Travels in Cascadia: The Toughest Hike I'll Ever Do...Stawamus Chief in British Columbia

Note that I didn't say the toughest hike YOU will ever do. Every hiking experience is individual, and this one left me...breathless. Stawamus Chief is one of the most popular hikes in the Vancouver-Squamish region of British Columbia, and when we passed through the area last July, I knew I needed to give it a shot.

Stawamus Chief is a granite dome that rises more than 2,000 feet above the east end of Howe Sound, the southernmost fjord on the west coast of North America. The dome actually has three summits, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, and the trail climbs to the first summit in a little over a mile. That doesn't sound so bad, does it?

The beginning of the trail is pleasingly flat, rising gently through the Stawamus Chief Campground. The wide flat trail offered no clue about what would follow. I know it sounds dramatic, but from the moment one takes the first step upward as the trail starts the climb in earnest, the trail is relentless and steep.

Some of the steps are on wood stairwells, but the rest of them are large uneven stone blocks that I found challenging. And there are no breaks. Many trails are steep, but most all of them have short breaks were the trail is level for a few steps. Not this one. It never stops climbing.

I climbed higher and higher, and grew more exhausted with each step. The thought was slowly building in my head that I was no longer young, and that some trails were simply too tough for overweight 60-somethings. But then another thought immediately followed: this quite probably was the only chance I would ever have at making the summit. Who could know if I would ever be here again, and with time marching on, my ability to climb would no doubt degrade with age. It was probably the toughest hike I would ever do (in the future sense). I decided I had to do it, and kept going. And going.

Everyone's experience will differ, of course, and some younger and healthier people would not have that much of a problem on this trail. Part of my own worries weren't so much the climb, but the descent. All of those huge steps had to be repeated, but going down, and I worried about the impact on my knees and ankles. But I had already come so far.

Stawamus Chief is a granite dome, and the resemblance to Half Dome in Yosemite Valley is unmistakable. One of the things about Half Dome is that it was never covered with glacial ice. The dome took it's iconic shape from exfoliation of the outer slabs of granite. The corners and edges snapped off as the pressure of burial was released upon exposure to the surface. Glaciers at the base quarried away the fallen rocks.

Stawamus Chief was different: as I approached the summit, a most unusual rock emerged from the trees. It was a boulder perched on a granite platform. It was a classic example of a glacial erratic, a rock left behind as the glaciers that flowed over this surface melted away. Unlike Half Dome, the summit of the Chief had been covered by glacial ice. And not just a little...the ice here was over a mile thick!

In the end, I didn't make the true summit. The young men in our group reported that another twenty minutes and 200 feet of hard climbing remained ahead. I just wasn't up to it. But I did make it to the summit ridge, which provided a stunning view of the eastern end of Howe Sound. From this elevation, the glacial origin of the fjord was obvious. And I was happy to be where I was. Elated, even. And thrilled to be alive (literally!).

The knees and ankles took the expected pounding on the way down, but no lasting damage was done. I would live another day, and take on the next challenge. It could well have been the toughest hike that I would ever do (in the future sense; I've done some really tough hikes over the years), but the neat thing about life is that you never know what comes next. Maybe I won't do this trail again, but there are many other trails and challenges ahead. Again, that sounds dramatic, but finding one's limits is always an exercise in drama.

Maybe I Need to Change My Spirit Animal...

The Geotripper Blog has been quiet for a few weeks, due to the fact that we have been conducting a field studies course on the geology and anthropology of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. It's been hectic, but also incredible. Today though, I just had to find a moment to post about my experience from this morning. It has to do with spirit animals.

I don't accept the claptrap that emanates from the psychic/new age community about such things because it is a form of cultural appropriation, but when I encounter indigenous people who have close ties to a landscape that they have occupied for millennia, I pay a lot more attention. It's one thing to be a member of a privileged group whose ancestors were responsible for genocide of entire cultures and then to pretend to take their religion seriously, and quite another to try and understand and respect these cultures that have existed for many centuries.

