Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: Stone Rings, Glaciers, and "Dinosaurs" on the Coast of the Salish Sea

We've got a mixed bag on this post...

Our vagabonding trip along the Cascadia Subduction Zone involved a desire to spend most nights camping, but we now we had reached Canada, our gear was all wet, and we were in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Victoria. We decided to spend a few days in the comfort of a hotel and dry out a bit.

Victoria is an architecturally scenic city, but it is also a city of geology and archaeology. Some of the best parts are found in city parks like Beacon Hill and a series of shoreline green areas (although not so green in this dry year). We spent some time here last year, but I was flabbergasted to find I had missed an obvious link to the past that had been in plain view. It was a group of stone rings on the slope of Beacon Hill above Finlayson Point, right next to Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway.

The stone rings were burial sites of the First Nation Songhees people. When Europeans established the city in the middle 1800s, there were several dozen of these rings on the hill, but the new colonizers were not particularly interested in preserving evidence of the past. They removed most of the stones and used them elsewhere. By the 1980s only four rings remained on the slope below Beacon Hill, hidden from sight by a thick growth of vegetation. In 1986, the parks department removed the vegetation, and then bulldozed the stone rings to facilitate mowing. They didn't realize what they were doing. Archaeologists directed to crews to replace the stones as best as could be remembered, and there were promises to protected the site and to provide interpretive signage. A low fence surrounds the rings, but when we were there, I didn't see any signs explaining the site.

The parks in the city of Victoria are good places to see the only dinosaurs remaining on planet Earth. They are of course the avian dinosaurs, the only members of the dinosaurian clan to survive the great extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period. At Beacon Hill, we saw several large bird species, including a Peacock. Seen only from the knees down, they look terrifying, as scary as any T-rex.

There was also a rookery of Great Blue Herons. A juvenile was hanging out in the low branches of a tree by the pond, and the adults seemed to be patrolling the area from high perches in the tallest trees. Every few minutes they erupted into an other-worldly shrieking, and there was a commotion up in the crowns of the trees. We couldn't see what they were upset about.

After a few minutes the reason became clear. They were at war with raptors. There was a pair of Bald Eagles trying to attack the nestlings and eggs in the rookery. It was a life and death battle going on over our heads (for more pictures of the event, check out my story at Geotripper's California Birds).

We continued along the coast to take in the coastal parks, and to climb one of the highest peaks in the Victoria area. It was a good way to see evidence of the glacial heritage of this landscape.

Direct evidence exists for only two advances of glacial ice across this region, but there were undoubtedly many more. The youngest events tended to erase the deposits of the earlier advances of ice. Soils obscure many of the glacially carved rocks, so the best place to search for glacial features was along the coastline where wave erosion removes the soil cover. 

The coastal drive provided many examples of glacial polish, striations, and grooves. The smoothed off rocks provided clear exposures of the ancient metamorphic rocks that underlie this part of Vancouver Island. The rocks are called the Wark or Colquitz gneiss, and they formed as part of Wrangellia, a terrane that formed hundreds or thousands of miles away across the Pacific. It was accreted to the North American continent about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. I had a pleasant teaching moment when some older ladies who were enjoying the view wondered why the strange man was taking pictures of the rocks rather than the coastline. They politely said thank you at the end of the long explanation (I get that a lot).

We then drove to the top of Mount Douglas (known by the Saanich people as pq̕áls or PKOLS), a 260 m (853 ft) hill that rises over Victoria, providing a 360 degree view of the region. The mountain provides several different biologic zones, including a Garry Oak woodland around the summit, one of the northernmost exposures of oak trees in North America. The lower slopes are covered by conifer forests.

The view is fantastic. It really is a wonderful spot to gain an appreciation of the regional geography. The Olympic Mountains were visible across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and I'm told that Mt. Rainier is visible on the clearest days (it's over 130 miles away). The entire city of Victoria spreads out to the south.

To the north is the Saanich Peninsula, and the glacially scoured Strait of Georgia, the northern extension of the Salish Sea. The mountains of Vancouver Island recede into the distance. The island is huge, 460 kilometres (290 miles) in length and 80 kilometres (50 miles) in width.

The next day was a layover for us, and we mostly pretended to be tourists, visiting Butchart Gardens (you can read my somewhat heretical review of the place here). The following day we were going to be seafarers once more, crossing the Strait of Georgia onto the Canadian mainland, and the Sea to the Sky Highway. I was anxiously watching the weather, because we traveled there last year, and never saw it because of low overcast conditions. What would we would see?

Northern Convergence: Stories on Trees, the Totems of the Northwestern First Nations

During the flurry of planning for our Northern Convergence journey through Canada and the Pacific Northwest, I was barely keeping up with the geology, and any background information on the anthropology/archaeology of the region fell to my colleague from our anthropology department. There were certainly some intriguing sights related to the First Nations people of  Canada, and the one of these impressed itself on me early in the trip.

