About an hour north of Edmonton, a quirky giant keeps its eye on the sky. Sangudo’s sundial—built in the shape of a prairie grain elevator—rises roughly 6.4 metres (22 feet) and tips the scales at over 40 tonnes. It sits on the south bank of the Pembina River, impossible to miss from the highway, presiding over a wide open field dotted with massive “time stones.”

Those stones aren’t just decoration—they’re ancient glacial hitchhikers. Farmers hauled them out of nearby fields, where they’d been loitering since the last ice age, about 20,000 years back. Precambrian shield granite, cretaceous sandstone… basically the rock equivalent of elder statesmen marking out the hours.
Photo credit: Bernadette Gallagher