Ten kilometres northeast of Smithers, a short trail and a bridge over Driftwood Creek lead to a cliff of shale laid down in a mountain lake more than 50 million years ago, layered with ash from volcanoes that erupted throughout the life of the lake. It is the northernmost place in North America with fossil Eocene insects, from water striders and aphids to lacewings, and it holds ancestral salmon and trout, including Eosalmo driftwoodensis, two fossil birds, one complete with feathers, and jaws of an early tapir relative and a small hedgehog relative named Silvacola, small forest dweller. The park was created in 1967 when Gordon Harvey donated the land to protect the beds, and a fossil lacewing was named for him in 2013. Older guidebooks still list it as a place to collect. That has ended: BC Parks now prohibits public fossil collecting because of rockfall from the cliff, the loss of the fossils, and sediment washing into the fish spawning water of the creek. The land lies in the asserted traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en.
Eocene insects, early salmon, a tapir relative · Early Eocene, about 51.8 mya
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
British Columbia
See it on the map
This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
