Badlands Guardian
If you could step back from the planet and look down on it, how different would it look? Pretty soon we'll all be traveling into space and finding out. For now, Google Earth will have to do the trick. Here's a great picture that a Canadian grandmother discovered while poring over Google's satellite imagery of the planet in 2006, looking for a dinosaur museum. It's a picture of the Badlands in Alberta, Canada, but it bears an uncanny resemblance to a Native American chief – wearing an iPod. He's been dubbed the Badlands Guardian.
Here's a picture of the same landscape from the ground. Looks very cool, but nothing like an Indian chief. Apparently people spend hours looking for weird anomalies on Google Earth, but the grandma in question (53-year-old Lynn Hickox from Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan) found the Guardian after only a few tries. Once news got out, it caused quite a sensation, and its name was chosen through a competition on CBC, beating out other suggestions like iChief, Chief M-P-Three, and Chief Bleeding Ear.
The image is formed out of well-weathered rocks, and the iPod wire is in fact a road leading to a natural gas well. Anyone wanting to go there will find it 350km southeast of Calgary, near a town called Medicine Hat and the US border – at 50° 0'38.20″N 110° 6'48.32″W to be precise. RM
Image (center): Courtesy of Travel Alberta
2008 Apr 13
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