Photo by ShironekoEuro on Flickr

July 9, 2012

I had known about the trip for months, but as usual saved packing for the last minute in favour of spending my Sunday evening basking under the stars in a friend’s hot tub. Leaving Vancouver in shorts and a t-shirt after haphazardly throwing a tent and some clothes into the trunk Monday morning, I felt grateful for the clear summer weather and yet knew that the drive would feel all the more tiresome without air conditioning in the interior heat. By the time we reached Cache Creek we were dripping sweat and downing frozen treats like deprived children of granola crunchers. Picking up another passenger in Williams Lake after lunch, we quickly found our way into the water to cool off, only to be met by persistent heat again as we continued north, baffled that we were only halfway on our journey. None of us had been this far north before, and one of my companions had never slept in a tent. As we entered the northern stretch of the Rocky Mountains the tall peaks around us blocked the sun. Staring out the window where the road had cut through the walls of these mountains, massive and mysterious in the same way that the body of an elephant seems to go on forever yet tells little about the rest of the beast, we caught glimpses of ancient history embodied as exposed sedimentary rock. The shale fractured along its own interpretation of the horizon, reminding us of the great tectonic forces that caused the Rockies to rise up out of ancient sea beds. Fascinating how looking up can hint at what might be found below. Following the Peace River now, we continued east past the future Site C dam, and soon found ourselves passing boreal forests and fields of forage punctuated by oil wells lighting up the night sky. Nearly 18 hours after leaving Vancouver, we joined six other students at the campsite, setting up tents under the eerie twilight of the northern sky at midnight.

July 10, 2012

We gathered at the local Northern Lights College and wasted no time pooling into vehicles and making our way to the first stop:  Albert’s Loft, a classroom space above the horse barn at a local art farm.  There, Rick describes the trip layout and gives us a few hints about the local geomorphology.  Kent Watson lead us through the basics of each soil order and some hints for making soil classification decisions, and finally we found ourselves outside comparing hand texturing with the jar test method.  Soil samples were wetted and rolled, squished and tasted by participants and instructors alike.   Chuck Bulmer pointed out that grains of sand are large enough to roll across the indents in one’s fingerprint, while silt particles are small enough to fit between the 500-micron ridges.  Somehow hand texturing never fails to remind me of William Blake.

We find ourselves following a trail of red markers through a woodlot of alternating alder and black spruce.  Soapberry and other shrubs flourish in the patches where the spruce has been harvested at the base of a gentle slope; Shannon carries her truffling rake at the ready.  My group begins hacking out the perimeter of a pit (description found here) using a Pulaski at a flat spot downslope.  On the surface, roots of long harvested spruce persist in the soil, but then the digging comes easily for a while.  Suddenly it becomes necessary to hop and wiggle on the shovels to gain purchase, each load of soil feels heavier and makes and moist sound of resistance as it is removed.  We decide to start describing the pit in the interest of time.  All of us are rusty and fumble about with the correct adjective, the correct place on the form to put information.  We see gleying in one of the surface horizons but are uncertain on how to classify it.  Instead, with Kent’s help, we focus on the more exciting clay skins we’ve found in the horizons below.  All too soon our time is up and we make our way to visit the other groups.  We hastily decide that we have found enough evidence of clay eluviation to call our soil a luvisol.  Remarkable how in so close a distance there can be such drastic changes as other pits show more mixing and less platy structures.  As we move from pit to pit, each expert chimes in with their personal experience, disagreeing at times but adding to our interpretations of the story of the site we are visiting.  I experienced a sense of frustration as I struggled to recall distant concepts like the laboratory methods for testing differences in parent material, things that I have learned, written assignments on, and then filed away to some inaccessible place in memory.

That evening Rick and Sandy invited the group over for a BBQ.  Caroline and I set up a game while desert was being finished and soon the lawn was covered with soil scientists racing to match descriptions with soil orders while a few guests happily watched from the porch.  As the cool of the evening set in, I noticed a smallish cob building.  Rick offered us a tour of what turned out to be a hand built sauna, cumulating with an offer to fire it up if anyone was interested in testing it out.  Test it we did, sweating out the dust from digging and camping, and wholehearted enjoying the chance to take a break from scholastics as we alternated between trading stories of adventures in the wilderness with silent contemplation of the growing darkness outside.  It was with deep gratitude that we bid our hosts goodnight.

