Marcel (my Uncle) started working on the ranch and living on the property. The ranch is roughly 400 km away from Edmonton and is southeast of Calgary in a county called Duchess.

Within the first week of starting my MSc at the University of Alberta, I met several grad students who have done a large part of their field work on the ranch. These grad students are doing all kinds of very cool research involving endangered birds, grassland research and looking at how grazing affects grasslands. Every summer the ranch houses researchers from May to September. In the 2018-2019 season, they had 725 person days for the whole year.

Something that amazes me about Alberta is the sheer size of farms. I thought the Mattheis Ranch was large, sitting at roughly 12,300 acres, which is larger than my entire home town, Belleville, Ontario. I was informed that it is “not bad,” which led me to find out about the McIntyre Ranch, which is 54,000 acres and located in Lethbridge, Alberta. While at the ranch, I got to see many hundreds of cows and some goats, and I got to pet some really cute cats!

View from the cab of a green John Deere tractor driving down a dirt track between fields at the ranch.

Goats in a fenced pen at the ranch, with spruce trees behind them.

A map of south Edmonton with a rectangle of about 51 square kilometres drawn over it, roughly the size of the ranch. — 12,300 acres drawn on a map of Edmonton. Map data © 2026 Google.

During the weekend, my family and I went to Dinosaur Provincial Park, located in Alberta’s Badlands, which is a 40-minute drive from the ranch. Dinosaur Provincial Park is a historic area where 35 new species of dinosaurs have been found within the borders of the park. Paleontologists have also found 44 species, 34 genera, and 10 families, with many other duplicates found. The park has many trails, some with structures around where dinosaur fossils were originally found, giving you a real glimpse into the process of discovering real dinosaur fossils.

Dinosaur bones left in place in the ground inside a glass-walled shelter at Dinosaur Provincial Park, with visitors looking in. — Dinosaur fossils in Dinosaur Provincial Park.

Some of the other trails allowed you to walk through the badlands, going up and down interesting landforms. The landscape was very pretty, and you could see different sediment layers, hoodoos, cliffs and valleys. The park had a very interesting dichotomy between clay sediment with little to no vegetation and areas by the Red Deer River with large swaths of what I assume is green vegetation (I am colourblind).

Eroded badlands hills at Dinosaur Provincial Park, with walking trails winding through them under a grey sky. — The badlands at Dinosaur Provincial Park.

My Thanksgiving weekend was a really great experience: catching up with my Mom over a 400 km drive, seeing a research ranch that was once just an idea but is now actively involved in friends’ thesis work, and going on hikes in a new place!