During this trip, I've been deciding what animal would represent my place in the cosmos, and because I have been seeing a great many Bald Eagles, I "picked" them (understood easily by our students, given the fact that I spend my time looking at the skies above for birds while talking about the rocks below). But this morning we were touring the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre in Whistler, British Columbia. The Centre celebrates the peoples whose traditional boundaries straddled the passes around Whistler, the Squamish (Sk̲wx̲wú7mesh) and Lil'wat (Lil’wat7ul). It is a wonderful facility and includes an outdoor area showing a pithouse and longhouse, as well as a forest trail identifying culturally important plants and animals. Including the sign in the picture below...

And not more than 150 feet away, there it was...a Black Bear foraging along the trail. It was being a "good" bear, looking for food from the forest rather than from the trash cans and litter of the people in Whistler. Frankly, it was just a bit eerie, but only a bit. The bear was unconcerned with my presence. It was mainly a moment of contact with the natural world that is all too rare in our deeply insulated society.

The Squamish and Lil'wat people hold the bear in high esteem. To them the bear symbolizes family and strength through motherhood and teachings. Mother Bears are fierce defenders of their children and are great protectors. Bear is a well-respected member of the community and is sometimes referred to as the protector of the forests. They look to the Bear to show them how to fish and pick berries in their territory.



The meanings of the other animals and spirits can be found here: https://shop.slcc.ca/legends-symbology/

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: Seeing Volcanoes from the Inside Out at Siám' Smánit (Stawamus Chief)

It's one thing to talk about a subduction zone from the outside, where one might see an oceanic trench, or a chain of volcanoes. It's quite another to explore the convergent zone from the inside out, by, for instance, standing under the volcano. Miles below the volcano. That's what one gets to do along the lower stretches of the Sea to Sky Highway between Whistler and Vancouver in British Columbia.

We were vagabonding our way through the landscapes of the Cascadia Subduction Zone between Northern California and the southern end of British Columbia. We were headed south towards home, but there were still some pretty intense sights ahead. As we drove down the Sea to Sky Highway back towards Vancouver, we had a chance to check out the awesome cliff of Siám' Smánit, Stawamus Chief at the head of Howe Sound. We got our first look of the immense cliff from several miles upstream at the Tantalus Overlook (below).

Stawamus Chief is a huge cliff and dome of granitic rock, specifically granodiorite (which chemically is a bit less rich in silica than actual granite). The chief has a height of 700 meters (2,297 feet), which is only a few hundred meters short of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park (900 meters, 3,000 feet). Interestingly, both names refer to "chiefs". The rock originated in magma chambers many kilometers below the surface of the Earth, underneath volcanoes that are presumed to have existed far above about 100 million years ago (the Cretaceous Period; dinosaurs would have wandered the slopes of these volcanoes). Tens of millions of years of erosion have removed the volcanoes and the many kilometers of intervening rock. We were quite literally standing within the internal plumbing of an ancient volcano!

One of the agents of erosion that has shaped Stawamus Chief was glaciation. We were at the head of Howe Sound, North America's southernmost glacial fjord, a spot where the ice stream was thousands of meters thick. The ice completely covered the "Chief" and eventually scoured and trimmed the edges of the huge rock.

In the 12,000 years or so since the ice melted back, the scoured and polished surfaces of the rock were weathered away, or buried beneath rock debris. Fresh looking glacial surfaces can be hard to find at times, but the 2010 Winter Olympics provided some excellent exposures here at Stawamus. How? The organizers widened the highway, and constructed a pedestrian bridge that provided access to the provincial park for people parking to the north.

The slopes in the Stawamus area were covered with glacial till and outwash deposits that hid the scoured granite surfaces. Engineers cut a low pass through the till. but they realized that the loose debris would be a road hazard. They carted away the till, exposing the beautifully carved and polished surfaces underneath.

Some of the till was still visible on the south side of the highway (below).

From north of the bridge, even more of the immense cliff could be seen. The mountain attracts legions of rock climbers, and we could see several of them inching their way up the rock face.

It was getting late, and the vagabonders had made no plans for the night. We continued down the highway, eventually finding accommodations in North Vancouver. The next day we would be making the border crossing back into the United States, where new adventures awaited. More to come!

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: Exploring North America's Southernmost Fjord

One of the nice things about vagabonding, traveling without a set itinerary, is that one can make allowances for weather. That's a major consideration with a journey through the Pacific Northwest. We stayed an extra day on Vancouver Island, letting a weak storm pass through the region, because I couldn't stand the thought of missing out again on seeing and exploring an extraordinary place, the southernmost fjord in North America.

