The quartzite boulder spent untold millennia riding a massive glacier all the way from Jaspers Tonquin Valley to its eventual resting place next to Nose Creek.
That was between 15 and 20,000 years ago. Sometime later, the first people walked past – and from time immemorial the Beddington erratic and dozens of others like it – became significant landmarks across the landscape.
It’s not clear just when, but the first people began to leave their mark – paintings telling stories or marking events, people or nearby resources.
“All of these sacred places were all marked – even the medicine wheels and the way they point – they point to a direction where something else happened,” says Grant Many Heads, an educator at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park on Siksika.
Many Heads notes the site was just literal steps from what’s now called the Old North Trail, a route that shadowed the …