Canmore Museum opens doors for Gadd show
Gadd Show
There was a lot of laughter at the Civic Centre this weekend.
The open house at the Canmore Museum and Geoscience Centre featured a couple of new microscopes for people young and old to get up close and personal with a selection of corals, quartz and shells.
There were a few sand boxes laid out for kids to get dirty on a “fossil dig,” and there was a bit of colouring going on for the kids as well.
But there were far more adults in the building this Saturday, when at 1 p.m. the building filled up with fans of the Colorado-born, Alberta-based writer, Ben Gadd.
Gadd was trained as a geologist though now he works as a writer and naturalist. He lives in Jasper, Alta. but said he’s moving to Canmore soon.
The well-versed speaker filled the council chambers at the Civic Centre Saturday to present a slideshow, which he called a whirlwind tour, or “The Canadian Rockies in One Hour” that informed a little and entertained a lot.
His slideshow took the audience from “the roof of the Canadian Rockies” up Mount Robson to the “basement of the Canadian Rockies” in Castleguard Cave. He informed along the way.
Gadd pointed to Mount Kidd in Kananaskis Country, how 75 million years ago it was being bent into its amazing shape.
Pointing out thrust faults, he spoke about Mount Yamnuska.
The prominent 360 metre cliff of the mountain, which makes Mount Yamnuska so noticeable is Cambrian limestone, somewhere around 510 million years old, while everything from the base of the cliff down, is Cretaceous shale, which is “much, much younger,” Gadd explained. But a thrust fault pushed the older rock up and over the rock that would otherwise lie on top.
The theme of the majority of the show though, Gadd summed up by saying, “Get out there, have an adventure — but especially — you need to get up high.”
His favourite part of the Rockies he said is up at the tree line.
He showed pictures of adventures passed, back-country ski trips up the Wapta Icefield and the Columbia Icefield.
Many of his photos were timeless and inspirational.
It was through the photos that he took of Castleguard Cave, documenting a cramped three-day journey, to the base of the Columbia Icefield, that provided if not the greatest scenery, some of his greatest stories.
The goal for cavers in Castleguard Cave is where the “belly” of the glacier peaks through the rocks.
“Castleguard Cave is like no other cave that we know of,” Gadd said, pointing to a slide of his party of three seated next to a shimmering grey blue slab of ice. “We are out several kilometres beneath the Columbia Icefield; the cave has been dissolved in the rock, so if you go up through the rock there, there would be just a thin layer of rock and above that would be the ice of the Columbia Icefield, it might be 100 metres thick.”
The Columbia Icefield, he explained, as it moves, “has cut its way into the cave.”
Whether it was his one-liners that stole the show, or the sense of wonder he instilled in the crowd, Gadd was the main event at the museum’s first open house of the season.
The open house also gave the museum’s summer staff a chance to get to know the community and to launch their summer programming.
Diggin’ Rocks is a half-day course for kids aged six to eight years old, beginning early July, designed to give kids a chance to get to know how the mountains got here, why they look the way they do, what the mountains are made of as well as some more basic geoscience knowledge.
Karen Chong is a summer student from the University of Calgary’s department of geology and geophysics. “We do glacial erosion experiments and a whole bunch of different thing that get kids to think about, when they’re looking at stuff that’s all around them, what they’re actually looking at,” she said.
Stones ‘n’ Bones is a similar camp for those aged nine to 11 years old. It’s a full-day, week-long camp that involves longer hikes and more involved science.
For dates and times and to register call the Canmore Recreation Centre at (403) 678-1537.
Pioneers in the Park is a half-day camp at the Northwest Mounted Police barracks learning about what it was like to be one of the first Europeans in the area.
To register call the museum at (403) 678-2462.
Rentalsintherockies.com
Thursday, 2 July 2009 Thanks to Canmore Leader for this story
