This Tiny Alberta Town Was Given $9K To Set Up A Tourist Spot & It's Dedicated To Gophers

Alberta is famous for a lot of things, from the stunning natural scenery of Banff to prehistoric history in Drumheller.

However, one lesser-known tourist attraction is so unique to the province and it involves a lot of stuffed gophers.

The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum sits in the small rural Alberta town of Torrington, around 160 km northeast of Calgary and with a population of 306 people.

Laural Kurta, a volunteer, told Narcity that the non-profit museum that is filled with dioramas of stuffed and dressed-up gophers, opened in 1996 in response to the closure of the grain elevators.

"It was devastating for a lot of small towns in Western Canada, especially small towns like Torrington," she said.

At this time, the Alberta government was offering a one-time $9,000 grant to any small community that could come up with a tourist attraction that could help support rural towns, Laural said.

Community members in Torrington met three times to come up with ideas and by the last meeting, everyone was frustrated with the process.

"One lady yelled: 'Why don't we stuff gophers as we've got enough of them?' and everybody laughed. Then they stopped laughing and said 'why don't we' and that's exactly how it got started," Laural explained.

Laural's parents were involved in the process of setting up the museum from the very beginning, helping to stuff some of the gophers and paint dioramas. Her mother was also the museum's curator for 23 years before retiring due to ill health, leading Laural to step in and volunteer.

"I know firsthand that when something shuts down there, it doesn't open back up again. I didn't want to see that happen with the museum. I have no special bond with it, but it's very important to my parents and very important to the town so I volunteered to keep it open," she explained.

While there's a novelty in the museum being filled with stuffed gophers, Laural said people get such joy out of visiting the museum and looking at the dioramas.

"I get to sit back and listen to these people giggle and laugh and people really relate to it," she said.

"They [the community members who worked on the museum opening] really took these gophers in the directions to represent small-town Alberta. Everybody knows somebody that is being represented by around them, especially the people that are rural."

Laural's personal favourites are a First Nations Gopher that wears the tooth of her own dog around its neck, the fishing gophers as they remind her of her father and brother, and the "moonlight romance" diorama of a biker and a girl in a poodle skirt.

The museum has been closed for the winter season, but Laural said she hopes the museum will be open for weekends once again in June, but until then, they are trying to accommodate private tours with a minimum $20 donation.