My Jaded Past, My Rocky Present

I’ve been knee-deep in bees, butterflies, moths and hummingbirds as part of my 5-month-long #janetsdailypollinator social media Covid winter project, so it might not surprise anyone that I can get a little bored with gardening and plants and insects. Thirty-three years is a long time to spend in one field, even one for which you feel great passion and dedication. The photo below was my first weekly gardening column way back in 1994, one of hundreds of weekly columns for the Toronto Sun and later the National Post.

But I wasn’t always a garden writer and photographer.  I’m reminded of that on the very few occasions I dig into my jewelry box, which, believe me, doesn’t contain much of value besides big earrings from the 1980s. I used to keep theatre tickets in there but who goes to plays anymore?  What the jewellery box does contain are some memories from long ago – things that come to mind on days like today when I find myself a little bored or… perhaps…  a bit “jaded”?  Okay, I could not resist a word like “jaded” as a lead-in to my personal reminiscence here – even though the word itself (“made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience or by having or seeing too much of something”) has no etymological connection to my job in the early 1970s, which is spelled out on the business card below and relates to the things I’m holding in my hand.  That would be two pieces of nephrite jade, a drill core and a sawn piece of “rough jade” from Ogden Mountain in the Omineca district of British Columbia.  

I was hired by the small mining company New World Jade in September 1972 – almost a half-century ago, which boggles my mind – to do bookkeeping and assorted clerical tasks. Before long I became the administrative manager, overseeing accounts, inventory, travel booking (mostly helicopters into and out of the mine site), correspondence and pretty much anything else that required a love of writing, a typewriter, adding machine or phone (no computer then).  Also in the jewelry box are pieces of jade jewelry: green baubles crafted from a mineral that I would learn to say to interested parties “has a hardness on the Mohs Scale at 6 to 6.5, where diamond is 10”. Our jade needed to be cut by water-cooled, diamond-edged blades, which whirred all day in the storeroom behind the desk where I worked.  Beyond its relative hardness and owing to its fibrous composition, nephrite jade is considered to be the toughest natural substance in the world, even tougher than steel.

One of the great paradoxes of life is that when you are in your 20s, you are sometimes presented with opportunities to learn things about which you have no curiosity – things that you will find truly fascinating decades later. So it was for me with geology. But if it is easy to fancy yourself an armchair quarterback or armchair philosopher it is impossible to be an armchair geologist – so much dense terminology covering geographically-specific regions over 4 billion years, the age of earth’s oldest dated rocks. That is why it was such a delight to read John McPhee’s Pulitzer-prize-winning ‘Annals of the Former World’ a 1998 compilation of five books by the Princeton University professor who still teaches a course called The Literature of Fact.

McPhee’s book, which takes a guided trip across America’s I-80, is an evocative and highly readable conduit into the world of geology and geologists. It is also a good reminder that human existence is but a tiny eyelash on the planet: our temporal concerns about political upheaval, climate change, pandemics and the meaning of life mere dust motes in earth’s 4.543 billion years.  This is my favourite paragraph, from the 1984 section ‘In Suspect Terrain’:

“When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent.  Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned – the mark invisible at the end of a ruler. If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea levels would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatans and Florida would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up – his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times, recommending that the mountain be bombed.”

Geologist Nick Eyles’s book ‘Road Rocks Ontario’, below, also helped me understand regional Ontario geology, as has my Facebook friend Andy Fyon, retired Director of the Ontario Geological Survey, who is always happy to answer a question about rocks.

Learning about earth’s geological history has become a favourite pastime, especially since several months of my year are spent treading upon an ancient, geologically stable part of the North American craton.  If our cottage on Lake Muskoka two hours north of Toronto had a geological address, it would be Moon River Synform, Muskoka Domain, Central Gneiss Belt, Grenville Province, Canadian Shield, age approximately 1.4 billion years. (The Grenville Province was named for the town of Grenville, Quebec.) I’ve learned all of that in the past few decades to help me appreciate photos I’ve made, like the one below, an aerial view of the entrance to the 4700-acre Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve near us. (I was in a little yellow plane with the window open!)

Last summer, I even dragged my husband along on a self-guided, all-day field trip after printing off an old touring schedule of “Friends of the Grenville”, so we could stop here, on Doe Lake Road, to see what geologists call the “Germania lenticular structure or megaboudin”……

…… and here, on Highway 169 to see the dramatic outcrops of banded gneiss: “amphibolites-facies, mafic-rich grey gneiss” formed during intense metamorphism while buried 35-45 kilometres below an ancient mountain belt called the Grenville Orogen, eroded away some 500 million years ago.

With my hiking group in 2018, I got close to the edge of Huckleberry Rock trail to gaze down at this amazing granulite ( a type of granite) road cut near Milford Bay on Muskoka’s Highway 118.  In his book, Nick Eyles calls it a “drive-through pluton”. He writes that plutons “formed during the Grenville Orogeny some 1.4 billion years ago and result from the melt at depths of about 30 kilometres of the surrounding gneiss.”

Other years, my hiking group walked parts of Ontario’s Bruce Trail featuring impressive geological sites like the Inglis Falls Conservation Area, below, its 60-foot cascade formed by the Sydenham River scouring the soft shales beneath the harder dolomitic limestone (dolostone) cap rock, which then collapses. As Nick Eyles writes in his book, widening is caused by ‘spring sapping’, where rainwater and snowmelt flow into cracks that erode the dolostone and sends boulders crashing below, as you see in my photo.

When not in Muskoka, we’re at home in Toronto, which does not lie on the Canadian Shield but is part of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Lowlands. Geologically, the most interesting thing about the city is that 13,000 years ago, all of downtown south of the Davenport–St. Clair escarpment was under water in Lake Iroquois, Lake Ontario’s Ice Age predecessor.

Rocks Around the World

In my international travels, I’ve been awed by geological features too, like the 50-million-year-old basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway on the Antrim Coast of Northern Ireland, formed when lava flowing slowly from a volcano to the coast was cooled by sea water.  I wrote a blog about the majestic sights of the emerald island, including my grandfather’s home near Belfast.

Geologist Mary Sanborn-Barrie helped me understand the formation I photographed in Sunneshine Fjord, Nunavut while on a 2013 cruise of the Eastern Arctic, as I explained in a recent blog. I thought they were young sedimentary rocks but Dr. Sanborn-Barrie emailed me to say: “Actually your photographs appear to be of the oldest rocks in the region, rather than the youngest! They appear representative of the deformed and layered Archean  tonalite gneiss basement  that underlies much of Cumberland Peninsula and which is dated at two localities at 2,990 million years old and 2,940 million years old.”

In Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, we stopped in 2014 to tour Bourke’s Potholes in the Blyde River Canyon, below, where sandstone gravel in the kolks (the Dutch word for the whirlpool-like vortices that occur when water rushes past an obstacle)  scoured out the cylindrical potholes or kettles we can see from high above. They were named for a local prospector, Tom Bourke, who correctly predicted that gold would be found in the area – except not by him.

As we flew into Queenstown, New Zealand in 2018 during our garden tour of both islands, I couldn’t stop photographing the dramatic view of the Southern Alps, the South Island’s long mountainous backbone. The mountains were uplifted here as the Pacific Plate collided with the Indo-Australian Plate beginning 15 million years ago.

New Zealand is seismically very active and endured two major earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. Our tour took us to Ohinetahi, the garden of respected architect Sir Miles Warren. He was asleep when the 2010 earthquake erupted nearby, toppling the stone roof gables of his 1867 home which fell into his library. Fortunately, he escaped injury and assembled some of the stones into a folly in his art-filled garden. 

