CROSSING THE BERING LAND BRIDGE

The Columbian Mammoth, the official state fossil of Washington, crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America some one million years ago and made a home roaming the vast grasslands that stretched from Alaska to Mexico, mirroring the great Rocky Mountains, and munching down about 300 pounds of vegetation each day.

During the Pleistocene this extinct elephant extended his habitat down into Central America to modern day Nicaragua and Honduras before dying out around 12,500 years ago. Photo courtesy of Filippo Bertozzi

SALMONID BONE BED: DRIFTWOOD CANYON

We are all familiar with the image of salmon returning to fresh water, to the rivers of their youth, to spawn and complete their lifecycle, in fact, it is one of the staple images of British Columbia.

As adults, we bring our children to witness this cycle, rushing to the banks of our local rivers to watch as the adults, keen in their fight for reproduction and survival, struggle to complete their epic journeys against currents and predators.

Arriving as they do, year upon year, season upon season, it seems to us that this is how it has been since time immemorial.

But we now have evidence that migration to the sea may be a relatively recent behaviour. Fossil beds at Driftwood Canyon, near Smithers, contain large numbers of fossil salmonid remains from the Eocene age, approximately 45 million years ago. What is interesting is that the fossil beds are filled equally with both juvenile and larger adults.

If these salmon were heading off to sea in their juvenile form and returning to spawn as adults we would expect to find an abundance of larger carcasses in the lake sediments and relatively few juveniles. Given the equal numbers, we can conclude that the salmonids of the Eocene, lived out their lifecycle as a landlocked species, the way Kokanee do today.

RAINFOREST FUNGI

TERRA FIRMA: UPTHRUSTING PLATES

Two hundred million years ago, Washington was two large islands, bits of continent on the move westward, eventually bumping up against the North American continent and calling it home. Even with their new fixed address, the shifting continues though subsiding laterally and continuing vertically. The force of these pressure strained plates continues to push seemingly immovable mountains skyward.

This dynamic shifting has created the landscape we see today and helped form the fossil record that tells much of Washington’s relatively recent history of the past 50 million years.

TYAUGHTON FOSSIL BEDS

HOWE SOUND 2010: BRING THE ADVENTURE

A short 90-minute drive north of the city of Vancouver, the nation's gateway to the Pacific, is a recreational Shangri-La that attracts four season adventurers from around the globe to ski, board, hike, mountain bike, kayak and climb the local peaks.

This treasure trove wilderness playground stretches along the breathtaking Sea-to-Sky Highway affording breathtaking views of the Pacific as it follows Highway 99 north out of the sparkling gem of Vancouver from Lions Bay, through Squamish and Garibaldi and into the picturesque Whistler Valley.

As you drive out of the city, look at the mountains to the north. Grouse, Cypress and Seymour mountains provide easy access skiing for the happy winter adventurer and a beautiful backdrop to the young city of Vancouver, Canada's third-largest metropolis, year-round.

While the city sits on relatively young sandstone and mudstone, the North Shore Mountains are made from granite that formed deep within the Earth more than 100 million years ago.

Following Highway 99, you’ll hug the coastline of Howe Sound, a glacially carved fiord which extends from Horseshoe Bay (20 km northwest of Vancouver) to the hamlet of Squamish. The road is perched high above the water, blasted into the rock of the steep glacial-valley slope and has been the chosen path for First Nation hunters, early explorers, the miners of the Gold Rush, the rush of tourism and soon the 2010 Olympics.

Carved from the granitic mountainside high above Howe Sound, this scenic pathway has been a rich recreation corridor and traditional First Nation hunting ground for many years.

Steeped in a First Nations history, bountiful wildlife and gorgeous vistas, the Whistler corridor is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful spots on the globe with something for everyone.

The world will be visiting in the next few weeks to see their competitors reach for gold. While many are loathe to pay for this particular budget challenged event, the hospitable hearts of British Columbians welcome you!

STEPPING-STONE ISLANDS

Steeped in mist and mythology, the islands of Haida Gwaii abound in local lore that surrounds their beginnings. 

Today the Hecate Strait is a tempestuous 40-mile wide channel that separates the mist-shrouded archipelago of Haida Gwaii from the BC mainland. Haida oral tradition tells of a time when the strait was mostly dry, dotted here and there with lakes. 

