Happy Canada Day!

As is tradition, this year's Canada Day festivities will begin at the Museum with a flag raising ceremony at 11:30 am. Bring your decorated bikes and strollers and participate in the walking parade from the Museum to the Riverfront Park along the scenic river trail. At Riverfront Park, the festivities will continue with performances and family activities until 3 pm. (For more information, please call Community Services at (780) 624-1000 or you can view their poster here.) And don't forget the fireworks that will take place July 1st at 11:59 pm!


The Museum will also be open from 12-4 pm and admission is FREE all afternoon. Come and see our Cabinets of Curiosities including our excellent rock and fossil collection and explore the Sir Alexander Mackenzie gallery where you can see a beaver, brown bear and many other northern furs and learn more about Sir Alexander Mackenzie's historic voyage across Canada.

Fun at the Fossil Road Show

Dinosaurs, rocks, fossils and minerals are certainly interesting subjects, and the residents of Peace River seem to agree. More than 240 people, including 117 students visited Athabasca Hall last Thursday to learn about Northwest Alberta Palaeontology from Grande Prairie Regional College palaeontologists Katalin Ormay and Robin Sissons.

There were slide shows of photographs and interesting facts, a floor puzzle, colouring sheets, crosswords, rocks and minerals to identify, and dinosaur bones to touch. In the photograph to the left, the Winters boys, Noah (7), Jabin (5) and Jude (8) show us the floor puzzle they completed and Noah also shows us a dinosaur he coloured and put together with moveable arms and legs.

The museum was delighted to host this event so that we too could learn more about palaeontology. Following the Road Show on Thursday, Katalin and Robin were at the museum on Friday, to help us identify all of the pieces in our collection. This project took all day and was fun for both the museum and the palaeontologists. They tell us that we have quite a wonderful collection!

This Road Show as well as the identification of the museum’s pieces stem from Robin’s first visit to Peace River to find out what sorts of palaeontology artifacts we have in our collection. They were quite impressed and offered to come up again to help us identify all of the pieces. There just wasn’t time in her first visit to identify it all.

We invite you all down to come and see this collection! It was unknown to us until last Friday, but we have another Albertosaurus tooth and another dinosaur bone in our collection. We can also boast that most of the bison bones in our collection are from the Ice Age, so they are at least 10,000 years old.

The museum would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Katalin and Robin as well as everyone that attended our event.

Artist of the Peace: Ground Level Youth Group

The Peace River Museum, Archives and Mackenzie Centre is pleased to host the art of the Ground Level Centre Youth Group. The group was run by Rhonda Warren and features a number of different kinds of projects. We hope many are able to come out and view the hard work of these young people.
Note that there is no fee to view the art wall. There is a $2 admission fee to see the Museum.
Please see below for some more information on the Youth Group, which is open to all young people, or come to the Museum to get a brochure and a calendar of events!

From the Youth Centre: "The Ground Level Youth Centre Project provides youth with opportunities, through programs and activities to connect with positive caring and supporting adult role models who are available to assist youth to build on their strengths, identify their weaknesses, and thus encourage them to be the best that they can be.
All programs, services and activities are structured in a manner so that youth are empowered to address the challenges they face and determine their own future with a sense of pride in a safe, secure and culturally sensitive environment.
Youth are actively involved in the project design, development and delivery at all levels within the project through their attendance and participation at regularly scheduled Youth Council meetings and daily interaction with project staff members.

Program Mission Statement:
"All youth are valued, supported and provided with opportunities to realize their individual and collective potential."

The mission statement is inclusive of all youth in our community and allows us to develop new programs, or revise to strengthen current programs and activities so that the ever changing needs of the youth are being met."

Results of Heritage Run

The Peace River Museum would like to sincerely thank the Peace River Running Club for organizing the 2011 Heritage Run and also to thank the individuals who participated. It was a great success with approximately 80 runners and walkers from all over the Peace Country and as far away as Edmonton!
Here are the top three times from each category (note that these are not organized by age group).

5k Run

John Mark Earle at 22:22
Mathieu Breker  at 23:44
Kevin Breker at 24:25

5k Walk

Ken Bonertz at 36:37
Danielle Murray at 49:19
Kayleigh Goy, Michelle Duval & Tracy Goy at 52:46

10k Run
Neil Martin at 47:13
Yves Lavoie at 48:22
Laurene Willox at 48:27

Half Marathon
Ken Wurst at 1:28:18
Bart-Jan Jorna at 1:38:01
Nicole Steffelaar at 1:49:50

Here are our runners coming in around the corner. As you can see, those of all ages participated in the run and we hope everyone had a wonderful time!

Dinosaurs Roaming the Peace

Big! Awesome! Scary! Cool!

These are all words that are often used to describe dinosaurs. Who doesn’t love the idea that over 65 million years ago, there were dinosaurs running around in our very own province? We even have a dinosaur named after our province, the Albertosaurus. We, at the museum, certainly think it’s cool. We didn’t know until just a few short months ago, that in our collection is a partial tooth from an Albertosaurus.