Travelling over the Andes from Chile to Argentina in 2019, I was more interested in the spectacular mineral salts coating the rocks from the hot springs emerging from the mountains than I was about the old abandoned spa.

When old friends in Utah drove us to Bryce Canyon National Park in 2018, I was awe-struck at the dramatic landscape stretching in front of me. Over thousands of years, frost weathering and stream erosion of river and lake bed sedimentary rocks have formed a vast amphitheatre of hoodoos measuring 12 miles in length by 3 miles in width. These are tall, thin spires of Paleogene-aged rock (66-44 Mya) consisting of a relatively soft rock on the bottom topped by harder, less easily eroded rock that protects each column from the elements. 

A day later, we were in Zion Canyon with its nine formations of sandstone representing 150 million years of sedimentation. Along with Bryce Canyon, it forms part of the “Grand Staircase” or “Escalante” of sedimentary rock leading south through Nevada to the Grand Canyon. 

Yellowstone National Park is a geology playground with some 10,000 geysers, mudpots, steam vents and hot springs. When we toured it in 2016, I was captivated by thermal features that are potent (and still deadly) reminders of the massive eruption of the caldera 640,000 years ago. My geologist friend Andy Fyon is fond of quoting American philosopher Will Durant:  “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”  If a Yellowstone-like event occurred today with its massive ash release, much of civilization in North America would likely cease to exist. In the meantime, it is a wonderful place to visit and I wrote a long blog about our time there, including a 7-minute musical video of the thermals. Besides the famous geyser Old Faithful, there are many small geysers like Clepsydra, below.

Then there is breathtaking Yellowstone Canyon with its hydrothermally-altered rhyolite lava and sediments, all the result of that cataclysmic event.

Our Yellowstone tour included the Grand Tetons. Guided by interpretive signage, I took note of the visible fault scarp on Mount Saint John (my arrows below). As the National Park Service says: “This fault is a crack in the earth’s crust due to tectonic forces. The Teton fault is a ‘normal; fault caused by regional stretching and extends down into the earth’s crust at about a 50 degree angle dipping off to the east. With stretching, the two blocks of rock hinge past one another – one tilting skyward, one downward – generating earthquakes as they move. Each movement results in about 1 to 3 feet up for every 4 to 12 feet down. Hundreds of earthquakes over millions of years have lifted the range, even as erosion wears it down.”

In September 2018, we drove from Portland to Vancouver through eastern Oregon so we could visit some of the geological formations there, including Lava Butte near Bend and the Painted Hills of the John Day National Monument near Mitchell, below. These are paleosols, ancient, iron-rich red soils and black lignite layers from floodplain deposits 39-30 million years ago.

Not far away was the spectacular Mascall Formation, below. As I wrote in my blog on this feature and the nearby Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, quoting the interpretive sign: “Imagine standing at the bottom of a long mountain valley, here, just over seven million years ago. A lush blanket of grass covers the length of the valley…… Nearby, four-tusked elephants graze playfully, ignoring a passing hyena hunting prey. The sound of munching grass comes from a wary herd of horses. Suddenly, a distant thundering explosion shakes the land. Birds burst from the grasses into the sky. Soon, the inhabitants settle down, as you wonder about the source of the explosion. Less than an hour later, the valley to the east quickly fills with a glowing tidal wave of fiery volcanic ash, gases and debris.

This onrushing cloud of death flows down the valley toward you at high speed, engulfing and incinerating all life. It is well you were not here. Successive ashfalls from the volcanic eruption, 80 miles to the south, covered the region. A fiery deposit, an ignimbrite, settled into that ancient valley bottom. The mountains and hills that held that valley have since eroded down, leaving the hard, resistant ignimbrite and valley bottom high in the sky.” 

After reading UCLA paleobiologist William Schopf’s book The Cradle of Life, I so desperately wanted to see samples of the biogenic, stromatolite-containing chert from the Gunflint Banded Iron Formation near Schreiber, Ontario that I e-mailed Dr. Schopf, told him I’d be in Los Angeles in February 2008, and asked if I might visit his office to see a sample of the rock. At the time of the discovery of the rock formation by geologist Stanley Tyler while fishing Lake Superior on his day off in 1953, it was the earliest form of life discovered and described in scientific literature, as well as the earliest evidence for photosynthesis. I stopped at Whole Foods on the way to UCLA and bought flowers, thinking it would be cool to link the earliest-known photosynthetic microfossils with a modern plant. It would have been much better to pose the rock outside with a properly photosynthesizing tree, but I was too shy and Dr. Schopf had been kind enough to open his office on President’s Day. My great regret is that I did not also photograph him and his wife Jane Shen-Miller, a plant biologist, who came in with him.  

While touring Costa Rica in 2015, we visited the Poás stratovolcano and its steaming Laguna Caliente. It has erupted 40 times since 1828, including in 2009 when at least 40 people were killed. While there, I photographed volcanic plants like the ‘poor man’s umbrella’, the big-leaved plant on the lip of the volcano, Gunnera insignis. Seventeen months after our visit, the volcano blew, fortunately with enough warning that visitors and residents were evacuated. It remained closed for a year-and-a-half, reopening in 2018.

In contrast, the volcanic eruption on Greece’s Santorini island, then called Thera, happened 3600 years ago, burying the village of Akrotiri in ash. The explosion, called the Minoan Eruption, was a hundred times more powerful than Pompeii and the pumice layer was visible (see my arrows) from our cruise ship in the sea off the island which is actually the basin of the caldera formed by successive eruptions. In fact, it was quarry workers digging out pumice for waterproof pozzolanic cement for the Suez Canal in the 19th century who first found Akrotiri’s walls. Archaeological excavations finally began in 1967, uncovering beautiful wall frescoes that I saw in the museum on the island and also in 2019 in the archaeological museum in Athens, while on a botanical tour of Greece.

My wonderful botanical tour of Greece included a visit to the otherworldly Meteora rock formation in Thessaly. Here, six 16th century monasteries (from an original 22) top a series of erosion-formed rock pillars, though hermit monks had occupied caves in the formation as early as the 11th century. At one time, the tops of the formations were accessed with ladders; today there are stairs. Originally part of an inland sea, the rock formations are made of sandstone and conglomerate (see my closeup detail), which is made up of  limestone, marble and various metamorphic rocks including serpentinite.

Serpentinite now brings me to California, the state whose native mineral is serpentine as I slowly circle back thematically to the nephrite jade that started this rumination. When I was on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay in 2019 with friends I affectionately call the ‘golf widows’ (our husbands were off chasing a little white ball somewhere), we took an open-bus tour around the island. When the tour guide mentioned “serpentine quarry”, I quickly craned my neck and snapped a photo as we drove by.  Having read John McPhee’s 4th book section ‘Assembling California”, I was interested in seeing this rock that forms such a pivotal part of California’s geological history, making up a good part of what geologists call the Franciscan Mélange. Alas it was only a fast glimpse. Historically, according to the Angel Island Conservancy, “Stone from the Angel Island quarry operation was used for the construction of the new fortress on Alcatraz in 1854.” When the military took over Angel Island, military prisoners from nearby Alcatraz worked the quarry, which yielded rock for the Presidio’s Fort Point. Serpentine quarrying ended around 1922.

From Angel Island, I could see the Golden Gate Bridge. Built in 1937, the structure was designed to withstand earthquakes, following the 1906 earth-quake that killed 3000 people and destroyed 80% of San Francisco, below.

