INNOVATION March-April 2019

O n April 22, 2018, three biologists boarded a helicopter to fly over northern Wells Gray Provincial Park in southeastern British Columbia to count endangered mountain caribou. The survey followed a standard route each year and was usually completed during February or March, when the park’s remote northeastern region is blanketed with snow. This year, however, the survey was conducted in spring, when the snow levels were lower. The crew saw a large waterfall plummeting into a deep void, and what looked like a large cave. John Surgenor, one of the biologists onboard, took photographs of the unusual landscape feature and shared them with pilot Ken Lancour. When the crew landed in Clearwater, BC, Lancour reported the cave to BC Parks and began asking his local contacts: “What’s the name of that park geologist?” CALL THE GEOLOGIST Dr. Catherine Hickson, P.Geo., is Wells Gray Provincial Park’s de-facto resident geologist. Her long-term relationship with the park began when she mapped subglacial volcanoes in the southern portion of the park in the early 1980s, while working on her PhD. She unravelled the complex three-million-year battle between fire and ice that created what is now known as Wells Gray. “I mapped there for several summers, got to know a lot of the people, and fell in love with the park,” said Hickson, who has worked with Visitor Information Services and Tourism Wells Gray to help create signage for visitors, and written several books about the natural world within Wells Gray. In 2016, Hickson worked with her colleague, lichen specialist Trevor Goward, on an application to add Wells Gray to Canada’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status, which would have catapulted the park’s profile onto the global stage and provided it unique protection status observed by international treaties. But the application was ultimately unsuccessful this time. Based on this decades-long relationship with the park, the photographs of the cave arrived in Hickson’s email inbox on May 2—just over a week after the helicopter survey. Her first response was, “Oh, my goodness. This is pretty remarkable.” GEOLOGICAL SURPRISE “As soon as I saw the pictures, I realized that it was, in fact, some kind of cave,” said Hickson. “It certainly was not something that I knew about nor would have expected, since that part of the park is mostly high-grade metamorphic rock.”

p hoto : C atharine h iCkson , p.g eo .

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