We missed seeing much of the landscape in and around Howe Sound last year because we were traveling with a large group and had a precise schedule. An unusually powerful summer storm hit the region  as we traveled through. It caused flood damage across British Columbia and Alberta, but we mainly saw rain and very cloudy conditions. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Extremely, teeth-gratingly disappointed. My choice of travel locales on this trip was governed largely by the desire to see Howe Sound and the Sea to the Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler.

I reveled in the beauty of the storm-free weather as we boarded the ferry from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island to Horseshoe Bay in Howe Sound on the mainland. The water was sparkling in the sun, and views were practically unobstructed in all directions. We crossed the Strait of Georgia, the northern arm of the Salish Sea, and entered the mouth of Howe Sound. It was my first time seeing a glacial fjord (even though I was there the previous year).

A glacial fjord is simply a drowned glacial trough, a long coastal inlet that is lined by steep cliffs. Glaciers can erode valleys below sea level if the ice is thick enough, but many fjords formed by flooding caused by the rise of sea level that followed the end of the last ice age. The term is Norwegian, and of course Scandinavia is famous for spectacular fjords. But Howe Sound is no slouch when it comes to incredible scenery. And there's a hint of danger, too...

The hazards of living along a subduction zone change as one travels inland. We were now the width of a huge island and a large strait from the trench, so the direct shaking from gigantic earthquakes offshore would be somewhat lessened. But rockfalls and tsunamis would still have to be considered threats. Some tsunamis could even be generated within the fjord by rockfalls. In 1958 at Lituya Bay in Alaska, a quake-generated rockfall produced a gigantic spash that erased trees, rock and soil from the opposite slope to a height of 1,720 feet (520 m). The tsunami moved seaward with heights of between 100-300 feet, removing entire forests and killing several people unlucky enough to be in fishing boats at the mouth of the bay (although several survived the wave and provided eyewitness accounts of the extraordinary event).

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

The existence of several important transportation corridors, both rails and highways, in Howe Sound has highlighted the dangers of mass wasting. There simply isn't much in the way of flat ground for the placing of rails or asphalt, so engineering problems abound. The original two lane highway was widened and straightened to ease traffic during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Problems with falling rocks and debris floods are constant, with an average of 405 events each year, and a death toll (since 1906) of 50 lives, although 37 of them were due to a single event, a horrific debris flow in 1921.

The other threat is volcanism. The slab of oceanic crust that is subducting off the coast carries water into the Earth's mantle, and a series of reactions lead to the melting of crustal rock. The magma rises to the surface, erupting out and forming a chain of volcanoes called a magmatic arc. Here, in British Columbia at Howe Sound, we were near the northern terminus of the Cascadia arc, and I was particularly anxious to have a look at Mt. Garibaldi and the Black Tusk. I had a brief view of the "tusk", an eroded cinder cone, as we sailed into the sound. There will be a bit more on the volcanoes in a future post.

We drove up the narrow highway and made a brief stop at Porteau Cove Provincial Park. We stopped there last year, but mostly had a view of some rocks up close, and fog. On this day, we had a dramatic view of the sound, and the surrounding glacier-covered peaks.

The water had changed from a dark blue to a turquoise hue. The reason had to do with the glaciers on the high peaks above us. As the ice grinds away at the rock, a fine silt/clay material results, and is carried in the meltwater to the sound below. The finest clay particles can remain in suspension for weeks or months, and that is what produces the unique color of the water in the upper part of the sound.

The main trunk glacier that produced Howe Sound was able to cut far deeper than the smaller tributary glaciers, so the side canyons ended up perched high up on the rim of the main valley. Shannon Falls is an example of one of these hanging valleys. It makes a dramatic cascading drop of  1,100 feet (335 meters) onto the valley floor at the head of the sound.

We reached the upper end of Howe Sound at the town of Squamish, and started the grade up into the mountains at Whistler. At a roadside viewpoint, we stopped and looked back at the head of Howe Sound. It was a much different place than the one we saw last year!

In case you were wondering what we did see last year, here is a shot from Porteau Cove in 2014.

And this was Shannon Falls in 2014. The fog had lifted a bit, so we actually saw the falls back then. I was struck by how feeble the falls were this summer. The drought extends far beyond California...