The Daily Bucket – Canadian mountains

September 2024

British Columbia & Alberta

Our goal on this latest road trip was to see the Canadian Rockies. I didn’t realize until we’d been on the road a few days is that there are a lot more mountains in Canada than the Rockies per se, and in fact if you include highlands, pretty much the whole province of British Columbia is quite mountainous. My ears were popping constantly with all the up and down, which at times were pretty steep.

We’re no strangers to mountains in western Washington, what with the Cascades and the Olympics, but I have to say we were humbled by the sheer size and scale of the Canadian mountains. It’s hard to convey in words or photos, but what follows will give you an inkling of that. I encourage you to visit them in person if you ever get the chance.

What makes the mountains of British Columbia and western Alberta so various and dramatic is a consequence of 200 million years of plate tectonic uplift and vulcanism, combined with relatively recent glaciation. Many of the rocks themselves are a lot older, such as the fossil-bearing Cambrian era Burgess Shale, which is 500+ million years old, formed before the mountains were raised.

In a nutshell, what began 200 millions years ago was the rapid westward movement of the North American craton, the extremely old (billions of years) core of the continent. The shallow coastal waters, deep sea rocks and island arcs of the Pacific Ocean area (on the Farallon plate) that had been wandering slowly eastward/northward got slammed into. Some rock was progressively pushed up, some squeezed under, some somersaulted over other rock masses, and many got massively compressed and twisted. When the relative movements of the North American and Farallon (and baby Farallon) plates quieted around 60 MYA the packed layers of rock relaxed, some pulling apart in giant faults, the most notable being the Rocky Mountain Trench just west of the main Rocky Mountain range. The net effect of all that activity is a series of high mountain ranges aligned northwest by southeast, more or less in order of accretion and formation. The many kinds of rock and their various histories are a geologist’s heaven.

(Sources: Geology of British Columbia, A Journey through Time. Cannings, Nelson, Cannings. 2011. Also, Chapter 21 Geological History of Western Canada)

We entered (and left) British Columbia from western Washington and spent a couple of days crossing the Interior Fraser-Thompson Plateau, which varies from 1000-4000 feet high. Some rock is hard granite, some basalt lava flows, some glacial deposit, some limestone, which each eroding differently.

Traveling eastward we encountered the first range of mountains, the Monashees. After climbing over a pass we descended into Revelstoke, on the upper Columbia River. We spent a morning climbing Mount Revelstoke….ok, we drove up to the highest parking area, at 6000 feet, and walked a mile up from there, another 400 feet up. This is a national park. It was delightful to see so many people walking a moderately strenuous path, including kids and oldsters like us. And yes, everyone was very polite, friendly and helpful. Canadians.
 

From Revelstoke we continued eastward across the Selkirk mountain range, descending into the Rocky Mountain trench where we had lunch at a cute little coffee shop in Golden on the Kicking Horse River (before it joins the Columbia heading north). From there it was a climb eastward into the Rockies, with ever steeper and and more sharply glacier-carved peaks than the earlier ranges.

I was keen to visit this stretch of mountains, to see the Burgess Shale setting and fossils. No way we were going to do the 11-hour, 14-mile hike up 2700 feet to see where the fossil quarry, but there’s a nice exhibit in the Field visitor centre at the foot of the mountain with an assortment of actual fossils to look at.

Over the Continental Divide, soon to enter Alberta and switch from Pacific to Mountain time….

We spent that night in Lake Louise. It was swarming with tourists and you can’t get close to the lake itself without getting on a tour bus so we chose to a skip that. Wish I could have seen it but we hate crowds. However we did enjoy several wildlife overpasses in that part of Banff National Park.

The next day we headed north on the Icefields Parkway, which runs between Banff and Jasper through a NW/SE corridor eroded from a weaker rock layer almost along the Continental Divide. The road had been closed until a few weeks earlier due to a major wildfire. Many rest/view stops and hiking trailheads were still closed, but we were thankful to be able to see these mountains even from the car.

They are so huge and steep you almost feel like the mountainsides are about to fall on you. Stunning.

You have probably noted how frequently rivers show up in these mountains. British Columbia has many awesome rivers. In my next Canada installment I’ll share more about rivers, plus waterfalls.

🏞️

Locally, here in the Pacific Northwest islands, we’re having typical fall weather. Mixed sun and showers. Cool temps (50s and 60s) and foliage is falling.

What’s up in nature in your neighborhood?