While the north pier (right) was anchored deep in red chert and basalt on the Marin side, the south tower went down into concrete hollowed out from serpentine headland.  When an earthquake did strike during construction in June 1935, the south tower swayed back and forth some 16 feet with twelve workers holding on for dear life, but it held fast to the seabed.

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California’s geological history, of course, is similar to that of Oregon, Washington State, British Columbia and Alaska. At one point in time, they simply did not exist. The North American continent ended hundreds of miles to the east. Then, over a very long period, a series of “exotic” or “suspect” terranes “accreted to” or “docked” against the North American craton. We know this from plate tectonics, which has informed geology for 60 years, building on the early but erroneous Continental Drift theory of Alfred Wegener (whose 1930 Greenland ice cap crossing, which I blogged about in November, would cost him his life); then defined in 1962 by Princeton’s Harry Hess, becoming the Theory of Seafloor Spreading and expanded in the mid-60s by the University of Toronto’s John Tuzo-Wilson to include volcanic ‘hot spots’ (i.e. Hawaii, Japan) and ‘transform faults’.   

How long did it take to assemble California?  As John McPhee writes, In 1906, the jump of the great earthquake – the throw, the offset, the maximum amount of local displacement as one plate moved with respect to the other – was something like twenty feet. The dynamics that have pieced together the whole of California have consisted of tens of thousands of earthquakes as great as that – tens of thousands of examples of what people like to singularize as “the big one” – and many millions of earthquakes of lesser magnitude. In the 1960s though, when the work of several scientists from various parts of the world coalesced to form the theory of plate tectonics, it became apparent – at least to geologists – that those twenty feet of 1906 were a miniscule part of a shifting global geometry. The twenty-odd lithospheric plates of which the rind of the earth consists are nearly all in continual motion; in these plate movements, earthquakes are the incremental steps. Fifty thousand major earthquakes will move something about a hundred miles. After there was nothing, earthquakes brought things from far parts of the world to fashion California.”

Serpentine…. earthquakes….. oceans….tectonics….  Where am I going with all this?

The Nature of Nephrite Jade

In fact, serpentine, below, is often the location clue to the nearby presence of nephrite jade. It occurs as part of “ophiolite” sequences that were uplifted from ocean crust and obducted above subduction zones between converging plates, then emplaced upon the continental crust. In Assembling California, John McPhee described a complete ophiolitic column of the ocean floor, from the accumulated sediments at the top to mantle rock at the base, then explained what happens when sea water intrudes: “Water that gets down through all this and into the mantle rock – at the spreading center or anywhere else – will change the nature and appearance of that rock. Through an alteration of minerals, the rock takes on a silky lustre and a very smooth texture, becomes fibrous, and develops color – occasional streaks and spots of white, but mainly chrome green, myrtle green, Nile green, in patterned shapes with the mantle black. Because the patterns strongly suggest the skin of a snake, this rock has been known – for nearly six hundred years in the English language – as serpentine. Geologists – in their strange, synecdochical way – have named the entire oceanic assemblage for this one component rock. But not directly. In their acute sense of time, they were not content to settle for a term of Latin derivation. Instead, they extracted from a deeper stratum όφις – ophis – the Greek word for snake. From the mantle upward, the complete column of ocean-floor rock is collectively known in geology as an ophiolite. The generally consistent differences within it are the ophiolitic sequence“.


My thanks to Vancouver geologist Barry J. Price for providing his slides. Barry has spent a lot of of time around nephrite jade, including New World Jade in the 1970s

There are two minerals called “jade”, with different compositions and origins: jadeite and nephrite. No commercial jadeite, a pyroxene, has been found in British Columbia; today most is mined in Myanmar, thus the phrase “Burmese jadeite”. Unlike the pure mineral elements gold, platinum, silver, copper and zinc, nephrite jade has a chemical composition that binds many elements together and hints at its formation: Ca2(Mg, Fe)5Si8O22(OH)2. Written in English, it’s an ultra-mafic rock (“mafic”= MA for magnesium and FIC from the Latin for iron); a silicate of calcium, magnesium, and iron; and classed as a fibrous actinolite-tremolite.  Nephrite can vary in colour from white (very rare ‘mutton fat’) to black, but primarily green, its deepness of colour reflecting its iron content. I think of it as “sea-green”, a mnemonic for its origin in the crustal rock of the sea.

Nephrite has been used by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest for four thousand years; middens have revealed nephrite “celts” (toolstones) used by the Coast Salish people, including the Marpole site along the Fraser River, as well as sites in Lillooet and Lytton.  On the south island of New Zealand, nephrite occurs as opiophites at contact points between deep mantle serpentine and igneous rock, especially in the Dun-Mountain Ophiolite Belt. The Maori people value nephrite or kawakawa as”pounamu which are treasured  family heirlooms passed down through generations as adzes, knives, chisels, fishing hooks, weapons and jewelry. Nephrite is treasured by the Chinese, who have used it for carving for millennia and call it yù.

According to ‘Chinese Jade Through the Ages’ by Stanley Nott (1937), “it was believed to have qualities of the solar light, and so to have relationship with the powers of heaven”, and thus, appropriate to the “son of Heaven, the Emperor”. At one time, the Chinese supply of nephrite came from the “jade mountains” of Eastern Turkestan, now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. But increasingly, the Chinese have looked to British Columbia for supply of nephrite jade.

Courtesy of Barry Price

B.C. nephrite jade occurs in three regions in a belt that extends the length of the province comprising what geologists call the Cache Creek Terrane, part of the Canadian Cordilleran “accretionary orogen”. The CCT is what geologists call a “suspect terrane” because its constituents, i.e. rocks, fossils, etc. do not fit with its current location. When it accreted to or docked on the North American continent, ophiolitic serpentine from the ocean crust was emplaced on land.

The CCT (now grouped in the Intermontane Superterrane) is one of a number of exotic or suspect terranes that ultimately made up what we know as British Columbia, accreting from the west through the eons, either from ocean crust or island arcs.  

Open access – https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/2/2/42/htm

As for New World Jade’s property on Ogden Mountain in the Omineca Segment of the Cache Creek Terrane, as geologist Barry Price wrote in a 1988 report: “Nephrite bands and lenses occur at the contact of sheared serpentine of Permian or Jurassic age and metasedimentary rocks of Upper Paleozoic age (Cache Creek Group).”

Courtesy of Barry J. Price

The property was in the Omineca Valley, below, where gold miners had tried their luck a century earlier in B.C.’s own version of the Gold Rush.  Although nephrite jade mining, being small-scale and relatively rare, is not as damaging as large open-pit mines, it does require removal of the “overburden” (trees, surface soil) to access the seams.

Photo by Peter Tasker – Beautiful British Columbia Magazine – Winter 1974

 New World Jade

My new job was not my first experience with British Columbia minerals. I’d worked one summer in high school in the occupational therapy department of a provincial home for people with developmental disorders.  There I learned to run the grinding and polishing wheels, teaching people to work with semi-precious stones like agate, jasper, quartz and my favourite, pink rhodonite, below, to make cabochons that could be drilled and set into pendants or made into earrings. But it would be almost a decade before I was introduced to B. C. jade, at a time when the province was alive with “jade fever”. 

