Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

For something approaching six thousand years, Blackfoot people and their predecessors used this sandstone cliff to hunt: buffalo were gathered over weeks in the basin behind it, then driven along carefully built stone lanes and stampeded over the edge, with the whole community processing the animals in the camp below. The deposits of bone and tools at the base run many metres deep. It is one of the oldest and best-preserved sites of its kind anywhere, and UNESCO listed it in 1981. The interpretive centre is built into the cliff itself so as not to break the skyline, and it is written and staffed largely by Blackfoot people, telling the story from the inside rather than about them.

History

Plains peoples used the jump for about 5,500 years, and the site was in use at least 6,000 years ago: before horses arrived, young buffalo runners dressed as coyotes and wolves guided bison from the Porcupine Hills, about 3 kilometres west, into drive lanes lined by hundreds of cairns and over the cliff, about 300 metres long and up to 10 metres high, and the bone deposits beneath it are 12 metres deep. According to the legend behind the name, a young Blackfoot who wanted to watch from below was buried under the falling animals and found with his head smashed in. The jump was abandoned in the 19th century after European contact, first recorded by Europeans in the 1880s and first excavated by the American Museum of Natural History in 1938, and it became a National Historic Site in 1968, a Provincial Historic Site in 1979 and a World Heritage Site in 1981 (Wikipedia, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump).

What's there

• The cliff and drive lanes - the jump itself and the stone lanes that funnelled the herds.
• The interpretive centre - five levels built into the hillside, told from the Blackfoot side.
• The bone deposits - the metres-deep layers at the base of the cliff.
• The prairie view - the plains and the Porcupine Hills from the clifftop trail.

When to go

May to September is the main season with the fullest programme, including drumming and dancing on summer weekends; the centre is open year-round with reduced winter hours. The prairie wind here is constant, so a jacket helps whatever the month.

Things to know

The site is a cliff and a grass basin, so almost all of the experience is the interpretive centre and the trails; visitors expecting excavations on view will not find them. It is two hours from Calgary with little else immediately nearby except Fort Macleod. The name is graphic and often misunderstood; it refers to a legend, not the buffalo.

Nearby

Waterton Lakes is an hour and a half south; Calgary is two hours northeast.

Key facts