(00:00):
This season was made possible with support from the government of Alberta's Heritage Preservation Partnership Program and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Southern Alberta.

(00:09):
Well, I'm in over my head, no one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. Well, I'm in over my head, what do I really need? Tryin' save the planet, oh will someone please save me? Tryin' save the planet, oh will someone please save me?

(00:33):
Welcome to In Over My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. While looking into the unique history of our provincial parks, I thought we should go way back and look at why geology...really is cool.

(00:44):
I'm Cory Gross. I'm a professional educator in history and or sciences here in Alberta. I've worked in the museum and heritage field here in Alberta for about 25 years. I've worked at the Glenbow Museum, the
Calgary Zoo, Fort Calgary Heritage Park, a number of different places. In 2021, I served as the historian residence here in Calgary. It's a program co-sponsored by the Heritage Calgary and the Calgary Public
Library. And I'm also the president and public outreach coordinator of the Alberta Paleontological Society. And I have my own company, sandstone Prehistoric Safaris, where I do geo-tourism and earth science-based education programs. And in 2020, I published my first book, the Ice Age in Western Canada, about the last 2.6 million years of history in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

(01:35):
So Cory, I thought when we look at the history of the parks, you can go back maybe 50 or a hundred years, but I thought, let's go way back. Let's go back to the prehistoric times because there's so much rich history, geological or fossils or things like that within our parks, and I thought it'd be really interesting to learn about that from you. Do you think maybe briefly you could talk about the ice age that we're in? Could you give a brief overview of some of that -

(02:00):
Brief overview of the last 2.6 million years? Sure.

(02:03):
Yes, please give me that.

(02:04):
Sure. So we are currently in an ice age right now. An ice age is defined as a period of time when there is permanent ice at the poles. So right now we are still in an ice age because for the time being, we do still have permanent ice at the Arctic and the Antarctic and there've been about five major ice ages over Earth's history. We happen to be in the most recent one started 2.6 million years ago. And basically how I would describe an ice age is that for about 80% diverse history, our climate has actually been very warm and very stable. It's a permanent greenhouse environment and so warm in fact that we would actually consider it quite uncomfortable and perhaps even at sort of more equatorial latitudes, people wouldn't be able to survive. Like we're talking that kind of warmth. But then these different factors all line up having to do with the Earth's orbit and energy output from the sun and all that sort of stuff.

(03:00):
Basically the amount of energy that we get fluctuates, these different things line up and then suddenly our climate starts going haywire. So it goes from being really warm and really stable to just suddenly
fluctuating wildly over the course of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years just going down low enough to have ice sheets spread across continents and then shooting back up and warming up again, melting most of those ice sheets, but leaving the ice at the poles and then back down doing this over and over and over again. And in this last 2.6 million years, we've had glaciers
advance about 50 different times and we're currently living in an interglacial. So the last glacial maximum was about 20,000 years ago. That's when the glaciers were at their largest extent. They have
now been retreating and are still are retreating. And that's sort of all of written human history has been in this last Interglacial episode.

(03:54):
And so within that ice age, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's where a lot of these fossils are and someof the various geographical things that we might talk about.

(04:05):
Yeah, well, a lot of the landscape that we see around us, you're driving around southern Alberta and you see these round ponds in the middle of nowhere, these sort of sinuous snake-like hills, various ridges
and rills and the beautiful u-shaped valleys that have carved through the Rockies. Those are all glacial features. So our surface geology here in Alberta is very much shaped by the Ice Age.

(04:30):
And I think when people think about some of that prehistoric history and the ice, things like that, they might think about Dinosaur Provincial Park, Midland Provincial Park, the Royal Tyrell Museum. And I think
those are all very interesting. I thought for our conversation maybe we could focus on some areas that maybe people didn't first think of when they thought of some of that ancient prehistoric history. So one
place you mentioned was Castle Wildland Wilderness Provincial Park. Tell me a little bit about that.