Our company got its start in 1963 when a California high school principal named Larry Owen moved his family to Canada and bought a tiny village called Manson Creek (population 18) in the Omineca region 300 miles northwest of Prince George. Back in 1870, it had been a supply center for the Omineca Gold Rush. He planned to do some fishing, hunting and a little prospecting.  He met a young man, a professional prospector named Stan Porayko who would later become his son-in-law; together they rambled around the countryside staking claims. In 1967, they found nephrite jade boulders in Ogden Creek. Two years later on July 9, 1969, at the 5000 foot level of 6000-foot Mount Ogden, while staking claims in a creekbed, they wandered down the slope and found the mother-lode. Said Larry Owen in a newspaper story in the Prince George Citizen, “We walked up to it, lit a cigarette, and sat down to relax.  I took the drill off my backpack and both Stan and I sort of stared at this rock. We edged closer. It wasn’t granite. It wasn’t serpentine rock outcropping and it wasn’t like anything else we had seen before.”  The photo below shows blocks of nephrite from the in-situ location being sawn in 1973.  

Photo by Peter Tasker – Beautiful British Columbia Magazine – Winter 1974

The initial ‘placer’ boulders from the creek yielded the first production from 1967-69. Once the ‘in-situ’ jade was discovered, it became necessary to secure outside investment to meet the costs of further exploration, production, transportation, storage, promotion and sales.  In came two young Calgary businessmen, Gary Gallelli and David Saxby, and thus was born New World Jade Ltd., the company name alluding to the Chinese ‘Old World’ with its connection to jade.  In fact, Dave Saxby was part of the Canadian Solo Trade Exhibit in Beijing in August 1972, one of the first cultural exchanges between China and North America.  As word got out about the jade, the newspaper headlines became ever more colourful.

Mining happened in a short summer season, with rain, mud, mosquitoes and the remote location adding to the logistical issues.

Photo by Peter Tasker, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine – Winter 1974

After wire-saw cutting, helicopters were used to lift the sawn jade to the road….

Photo by Peter Tasker – Beautiful British Columbia Magazine – Winter 1974

….. where they could be trucked to the warehouse/office in Vancouver where I worked. Here they would be sawn with the whirring diamond saw blades and inventoried according to quality, i.e. colour and lack of inclusions and fractures. (As I recall, the lovely man on the forklift was named Eric.)

Photo by Peter Tasket – Beautiful British Columbia Magazine – Winter 1974

Inventory valuation was an interesting notion, since to the best of my recollection, the jade sold for between $50/lb for gem-grade to a fraction of that for ‘building grade’ jade for floor tiles, etc. Our customers were amateur rockhounds, jade carvers and of course China and Taiwan. But until large blocks and boulders were rendered into smaller pieces, there was no way of estimating the value of inventory – which is the essential problem with nephrite mining itself. It’s not like gold, with a known production value, it’s a crap shoot. Below you see Eric with the Ogden Mountain jade property founder Larry Owen, who bounded into the Vancouver office now and then wearing his bomber jacket and a big smile.

Photo by Peter Tasker – Beautiful British Columbia Magazine – Winter 1974

A neighbouring jade property that was struggling, Northern Jadex, was acquired by New World Jade, but it didn’t buy up all its competitors. The most interesting (and photogenic) was the woman the press would dub ‘the jade queen’, Win Robertson. A former television personality and occasional fashion model, she was also an avid rockhound with a keen understanding of where to look for jade (serpentine belts), developed through her friendship with geologists. In 1968, she and her son found piles of jade boulders in O’Ne-ell Creek on Mount Sidney Williams near Smithers. Overnight, she became famous, with Good Housekeeping magazine and the London Illustrated Times arriving for photo shoots. But like Larry Owen and Stan Porayko, she needed working capital, so she turned to a subsidiary of Vancouver’s Sandwell Company, Athabasca Columbia Resources, for financing. They became 51% owners of her jade mine. That transaction would become pivotal in how my own life turned out.    

Photo from Stan Leaming, Courtesy of Barry Price

There was a second component to the New World Jade operation, the carving studio called New World Jade Products. Raw material was obviously not an issue and there were lots of young artists ready to learn how to carve jade. The carving studio launched in 1972 with Quebec-born sculptor Robert Dubé.   As well, there was an opportunity to create small jade pieces and jewelry items on a mass manufacture basis, thanks to the talent of stone-cutter Al Hampson, who created special saws and equipment to work the jade.

Photo by Peter Tasker, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, Winter 1974

David Wong, below,  had emigrated from China in 1971, met Robert Dubé, and launched his jade-carving career with New World Jade in 1972, becoming one of the firm’s most prolific sculptors. He is carving a one-of-a-kind black and green jade chess set.

Photo by Peter Tasker, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, Winter 1974

Deborah Wilson, below, began carving at New World Jade Products in 1973 along with several other graduates of the Vancouver School of Art. Today, almost 50 years later, she is a successful jade carver and teacher with her own Okanagan studio where she gives workshops to sculptors from every corner of the world.

Photo by Peter Tasker, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, Winter 1974

Another VSA grad, Alex Schick, carved beautiful pieces. Today, he works in bronze casts and you can see him with an artist friend in this lovely video.

Photo by Dave Paterson

My administrative role with New World Jade expanded to accompanying the carvings to various art shows, including Dallas, Texas in a guarded-room containing $6 million in art from various places. I have old clippings showing me with a black jade buffalo by George Rammel….

…. and a bird in flight by Chuck Wiggins.

In December 1974, I was photographed with Gary Gallelli ‘playing chess’ with David Wong’s chess set, valued at $25,000. I didn’t know the first thing about chess, and certainly Gary didn’t have to worry about me dropping a piece (!) because as we’ve seen, nephrite is tough as steel.

Photo by Nick Yunge-Bateman

The art studio was located on Cordova Street in Gastown, and in 1973 or early ’74, our office moved from West 1st Avenue to the newly-renovated historic Garage at 12 Water Street in Gastown. Our neighbour to one side was the radio personality Jack Webster; to the other side were music agents Bruce Allen and Sam Feldman (Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Bryan Adams, Sarah McLachlan, Joni Mitchell, Diana Krall). From time to time, late on a Friday afternoon, the office cupboard would open and a bottle would emerge. On those occasions, I remember Webster and his good friend, columnist Allan Fotheringham, coming in to join us for drinks while holding forth with rollicking stories. Another friend came by on the odd Friday night, a Toronto-born man who had been in the same Harvard MBA class as Dave Saxby and Gary Gallelli.  His name was David Ingram, and we became good friends. From time to time, he brought with him a childhood friend from Toronto who happened to be working as a financial consultant for Sandwell Co. and had been assigned the task of finding a buyer for the jade mining company they now fully owned, Jade Queen Mines, Win Robertson having sold her interest back to the company.   

To make a long story short, the financial consultant was Doug Davis and in time, we moved beyond being ‘friends at the jade office’ to him actually asking me out on a date. Eighteen months later, we got married, our wedding attendant his 7-year old son who became the beloved big brother to his three siblings. The date was April 16, 1977, exactly 44 years ago today. And no, New World Jade did not buy Jade Queen Mines. In fact, we always joked that we were the assets that escaped, since the mining company was sold to Japanese interests and the carving company went into receivership.

April 16, 1977 – and my two Dougs

Today, our living room shelf holds two beautiful carvings by David Wong – the whale a gift to me on leaving the company, the bird a wedding gift to both us – as well as a sea lion by Stan Schmidt rescued from the junk pile at the studio. Nearby are soapstone carvings that, unlike jade, are so fragile that movers managed to break one.

In my kitchen window, I have a ceramic planter of grape ivy that I planted in 1994 and have not divided or done a thing to since other than thinning its incredible growth. But it might be the only plant pot in Canada with a nephrite jade dust glaze!

