Motorbikes, burnouts and family fun.
    That is what those heading to Wayne this weekend will get to experience.
    The 2015 Motorcycle Madness will ride the Valley on Friday July 10 and Saturday July 11.
    Organizer Terry Kuhl said the event has been taking place for over 10 years and is for fun, but also for local charity.
    “This year the charity we have picked is Kids Sport. Kids Sport is a national foundation but the money that we raise will stay local and help local kids with cost of participating in various types of sporting activities,” he said.
    Kuhl said the event will start Friday evening with a meet and greet get together where the participants meet at Yavis Restaurant for a steak supper and ride.
    Saturday morning Breakfast will be served at the Last Chance Saloon in Wayne and then the Show n’ Shine will take place at 10 a.m. along with the poker run registration.
    “Every year we get about 60 or 70 bikes entering in the different classes. We’ve got a class for vintage bikes, metric bikes, American standard and custom,” he said.
    After the winners are announced, the bike games will begin. The events will take place in an open field area next to the Saloon and will feature various types of races and a motorcycle tire toss. Kuhl said prizes are given away for the different events as well as for the show n’ shine.
    “There may even be a burn out if we have someone interested in setting some smoke for us,” he said.
    He said after the games are completed the Poker Run will begin.
    “This year it will take us to Rockyford, Carbon and then back into Drumheller. It will end sometime around 4:30-5 with bikes coming for their last card at the Last Chance Saloon,” he said.
    “Last year we sold about 75 hands for the Poker Run, so we probably had something in excess of 100-125 bikes,” Kuhl told the Mail.
    “People are certainly invited to come out and participate in viewing of the show n’ shine bikes,” he said. “They can put an entry form in for people’s choice and get the chance to maybe win something for themselves, and of course the bike games are always fun to watch.”

Drumheller residents may be seeing a different type of aircraft flying over the Valley in the next few months.
    Palliser Regional Municipal Services Ltd. will be bringing their drone to do some modeling of the valley to help with flood mitigation. The Drone is called the Sense Fly Ebee Real Time Kinetics unit.
    Justin Hill, GIS coordinator for Palliser said, “It is a fixed wing mapping drone that uses GPS technology, both on the ground and in the sky and it has real time links between the two in order to provide survey grade accurate mapping.”
    The drone is able to cover a “large amount of area in a short amount of time,” Hill said continuing by saying that the accuracy is “flexible. You can adjust it based on what you want to get. Pixel accuracy is more or less determined by the elevation of the drone, so we can control the elevation of the drone at which it flies. Typically we will fly at about 95 metres above ground level, which will give us about two and a half centimeter resolution. We can fly higher and we can even fly a little bit lower to get a bit tighter imagery as well.”
    At the regular council meeting on Monday June 29 Hill said the hope is to improve the mapping that is available for flood mitigation in Drumheller.
    “We want to fly all the areas around the river valley, and get a really good look and a three dimensional model built up of all the berms and dykes and the flood mitigation system around the town of Drumheller and really be able to improve the mapping that we have for that capabilities,” Hill explained.
    He said there are a lot of different applications that are in mind for the drone. “Not only are we able to do this three dimensional mapping for flood mitigation, we are able to do two dimensional photography, we are able to produce three dimensional areas of things like stock piles, gravel pits, produce volume calculations, there are a number of different aspects.
    The drone cost, Hill said, was “in the neighbourhood of $60,000 just for the drone itself, and then the survey bay station equipment would add a little bit more to that as well.”
    Drumheller Mayor Terry Yemen said this Drone is a good example of new technology.
    “It is quite remarkable what they can do and it certainly comes with a huge cost savings for the Town of Drumheller,” he said continuing by saying that it use to be very costly to take aerial shots of the Valley but now they can do that for less.