(04:54):
Sure. Well, I mean just to set the stage in general, Alberta is one of the best places in the world to be if you're into prehistoric life, we have everybody knows, again, as you mentioned, the dinosaur remains
best dinosaur fossil deposits in the world, but we also have the Ice Age deposits, some of the best ice age stuff in North America. We have the Rockies are all primarily rock from the Devonian and the Paleozoic before the dinosaurs, beautiful deposits of those. And also subsurface, that's where oil and gas comes from, are these rocks from before the age of dinosaurs, these ancient coral reefs that were here. And then we have rocks going back one and a half billion years. And that's what we find in Castle Wildland. So Castle Wildland is part of that whole crown of the continent area, ecosystem environment. That includes Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, Castle Wildland, Castle Provincial Park, and
Crowsnest pass area, as well as going into British Columbia. But this is about Alberta's, we're not going to talk about it.

(05:59):
And those rocks are going back about 1.4 to 1.5 billion years back when we were part of a supercontinent called Columbia. And there's still some debate among scientists about exactly which other continent we were connected to. Depending on which papers you read, the thought is that we were either in that area connected to Siberia or connected to Antarctica, but right where again, Waterton Glacier and Castle Wildland are, that was a rift valley. So that was the supercontinent of Columbia was rifting apart. And between them you had this vast sort of play a lake, this dry lake, very shallow that would experience these floods coming in from the mainland that are beyond anything we can even imagine today because one and a half billion years ago, well, there's nothing on land, so there's nothing to sort of constrain some of that erosion. We just have these massive floods coming in into this dry lake bed and depositing these massive packs of sediments that today calculated about 18 kilometers thick is how much sediment is in this whole rock system that we see in this area.

(07:15):
And when you go down to Waterton glacier or Castle Wildland and you're hiking around, you see these beautiful multicolored rocks much different from the Rockies further north where we have the blue Canadian Rockies, so the blues and grays. Instead you have these greens and reds. The reds almost go down to purples and so on. And that's because of these shallow lake conditions. So the very, very shallow you get, well, there's a lot of iron in the sediments and the very, very shallow conditions, the
iron in those sediments would oxidize. That's where you get these red rocks as you see down there. Then slightly deeper water, very slightly deeper water. It actually reduces so that iron turns green and
you get these green layers of rock. And then when the water got even deeper, then you start to get more of the gray limestones because now enough of these organisms, singlecell organisms that can
move in and they produce a lot of this calcite that becomes a limestone.

(08:15):
That's also where we find stromatolites, which were the most advanced forms of life back then. So they're basically, these mounds are colonies of bacteria and basically they're growing in a little patch on the floor of this sort of saline lake bed. They're kind of sticky, so sediment gets deposited on top, they don't like that. They grow another layer more sediment, another layer, and on and on and on it goes. So you get these sort of like cabbage sort of layered mounds, and you can find fossils of those all through again, Castle Wildland and Waterton Glacier. And then it would shallow out again, this is a constantly fluctuating system over 0.1 billion years. It was 0.1 billion years among friends, right? Until eventually this whole lake system just rifted apart and the ocean moved in and the continents drifted on to reconnect another supercontinent a few hundred million years later.

(09:09):
Oh no, that's really interesting. And so if someone were to go there, could they actually see those different colors and things like that?

(09:15):
Oh yeah. Yeah. It's hard to miss just as you're driving around heading down south there to see these hills with these swaths of green and red in there. And of course the closer you get to them, the more you get
to see of them. Waterton has some easiest accessible exposures of these RedRock Canyon in Waterton. But if you want to get away from the crowds in Waterton, that's where you go to Castle Wildland. So if
you're heading south down to Waterton, you just turn right, there's signs there for the Shell Waterton complex and just drive around the giant shell plant there and the giant mounds of yellow sulfur and whatever else they're extracting there. And you go down to Butcher Lake and those areas and you get nice up and close to the mountains and just absolutely just stunning scenery. And you can see those beds of red and swaths of green and things like that. And then if you want to go hiking into there along the shell development roads and things like that, you can actually get up to those layers.

(10:21):
And you said you also found fossils while you've been there?

