Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Glory Traverse, for real.

This was at our lunch spot, heading up to that knob on the left.
Today was the best traverse of my life. We started in this little marshy area, hiked up a knob to see the contact (there was no contact, which means we have a brutal traverse to do to find out where the heck that contact is), and then slowly made our way up a lovely treed slope until we hit the alpine tree-free slope, ate lunch, and then cruised around above treeline looking for fossils (we found none), admiring the lovely vegetation, view, local animals, and working on our tan.


Also at lunch, looking south to Mt Edziza with that cloud looming above it.


Seriously. It was incredible. I have this brutal sunburn (accentuates my watch tan just beautifully), but I don't even mind. We could see clear over to Mt Edziza (south of us) and the Coast Mountains (to the southwest).

By the time we got to our pickup spot, the clouds of Edziza had cleared and we could see the peak. I only took a photo with my film camera up there, so it'll be a few months until you can oogle the peak, but believe it, it was beautiful.

We were supposed to find the contact between two major units here at our first station (the Takwahoni (sedimentary unit, lots of sandstones/siltstones/conglomerates/some limestone) and the Stuhini (a volcanic unit, lots of flow/breccia/volcanic conglomerate). All we saw were the siltstones from Takwahoni, even though the previous mapper had clearly marked a contact where we were. So now we're going to be hiking down into the creek and then back up the other side for a heli pickup. Should be interesting. We saw a fair amount of limestone cobbles in the conglomerate, which was pretty neat (about 5cm or so) and a LOT of siltstone. We spent about an hour looking for fossils in an area marked as fossil rich, but we couldn't find anything. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow!

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