Over the years, various tours around the province, most recently last weekend with the University of Regina Chamber Singers to Swift Current and Yorkton, have given me an appreciation for the varied nature of the Saskatchewan landscape.
It might be flat and treeless around Regina, but in the parklands rolling terrain is the norm; out west are the dramatic Cypress Hills; down are the badlands, straight out of a Western movie; up north there are rocks, rapids, ravines, cliffs and forests.
These landscapes didn’t just happen. They’re the results of geological events and processes that occurred millions of years ago or, in some cases, are still occurring (geological processes don’t stop; they just move so slowly it seems like it to short-lived humans).
Now there’s a new tool to help you understand what you’re looking at as you drive around Saskatchewan–and to direct you to some fascinating features of the province you may be unaware of.
The Geological Highway Map of Saskatchewan, created by a volunteer group of government, university and private sector professionals, is now being distributed free to all Saskatchewan school libraries and sold to members of the public for the same price as the provincial road map, $1.75.
One side of the map focuses on the northern half of the province, the other on the southern half. On each side the province’s major roads wend their way through a multitude of multicolored blobs, each of which indicates a different underlying geological structure.
The map is easy to use. For instance, our tour to Yorkton took us through Melville, which on the map is located inside a dark green blob, coded with the letters Qmr. The legend reveals that Melville is located in a region of “ridged moraine”–moraine being the boulders, gravel, sand, silt and clay deposited by glacial ice–which accounts for the rolling terrain.
Regina, on the other hand, is located in a pale purple area coded Qlp. That means it is located in an area once covered by a lake formed from melting glaciers. The smooth, thick silt left behind accounts for both the flat terrain and the richness of the farmland.
A number of specific areas of interest are marked with numbers–sites like the Avonlea Badlands, for instance. Photos and a description are provided. Places where oil and gas are extracted and minerals are mined are also indicated, and explanations given of how those minerals got there (potash, for instance, was deposited while southern Saskatchewan was covered by a very salty sea 400 million years ago) and how they’re recovered.
What’s most interesting about the map, though, is the way it reveals places you didn’t even know existed. If you were to drive to the end of Highway 955 (a gravel road in the far north), you would find yourself dipping down into a valley. That’s no ordinary valley, the map reveals; it’s actually a meteor crater, 35 kilometres across, formed 478 million years ago when a meteor between half a kilometer and a kilometer in diameter struck the Earth.
Or maybe you’re unaware of the Otter Rapids on the Churchill River, which flow over 1.8 billion-year-old sandstone, colored pink by an abundance of a feldspar mineral called microcline. (Don’t know what feldspar or microcline are? The map includes a glossary of such geological terms.)
The map points you to the conglomerate cliffs in the Cypress Hills, composed of pebbles and cobbles eroded from uplifted highlands in Montana and deposited in Saskatchewan by northward-flowing rivers 44 to 25 million years ago, then cemented together by calcium carbonate precipitated from groundwater. It highlights the Great Sand Hills in the south, and the remote, spectacular Athabasca Sand Dunes in the north. It shows you to the Frenchman River Valley, where Scotty, Saskatchewan’s famous Tyrannosaurus rex, was found.
The goal of the map, its creators say, is to help people understand the origins of the many geological features they see as they travel across the province by car or plane, and to explain why mines, quarries and pump jacks are located in certain areas and not in others.
That’s a bit prosaic, if you ask me. I think I’d say that, like wind and rain stripping away topsoil from underlying rock, the Geological Highway Map of Saskatchewan strips away the myth that Saskatchewan’s terrain is boring and reveals the truth: our province is a beautiful, varied, and endlessly fascinating place to travel through and explore.
The map is available from the Saskatchewan Geological Society, Box 234, Regina, SK, S4P 2Z6, or by contacting the Saskatchewan Energy and Mines Communications Branch at 787-2526.