(10:24):
Yeah. Well, as I mentioned, the most advanced form of life at the time were the stromatolites. So you can find them in, it's called the variously in the literature, the Helena or the Siah formation, but it's one of these
bands of gray limestone could represent depths up to a hundred meters, but as long as there's enough, it's shallow enough that light can get through so that these stromatolites can grow. And so you find these,
again, sort of cabbage looking round stromatolite in those layers. But in the red and the green layers, it was so shallow in this dry lake you can find, we call trace fossils. They're fossils of environmental processes
where that could be like animal track waves or in the case of the castle area, there were no animals to make tracks yet you find mud cracks, you find ripple marks, things like that.

(11:17):
One of my favorite for how a moment in time can get captured for billions of years is you can have these rocks that have mud crack ripup clasts in them. So basically you would have this dry lake, the water level would recede, you'd have these mud cracks form and then coming down this river system, these massive flood, and it would rip up those mud cracks and then deposit them elsewhere. And so when you're looking at the rocks, you can see this, there's a band of red, and then this band of quartzite, which is sand that became sandstone, which then got metamorphised over one and a half billion years into this very hard rock called quartzite. So you see a slay of quartzite, but it has these little chips of red in there, and those are those mud cracks that were ripped up by this water and then deposited later on am installed this sand, and then you get another layer of red on top because more mud came in and
then that cracked and so on. So it's like just capturing this one flood that happened one and a half billion
years ago and captured it for eternity. It's amazing.

(12:22):
Absolutely. Yeah. How close would you have to be to actually see those kinds of details?

(12:26):
You can just see them in a little sample the size of your hand. I mean, there are of course these magnificent specimens of ripples across this entire huge block, but just down in the creek bed, you can find us little hand-sized samples of them, but do not take them from a provincial park. So you got to keep that in mind as well.

(12:46):
Of Course, yes. Yeah, we want to protect it. Yes. Yeah. I guess was there anything else you wanted to mention about Castle specifically that makes it special or unique?

(12:54):
One thing that's really also find exceptional about that area is that you have the rocks that were deposited one and a half billion years ago, super ancient rocks, the oldest rocks in the Canadian rocky mountains. But how those mountains were carved out into their current shape and the area in front of them, that whole area is sort of renowned, is where the prairie meets the mountains because the foothills are actually buried underneath glacial till. And so that whole area is just also just ripe with all of
these glacial features as well that were left behind by the glaciers coming out of the mountains. So you can see these kettle ponds again, these sort of round isolated ponds in the middle of prairie fields that
were left by essentially icebergs, ice caved off of the glaciers and just, well, didn't have anywhere to float away, so just right in the middle of the prairies and then eventually melted and left behind this depression that forms this kettle pond.

(13:51):
You see these eskers and Kames, so Kames are where you have a landslide or a rock slide on top of a glacier, and then as the glacier melts away underneath it, that material just dumps and gets deposited forms a
hill. So for example, the hill that the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Lakes is on, that's a Kame, that's debris that fell on top of the glacier. The glacier melted away and left this hill behind. You see those, the
drumlin, all those sort of stuff. You see just beautiful examples of down in that area. It's like an outdoor classroom for glacial geology features.

(14:24):
Oh, that's really interesting. Cory, and another area that you had mentioned that has some significance is the Kananaskis area. So tell me about that.

(14:32):
One really weird, neat thing that most people might not even think about is that, of course, the rocks that make the Rockies today at various times were essentially continental shelf much of the time before dinosaurs. And that as North America was being pushed during northward and westward by the opening up of the Atlantic Ocean after the last supercontinent, Pangea got the splitting apart, the Atlantic is ocean opening up and it still is today pushing North America, northward and westward, and again, still is the same speed your fingernail grows. And as North America was moving, it's colliding into these island chains on our west coast. And those island chains then get grafted onto the continent. And that's what
actually forms most of British Columbia. In fact, this process is still going on. So someday in the far future, Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii will eventually become part of mainland British Columbia.

