Day 161: The Burgess Shale

Yes, the famous Burgess Shale! After reading Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life in the mid-1990s, I was hooked on all things related to these fossils. Our original plans for this trip to the Rockies were to spend a few days in the Lake O'Hara area, but when we couldn't book that we thought we'd just idle away our time in other parts of Yoho National Park. We remembered seeing the Burgess Shale beds from Emerald Lake a couple of years ago, and we pondered the idea of going on one of the guided hikes to see the fossils. This trip offered us the perfect opportunity and we were delighted that Merewyn was also interested in going along. Parks Canada warns people signing up that it's a long, strenuous hike but for us it falls into "moderate day-hike" territory :-) Mind you, having just done nearly 30 km in the two days before, I had some misgivings on the morning as we hauled ourselves out of our tent before sunrise...

But we needn't have worried. It was actually a pretty easy hike on the whole, though I do tend to find long hikes more tiring than steep hikes. I remember reading in Gould's book about the steep scree slopes above the treeline in the Rockies, and it sounded so risky. At that point I never imagined that one day I'd actually find it quite easy to make my own way up there! The quarry was perhaps a little underwhelming but it did give me an appreciation of how hard it is to find good fossils: you have to shift and sift a whole lot of rock to find the good specimens. We were free to explore for the better part of an hour, and though I found a few fossils I was, at heart, a little disappointed that I didn't find any of the "classic" species, such as Marella or Anomolocaris. (I've since learned that most of these specimens are in collections at the Royal Ontario Museum and in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.) But at the end of the day, that didn't really matter: it was a treat to visit this amazing place, with its amazing views.

I have to say I think it was well worth it. More photos from the day are on Flickr

Marella