I kind of wanna give this a rating of 3 or 4 stars... haha I couldnt' quite decide. There were a lot of cool things, but also some not-so-cool things, about this park.
First, the cool things. This park is amazingly beautiful. The geology of the area is so interesting! It's like the hoodoos in Drumheller, but times 10 in terms of coolness. It was really breathtaking. The river that runs through it was fun to swim in- I especially loved the muddy area where your feet sink into the mud, that was the best :D
Of course, one of the main draws for this area is the rock art - it's full of old Native rock carvings & paintings. We did a guided tour - which is the only way you can see many of the carvings, as they're in a protected archaeological reserve. The tour price was really reasonable, and well worth it. The lady who did our tour was friendly and told some excellent stories - stories about the area's history, what the carvings meant, traditional Blackfoot stories, and even a little teepee etiquette- and it really made it much better than if we had gone on our own to look at them. It was all really interesting :) Also, there's a pretty neat interpretive centre at the main entrance to the park.
Now for the not-cool things. Firstly, there is virtually nothing right near the park. The nearest town is Milk River, which is a decent enough town but it's like half an hour away from the park, & there's not much else in between the two but farmland.
When we went, the weather just happened to be above 30 degrees every day, so this meant that there were no towns nearby or anything to, say, stop off at during the hottest part of the day and grab a cool drink & relax for a bit. There is a little store in the campground located at the park, but since there's no area to sit in, you can't really hang out there & wait out any bad weather. On the flip side, no food or drinks are sold in the interpretive centre, so that rules out another spot where you could potentially sit & relax for any extended period of time (like, an hour or 2, for example). Because we were only here for 1 day, and our camp was in Milk River half an hour away, we ended up braving the heat & doing the self-guided hike anyway in the middle of the afternoon, & predictably got heat stroke. At which point, there wasn't really much of a spot to cool down in. So that really sucked.
Also, the self-guided trail was in worse condition than I'd expect at a provincial park. Given that it's in southern Alberta & can get quite hot, the presence of metal handrails are a bit of a mystery. And many parts of the trails needed to have the plants trimmed back badly - at a few points we had to push our way through rather thick bushes that were growing across the trail.
Lastly, the campsite at the park looks lovely and is reasonably priced - unless you wanna book in advance, at which point they tack on like a $13 reservation fee. Not cool.
All in all, the park is something worth seeing. But do be prepared for its relative geographic isolation and the somewhat poor conditions of the trails. And for the love of Mike, get your car's AC fixed before you go, or be prepared to drive half an hour one way to get to a sheltered place to take a rest stop. read more