Looking Back: There’s Gold in them there Hills

My father had the presence of mind to collect a sample of the ash that had coated his old 1962 Pontiac on May 19th, 1980.  I keep it in an old prescription bottle as a reminder of the power of nature. It was volcanic ash from the catastrophic eruption of Mt. St. Helens volcano that had occurred the day before. We are about 700 kilometers northeast of what remains of St. Helens as the crow flies. As the ash flies, at apparently about 100 kilometers per hour, it theoretically took only seven or so hours for that ejection to find its way here in what was a fairly thin dusting compared to further south.

St. Helens sent an eruption column 80,000 feet into the air and blanketed 11 states. Of course the internet coverage makes little or no mention of its impact on Canada and most of the ash distribution maps end abruptly at the Canada/ US border, like there was some kind of a wall there!

The logistics of St. Helens are well known (57 people died, 2.8 billion in damages) but what is not that well known is that it is part of what they call the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a series of 20 major volcanoes and 4,000 separate volcanic vents that have been erupting for the last 38 million years along the Pacific Northwest. Names like Mounts Girabaldi, Rainier, Adams, Hood and Baker come to mind. Mt. Baker is clearly visible from Vancouver as you drive east towards Chilliwack. It is a stunningly beautiful mountain to behold.

Towards the southern end of this arc is another spectacular place called Crater Lake National Park in south-central Oregon. It is a 1,943 foot deep caldera lake that was formed about 7,700 years ago after the collapse of the Mount Mazama volcano. Crater is the second deepest lake in North America after our own Great Slave Lake. Yay, we win again.

 I first discovered the Mazama story in Volume 1 of Alberta Formed, Alberta Transformed, a wonderful collection of thirty distinctive essays spanning 12,000 years, that were published in 2006 as part of Alberta’s centennial. The third essay in this sequential review is entitled: “The Day the Dry Snow Fell” and using known volcanic data presents an imagined account of this natural disaster. The authors, Alwynne B. Beaudoin and Gerald A. Oetelaar, reconstruct what happened by “examining the effects of the eruption as they are preserved in the landscape.”

Unlike the Mt. St. Helens ash map, the Mazama distribution map has a much broader reach and much more substantial depositing. Mazama’s reach was in the order of 2,000 kilometers north and east of the vent and covered an astounding 1.7 million square kilometers.  The essay estimates that a layer perhaps 15 centimeters deep was left over Southern Alberta. Its widespread distribution makes it useful in archaeological studies as a horizon or time, marker. Mazama ash has a very distinctive mineralogical composition which allows it to be distinguished from other volcanic ash deposits. Radio carbon dating from charcoal from within or adjacent to the ash layer dates the ash to between 7,640 and 7,620 years ago and this was further verified in Greenland. Yup, the ash made it that far and counting annual ice layers in ice-core from the Greenland ice cap puts it at 7,627 years ago (with an uncertainty of plus or minus 150 years!)

Just imagine what it must have been like to have been out on the prairies 7,700 years ago and see that looming cloud of ash racing towards you. The effects of this heavy coating of tephra on vegetation and drinking water must have been substantial and long lasting. Animals and peoples of the area would have been on the move for some time seeking new sources of food and water. The Mazama ash in Southern Alberta is very fine-grained, almost like flour. I can’t imagine what it was like, with winds and rain stirring up and redepositing and moving this amount of material around. 

We know that some ash carried up high in the atmosphere remains suspended for weeks and months after the event and is carried around the world by upper atmospheric winds. There is would have affected temperatures, blocking sunlight. That first winter must have been a nasty one and on the prairies no doubt the ash had buried and crushed most foliage and affected most plant’s ability to photosynthesize and reproduce berries and seeds. The ash would have: “affected all aspects of life for people in Southern Alberta for many years.”

The essay mentions a horizon (time) marker from a 2004 archaeological excavation in the Cypress  Hills called “Stampede site (DjOn-26).” The Mazama ash layer found there had a thick, distinctive layer. Beneath the ash layer was lots of evidence of peoples coming back to the area again and again, camping there as it offered food, shelter, lodgepole pine trees for tipi poles and fresh water. Above the Mazama ash layer there is a considerable gap with no evidence of human occupation. Some suggest as long as seven hundred years!

I have tried to imagine what the early First Nations’ peoples of Southern Alberta must have thought when the “Day the Dry Snow” happened. The Krakatoa eruption in 1883 was heard as far as 4,700 kilometers away. I wonder what they thought on that early autumn day when the sound of Mazama came thundering over the prairies.

An interesting side note. Years ago a geologist mentor handed me an unusual piece of rock and informed me that it was  called “tonstein” or ancient volcanic ash. I soon came to realize that it was often found in coal seams which were originally swamps where the ash would have accumulated undisturbed and eventually compressed into a compact sedimentary rock with a very distinctive characteristic and appearance.  While obviously not very thick they proved to be, nevertheless, the perfect way to correlate coal seams and disturbances (faults) in them. 

How remarkable for me that part of my career at a coal mine involved tracking volcanic ash layers 140 million years old. It seems that this business of dry snow has been around a long long time.  

I have noticed on occasion that excavations in the Pass that go deep enough have a distinct white layer , a couple of centimetres thick, down low in the foundation diggings. I took the liberty of taking small samples of this ash layer at a few sites and had it analyzed.  There is a whole raft of minerals to be found in Mazama ash including silica, aluminum, iron, magnesium and potassium. To my surprise it also revealed a surprisingly high percentage of gold. Gold can come from volcanic gases and can precipitate out forming native gold in sublimates.  Also in hydrothermal alteration zones hot fluids interact with the volcanic rocks that can lead to gold also precipitating out. 

I also sent a bit of my father’s Mt Saint Helen’s ash off and discovered, once again, a surprisingly high content of gold fleck is in that ash.  So there you have it. Not only is there gold in with the analcime and melanite in the Crowsnest Volcanics from around 100 million years ago but there is gold under underneath us pretty much everywhere.  Mount Erebus, an active volcano in Antarctica, spews tiny crystals of metallic gold that scientists have estimated at roughly 80 grams of gold daily, which is worth about $6000! Gold has come from the skies here in the dry white snow that fell 7700 years ago.  When they said, there’s gold in them there hills, they were not kidding.