During the last ice age, glaciers locked up so much water that the sea level was hundreds of feet lower than it is today. Soil samples from the sea floor of Hecate Strait contain wood, pollen, and other terrestrial plant materials that tell of a tundra-like environment. Whether or not the strait was ever completely dry during these times, it seems that it did at least contain a series of stepping-stone islands and bridges that remained free of ice. An ancient Haida tale, recorded in the late 1800s by a Hudson’s Bay Company trader, records the island's glacial history. 

Scannah-gan-nuncus, a boy who lived in the village now called Skidegate, had canoed up the Hunnah, a tributary to Skidegate Channel. Today, the Hunnah is a rocky creek, seldom deep enough to navigate. 

The Haida the legend accurately records that it used to be several times deeper. Tired from paddling upstream, Scannah-gan-nuncus landed to take a nap. “In those days at the place where he went ashore were large boulders in the bed of the stream, while on both sides of the river were many trees. While resting by the river, he heard a dreadful noise upstream. 

Looking to see what it was, he was surprised to behold all the stones in the river coming toward him. … all the trees were cracking and groaning … he went to see what was crushing the stones and breaking the trees. On reaching them, he found that a large body of ice was coming down, pushing everything before it.” Scannah-gan-nuncus’ experience with the glacier would have been familiar to the inhabitants of the islands. 

Today, the highest peaks are often bare of vegetation and snow-covered during most of the year, but back in the time of the glaciers, these same local mountains were the birthplace of advancing ice. 

Precipitation and a significant drop in temperature gave rise to the Queen Charlottes ice-sheet, a thick mass of flowing ice that ran tandem with the Cordilleran sheet in the Hecate Lowlands. Strolling around today, you can see where the glaciers left their mark on the Islands’ U-shape valleys, once a steep V-shape, now scoured into a smooth by glaciers that also deposited the erratic boulders can been seen sitting like out of place sentinels on the beach.

SALMON CHIEF: FOOD OF THE GODS

Salmon have permeated First Nations mythology and have been prized as an important food source for thousands of years.

For the Salish people of the Interior, salmon was the most important of the local fishing stock and salmon fishing season was a significant social event which warranted the nomination of a “Salmon Chief” who directed the construction of the hooks, weirs and traps and the distribution of the catch.

In the Interior of the province, archaeological evidence dates the use of salmon as a food source back 3,500 years. Sheri Burton and Catherine Carlson were able to isolate and amplify mitochondrial DNA from salmon remains from archaeological sites near Kamloops, and identified the species as Oncorhynchus nerka, or Sockeye salmon. No older salmon remains had been found in the Kamloops area until the 1970’s, when fossil salmon concretions were collected on the south shore of Kamloops Lake.

These concretions were originally dated as Miocene (24 – 5.5 million years old) by the Geological Survey of Canada, based on analysis of pollen grains found in the concretions. However, many local experts, including UBC geology professor W.R. Danner and the late geologists W.H. Mathews and Richard Hughes, suspected the remains were from the much more recent, Late Pleistocene epoch. But it was not until the early 1990s that Catherine Carlson and Ken Klein found definitive proof of this.

By good luck, the fish remains in the Kamloops Lake concretions had not been completely replaced by minerals – enough of the original organic bone collagen remained for radiocarbon dating. The corrected date is approximately 18,000 years. It is likely that erosion during the time of deposition had carried pollen down from Miocene layers in surrounding hills, to be deposited around the dead fish, causing the initial over-estimation of the age of the concretions.

An age of 18,000 plus years – sets the fossils firmly as the only salmonids of the Late Pleistocene in North America, a very significant find. The date also changed our ideas about the early climate of the Interior; the Thompson Valley could not have been covered by glacial ice for as long as originally thought.

It has long been accepted that the most recent series of ice ages began approximately 1.6 million years ago, beginning as ice accumulations at higher altitudes with the gradual cooling of the climate. Four times the ice advanced and receded, most recently melting away somewhere around 10,000 years ago. Ice retreated from southwestern British Columbia and the Puget Sound area around 15,000 years ago.

In the southern Interior, ice built up first in the northern Selkirk Mountains, then slowly flowed down into the valleys. Once the valleys were filled, the depth of the ice increased until it began to climb to the highlands and finally covered most of the Interior of British Columbia. Between ice advances, there were times when the Kamloops area was ice free and the climate warm and hospitable.

Glacial ice was believed to have initiated its most recent retreat from the South Thompson area around 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, but salmon remains from 18,000 years ago suggest that it may have actually began its northwest decline much earlier and indicating a much warmer climate in the Interior than archaeologists or geologists had originally estimated.

