Behind the Story: Hiking Through Our Geologic Past
“Geology’s greatest contribution may be philosophical rather than scientific: the concept of deep time,” wrote Taylor Roades in her Issue 13 feature, Time Scales. “Hiking, then, becomes a way of moving through that scale. Like a walk through a library not authored by people but by Earth’s dynamic history.”
In her piece, Roades turned readers’ attention to endurance as “a deeper measure of persistence written into the land itself.” Paying attention to geologic history while backpacking, Roades muses, affords perspective and centers us deeper within a particular landscape.
Her story starts on the Villarrica trek near Pucón, Chile, a route Roades hiked back in 2016––a year after the last eruption of the Villarrica Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in South America. She can still recall the molten lava inching across the landscape, and how every few kilometers, the landscape changed completely.
Readers are then transported to the Mummery Glacier near Golden, British Columbia, where Roades’ photos capture the region’s straited bedrock. In the Burgess Shale region, at the base of the Stanley Glacier in British Columbia’s Yoho National Park, Roades revels in a likely 500-million year old trilobite fossil––one of many hiding in the Canadian Rockies.
Three years ago, Roades said she worked with geologists on a story about permafrost thaw and underground rocks affecting Alaska’s water systems. The next year, she pursued another ice melting story in the Yukon with multiple First Nations, living in a cabin owned by geologists who brought her to the Tombstone Territorial Park Geology Weekend in late August.
Soon thereafter, Roades hiked among the Yukon’s jagged ridges and spires, snapping the photos what would be included in Issue 13. Every step she had to balance the breathtaking scenery of the present with the hundreds of millions of years of crystalizing magma and tectonic uplift that formed the impressive peaks before her.
“It's one thing to have an amazing view––and I'm a photographer, so I'm pretty much always hiking for a good view,” Roades told me recently.
”But once you know a little bit more, exploring becomes so much more fun and much more interactive.”
Interested in more stories like this? Here are three books Roades recommends for those wanting to wade deeper into geologic history:
- Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud
- Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of Earth by Marcia Bjornerud
- If I Am Right, and I Know I Am: Inge Lehmann, the Woman Who Discovered Earth’s Innermost Secret by Hanne Strager
- Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
— Angie Stevens