We were rushing from one part of Vancouver Island to another, and I was running down the beach cliffs below Beacon Hill Park in Victoria while Mrs. Geotripper went wandering off somewhere.  I was vaguely aware that there was a really tall telephone pole or satellite receiver tower at the edge of the forest, and eventually I noticed that Mrs. Geotripper was motioning me over.

It slowly dawned on me that I was looking at one of the largest totem poles in the world. It was impossibly tall, and I had to go up and touch it to make sure it was made of wood. It was. The plaque at the base notes that the pole honors the First Nation people who fought in the world wars.

The pole was carved from a gigantic Western Cedar tree in 1956 by a team led by Mungo Martin, a Kwakiutl tribal chief. According to the city history, the pole was expected to last no longer than 50 years at which time it would return to the Earth. Major restorations a decade ago added some years, but it may not be there beyond 2020 or so. It stands 40.5 meters (133 feet) high, making it the fifth tallest in the world (or the tallest "free-standing"). The tallest in the world is in the village of Alert Bay on Cormorant Island at the north end of Vancouver Island. It is 53 meters (173 feet) high. We may not see many more poles of this height. There are few monster sized Cedar trees left to carve them from.

Totem poles haven't left much of an archaeological record for fairly obvious reasons. Wood disappears fast in this humid environment. They are known from the 1800s, and are known to have been present with some First Nation tribes prior to European contact. They are a beautiful art form, and communicate family histories, legendary stories, and clan status. They were apparently never objects of worship.

On our rainy day with the students on Vancouver Island, we made a stop at the town of Duncan in the Cowichan Valley, a region with a large First Nation presence. The town has embraced the display of totems, with around 80 in the town center. Each was carved by a local First Nation artisan..

It was an interesting area to take a break and learn a bit of local history. The town is also home to the Quw'utsun Cultural and Conference Centre run by the Cowichan tribe, the largest in British Columbia.

The rain continued (the blue skies in these pictures were from our reconnaissance trip a week earlier), and we needed to be in Nanaimo in a few hours to catch the ferry back to mainland. We drove north to Departure Bay. Our story will continue with our journey up the Sea to the Sky Highway.

Northern Convergence: The Day We Actually Had on Vancouver Island...and Goldstream

A plan is such a wonderful thing! With a plan, one can conduct field trips smoothly, with no delays, no missed stops,  no problems. Oh, did I say plan? I meant to say "luck". I've been having fun with my recent posts, talking about the places on Vancouver Island that we intended to visit on our recent field studies course, but which we had to miss. There were plenty of reasons, all of the normal kind: it's all about what happens when you try to move 22 people from point A to point B.

But we did see some neat geology, and discovered a pretty good site for studying the regional rocks.

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

The day started out as planned. We slept in a bit, having arrived the previous night very late on the ferry from Port Angeles. We headed out to Beacon Hill Park in the center of Victoria. The geology of the park was covered in this previous post, with the main difference being that it was seriously overcast and starting to rain. We certainly couldn't see across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. As is usual, we took longer than expected, and the situation was complicated by the fact that we couldn't find bathrooms where we expected to. And traffic was getting heavy in the downtown area. Think of the challenge of maneuvering five vehicles through heavy traffic looking for a gas station. And then finding one, which turned out to have a single bathroom. Time was ticked away, and just like that we were an hour or two behind schedule. The Sooke Potholes fell from the schedule first. East Sooke Park disappeared next. And the rain was coming down more heavily. We needed a substitute plan...

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

We'd passed the signs for Goldstream Provincial Park during our reconnaissance trip. In the crush of trip planning, I didn't have time to consider the site carefully, but we needed someplace to stop, use a restroom, and to discuss some of the anthropology/geology topics that had been delayed by rain at our other stops. Goldstream turned out to have a really fine rain-proof picnic shelter and the all important restrooms! We caught up with class, while I ran to the visitor center and tried to learn the geology of the park in ten minutes.

Goldstream Provincial Park turns out to have a lot of important geology in only 800 or so acres! The Leech River Fault, a major terrane boundary, cuts through the park. It 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.

The main park trail winds past some of the finest examples of old trees.

The appearance of a rainforest belies the fact that the park includes one of the northernmost examples of a dry Mediterranean climate zone on the continent, and maybe in the world. Such climates are distinguished by dry summers and mild winters. The mild climate results from the moderating effects of the Pacific Ocean and Strait of Georgia, and the dryness from the rainshadow effect of the mountains along the main part of Vancouver Island.  

The park includes an estuary complex and river (the Finlayson Arm) that hosts ten different species of fish, including three salmon species, Steelhead trout, and Coastal Cutthroat Trout. The estuary is evidence of the glacial origin of this landscape, having been carved by the continental glaciers that covered the region as recently as 13,000 years ago. The glaciers were exploiting a weakness in the rocks from a fault that ran through the valley.

Looking south from the Nature Center one can see Mount Finlayson, another feature that indicates the presence one time of glaciers. The rounded form of the mountain identifies it as a roche moutonnée, a larger-scale version of the rounded forms seen in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria. The rocks making up the peak are metamorphic volcanic rocks and granitic plutons dating from the Mesozoic Era.