Forty-four years is a long time to be married, and we’ve been lucky to have a good life and a wonderful family. I made the montage below with photos from 1977-2021. Once in a while, we even talk about the “jade days”, especially when I root in my jewelry box.

David Ingram remained a dear and very special friend to both of us for four decades, entertaining us when we travelled “home” to Vancouver and visiting us at our cottage and home in Toronto. His enthusiasm for people, places and business opportunities never flagged, but he was always so busily preoccupied that he sometimes tended to miss little details. When we were together last in 2016 in Kenya for the wedding of the son of a mutual friend, he forgot to pack the cufflinks and studs for his dress shirt. I suggested he ask Karmushu, the Maasai manager of the lodge if he could improvise. When his shirt was adorned with Maasai jewelry and we were about to leave for the ceremony, David asked me to take their picture together. Sadly, it was the photo the family would use on his funeral program nine months later.  

I dedicate this blog to David Ingram, and to the late Larry Owen, Stan Porayko and David Saxby, as well as Gary Gallelli, the late Win Robertson, Barry Price, the late Stan Leaming and all the artists who worked their magic with British Columbia nephrite jade.

The Joyous Alma VanDusen Garden

This post has been almost 9 years in the making! It was August 29, 2011 and I was in Vancouver to visit my mother, who was living in a care home in the suburbs.  As I have done every time I travel “home” to Vancouver from Toronto, I set aside several hours to walk through Van Dusen Botanical Garden, a place I know well and one for which my late mom and I shared a deep affection. As you can see from the map below, its 55 acres (22 hectares) make quite the journey.

That late summer day, just months before the formal opening of the new Visitors Centre, colour abounded throughout VanDusen. There was the most amazing planting of colourful annuals out by the entrance, below: a textural mixture of Salvia patens ‘Cambridge Blue’, Zinnia angustifolia ‘Profusion Orange’,yellow coreopsis, purple Verbena rigida and fuzzy bunny tails grass (Lagurus ovatus).

Inside the garden, I was happy to see the carnivorous pitcher plants (Sarracenia flava) thriving in their beautiful urn.

I sauntered slowly through the Fragrance Garden, sniffing the sweet peas, Auratum lilies and chocolate cosmos.

As always, the Black Border with its contrasts of dark and chartreuse foliage was simply sensational.

The Southern Hemisphere garden looked spectacular, with its Fuchsia magellanica, big-leaved Gunnera manicata and Nicotiana sylvestris.

The Perennial Garden featured bands of orange crocosmia, white echinacea and orange helenium.

I explored the big hydrangea collection, so lovely in late summer.  This was Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Europa’, just changing colour sumptuously, as mophead hydrangeas do.

Hours after entering, my feet tired and ready to head to my car, I came to the very back of VanDusen, as far away from the entrance as you can get in this big garden. (See the red arrow in the map above.)  I’m usually a spring visitor, when the rhododendrons, camellias and blue poppies are in flower (you’ll meet those in my next blog), so I was surprised and intrigued to see a mass of colourful flowers, all annuals, in a wildish, meadow-like garden. I waited a few minutes while a bride-to-be finished her wedding photos, then wandered in along the bark chip path. It was like walking into a Willie Wonka flower factory. Past the dark-leaved fountain grass entrance, there were sunflowers towering over my head; pink, white and mauve spider flowers; bronze canna leaves; gloriosa daisies; wine-red, feathery amaranth; and a bright edging of ‘Lemon Gem’ marigolds. All of these flowers are grown from seed!

But unlike many public gardens where they grow in soldierly rows, here they were grown more like a tapestry of perennials.

It wasn’t until I started gathering the images for this blog that I realized that almost all of these annuals are native to the Americas. For example, Amaranthus cruentus, below is a native of Mexico and thought to have been wild harvested before spreading to the southeast U.S.and domesticated for agriculture by Arizona’s indigenous Hopi people around 4000 B.C. They called it komo and used it not just as a grain for flour, but harvested the bracts of the feathery magenta flowers as “Hopi red dye” to colour the dough for their cornbread.  Yellow signet marigold, i.e. Tagetes tenuifolia ‘Lemon Gem’, below, is native to Mexico, Central America and Peru and Argentina. It was used in traditional medicine and its flowers are edible and often used today as a salad garnish. Slender vervain (Verbena rigida), below, originates in Brazil and Argentina.

Spider flower (Cleome hassleriana), below, comes from South America.

I loved the combinations in the garden.

The native American sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), especially, were gorgeous in late August and seemed to have been grown from many seed strains.

Van Dusen Botanical Garden has beehives and the honey bees were all over the sunflowers…

…. enjoying gathering nectar from the tiny disk flowers in the centre. Did you know that there’s a honey in Burgundy, France made from sunflowers? It’s yellow and buttery and is called Miel Tournesol.

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The garden makes extensive use of gloriosa daisies, the tetraploid form of biennial black eyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta), another plant native to a wide swath of the Americas.

This one looked like the cultivar ‘Autumn Colors’.

As I came to the end of the path that day in 2011, I looked back and noticed castor-bean plant (Ricinus communis ‘Carmencita’), native to the Mediterranean basin, and the tall South American vervain (Verbena bonariensis).  Everything here was at its peak, and I could see the foliage of delphiniums in the mix as well.

East of the flowery garden adjacent to the Maze was a border filled with brilliantly coloured perennials and annuals beneath bright-gold ‘Frisia’ black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia).

I couldn’t help but think of all the kids who would have been wowed by these giant sunflowers!

This was a fun combination: tall cup plants (Silphium perfoliatum),  yellow Sinacalia tangutica, white Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) and blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’).

As I left VanDusen that August day in 2011, I asked a gardener in the Southern Hemisphere Garden who managed the colourful garden I’d just toured? “Oh, that would be Miguel,” he said. I wrote down the name somewhere and lost it. A few years later, when former VanDusen Garden Director Harry Jongerden became our Director at the Toronto Botanical Garden, I was asked to photograph him, below. When we were finished, I mentioned this amazing flower garden way at the back of VanDusen. “Oh, that would be Miguel Molina’s garden”, he said. This time I wrote his name down.

VanDusen Botanical Garden will be 45 years old this summer. Prior to becoming a garden, it was part of the old Shaughnessy Golf Course, leased in 1911 from Marathon Realty, at the time an arm of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  And yes, that’s actor Clark Gable (‘Gone With the Wind’), below, smoking his pipe while playing in a foursome at the club in 1933.

When Shaughnessy’s lease was up in 1960, Marathon’s plan was to redevelop the entire property as housing, commercial and retail. But in 1966, a group of concerned citizens got together and formed a charitable organization called the Vancouver Botanical Gardens Association (VBGA). They worked with the City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia and the Vancouver Foundation to come up with the money to buy part of the old golf course to create a botanical garden. The Vancouver Foundation had been started as a perpetual legacy in 1944 by the lumber magnate and philanthropist Whitford Julian VanDusen (1888-1979) and is now one of the largest in North America, worth $1.2 billion. Within the fund were several VanDusen family funds, including the Alma VanDusen Garden Fund. W.J. VanDusen himself made a $1 million donation to the garden’s development. In thanks, the garden was named for him, one of the few public references to his generosity and he was invited to cut the ribbon at the official opening on August 30, 1975, below, flanked by Premier Dave Barrett, left, Alderman May Brown and Vancouver Mayor Art Phillips.