(15:30):
They'll get smooshed onto their previous mountain belts. And as those mountains got smooshed onto the side of the continent, of course it's pushing and compressing the continental shelf that had been
built up in the time before the dinosaurs, during Paleozoic, and then all that rock that formed then it is cracking, it's folding, it's being pushed and piled up, and that's what makes the rocky mountains. And so these cracks in the rock, we call those faults. And there is one, I mean there's several major faults and scientists like to name these things. I know which one we're talking about. And there's a major one, the Lewis thrust fault, and that is the thrust fault that you can see down in the crown of the continent area. So a castle wildland where it's pushed up these ancient, ancient one and a half billion year old rocks on top of the much younger late Cretaceous rocks.

(16:21):
So like 70, 80 million year old rock you had this one and a half billion year old rock on top of that got pushed up there by this thrust fault. Well, the Lewis thrust fault goes all the way north to about Mount Kidd in Kananaskis, and it's the same thrust fault up there. So there's a bit of connection there. It's going through, but very different rocks because once you get up to that area, then you're getting into these rocks that are about 370 to 350 million years old. And so now you have this continental shelf. Well, established Alberta was down by the equator bottom of a warm, shallow, tropical sea, sandy beaches, coral reefs, all that kind of thing on islands in this ancient tropical sea, tropical Alberta. You wouldn't
have had palm trees swaying in the breeze though, because trees hadn't evolved yet. So you'd had giant club mosses, giant ferns occupying the niche of trees for wildlife, or there weren't any birds or mammals
or even reptiles.

(17:19):
Yet the dominant land animals would've been giant insects like arthro pleura. It's a nine-foot-long centipede and giant dragonflies with wingspan of one or two meters. So it depends what you're looking
for in wildlife. But in the tropical seas, you'd have these massive systems of coral reefs, and those reefs are depositing what would become this limestone that would become the blue Canadian Rockies 350
million years later. But also all the algae and plankton and coral and fish and stuff, dyes, sinks to the bottom, gets covered over, gets squeezed and squished over hundreds of millions of years and gets liquified and turned into oil and gas. So the rocks that we see exposed in the Kananaskis, those are also the same rocks that are under the ground at places like LeDuc, and that's where they're drilling for oil. These ancient reefs, both the biomass in them, the what used to be algae and everything is making the oil, and then the reef rocks themselves from a perfect reservoir.

(18:18):
All these little spaces in there, you can drill into that. So that's what sort of the larger story going on there. But what I find particularly neat about Kananaskis and discovering this is during covid and everywhere shut downs and nothing to do but drive around. So let's go explore places we haven't seen before in driving around through Kananaskis and so on, and noticing all these mountain building processes, all that squeezing and squishing and compressing and breaking and piling up. That was going
on since the time of dinosaurs to build up the Rockies. You can see those processes in Kananaskis. So Mount Kidd, which I already mentioned, beautiful, beautiful folds in there. So you can actually see it's just
compressed like an accordion or something. And you see these anticlines, which are where it's folded upwards and sin clines where it's folded downwards. Just imagine taking a piece of paper and you push
the two ends towards each other and it makes the uphills and the downhills as it squeezing together.

(19:16):
You see that exact process on Mount Kid. And ptarmigan cirque where the cirque is a bowl shaped depression in the mountains where a glacier starts. And so snow pack builds up, eventually enough snow gets piled on
that it becomes ice under its own weight and enough ice gets built up that under its own weight, it begins to flow. That's when it becomes a glacier. And so the snowpack builds up in a divot in the mountains, and then as it starts to flow, it carves that out into a bowl shaped depression, and then flows out to meet the larger glacier that's flowing through the entire valley and carving out that whole valley. So ptarmigan cirque is a beautiful place to go and get up into one of those cirques and to see where a glacier got its start from up there. It is not a glacier up there anymore.

