August 19, 2007

August 19, 2007

In the morning we rise early and drive west on Canada’s Hwy 1 to Yoho National Park and stop at the town of Field, British Columbia. There we meet up with a group for a hike to the Mt. Stephens Trilobite beds. This and the nearby Walcott Quarry are part of the Burgess Shale formation. To protect these world-famous fossil sites from pilfering, they are strictly off-limits except by a government-sanctioned guided hike. Ours is led by a paleontologist from the University of Calgary. The trilobite bed is on the side of a mountaintop and is a very strenuous three-hour climb, not hike, up the mountainside.

As an amateur wanna-be geologist, it is well worth the effort for we are rewarded with an amazing site. The bed is a sliding mass of slate slabs with fossil imprints of 500-million year old trilobites on what seems like every other sheet. I feel bad walking over the area thinking I am destroying an ancient fossil with every step. A trilobite was a hard-shelled sea creature and one of the earliest animal species on earth. The hike up was tough, but the hike down was treacherous. The constant drizzle for the last 12 hours turned the steep grade into a slippery mess.

After the hike, we quickly peruse the small fossil exhibit at the Field visitor center. Since we are cold, tired, and wet, we are ready to stop early, so we head west out of Yoho, stopping only for a few minutes to see the parks Natural Bridge oddity. We spend the night at a public RV park in the town of Golden, BC.