Late last September, my husband and I made a fast run through VanDusen on an overnight stop in Vancouver before flying in to Cougar Annie’s Garden in the rainforest outside Tofino. I wrote a two-part blog about that fantastic experience.  As is my habit, I visited the flower garden, which I learned was named for W.J. VanDusen’s wife Alma VanDusen (1888-1969). The Alma VanDusen Garden is adjacent to the Alma VanDusen Meadow.  According to a Vancouver Foundation report, “Although she had a spirit of adventure, Alma was outwardly a quiet, private person similar to her husband. She was an artistic soul who enjoyed music and painting. A lover of flowers, Alma grew magnificent orchids in her greenhouse and later tended beautiful gardens at their farm in Langley.”

Given that it was now early autumn, the fountain grass was in flower and those…..

… seedling delphiniums had started to bloom, too. I noticed zinnias were being used to fill in the spaces between the tall flowers.

 

As we walked on towards the parking lot, I spied a gardener digging in the vegetable garden nearby. “Are you Miguel Molina?” I asked.  “Yes,” he answered. I asked if I could photograph him for my blog and he posed for me. Most importantly, at last I was able to thank the gardener who tends such a joyful, colourful garden of memory, dedicated to the generosity of two Vancouverites who helped to make this stellar botanical garden possible.

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I will be writing about VanDusen Garden in May in my next blog. If you want to read about another exceptional Vancouver garden, visit the blog I wrote on UBC’s David Lam Asian Garden.

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Other public gardens I’ve blogged about include Toronto Botanical Garden; Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton ON; Montreal Botanical Garden; New York Botanical Garden; Wave Hill, Bronx NY; New York’s Conservatory Garden in Central Park; New York’s High Line in May and in June; fabulous Chanticleer in Wayne, PA; the Ripley Garden in Washington DC; Chicago Botanic Garden; The Lurie Garden, Chicago; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin TX; Denver Botanic Gardens; the Japanese Garden in Portland OR; the Bellevue Botanical Garden, Bellevue, WA; the Los Angeles County Arboretum; RBG Kew in London; Kirstenbosch, Cape Town; the Harold Porter National Botanical Gardens, South Africa; Durban Botanic Gardens; Otari-Wilton’s Bush, Wellington NZ; Dunedin Botanic Garden, NZ; Christchurch Botanic Gardens;

Tiptoeing Through the Tulips at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival

It’s a cool spring here in Toronto, and things are late to flower; when they do, they hold on for a long time. My tulips have just started opening, but ten days ago I was lucky enough to tiptoe through gazillions of gorgeous tulips at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival in the Fraser Valley, about 73 kilometres (43 miles) from Vancouver, B.C.  I was there visiting my west coast family and my sister Bonnie, right, was kind enough to take me to the festival. So… natch… we asked a perfect stranger to take our picture.

Then we started touring.  This is the patch where visitors are allowed to pick their own tulip stems to buy to take home. Isn’t it fun?

People were very happy to be capturing a little of this floral joy.

And the cameras! From pros with tripods, to SLRs around necks, to every kind of cellphone camera, the shutterbugs were there.

Tulips have a long period of flowering, from the Single Early types and botanical tulips to the Single Late varieties. In a cool spring, tulips might flower for six weeks, but when temperatures warm up, so does the speed with which the tulips flower and fade. Fortunately for me our visit was perfectly timed at pleasant (not warm) temperatures for maximum bloom! And best of all, it was the kind of high overcast sky that I love for photography (and thanks to my sis for the photo below).

As for photography tips (and almost all of mine were made with my Samsung S8 cellphone), here are two images I made from my vantage point above. I think most people would agree that this one…..

….. is not as visually powerful as the one below. Why is that? While the one above captures the little mountains in the background and has a nice sense of vanishing point perspective, it’s a bit too easy on the eyes. The one below, by placing the angle of the tulip rows on the oblique and cutting out the far landscape but leaving the horizon showing, focuses attention on the spectacular geometry of the fields and the brilliant colour combinations of the tulips. That double magenta, by the way, is ‘Margarita’.

I caught Bonnie photographing the rose-flushed, light-pink Triumph tulip ‘Rosalie’…..

…. which is a lovely soft shade to use with mauves and lilacs.

One of my favourite tulips is the dramatic Single Late ‘Queen of Night’. I grow this one myself…..

….. and I liked the way it had cheekily intruded into this hot pink and orange mix.  Hello!!

Speaking of intruders, I think most of us secretly love it when a solid block of single-colour tulips is visited by an interloper – the tulip version of photo-bombing. This is the Single Late yellow ‘La Courtine’ in a bed of the magenta-pink Triumph ‘Milka’.

Tulip interiors like those of ‘Milka’ are fun to photograph. Defined as “perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes” (i.e. they come back every year, they’re herbs not shrubs, they grow from bulbs, and they have perennating, underground storage organs), tulips are members of the Lily Family, Liliaceae.

Tulips are native to parts of southern Europe and Central Asia (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and the other “stan”countries) and the name is believed to derive from the Persian word for turban, tuliband. Indeed, tulips were an essential part of the court of the Ottoman Empire, as this story from Amsterdam’s Tulip Museum recalls.

The Dutch, of course, have cornered the market in tulip-breeding. When we were in the Netherlands in 1998, we loved driving through the tulip fields near Lisse.

Those blocks of vibrant colour are so tantalizing. In 1885, Impressionist painter Claude Monet travelled in the Netherlands and painted The Tulip Fields and Rijnsberg Windmill.

As well, you can see tulips planted in beautiful combinations at spectacular Keukenhhof Gardens, which is the exhibition garden for numerous Dutch bulb-growers.

Here in Canada, I’ve been to the Ottawa Tulip Festival, which I wrote about in a previous blog.

But back to the Abbotsford Tulip Festival, here are some beautifully grown modern tulip bulbs. This is ‘Camargue’, a pink-streaked sport of the tulip ‘Menton’. It starts out pale yellow and ages to ivory-white.

‘Caravelle’ is a stunning tulip, a Single Late variety with beetroot-purple flowers. It was used in several mixed beds here at the festival as well.


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‘Happy Generation’, below, may look familiar to some. It was branded as a Limited Edition ‘Canada 150’ tulip during our country’s sesquicentennial in 2017, since it looks like the flame that burns at our parliament buildings in Ottawa.

I grow ‘Dordogne’ in my own garden – I love the gold and salmon tones in this tulip.

‘Flaming Parrot’ is a fine-feathered bird (as are all the Parrot tulips). It starts out with yellow in the colour mix and then fades to creamy-white and red.

It’s also fun to look into this one.

And here it is in a beautiful mixture at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival.

‘Spring Green’, below, is a Viridiflora Tulip.  Underneath it is a lovely tulip I grow in my garden…..

….. the deep-red 1942 Parrot Tulip ‘Rococo’.

Some combinations are unusual but work well, like the dark-mauve Fringed Tulip ‘Louvre’ with the salmon-flushed golden-yellow Darwin Hybrid Tulip ‘World Peace’.

‘Denmark’ is a strong, bicolour Triumph.

Pink and white make a pretty pairing – don’t know the names of these two.

Okay, I think we’ve taken the weird double tulip thing far enough. I don’t care if they look like  sundaes and someone named them ‘Ice Cream’ – please make this trend stop!

At the far end of the tulip fields, there was a windmill. Of course! And I had to pose.

There was also a basket, which we decided must be suggestive of a hot air balloon….? Or maybe bulb growers in the Netherlands carry bulbs in baskets? Anyway, we posed it that, too!

What fun people were having with their selfie sticks and walking up and down the paths with kids and grandparents.

Everyone was posing for the perfect tulips-and-me shot!

Wisely, the festival folks made it easy to get online publicity….. #colourinthecountry. And they have an online store too where you can order favourites.