(20:04):
And then I'm just a little bit further north of Kananaskis there when you get around Barrier Lake and Mount Yamnuska. So in Bow Valley Provincial Park there you are actually also seeing another thrust fault. This is the McConnell thrust fault this time and what it's done, it's taken Cambrian rocks, about 500 million year old rock and pushed that up on top of again, that late Cretaceous rock. So again, like 70, 80 million years old and Mount Yamnuska, and that's the most famous example, really easy to see. You have that massive cliff-forming limestone, a Cambrian limestone there, and then you have that very abrupt line and this gently sloping base of Cretaceous Shale, and that's the McConnell thrust right there. But if you're stopping going to Kananaskis, stop off at Barrier Lake, and you look at the Yates mountain just across from the lake, and you can see that same line right there. So you can see all these geologic processes at
work for what built the Rockies and what they are today.

(21:05):
Also, you had mentioned it might be worth talking about Sheep River Provincial Park. What's going on there?

(21:11):
Right, so Sheep River has an amazing, wonderful, beautiful surprise, and I'm not sure how many people notice this surprise, but if you're a big rocky click I am, then you're just like, what blows the mind? So if
you're driving into Sheep River Park, stop at the turnout there for Sheep River Falls. And as you're walking along the riverfront, there is a syncline and anticline system there, right at ground level. And so there's one spot where you'll notice if you're walking along that the rocks are kind of curved. It was sort of like a bowl, something like that. And you can step right smack in the middle of this curvature, and that is a syncline right there. So that's again this fold in the mountains. You're standing right in middle of this curve. And then if you look across the creek and you look at the opposite shoreline and it's been sheared off and whatever, but if you look closely at the rocks that are exposed and you can see an anticline, you can see some rocks rising.

(22:17):
I'm using my hands on a podcast, you can see these rocks rising up on one side, an angle, and then coming down on the other side at sort of the opposite angle. The top has been sheared off though, so you see the sort of sheared off anticline there. And so you're looking at this, again, this folded system. So you've got the downward fold and the upward fold, and both have been kind of sheared off that you can actually step right into the middle of the downward fold the incline, and look across the creek to see the sheared off remains of the upward fold, the anticline. So it's sort of a neat little thing. Most people go at the waterfall, which is great, but there's the geologic features there. And while you're trying to look for this anticline and syncline system there look down at the rocks as well. And you see lots of ripple marks, things like that as well, these ripples that have been preserved in stone.

(23:07):
No, that's super interesting. Yeah, for sure. And another place that you think you said was worth talking about was Cyprus Hills. What makes that space unique?

(23:16):
Well, Cypress Hills is a fascinating place because it's actually the highest point in Canada between the Rockies and Labrador. And as a consequence, the tips of it were actually not covered by glaciers during
the Ice Age. And it also helps that there's a very resistant layer of rocks and gravel at the top of it that was deposited by ancestral rivers that predate the ice age, but depositing all this very tough rock there
that helped to shield the Cypress Hills a bit as well. But basically glaciers, they're water, it's frozen water, but it's still water. So as they're flowing, they're following the same rules more or less that water does.
So it's a lot easier to go around something rather than over top of something. So the ice wants to just go around Cypress Hills doesn't really want to go over top of it. So during the last ice age, well Cypress Hills,
at least the very top peaks of it we're not covered by glaciers called that a nun attack and very probably don't know for sure about animals, but for a lot of plant life that would've been a place for them to eke
out some kind of existence at the top of this against Rocky outcrop amidst this sea of glacial ice.

(24:39):
And one last place we wanted to focus on, although it's not really a provincial park, one area that I found really interesting in your book was talking about the St. Mary's reservoir. Something interesting was
going on there. So tell me about that.

