I think I am shaving my beard today, and cutting my hair. Unrelated, yes, but if you took a gander at my mug it would be a momentous occasion of note, and worthy of recognition and posterity.
Bumbling. This is a word I wish to use more. Look for it.
Back to the story: Smithers was our last "trip" after our "trip" out here. Crystal started cracking down on books and research, and I started cracking down on finding a job, and then working at said found job. Most our weekends now are filled with work (I am employed working for UNBC as field research asst., with crystals project, so weekends we are out in the field hiking around streams and studying salmon habitat and redds) and little time to actually relax and have fun. That said, the work itself is fun, exercise, cognitivly active, and overall a learning experience - so I enjoy it greatly. The point is that since being in Prince George we have been busy working and studying, working on the weekend, and have had little time to explore outside of the research area (near Williams Lake...) and the locality of PG itself. So, Smithers was the last offical 'exploration' around northern BC. Not the last, but the last for now.
Enjoy.
Another view of our lunch spot, minus me. The white portion to the mid right of the photo is the Kimberly Glacier, and the three peaks inthe back are somewhere around +3500 masl. That is a guess, perhaps they are more.
This is the view from the toe of the glacier. The waterway in the picture is the meltwater form the glacier (subglacial melting, not supraglacial). We wanted to try to cross this so we could set our bodies to rest in a lone shard of sunlight protruding from the peaks in the background, but alas there was no way. It was too cold to ford, too wide to jump, too everything to do anything. Beautiful, though.
Evening view from our site; Kimberly Glacier is to the left of the main peak in this view. How can you complain while this view accompanies your evening.
Back up the mountain....this is me hiking past the downstream portion of the glacial stream. The previous picture of the stream is right below the glacier, this is about1/4 km below.
One of the most famous fossil beds in BC. Not a single one ws found by me or Crystal, but I think that is alright. This is where most of the geological history of BC and western Canada was pieced together many years ago. Maybe god put the fossils there....oh wait, they are 'just piles of dirt' so maybe thie whole region and paleological study is a farce, a pseudoscientific farce with the likes of radiometric dating, MRI's, paleomagnetism, ice cores, isostacy and evolution. Or, perhaps, just perhaps, these beds survived myriad species by encasing them in a mineral case, layed upon myriad planes of sediment, aged for aoens, and recovered by erosion geologically recently. Yes, perhaps that is the truth. Erosion gave us fossils (in a round about way), and erosion thus shows them to us. Time, folks, time. Whew...tyrade over.
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