"Roads? Where we're going, we don't NEED roads..."

View from my tent at second camp

All right, I'm back in the future again!


Fly camp was amazing. There's nothing like being in the middle of nowhere (literally) with nothing. Okay, well, we had tents and food and a stove, but basically nothing. We flew out of Dease Lake Airport around 8am on Monday morning. It was about a half hour flight to our first camp, which was in a cirque with a small creek running out of it. We dropped our gear, tarped it  and then got a drop off on the top of the ridge so we could hike back to camp, geologizing on the way. We were in the middle of the Cake Hill intrusive unit, which is a titanite-bearing hornblende-quartz-monzodiorite. We were there to get a good feel for the unit, because it's altered in most of the other areas nearby. It was a nice hike, aside from the rain and the hail. It basically started dumping rain and hail (alternating) about 5 minutes after the chopper left. So we cut our traverse short and went back to camp (via scree slope in the cirque) and set up camp for the night. It was cold. Real cold. Too cold for July. Granted we were above treeline, but it was chilly. I slept in my -10 sleeping bag with my winter long-johns on. It was freaking cold that night.

The next day we hiked out of camp to the contact where a more-potassic unit intrudes the Cake Hill, introducing some biotite into the Cake Hill (so it is a titanite-bearing biotite-hornblende quartz-monzodiorite). Unfortunately the exposure was bad (we had no outcrops at the contact, and nearby it was pretty crummy), and the weather was.....well, let's just say snow should not be falling in July. It didn't stick, but it was definitely snowing. We got picked up by the chopper, and then moved our camp that night to another cirque a few miles east. I didn't take any photos of the first camp, but I did at the second camp.

Second Camp seen from the peak we hiked on day three

The second camp was between two lakes (which turned into one by the end, thanks to all that rain). We hiked the ridges on the west and east sides, and then around the cirque and to the south on our last day. We just about missed the 'ridge' on the east side, as it was pretty steep. It got to the point where we had to turn around and face the cliff and boulder our way down, because we couldn't really walk down anymore. It was scary, because it was so steep. Thankfully it was foggy that day so you couldn't see how far down the drop was if you fell. It kind of turned into a joke about how if the mountain goats could go there, then so could we. Those goats are crazy.

We didn't see any wildlife at all, aside from some ptarmigans (or mountain chickens, as my Dutch geo-partner likes to call them). This was probably a good thing, although we had a shotgun (in case of aggressive wildlife like bears) but thankfully we didn't have to use it at all.

Did you want some hornblende?

The geology at our second camp location was pretty awesome. It was predominately the central phase of the Three Sisters Intrusive, which is a hornblende-biotite quartz-monzodiorite to monzonite. Oh, and sometimes it has titanite (as we discovered). There's a mafic phase which is an acicular hornblende diorite, and there are xenoliths of that within the central phase. We found this one outcrop where we had the mafic phase, the central phase, and the potassic phase cutting through all of those. It was like the Rosetta stone of the Three Sisters. The photo here is of the larger hornblendes, about the size of my pinky. The hornblende was usually 1-2mm long, and evenly distributed throughout the plagioclase.

It's tricky because at one point, there's a contact between the Central Phase (hornblende-biotite quartz-monzodiorite to monzonite, with some rare titanite) and the Cake Hill (titanite-bearing biotite-hornblende quartz-monzodiorite). The original mapper didn't find any titanite in the Central Phase, which would have made it a LOT easier to map it. Even still, it was a bit silly at points. I have a wicked handlens (my boss calls it Hubble, after the space telescope, because the field-of-view on it is huge and it's 20x) so the titanite just kind of pops out at you.

Kicking a boulder off the cliff

We had a couple outcrops where there were these beautiful boulders, just perched on the edge of a cliff, so we started assisting erosion. Pushing rocks off of cliffs is spectacular fun. We had a couple high scores where the rock continued way down the slope, or where it picked up more rocks along the way down....So much fun. Good stress relief when the outcrops make no sense. We decided it would be a good event for the Geological Olympics...biggest boulder pushed, farthest distance, and biggest landslide created. The only trick would be finding a suitable location to host the event.




The night we had our cheesy pasta dinner, we made a ridiculous amount and had leftovers for lunch the next day. Eating cold pasta on a ridge in the rain is not my ideal situation, so I invented the Fly Camp Microwave. You place your food that you want heated in a Ziploc bag, and then place that in a pocket close to (but not next to) your skin. You have to keep rotating it, otherwise it doesn't heat up evenly. I recommend about 3 hours, hiking steadily (preferably uphill). Also, eating pasta out of a Ziploc bag is rather difficult, and I highly recommend bringing a fork.

View of Edziza from our pickup knoll on the last day

By the last day, the weather had cleared up enough that we could see mountains in the distance, and I took off my rain pants (and my long underwear). It was beautiful, and made me forget about how cold and rainy it was for the first 4 days. I would go out on fly camp again, for sure. Just maybe when the weather is nicer.

Bruised and beaten, but still alive

I bailed pretty good on the last kilometer, and the photo is my bruise today (from falling yesterday). I have a feeling it's going to be a record-breaking bruise, even better than my previous one. I rolled over in my sleep and the pain woke me up. It was epic. I tried to crop as much cheek out of the photo as possible and still do justice to my bruise, so I think it's pretty SFW (safe for work). I thought I almost broke my leg when I fell because I almost fainted from the pain. But I didn't, so we hiked up that last kilometer to our pickup spot.

Those are blackflies swarming my head, but I don't care,
45 minutes until beer and a shower

All in all, it was a solid week. Good company, good geology, crap weather, but awesome scenery and just amazing to be out in the middle of nowhere, hiking on ridges that no other people have ever hiked on... Just wow. I love my job.