Kootenay National Park

Wherein Moominmama learns about Cambrian fossils, shares her campground with bighorn sheep and kayaks the Columbia River...

The entrance to Redstreak Campground is up a steep road, and the grass on either side is a favorite of the local bighorn sheep. Moominmama even spotted them in the town of Radium Hot Springs, relaxing on a grassy verge along Main Street. The town has adopted them (or maybe vice versa), and inside its main traffic circle is what first looked like an abstract sculpture until I realized it was a giant recreation of their magnificent horns. 

Radium is the entryway into Kootenay National Park on the western side of the Rockies. The park stretches from Radium to the Continental Divide and Banff, twisting northeast between mountains with rivers and creeks feeding into the Kootenay River which, in turn, feeds the Columbia River in Radium's valley.

In this photo, Tookum Creek has carved a deep channel known as Marble Canyon as the green water runs into the Vermilion River. Vermilion seemed an odd name for a green river but it's near Vermilion Pass, which is full of orange-red mud once used by the local Ktunaxa people as a pigment and dried into a powder for trade -- possible because of rivers like the Columbia.

Moominmama took advantage of the opportunity to kayak on the Columbia, with a deal that allowed me to follow the river from Invermere to Radium and get a ride back to my starting point. 

It was early morning and calm. I saw a pair of bald eagles, including a female who grabbed a fish from the water in front of me and took it high up in the trees for her breakfast.

I saw enormous herons, a pair of them, sail overhead. And kayaking near the shoreline, a beaver popped up alongside me twice before diving back under with an enormous slap of his tail!

The trip starts at the top of Invermere Lake in a wetlands with clear water, then picks up silt and speed once Horsethief Creek feeds in. I was glad to be heading downstream!

But Moominmama's favorite outing during my time at Kootenay was a hike with a park ranger to learn about the Burgess shale deposits and their Cambrian fossils. If you look closely at the left side rock face in this photo, you'll see a mid-level horizontal band that's slightly darker. That's the Stephen Formation and where the Burgess shale lies sandwiched between limestone. 

The combination of weather and glacial activity has broken up and dropped bits of shale into the basin below where we went fossil hunting.

It's funny to think that evidence of all these underwater creatures now appears on mountains 5,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level. But the Cambrian period dates back 500 million years and long before plate tectonics shifted an equatorial seabed that's now part of North America and lifted it into the ridge of mountains known as the Rockies.

The Burgess shale in Canada drew attention in 1909 when paleontologist Charles Walcott discovered a rich bed of fossils in Yoho National Park and named the area after himself, Walcott Quarry. (The shale layer is named after Mount Burgess in Yoho). 

The fossils in Kootenay were discovered much later and almost by accident. A couple of hikers in the late 1980s found fossils on a hike up to Stanley glacier and brought those to the attention of park rangers. 

Since then, the Stanley glacier basin has been widely studied, and park rangers now do guided day hikes at Walcott and at Kootenay. The parks are both UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The Burgess shale has yielded tens of thousands of life forms, and new species continue to be found. While Stanley glacier is open to the public, other research sites are sealed and kept secret because of issues of theft. In fact, what's left now in the Stanley glacier basin is mostly trilobite fossils, and fewer of those every year as visitors slip one into their pockets thinking no one will miss one more.

But one of the unique finds in Kootenay, and named after a sea monster featured in Ktunaxa legends, is this one: Yawunik kootenayi, reported in 2015 near Marble Canyon, a lobster-like creature about 4-6 inches long. It's recreated here by an artist who worked with paleontologists to arrive at this image, though paleontologists have no idea what colors their creatures might have been, so artists are given leeway in that aspect! 

One of the unique features of the Burgess shale is the extent to which it has preserved not just the shells of creatures but some of the soft tissue, which allows scientists to learn much more about how the creatures lived, ate and moved about.

While Moominmama did not make any great discoveries on her group fossil hunt, she did get to see some rare and unusual fossils shared by our park ranger. 

Metaspriggina is a small fish-like creature and one of the first creatures with a spinal cord. It's considered a stem-vertebrate -- in other words, one our earliest ancestors! It was first found in the Walcott quarry, and one of the actual fossils is now used by park rangers in their educations programs. Moominmama got to hold it even!

At the very start of the hike, I took this picture of the sun on the rockface, and only after I returned realized I can now see the Stephen Formation clearly. It's interesting how learning something new has a way of changing what you're capable of noticing thereafter.

But I can't leave you without a picture of the Stanley glacier itself since this is, alas, my last glacier of 2025. I head south shortly.