But it was now time to go. I did love the brilliant displays with all their colourful geometry and such beautifully grown tulips, but……

…. as a gardener, I prefer to grow them not in soldier-like rows but mixed in with daffodils, small bulbs like Anemone blanda, crocuses, grape hyacinths (Muscari sp.), all set in a matrix of emerging perennials that will carry the garden throughout summer into autumn. And colour-wise, I do love a tulip party, thanks to my own bulb supplier pal Caroline de Vries.

In my garden, the tulip season begins with Darwin Hybrids and finishes with the Single Late tulips in a symphony of light-purple Camassia leichtlinii and Fothergilla gardenii. And that should all be happening any day now, if spring in Toronto would just warm up!

 

Six Miles Up – Viewing Earth from Seat 45K

The blog below is one of those little bits of fancy you think is just too silly and much too much work to pursue, then find yourself doing exactly that for three days straight. Why did I think it was worth the exercise to work on not-very-good photos of North Dakota, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia in order to present them to people who couldn’t care less about spotting Minot Air Force Base from six miles up? Well, I guess I could ask why people flying over a spectacular, sunlit tapestry of farm fields, canyons, mountains, rivers, lakes and towns can’t get their nose out of their novel or stop watching a recycled movie on a little screen long enough to appreciate the diversity of this magnificent continent we call home.

Plus, I’m a little obsessive. You might have noticed.

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9:39 am – I’m nicely settled into my window seat of Flight 103 from Toronto to Vancouver, anticipating a little reading after an hour-long nap to overcome the fatigue that happens when your alarm rings at 4:45 am on a travel day. It’s a comfortable and fairly new Boeing 777 and my seat, 45K, is behind the wing on the right side, which gives me a nice view of the scenery below and to the north. I glance down as we cross the western shore of a Great Lake (Superior, I think) and reach for my phone, more for fun than anything, since I’m clearly not an aerial photographer and the Samsung S8, though a lovely little phone camera, has very limited resolution – especially at an altitude of more than 10,000 metres (6 miles) and a speed of 800 km (500 mi) an hour.  What I see is this…..

10:01 am – Hmmm. Rhapsody in Blue… not the ideal. Airplane windows are strong, double-paned acrylic with UV filtration – and often splashed with rain drops or bits of grunge – so it’s a challenge to capture the scene on the ground the way your eyes see it. But once I start, I’m hooked. My next image is all blue as well, but with a lot of Photoshop post-processing (starting with Auto Colour, then various colour filters, shadow highlighting, contrast fixes, etc.), I manage to make it look like this, below. Whatever is in that window acrylic or shading, the camera senses skylight differently from the scene on the ground and blows the background out.

A way to fix that is just to delete the plane wing and turn the vertical into a horizontal. Now it just looks like one of those vintage, turn-of-the-century postcards with lovely late August farms.  Or a quilt patch.

10:12 am – But where on earth am I? Somewhere in northern Minnesota or North Dakota, I think. There’s that little town cluster of buildings with the unique rectangular fields to the right. It seems to be a place that has some crops already harvested and the soil plowed (grayish fields) and other fields with lots of grain still to be cut. The green patches might be winter wheat or alfalfa crops sown to enrich the soil.

10:16 am –  Minutes later, it occurs to me that there’s a way to figure out approximately where the plane is. So I begin to snap a quick shot of the Moving Map feature on the entertainment console in front of me after each out-the-window photo. It gives the rough coordinates, the time, the kilometres travelled and still to travel, the altitude and the airspeed. It isn’t exact GPS by any stretch, but it will be a useful guide later. And the identifications below are thanks in part to that guide, but especially to wonderful Google Earth, where you’re looking down on the actual forests, rivers and farms that you can see from the plane. (Any errors are mine, not Google Earth’s.)

10:17 am – The late summer fields are resplendently golden around Morrison and Sweetwater Lakes in North Dakota.

And this is how I saw those lakes on Google Earth later (with a lot of squinty searching…)

10:18 am – Lakes in North Dakota are often named after people. Here we have Lake Alice, Mike’s Lake and Dry Lake at right, which already seems to be drying up.

10:20 am – Highway 2 leads toward Church’s Ferry on Lake Irvine, right. I’ve always wanted to go to North Dakota and this is a fun way to see it.

10:31 am – That runway, below, is a big clue to Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.

Later, as I look for the locations on the photos, I discover various ways to plot the pilot’s route. One is to take two places you’ve already identified and draw a straight line between them, as I can now do with Sweetwater Lake and Minot Air Force Base. That should be the pilot’s general route and help with the rest of the photos.

10:32 am – A lake trickles forward in a narrow, sinous stream through a valley that looks like varicose veins. Why it’s the Lake Darling Dam, the Souris River and the Upper Souris National Wildlife Refuge. (Later, I discover it’s named for Jay “Ding” Darling, the eminent naturalist I wrote about in my blog on a wildlife-friendly garden in Austin, Texas.)

10:33 am – Not far away (at least at 800 kilometres or 500 miles an hour) is another beautiful natural site: the Des Lacs National Wildlife Refuge.  Here’s what I see by zooming the phone in.

10:34 am – And this is what I see as the plane moves west, along with the Upper Des Lacs River above it. Imagine TWO wildlife refuges to accommodate the migratory birds that stop in North Dakota on their way south and north!

Using Google, I learn later that the actual driving distance from one refuge to another is 52 minutes, using Highway 5.

10:43 am – I’m fascinated by the vast number of farm ponds in this part of North Dakota, below, unlike any other part of this journey over the Central Plains.  I later learn, courtesy of my geologist friend Andy Fyon, that these are called prairie potholes.  But that is an actual geographic designation, according to Wikipedia:  “The Prairie Pothole Region is an expansive area of the northern Great Plains that contains thousands of shallow wetlands known as potholes. These potholes are the result of glaciaer activity in the Wisconsin glaciation, which ended about 10,000 years ago. The decaying ice sheet left behind depressions formed by the uneven deposition of till in ground moraines. These depressions are called potholes, glacial potholes, kettles or kettle lakes. They fill with water in the spring, creating wetlands, which range in duration from temporary to semi-permanent. The region covers an area of abouat 800,000 sq. km and expands across three Canadian provinces, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta and five U.S. states, Minnesota Iowa, North and South Dakota and Montana.”

10:45 am – What’s this? White lakes? Why, yes! These are the saline lakes that extend from western North Dakota near Montana up into Saskatchewan. Their brine is also the source of Glauber salt or natural mirabilite crystals, which is used in making Kraft paper. This is Divide County, which means that it sits astride the Continental Divide, where rivers flower either east towards the Atlantic or west towards the Pacific, depending on which side of the divide they’re located.

10:46 am – The green lake, Miller Lake, is a little deeper and has not yet dried up except at the edges, exposing the salt residue. I love the round fields here, designed this way for centre-pivot irrigation. (See what you learn when you look out a plane window?)  Montana is in the upper left of the photo.

10:46 am – Closeup of Miller Lake. (When I was a child living in British Columbia and we went on our summer vacation to my grandparents’ house in Saskatoon, my parents took my brother and me to one of Saskatchewan’s many salt lakes, Lake Manitou, near Watrous. The hilarious thing for kids was that we could not stand up in the water but we could not sink either, because the hypersaline concentration made us buoyant! These days it’s a mineral spa.)

10:53 am – Seven minutes later, we’ve crossed over the international border and we’re flying over the southwest Saskatchewan municipality of Hart Butte No. 11.