July 11, 2012

Our second morning brought us to the site I had been eagerly anticipating: a well-established forage grass with patches of native prairie on the uneven edges where getting a tractor through was impractical.  My experiences with anything even remotely resembling a prairie are few and far between, and the idea of a native grassland ecosystem made my agrarian heart sing.  My team and I made a beeline for the site selected off to the side, on the gentlest of inclines, where there was a slight change in vegetation indicating the absence of cultivation (description found here).  With the utmost of care, we cut out the top blocks of sod and laid them to the side.  A rich brown layer was then piled up neatly, next came a paler brown soil, easy enough to dig but breaking into the occasional block or prism once piled.  Into yet another pile went the underlying layer of heavier soil, again requiring that delicate hopping and wiggling with the shovel.  Suddenly, as I wiggled and hopped and wiggled some more, all at once a whole block of soil slipped loose from its surroundings.  At least 30cm square and 10cm thick, this block was easily lifted from the pit and examined.  The bottom had a sheared, slightly shiny appearance.  Kent stood by, filming our excitement and confirmed our hypothesis: we had found slickensides.  We preserved our specimen and continued to dig deeper still into this mysterious horizon.  Slickensides are something that we soils students in Vancouver read about in textbooks, but as they are nearly impossible to preserve or show in a monolith, it was a rare treat to find them so well presented in the field.  While studying soil management and agricultural production are essential to my field, I have a quite love for the detective work that comes with telling the story of a soil through pedology.

Finally the pit was deep enough and we were able to get to work describing and classifying the soil.  Texture baffled us, as the aggregates were small and so strong that a solid shake with borax did little to diminish their size.  The real debate came when we got to the third horizon.  It was paler in colour than surrounding horizons, and overlying a clay enriched layer which gave good evidence to call it an eluviated A horizon, or an Ae.  Yet something did not seem right, because the well-developed prismatic structures we had observed digging simply did not fit into my conception of an A horizon.  The answer came when we took out our dropper of HCl.  Fizzing in the lowest horizon tipped us off that carbonate accumulation was occurring, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to think about other accumulations, including salts like sodium.  If the mystery horizon were full of salts, then that would account for the pale colour when dry, and sodium is well known to disrupt soil aggregates and form telltale prismatic structures we were finding.  Without taking the soil into the lab it was impossible to confirm this hypothesis, but it was a satisfying answer to the uncertainty that had pervaded our pit.

Reluctantly we left the native prairie behind and drove to our afternoon site.  We passed startlingly yellow canola fields and Sandy remarked that canola oil prices must be up this year; normally there would be more forage crops grown in this region.  The site we arrived at was also agricultural, though this field had been worked more recently and contained a mix of clover and grains.  We were surrounded by aspen forest and Sandy explained that the landowners were avid birders.  So avid, in fact, that they had sold much of their property to Ducks Unlimited to serve as a bird sanctuary.  Digging was a pleasant surprise as most of the profile contained very little clay (thank you, glacial rivers).  I was surprised by the lack of organic matter accumulations at the surface (description found here).  There was very little plant litter and not much evidence of the typical organic matter accumulations from decaying plant roots often found in grassland ecosystems.  There were some interesting growths on the roots of clovers in our pit and the one next to us; not nitrogen fixing nodules like one would expect to find, but some sort of tuber-like energy storage growth as Shannon pointed out.  The heat was beginning to get to us and designating the horizon boundaries took longer than it should have; I have some lingering doubts about our accuracy.  A big part of the confusion was a series of thin ribbons running weaving their way across the profile, following the same wavy trend as the rest of the horizons but differing in texture and only several cm thick.  In the end we decided to note these on our description form and not classify them, since in the long run they would be unlikely to change our classification of the soil or management recommendations that would come out of it.  Some weak mottling appeared as a spider web of reddish threads midway through the profile, indicating that despite the dry conditions we were currently in, the water table periodically perched higher in the soil profile.