Also in our collection are a vertebra of a hadrosaur tail (backbone), two ichthyosaur vertebrae (marine reptile backbones), ammonites, baculites, coral, brachiopod shells, bison bones, a mammoth molar, and many more.

To help us learn more about the exciting field of paleontology, Grande Prairie Regional College (GPRC) is coming up to Peace River on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 for a Fossil Roadshow, complete with school presentations, public drop-in times, and a public presentation.

Come and join the museum in learning about dinosaurs and fossils from Katalin Ormay and Robin Sissons, paleontologists from GPRC on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at the Athabasca Hall. Public drop-in sessions are from 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM and from 3:00 – 6:00 PM. At 7:30 PM is the public presentation.

16th Annual Aboriginal Gathering and Pow Wow

This weekend (June 11th and 12th) is the 16th Annual Aboriginal Gathering and Pow Wow at the Peace River Ag Grounds (NOTE: new location from previous years). For more information, please see the Aboriginal Interagency Committee website for more schedules, directions, etiquette information and other details.

Heritage on the run – a way to perpetuate our past

Fourteen years ago this June, the Peace River Running Club changed the name and the beneficiary of its annual race.

Routes, running surfaces and people have changed. One thing has not – the running club’s commitment to a healthy fund-raising endeavour to benefit our community. In 1997, the Museum and the Peace River Running Club teamed to present the Peace River Heritage Run, the successor to the previous summer’s Run in Peace 10K. As race director Patrick Mackenzie said in a 1997 news release – “[It] will not only provide a recreational and competitive opportunity for runners from near and far, it will also raise money for, and awareness of, the Museum. The Peace River Heritage Run brings together two important aspects of life.”

Museum Director Laura Gloor knows first-hand the value of the Heritage Run. “The museum has been a most appreciative annual beneficiary of the physical and financial efforts of the PRRC organizers and the runners and walkers since 1997. These sizeable donations have purchased exhibit cases, Ken Ayre of Ayre Loom wooden furniture, a research table and most recently, contributed almost $3,000 towards our new, compact, mobile shelving in the Diane Gayton Collections Room. Combining Heritage and Health is beneficial in so many ways.”

The Heritage Run, Sunday, June 12, this year is comprised of a half marathon, 10km individual run, 5km individual run, 5X2km relay and 5km walk. Start times are not quite as early as in previous years to allow out-of-town participants an opportunity to attend. “We hope this allows for an increase in the number of participants,” says Frits Dijk, race director. The half marathon begins at 9:30 a.m., while other distances commence at 10 a.m. – all from just south of the Museum. Entry forms may be obtained by going to the Peace River Running Club’s Heritage Run website or from Marian Craig: sunshine@wispernet.com or Ken Wurst: Ken.Wurst@hotmail.com

Dijk urges race-day entrants to arrive in plenty of time to register.

York Boat arrives on the Peace Once Again!

It is an historic event! For the first time in over a century, a York boat will be navigating the Peace River!

Our river was a major route for Canada’s fur trade from the late 1700s to the late 1800s. Trade goods, furs and people plied the water of the Peace in canoes and flat bottomed scows until the arrival of the York boat. The design was commonly associated with the fur trade empire of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). It came with the rugged Scottish men of the Orkney Islands who brought their seafaring hardiness, along with the boat design, to the HBC. At 3000 pounds and 33 feet long, the freighting capacity of the Hudson’s Bay Company was greatly improved, thus providing a competitive edge to their intense rivalry with the North West Company.

GeoTourism comissioned this historic watercraft to be rebuilt and with Flow North Paddling is recreating a trip from Ft. Dunvegan to Ft. Vermilion. To see photographs of the building of the boat, please visit the GeoTourism website. The York boat was blessed by Dave Cummings of Fairview and given a grand send off from Fort Dunvegan Park on June 1st. To follow its progress, visit the GeoTourism facebook page.
The boat is scheduled to overnight at Strong Creek Campground June 3rd and to arrive at Riverfront Park at midday June 4th.

There will be a pancake breakfast at Strong Creek Campground at 9 am, June 4th. Everyone is welcome to enjoy some delicious pancakes by Grimshaw High School and witness the launch of the York boat.

At around 1 pm, the Town of Peace River will give a hearty welcome to the boat and the crew at Riverfront Park. Enjoy the performances that will highlight the cultures of the First Nations, Métis Scottish and Francophone people who inhabited the land along the river one hundred years ago. Dress in your best Twelve Foot Davis outfit or your best trapper gear for prizes to summer events like Peacefest and the North Peace Stampede!

Following the departure of the York boat, the band C.Alice will take to the stage to launch the first of the summer Concert in the Park Series, sponsored by the Town of Peace River and Northern Sunrise County.

We would also like to let our community know that it is a weekend full of events and we hope you will be out taking in as much as you can. Along with the York boat's arrival, the Peace River Art Club and The Social are hosting the "Arts in the Hall" event all weekend with art, concert and workshops.