The Tour of Alberta is set to roll through Drumheller in two days. Though most of the attention will be on the racers, who will make the trek from Strathmore, the day will be a chance to shine for Drumheller.   
    Already, plans are being made to give international and local audiences a peek at what makes Drumheller so unique. The Town of Drumheller has organized a festival for race day, featuring volunteers from the Atlas Coal Mine, staff from the Royal Tyrrell Museum, the Cat Country Cougar Hunters, and Jenn Beaupre.
    “It’s going to be a lot of fun,” said Judy Quinten-Arvidson, administrative assistant with Town of Drumheller Community Services.
    As the racers are crossing the finish line, the Atlas Coal Mine volunteers will debut the Wheelbarrow Waltz at the race stage next to the finish line. Following them will be the Royal Tyrrell Museum story time and science break.
    At the same time, the Cat Country Cougar Hunters will be on the entertainment stage, followed by Jenn Beaupre.
    The finish line area, next to the Badlands Community Facility, will be filled with activity.
    “The Tour of Alberta brings their own entertainment and booths, but we’ll have quite a few local booths as well,” said Quinten-Arvidson. “There’s going to be a children’s bike race around 3 or 3:30 p.m., whenever the race is over, at the finish line and they might do some chalk art as well.”
    Norrep Funds will be riding the Orkney loop ahead of the racers and a few Olympians will be joining them. There is a chance, after they finish, to meet former Canadian Olympians and some up and comers.
    “They’re bringing some Olympians with them, some former and others competing in the next one. They’ll be around to visit and meet with people. That should be a lot of fun,” said Quinten-Arvidson.
    Unlike most other towns in the Tour of Alberta, Drumheller will have two chances to see the race go by. Racers will arrive in Drumheller via Highway 9 South, proceed north through 5th Street East and Riverside Drive, and then they will head north on Highway 9/56 to the Morrin Corner. From there, they head west to the Morrin bridge, then back to Drumheller via Orkney.
    The result will be Drumheller featured twice in domestic and international media coverage.
    “It’s going to be exciting, because we’re a double pass town. It gives us two shots at it, because the international media will be following them. It looks great for the international media if we have a lot of people cheering and the racers love it,” said Quinten-Arvidson. “We’re trying to get the schools to let out for the afternoon so the kids can see this world class sporting event.”
    It is expected roughly 10,000 people could visit Drumheller for the race.
    Everyone is encouraged to drop by the finish line in the afternoon and partake in the Tour of Alberta festivities.
    “There will be a lot of things to see and do, and they encourage people to come down and meet the racers after the race is over. They are very open to signing autographs, talking about the race, and meeting people,” said Quiten-Arvidson. “It’ll be great. It’s about as close as you can get to the Tour de France without leaving town!”

    Nearly three seasons have passed and residents in the Dalum area are still bumping down the Taylor Siding Road hoping not to fall through.
    The Mail brought its readers a story last November about a hazard on the road. There is a major cave-in near where southbound Highway 841 becomes eastbound Highway 569 in Wheatland County. At that time, the road had already been crumbling since last September.
    Junior Jensen lives near the highway and says while there has been some work, the situation has not changed much in the last 10 months.
    “They have been dumping gravel and they get it up to grade in the day, and it falls six feet down in the night,” said Jensen. “It’s awfully ugly.”
     He explains there has not been much action on fixing the road until this summer. Despite efforts to build the road up, it continued to slough off. He has learned that engineers have been called in to revisit how to properly fix the road.
    “They are putting it (gravel) on top, packing it in and it keeps pushing the mud out the bottom,” said Jensen.
    Construction engineer for Alberta Transportation Dennis Grace told The Mail this summer the department struggled to secure a contractor to make the fix in light of the flooding. When they were able to have crews come out and work on the road, their efforts were unsuccessful.
    “That road has been sliding a little bit for years,” said Grace. "We had an engineering firm look at it, and based on surface observations, looked at the least expensive plan and went with it. They did some repairs on the road, but it showed movement after, so we are going to modify our plan.”

This summer crews have attempted to rebuild a section of Taylor Siding Road without success. The Mail first reported the road was sloughing in November of last year.

    He said they have stopped work on the area  to observe and come up with a plan.
    “Hopefully by fall we’ll have something in place and finish it off by fall.”
    Grace explains one of the difficulties with repairing some of these out of the way roads is they don’t know the construction history and how it was built.
    “You are guessing on a lot of this stuff,” he said.
    “It's frustrating, you always want to do things 100 per cent but  when you try with what you see on the surface, you can’t always get it right the first time.”    
    The highway is classified as a resource road, there are a couple of oil and gas based installations along the road, making it relatively busy.
    “There must be 40 b-trains of oil coming along the road every day,” said Jensen.
    With the coming of harvest season the traffic will be even greater.
    Jensen is hopeful the recent efforts will pay off.
    “The good news is they are going to have another look at it, but we know it is going to take that much longer to get it fixed,” said Jensen. “But now we can maybe get it fixed right because it was just patchwork before.”