One might wonder the derivation of the name of the park. The rocks on the west side of the canyon are part of the Leech River Complex, a collection of schist and slate dating from the late Mesozoic Era. The rocks at one time or another 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.

There was one more treasure for us to discover. When the ice sheet moved through the area, it preferentially eroded the north-south fault valley, and the east-west drainages were not cut so deeply. When the ice disappeared, the side drainages remained as elevated river valleys, and waterfalls were formed. A beautiful small waterfall with the somewhat pretentious name Niagara Falls can be reached by a short hike from the parking area. The name comes clearly not from the volume of the waterfall, but from the height, which at 155 feet (47.5 meters), is similar to that of its more famous cousin in New York/Canada (167 feet/51 meters).

We were there in the dry season (despite the rain that was falling on us), and the falls were at such a low ebb that the pool at the base was not flowing more than a few meters downstream. It was sinking underground instead.

Goldstream Provincial Park was a fascinating little park to visit, but by then our schedule was in serious trouble. We had to catch a 5:30 pm ferry in Nanaimo, and it was well past lunchtime (but we had not had lunch). We hit the highway and headed towards Duncan for food. And some really cool anthropology, as it turned out.

Northern Convergence: Victoria, Finding Geology and a Rare Ecosystem in a Beautiful City

We start our blog journey through Canada with a view of alpine peaks, forests and birds. If the picture seems a little fuzzy, it's because it is a highly cropped view down one of the main avenues in the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island (below). And truth be told, the peaks are actually in the United States. They are the Olympic Mountains, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We had not gone far into Canada yet!

Victoria is a pretty little city (population around 80,000, with a suburban population of about 340,000) that feels a little like it was carved from a wilderness, being surrounded by deep forests and rocky shorelines. All cities are imposed on geology, and Victoria is a vivid example. Just 12,000 or 13,000 years ago, the entire region lay beneath thousands of feet of glacial ice.

Glacial landscapes are exceedingly uneven, and the city's most venerable building is a victim of that fact. The Empress Hotel, constructed in 1908 (and no, we didn't get a chance to have High Tea there), has settled unevenly because portions are built on bedrock and the remainder on looser soils. As a consequence, one part of the foundation is a full meter lower than the other.

I suppose it is useless to point out the "Victorian architecture" when we are discussing a visit to Victoria, but the city was one of the oldest British settlements on the west coast of North America (1843), and the city has kept the flavor of old Britain (although most of our restaurant servers had Aussie accents or mentioned that they spent time living in Modesto!). Carriage rides are a staple of the tourist trade, and the city parks have tried to replicate the kind of flower gardens found in London, but the geology in some ways refuses to cooperate: glaciers didn't cover London, but they covered Victoria. Irregular knobs of bedrock pop out everywhere, and in those spots the park engineers surrendered to nature. Beacon Hill Park was our first geologic stop on the second morning of our trip.

The rocks themselves are quite unlike the rocks found across the Strait in Olympic National Park. Instead of deposits formed deep inside a subduction zone complex, the rocks exposed in Beacon Hill Park are metamorphic rocks derived from gabbro and granodiorite, a mixture called a migmatite. These rocks are derived from deep in the crust. They may date to 200 or 400 million years ago. 

The rocks were abraded by the glaciers, forming small roche moutonnées or crag and tail features. Such rocks are smoothed off on one side and plucked on the other, forming an asymmetrical linear ridge.

It occurred to me that the natural areas of the park were dry and out of character compared to other parts of the northwest coast of America, a place I associate more with rainforests. And there were oak trees, something I've never associated with western Canada. I thought that the northwest was all about conifers. It turned out that we had stumbled on one of the rarest biologic entities in Canada, the Garry Oak Ecosystem. Yes, it's really called that. The Garry Oak (Quercus garryana) is the only native oak species found in Washington and British Columbia.

Victoria is the driest locality on the west coast of Canada, averaging only about 24 inches of precipitation a year, with little and sometimes no snow. The local climate benefits from the moderating effect of the Pacific Ocean and Strait of Juan de Fuca, and lies in the rain shadow of the Olympics and other coastal mountains. Douglas Fir could still thrive in a climate like this, but wildfires keep them at bay. The Garry Oak Ecosystem covers far less than 1% of the land area of British Columbia, and is considered highly endangered (mainly due to development). It's also a harbinger of the future. With global warming, the oak woodland may become more widespread due to warmer and drier conditions.

Beacon Hill itself offers stunning views of the Strait of Juan de Fuca with the Olympic Mountains on the horizon. The coastal strip leading down to Finlayson Point is covered by glacial deposits.

Where wave erosion has removed the loose sediments, fresh exposures of glaciated bedrock can be seen. The rocks have been scored by striations and groves.

The southwest corner of the park holds one human-made distinction. It is Mile '0' (really, kilometer '0') of the Trans-Canada Highway that transects the entirety of the nation of Canada. It a sense it was mile zero of our journey through Canada as well.

Our next post will explore some of the fascinating geology of Vancouver Island beyond the city boundaries of Victoria.