Eighteen thousand year-old salmon also challenge the archaeological notion that aboriginal people of the Interior have had access to salmon as a significant protein source for only a few thousand years. In the popular view, people living in the Okanagan and Thompson Valleys were felt to have moved to settlements that were semi-permanent about 4500 years ago.

By that time they would have had a seasonally regulated diet composed primarily of salmon and supplemented by local game - deer, elk, small mammals – and available shellfish, birds and plant foods. If salmon were present much earlier, it is possible that this pattern of food utilization may have arisen earlier than thought.

Richard Hughes had originally identified the fossilized Kamloops salmon as Oncorhynchus nerka or Sockeye salmon, the same species found in the 3,500 year old archaeological sites. But, using the carbon-13 isotope ratio, Klein and Carlson were able to determine that these salmon did not feed on protein from a marine source and relied solely on a freshwater diet.

In other words, they could not have spent part of their life in the ocean, as modern Sockeye salmon do. Based on the specimens’ smaller heads and stunted bodies, the longest measuring in at a pint-sized 11.5 cm, Klein and Carlson feel that the fossils are likely Kokanee, a modern landlocked variety of Sockeye.

Here two people very precious to me celebrate life's many gifts from land and sea at the 1994 Hunt Memorial Potlatch.

HALE CREEK FOSSIL FIELD TRIP

ELECTIC LIGHT

bronze

CIMETIÈRE EN PROVENCE

ROCKY MOUNTAIN RIDGE FIELD TRIP

MARITIME MUSEUM

CHUCKANUT FOSSIL TRACKWAYS

Chuckanut Drive is much younger than other parts of Washington. The fossils found there lived and died some 40-55 million years ago, very close to where they are now, but in a much warmer, swampy setting. The exposures of the Chuckanut Formation were once part of a vast river delta. Imagine, if you will, the bayou country of the Lower Mississippi. The siltstones, sandstones, mudstones and conglomerates of the Chuckanut Formation were laid down about 40-54 million years ago during the Eocene epoch, a time of luxuriant plant growth in the subtropical flood plain that covered much of the Pacific Northwest.

This ancient wetland provided ideal conditions to preserve the many trees, shrubs & plants that thrived here. Plants are important in the fossil record because they are more abundant and can give us a lot of information about climate, temperature, the water cycle and humidity of the region. The Chuckanut flora is made up predominantly of plants whose modern relatives live in tropical areas such as Mexico and Central America. If you are interesting in viewing a tropical paradise in your own backyard, look no further than the Chuckanut. Images and tag lines: Glyptostrobus, the Chinese swamp cypress, is perhaps the most common plant found here. Also abundant are fossilized remains of the North American bald cypress, Taxodium; Metasequoia (dawn redwood), Lygodium (climbing fern), large Sabal (palm) and leaves from a variety of broad leaf angiosperm plants such as (witch hazel), Laurus (laurel), Ficus (fig) and Platanus (sycamore), and several other forms.

While less abundant, evidence of the animals that called this ancient swamp home are also found here. Rare bird, reptile, and mammal tracks have been immortalized in the outcrops of the Chuckanut Formation including tracks of Diatryma, a massive flightless bird that reached up to 9 feet in height and made a living in the grasslands and swamps of the Eocene.

Tracks of a type of archaic mammal of the Orders Pantodonta or Dinocerata (blunt foot herbivores), footprints from a small shorebird, and tracks from an early equid or webbed bird track give evidence to the vertebrates that inhabited the swamps, lakes and river ways of the Pacific Northwest 50 million years ago.

WANNERIA DUNNAE

Wanneria dunnaeis an impressive trilobite from British Columbia's Eager Formation, and one of the more striking specimens found at the original research site of the lovely Lisa Bohach, a paleontologist now working out of Alberta.

The site has changed over the years, both physically and politically, but the one constant is the exquisite detail of the specimens. Both Wanneria dunnae and Ollenelus ricei are commonly found here. I had a eureka moment there a few years ago when ambling up the path to the main pit. The sun hit a wily would-be hiking track on a bit of shale at just the right angle. Closer inspection showed it to be a Tuzoia, one of the rare arthropods to come from the area.

BEAUTIFUL EARTH SERIES: VALHALLA

MOONLIT PADDLE

CROCODILIAN UPSTARTS: THE CRUROTARSANS

Dinosaurs, long hailed as the rulers of the Triassic almost lost the title belt to a group of crocodilian upstarts, the crurotarsans. In a short lived battle for survival, geologically speaking, the two groups ran head-to-head for about thirty million years with the Crurotarsi butting their massive skulls and narrow snouts against their evolutionary opponent and ultimate successors, the dinosaurs.