(24:51):
Yeah, well, those little provincial recreation spots alongside dams and things can be really neat places as well. Now, St. Mary's Reservoir, the Wally's Beach, that area that is actually the site, an incredible ice
age paleontology site, but also to the oldest evidence for human beings in Alberta found down there. So during the 1990s is when this site came to attention. There had been a drop in water levels in general, and they were doing work on the dam, so they had to lower the level of the dam, and that exposed these vast dusty flats, silty flats that were underwater. And as the wind in that area ripped through as it is want to do it, exposed this vast trackway system from the ancient St. Mary's river valley down there.
And right at Wally's Beach was actually a perfect access point for a wide variety of different animals to go down to the ancient

(25:50):
St. Mary's river and get a drink. It's a watering hole. And so they found tracks of mammoths, camels, muskox caribou, all down there, horses as well. Tracks are so good. One of the mammoths had limp in his back, left leg, and also finding skeletal remains of horses, camels, muskox and a scimitar cat, a scimitar cat is a relative of the more famous saber tooth cat, smilodon. Smaller teeth, and at least in some areas seems to maybe have specialized in hunting young mammoths as well, finding their remains quite often with a lot of young mammoth bones and things like that, at least in some areas. Of course, these animals ranged across North America, so hunting different things at different places and all that alone is incredible. Finding the horse bones and camel bones and scimitar cats and mammoth footprints and all sort of stuff. But also a lot of these horse bones show evidence that they've clearly been butchered by humans.

(26:51):
So we're talking like sections of rib with cobblestones placed on top of them. They've found various spear tips and stone flakes and things like that used in the flushing process, the butchering process. And
some of these spear tips have blood residue on them that have been DNA tested, and they found that it's horse blood. So basically the ancestors of Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) people were here 13,300 years ago, lying in
ambush at the watering hole and jumping on these small groups of horses and hunting them. The last papers that I read on the subject of sort of taphonomy, the depositional process of a fossil or a trace fossil
in this case was suggesting that these would represent tracks from a single season, possibly even a single event. So maybe a week and then got buried or something like that, but at least a season. So that's like
this one layer of trackways that they found might represent a single summer, 13,300 years ago.

(27:59):
And they're constantly going back there as well. Whenever the researchers get word that from a local or whatever that hey, there's more tracks and off they go, got to get down there before the wind blows
them away as well, because it's still Trixie down there with the wind and then the water coming in, filling up the dam and all that sort of stuff. So it's a very narrow window of opportunity to go down their poke around, take casts or photos of any of the prints, see what else they can find in way of bones, or also evidence of humans as well, hearths and things like that. Fire boiling pits for deflushing bones and things like that narrow window of opportunity. But these would be representing often a single season.

(28:43):
Yeah, yeah, I know. I find that interesting. It seems like all those animals and the people that were there were potentially interacting together, kind of gives you a picture of what that looked like in time, right?

(28:53):
Yeah. And there's even of the seven or some odd different horse skeletons that have evidence of human butchering, you can even tell what was going on in the minds of the people as they were doing it just by
what sort of missing, what's there, that sort of thing you figure out, okay, on this one they were like, hurry up, get the good stuff and let's go this one. They were a little more leisurely with things like that.
This is why I love this stuff so much is that you have just these little snippets, these little moments, this one animal, this one flood, this one butchering on this one day, on this one season, however, thousands
or millions or billions of years ago, this gets preserved for eternity. It's the closest thing we have to time travel. We can't go back in time, but the past can come through to us through these fossils and traces
and remains and so on.

(29:46):
Yeah, it kind of leads to my follow-up question there. You kind of answered it a little bit, but yeah, why do you find this work so important and so fascinating to do that you would spend so much time doing it?
Why does it matter to you?

(29:58):
To me, I think it's really important because it answers those why questions. Where did we come from? What happened before us? Why are things the way they are? Why does that hill look like that? Where
we're recording here, we're right near Fish Creek Provincial Park. Why does that exist? What made that right? Why is there this very broad, shallow sort of flat bottom valley with this tiny little creek rain
through that tiny little creek make that, well, no, actually it's a spillway of water from Glacial Lake Calgary emptying out and following the front of the glacier back eastward. It explains why are things the way they are? Why is it this way? And by understanding why it's the way it is, then we can figure out, be better informed for how to manage it going into the future. Plus's just cool. It's just neat. Dinosaurs are cool.