By the end of the day, we were all ready for a dip in the river before dinner.  As though we couldn’t handle the thought of being clean, river clay was smeared on arms and faces as we joked about our own private spa.  Alex, the park warden, came by after dinner to collect fees.  He accepted our offer of a cold drink and our fire circle expanded to ten.  The conversation turned somber as Alex described the many jobs he had held, from long haul trucking to running a small mill to working. “But”, he pointed out, “If we keep on going the way we’re going, there won’t be much to log soon”.  Seeing a burly sixty something year old man get emotional over a clear cut is not something I’ve witnessed in my life, and it left an impact.  Alex praised us for our decision to tackle some of the environmental muddle that our planet is faced with, while expressing his dismay that one of his children had chosen to become a good-for-nothing artist.  Somehow the capacity for art as a means of social change always seems to get overlooked in times like these.  Quieted, we sat in silence for a bit, staring into the fire and up at the first faint stars.  Midnight had snuck up again and we trickled off to sleep, feeling more than a little uneasy with the task we’d been charged with.

July 12, 2012

Our final pit was located on the side of Bear Mountain, a few kilometers south of Dawson Creek.  I chose to carpool with a group of young woman working in the environmental consulting industry.  Hearing how much they enjoyed their work and their free time in the outdoors, it occurred to me for the first time that the North might just be a reasonable option for me after graduation and not just a last resort.

We slogged our way through a scraggly forest to the sites that Rick had selected for pit digging (description found here).  Again the Pulaski was needed to cut through the web of roots woven into the dense mat of surficial organic material.  I regretted leaving my Forest Soil Humus Form classification manual in Vancouver as we argued over what constituted peat and what was still litter.  A quarter of a meter into the mineral soil, we had water trickling in through coarse pores.  We were unable to dig more than half a meter, but Rick had thought ahead and brought us a soil corer to investigate what lay below.  As we worked to classify the horizons, the challenge of defining mottles and their intensity came up again.  Could it be that what we were seeing in the upper horizon was simply weak accumulation of iron oxides, forming a Bm horizon?  Yet again, we consulted Soils Illustrated, or what we had more affectionately deemed “Portable Kent”.  Still, textbooks and manuals are written from an expert’s perspective, and we needed some help calibrating ourselves to the descriptions we were reading.  With the help of Rick, we decided that what we were seeing was indeed mottling, and made use of use the difference in mottling severity to differentiate two tricky horizons.  Going around to the other sites, we noticed that while the presence of mottling was less consistent, clay skins seemed to be a prominent trend and proved useful in selecting a great group for our soil.  There was much discussion amongst the experts over how the surficial non-mineral material would be classified, which made us students feel a bit better about our own uncertainty.

We visited the wind park for lunch, driving past great looming towers of renewable energy generation reaching up above the treetops.  The final stop of our trip was an indisputable organic peat bog populated by cranberries and the occasional persistent black spruce.  Our initial probe found mineral soil sooner than expected, likely due to the mixing effects of wind-throw.  Moving several meters away, we again plunged into the peat and this time found what we were looking for.  Paul pointed out the tangible transition between the fibric and meisic forms of decomposing moss, noting the soapy feel of the more thoroughly broken down meisic horizon.  The bog was underlain by a layer of heavy clay, keeping the soil saturated and slowing down decomposition of the already acidic moss.  This was the end of our adventure, the time had come to part ways.  We thanked our instructors yet again and encouraged participants to share their photos online.  Taking a backseat in coordinating the event while Carolyn and Jeff were in charge was a strange contrast from previous trips where I’d come along as PRSSS President; it felt nice to simply be a student.

I felt a twinge of regret for not having more time to explore this part of my home province as we drove east through the Rockies at sunset.  The trip had opened my eyes to a realm of possibility for my future in a place that I had previously seen as too tainted with oil for my liking.