Our journey through British Columbia last July continued. We were on Vancouver Island and were leaving the city of Victoria to catch the ferry back to the mainland at Nanaimo. But there were still some sights along the way. The town of Victoria was built on the lowlands at the south end of the island, but as we began traveling north the landscape grew more rugged and mountainous. The vast ice sheets of the last ice age covered the entire island, but the ice could not remove the tougher bedrock of the island's interior. Looking south from Malahat Summit (l,155 feet/352 meters) we could see the hills we had just explored, including the delightful Goldstream Provincial Park.
The park hosts a surprising variety of plant and animal life, due to a wide variety of habitats. Part of the value of the park is that it has not been logged, and thus preserves old-growth forests, including 700 year old Cedar trees. It includes an estuary/wetland at the end of the Finlayson Arm of the Strait of Georgia, part of the Salish Sea. The long inlet exists because the glaciers were able to exploit a fault zone that left the rocks weakened and broken. The Leech River Fault, a major terrane boundary, cuts through the park, dividing the Pacific Rim Terrane (the Leech River Complex) from Wrangellia. Wrangellia is made up of igneous intrusive rocks and metamorphic rocks from the Mesozoic Era, the age of the dinosaurs.
Looking south from the Nature Center one can see Mount Finlayson (below), another feature that indicates the presence of glaciers in the past. The rounded form of the mountain identifies it as a
roche moutonnée, a larger-scale version of the rounded forms
seen at Mt. Douglas and Mt. Tolmie in Victoria.
The title of today's post refers to one of the small delights of the park. The erosive action of the glaciers was oriented mostly north to south, and the ridgelines drop steeply into the valley containing the Finlayson Arm. Small creeks and rivers occasionally form modest waterfalls, including the easily accessed Niagara Falls. Visiting the waterfall, one realizes it was not named for the similarity of its
volume to the better-known falls back east, but to the height. At 155 feet, it's just a bit shorter than Niagara's 167 feet (note the people at the bottom of the canyon for scale).
One might wonder why Goldstream Park has the name it has. The rocks of the Leech River Complex were altered by superheated mineralized water, and quartz veins with minor amounts of gold were emplaced in the area. The gold was discovered in 1858, and a minor rush involving perhaps 300 miners ensued a few years later. There was not a great deal of gold to be had, and the boom soon petered out, but the name remained. A few old tunnels and mines can still be seen in the park.
I know this is a geology blog, and most of the time I don't have much patience for trying to get pictures of deer, but as I was walking up the trail to the falls, I broke with tradition. Up ahead of me I could see some kind of four-footed animal, and it turned out to be the cutest little fawn ever. It was happy to share the trail with me for a few moments, until the rest of the crew caught up with me. It then took off into the underbrush.
Goldstream Provincial Park is west and north of Victoria on the Trans-Canada Highway 1. We were there on a holiday weekend and the parking lots filled quickly (we made some people
very happy when our four vehicles left all at once). If you have the time and energy, a trail climbs to the summit of Mt. Finlayson.
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