The Crurotarsi or "cross-ankles" as they are affectionately known, are a group of archosaurs - formerly known as Pseudosuchians when paleontologist Paul Serono, the darling of National Geographic, renamed them for their node-based clade in 1991.

LIMESTONE AND SALT AIR: GORDES

HANGING AT THE DOG PARK

BITING ANGUS

SLEEPY BABIES

CETACEA: HUMPBACK WHALE

Look at this lovely maternal bond between an adult Humpback whale female, Megaptera novaeangliae, and her young. Humpbacks are a species of baleen whale for whom I hold a special place in my heart. 

Baleens are whales who feed on plankton and other wee oceanic tasties that they consume through their baleens, a specialised filter of keratin that frames their mouths.

There are fifteen species of baleen whales. They inhabit all major oceans, in a wide band running from the Antarctic ice edge to 81°N latitude.

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, whales are known as g̱wa̱'ya̱m. Both the California grey and the Humpback whale live on the coast. Only a small number of individuals in First Nation society had the right to harpoon a whale. It was generally only the Chief who was bestowed this great honour. Humpback whales like to feed close to shore and enter the local inlets. Around Vancouver Island and along the coast of British Columbia, this made them a welcome food source as the long days of winter passed into Spring.

Humpback whales are rorquals, members of the Balaenopteridae family that includes the blue, fin, Bryde's, sei and minke whales. The rorquals are believed to have diverged from the other families of the suborder Mysticeti during the middle Miocene. 

While cetaceans were historically thought to have descended from mesonychids— which would place them outside the order Artiodactyla— molecular evidence supports them as a clade of even-toed ungulates — our dear Artiodactyla. Baleen whales split from toothed whales, the Odontoceti, around 34 million years ago.

MATERNAL MACAQUE

EVENING PADDLE

EVENING LIGHT

EARLY NEW YEAR'S MORNING

ALPINE ADVENTURE FOSSIL FIELD TRIP

Camping at about 7,500 ft, we were treated to all four seasons and some great collecting.

Over the course of the week we collected some beautiful ammonites, several of which are new species, and saw a buck with a sexy set of horns, flocks of Franciscans and a majestic lone wolf.

The area is home to active research by UBC paleontologist, Louise Longridge, and boasts abundant fossil marine specimens and a chance to see the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, a rare treat.

HAIDA GWAII: ISLANDS OF FIRE

Located as they are in Canada’s most active earthquake zone, the Queen Charlotte Islands have had their share of shake-ups and scourings. Many of the Islands’ hillsides are scarred by slides. But the rock beneath speaks of an even more violent past.

Very few people know that the rock in the Queen Charlottes holds the key to a catastrophic event from eons ago. We’ve heard tales and seen images of the cataclysmic damage caused by meteriorites smashing into the Earth’s surface.

Until recently, it was a meteorite impact that was blamed for the worldwide Triassic/Jurassic Mass Extinction. This wholesale dying out of species occurred some 200 million years ago. New evidence challenges the meteorite theory. Experts now believe that tectonic forces may have caused hundreds of volcanoes around the world to erupt simultaneously. The subsequent showers of volcanic ash would have altered the composition of the atmosphere dramatically and plunged the world into near total darkness for years until it settled from the sky.

The picture painted of the sun flickering fitfully through inky clouds, paling against the torrents of glowing lava, while everywhere life is smothered, poisoned, or starved, rivals the most apocalyptic imaginings of Hollywood or religion. We know from worldwide evidence that the extinction was dramatic and affected upwards of 70% of the world’s biota.

Perhaps counterintuitively, for one might think of water as a refuge from fire, smoke, and lava, it was marine lifeforms that suffered the most. This is particularly well documented in the rocks of the Queen Charlottes, especially at Kennecott Point and Kunga Island.

Radiolarian microfossils, tiny, siliceous, single-celled microrganisms, tell the tale. In the Upper Triassic rocks, which predate the extinction by about 10 million years, radiolarians are preserved in hundreds of forms. Just above them, in the early Jurassic rock layers laid down about the time of the great die-offs, only a fraction of the previous number of forms are represented. The more recent Jurassic rock shows a rebound of radiolarian diversity, though of course, in different forms, a diversity which continues to flourish and expand in today’s oceans.