10:55 am – I’m unable to pinpoint the exact location below, but I love the striped fields and am delighted to discover that they’re just the result of the way the farmer plows, not that he sowed dark and light crops in rows! City slickers…..

10:56 – The big rocky chunk below is Poplar Valley, Saskatchewan, with Fife Lake in the upper left.

11:01 – Prairie topography is not all pancake-flat, of course, and the view below shows the delicious tentacles of prairie valleys near Wood Mountain Provincial Park (there’s actually a little mountain there.)  This region has a fascinating history.  In 1876, following his defeat of General Custer at Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull and 5,000 of his Lakota Sioux followers took refuge here, resulting in negotiations with the North West Mounted Police who gave them shelter provided they obeyed Canadian laws.  In time, many died and many more left, including Sitting Bull, who headed to Wyoming in 1885 and joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.  Last autumn, after visiting and blogging about Wanuskewin near Saskatoon, where I was born, I read the gripping accounts of those long-ago days in Wallace Stegner’s delightful book Wolf Willow, which I highly recommend to lovers of all-things-prairie. From 1917 to 1921 he was a young boy in Eastend, Saskatchewan (which he fictionalized in the book as Whitemud) when his parents tried to make a farm living there. His memoir-history-novelette brings the region to vivid life!

11:07 –  Speaking of Eastend, this is the long Frenchman River Valley just west of the town. On the north side around the middle is Jones Peak, which gives a commanding view of the area, including the new T.Rex Discovery Centre, home to Scotty, the world’s biggest tyrannosaurus! It’s also the repository for fossils from the Frenchman River Valley and the nearby Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park.
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11:24 – After reading Stegner, one of my aims in life is to get to Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park – 2,500 square kilometres of prairie (fescue grassland, dry, mixed grass prairie) that reaches across the provincial border into Alberta. (Maybe combined with a trip to Alberta’s fossil-rich Badlands.) I caught a little section of the park below.

11:32 –  Taber, Alberta isn’t very big, but I managed to find it, along with winding Old Man River, the Horsefly Lake Reservoir and Taber Lake.

I have a funny little story about Taber. They grow sugar beets there. How do I know? Because when we were kids on one of those interminable summer car trips to Saskatoon from Vancouver (or Victoria before that), my dad stopped for gas at a station. It wasn’t open but the big tanker truck was filling up the tanks and the guy offered to give us some gas. After we headed down the highway, our little 1949 Austin of England sputtered to a stop. It wasn’t until dad hitchhiked into Taber, leaving four of us sitting in a hot little car beside a sugar beet field, and returned with the tow truck to haul us into a service station, that we learned that the tanker truck had filled our little car with diesel fuel, not gasoline. This is that car a few weeks later, camping gear on the roof, set for the 3-day return trip, with grandpa and me in his vegetable garden and my uncle and cousin standing behind to say goodbye. What great summer vacations those were.

11:35 – Three minutes after Taber, we fly over the town of Coaldale, Alberta on the Crowsnest Highway. Though coal wasn’t mined there (it was named after its wealthy first resident’s family estate in Scotland), the fact that a station was built there on the brand-new Canadian Pacific Railway line resulted in it becoming a service town in prime, wheat-growing territory in southern Alberta. In fact, Coaldale become known as the “gem of the west” for its wheat. (Which reminds me of another family story. My elderly Aunt Rose, a maiden great aunt living north of Saskatoon in Elrose, Saskatchewan grew wheat on her property as well. In those boom days for grain, her relatives in B.C. knew the “Russians were buying wheat” when she included a crisp $20 bill in her Christmas card.)

11:36 – For photo-editing comparison, I include the image below of Lethbridge, to illustrate the appearance of the images straight out of the Samsung 8.

11:36 – And now here’s Lethbridge with some help from Photoshop. The largest city in southern Alberta, it’s the fourth largest in the province after Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer.

11:40 – That white patch below is Mud Lake, just a little west of the town of Fort MacLeod, out of the picture on the right. And that grey patch to the left is the start of the Rocky Mountain foothills.

11:47 – Seven minutes later, we’re flying over /Alberta’s Rocky Mountains heading into British Columbia.

11:51 – This part of the Rockies in southeastern British Columbia is referred to as the Kootenays, after the Kootenay River, which is in turn named for the Kutenai First Nations.  In previous spring trips when I glanced out the window, the mountains were covered with snow. Now I see the jutting grey rock and the fuzzy green of the treeline below.

11:51 – Puffy clouds hang over the mountains but visibility is still very clear.

11:53 – The Kootenay River winds along the valley bottom and eventually empties south into Lake Koocanusa – an acronym of Kootenay-Canada-USA, since the lake spans the border.  These mountains are the headwaters of the river, which flows through Montana and Idaho and back into British Columbia where it joins the Columbia River.

12:01 – Looking out the airplane window, it occurs to me that air flight entertainment could potentially offer much more than just second-run movies and network news. This map feature could offer geography and geology lessons in real time. Reading John McPhee’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning opus ‘Annals of the Former World’ earlier this summer, I read about the Laramide Orogeny (named for Laramie, Wyoming), the mountain-building process that saw the Farallon Plate in the Pacific shove itself under the Continental plate and give rise 80-55 million years ago to the Rocky Mountains, this backbone of jutting granite peaks reaching from Canada into Mexico.  As Wikipedia states: “The current Rocky Mountains arose in the Laramide orogeny from between 80 and 55 Ma.  For the Canadian Rockies, the mountain building is analogous to pushing a rug on a hardwood floor: the rug bunches up and forms wrinkles (mountains). In Canada, the terranes and subduction are the foot pushing the rug, the ancestral rocks are the rug, and the Canadian Shield in the middle of the continent is the hardwood floor.”

12:12 – That bridge across long Okanagan Lake is a clue that this is Kelowna below.

12:13 –  The little towns below flanking Okanagan Lake are B.C.’s prime fruit-growing and vacationing region – an area we simply called “the Okanagan”.

12:14 –  Okanagan Lake is 135 km (86 miles) long, with a maximum depth of 232 metres (761 feet). It’s classified as a “fjord lake”  because it was carved out by repeated glaciations.

12:15 –  Unsurprisingly, clouds roll in as we fly over the mountains on the far side of the Okanagan valley, obscuring some of the most beautiful scenery in North America.

12:35 – The clouds clear in time for me to see the busy Burrard Inlet and port of North Vancouver below.

12:36 – A minute later, through small breaks in the cloud and raindrops on the window, I can just make out Lion’s Gate Bridge spanning from the north shore to Stanley Park in the bottom middle. The captain has now raised the spoilers to slow the plane and prepare to begin his wide turn over the Strait of Georgia, the arm of the Pacific Ocean between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland.

12:37 – I see a circle of freighters at anchor in English Bay.  For a few years back in the mid-1970s, this bay and its weekend sailboat races were my view when I lived in my little condominium up the hill in nearby Kitsilano.

12:41 – More clouds over the ocean.  We’re flying blind. Fortunately the captain has instruments.

12:42 – Out of the clouds now and I see a freighter outward bound into the Pacific.

12:45 – Vancouver International Airport is located on Sea Island and these marshes at the runway perimeter are on the ocean.

Sea Island sits between the north and south arms of the mighty Fraser River as it empties into the sea after its 1375 km (854 mile) journey from far up in the Rocky Mountains.

12:46 – On the tarmac and taxiing towards our arrival gate. I calculate that I’ve been photographing out the window at Seat 45K for more than three hours. And having chronicled the journey, I feel that I know a little more about this beautiful old planet than I did when I put my seat belt on in Toronto. Much more.