(30:48):
Absolutely. Yeah, I think when you describe some of these places to me, I've been to some of them and I know nothing about any of this stuff, if I'm being honest. I'm quite in over my head on this topic for sure.
And yeah, I think the way you describe it and reading your book and learning about some of them, it made me appreciate these places in a new way. I feel like so many times we go to the very famous places and people will take a selfie in front of a sign or in front of a famous mountain, but they don't really take the time to look at those places and to notice those subtleties and to spend time. Do you think people need to do that more to appreciate those spaces?

(31:24):
Yeah, well, that was a lot of the purpose of my book as well, that it's not just abstractly about, oh, the Ice Age in Western Canada. I specifically want to include places where you could go and see the thing,
because I want for people to be able to read that or to hear this podcast or whatever, and to be able to look at those rocks and understand why they're there, what story they're telling, and to be able to see with those different layers. On the one hand, you're seeing the mountains, but then you can also practically see that ancient dry lake bed or whatever. When I'm driving across the prairies, going to wherever, doing a tour or something like that, I can't help but see like, oh, there's a glacial spill away. There's an esker, dah, dah, dah, dah. I want other people to have that curse as well, that you don't just see the thing, you see the process that made it as well. And I sincerely believe that deepens and enriches your connection with these places as well, that it's not just going and grabbing the selfie and seeing the beautiful lake or whatever, which is great, but then you can also see it on these other levels and these deeper levels and feel more connected to it because you understand it more.

(32:37):
Yeah, and talking about that and appreciating these places, I think protecting them is also important too. If people want to ensure that these places are preserved, what can people do?

(32:50):
Yeah, it's so touchy because how do you best manage these spaces that allow for protecting them, but also allow for people to use them as well? I dunno how saucy you want me to get on your podcast, but I do admit a certain amount of frustration sometimes say, going down to Castle Wildland and seeing these beautiful fossils and trace fossils and things there and not being able to collect them, which you are allowed to collect fossils in Alberta, surface, collect them. You're not the owner of them. The province is the owner. The crown is the owner of fossils found in Alberta, but you as a finder of a fossil on the surface, can be a custodian for that fossil, except of course in provincial parks, we have to leave
them there as part of the natural processes that these parks are preserving. But then it was a shell road.

(33:50):
I hiked up to get to that site, dodging grazing cattle along the way. It's like, okay, how are these being used? And I don't want to say no to this, no to that, but how it's letting government officials, letting people in charge, know how these spaces are used, how you'd like for them to be used, how you'd like them to be protected sort of thing. So being involved just in advocacy, writing to your MLA meeting with your MLA, talking about your concerns with these spaces and how they're being used or how opportunities you'd like to see in them, how they should be protected, those sorts of things. That's probably the number one thing I can think of for what an individual person can do. And of course,
learning about them as well. Learning about why these spaces are important to see what's protecting, bringing that dimension of time as well into things.

(34:45):
When I look at the ecosystems that we have today, they're composed of ice age survivors because mallard ducks and the Canada Geese and the black bears and the mule deer and all sort of stuff, they're also ice age animals. Chickadees. Were flitting around alongside woolly mammoths. They just happen to survive. And so it's a little bit sad because now I see what's missing as well. There should be mammoths here, but there's also then that drive to protect what's left to protect these survivors, so they continue to survive. And that's an important role that these parks play.

(35:23):
Next time on Remembering Alberta Parks, I learn about archeology and dig up some history in Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park.

(35:33):
So this quarry is unique because it provided this sandstone that built the government buildings when Alberta became a province and doing the research on it. At McDougall's school, for example, I can look
at the one door and I know the name of the man who built it, and I know how long he spent carving those details around that window and around that door. And it really makes it mean more when you know the name of the person and what their life might have been like.

(36:03):
I Over My Head's Remembering Alberta Parks was produced by Michael Bartz with production assistance from Shinichi Hara. Special thanks to all the guests who gave generously of their time and expertise.

(36:12):
I'm trying to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?

(36:22):
This season was made possible with support from the government of Alberta's Heritage Preservation Partnership Program and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Southern Alberta.