Canadian Rockies Geology Road Tours [Paperback]

If you are going to tour the Canadian Rockies, get this book. Just one example: The Waypoint IP23 on page 327. It's a road cut that millions of fossils from an ancient reef just popping out from the wall. You'll zip by this in a car and never see it. It stinks of oil and is in fact, 100 east part of the formation that holds Canada's oil. Also described nearby is a slot canyon. It is unmarked and undescribed by most tour books but it is even more spectacular than the tourist "hot spot" canyons. You see a large river disappear into a slot and then walk down to see a 100 foot deep very narrow rushing canyon. You will never find these kinds of things without this book and there are many wonders. Also, just reading as you go, you will learn as much or more as taking a college class in Geology. There is really no better place to see all the processes of Geology in one place than the Canadian Rockies because it is there that so many sedimentary layers are uplifted and very old basement rock is still there, some almost 2 billion years old. He tells you where to see this.

If you are a geologist or just interested in geology, this book is very well written and is much better than trying to read a text in geology. The first 80 or so pages go over the general theory and then you see the practice in well illustrated images there after. This book is great, I'd recommend to anyone even if you never go.

...the text on page 87 is embarrassing to read.

This book is well written, informative, and the result of Ben Gadd's tireless exploration. I downloaded the GPS waypoint list from his website and used it while traversing the Icefields Parkway. It is a clever and useful way to take the reader to the rocks and formations. His efforts deserve great praise.

Now, the embarrassing - and if not embarrassing, then silly - text. Gadd has bought into the nature-good-man-bad worldview that leads to all sorts of conclusions that are simply untrue. Take his insistence on the ludicrous pronouncement that 140,000 (yes, 140,000) species go extinct every year. He cites as proof to that claim the name of E.O. Wilson and a United Nations report. Ye' gods. Enough said, except that he wrote to me pointing out that the current global warming trend (which trend is controversial) is out of phase with solar insolation (i.e., Milankovitch style) forcing and therefore must be anthropogenic. However, he fails to point out that the Younger Dryas glacial advance he briefly mentions too is out of phase with orbital forcing. Sorry Ben, but you can't have it both ways; namely, using temperature records to argue anthropogenic inputs causes warming because it is out of phase with orbital forcing and then simply dismiss the sometimes lack of correlation between the Quaternary climate record and orbital forcing. Sadly, that appears not to matter to him. Nay, all that matters is the seriousness of the charge.