Читать книгу Waterton Lakes National Park: lakes amid the mountains - David M. Baird - Страница 3

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Waterton Lakes National Park is in the southwest corner of Alberta with its southern boundary along the United States border and its western boundary along the Alberta-British Columbia border. Its eastern and northern parts include part of the rolling grasslands of the great plains, and these give way along a fairly sharp line to the rugged peaks of the Rocky Mountains. The Waterton Lakes extend from south of the International Boundary to make a focal point in the park.

The mountains are sculptured from a great thickness of sedimentary rocks which were laid down in the seas that covered this part of North America more than a thousand million years ago, in a period of time which the geologist refers to as ‘the Precambrian’. In some places the rocks are flat lying, even in the highest mountains; in others they are standing on edge or are intricately folded. In places they show great ‘faults’, or breaks along which one mass of rocks has ridden up over another. Deep erosion into this complicated mass of rocks has resulted in the array of mountain peaks—some with sharp jagged tops, others resembling castles or layer cakes, and still others with rounded contours. The sides of some of the mountains, extending as they do through thousands of vertical feet, expose many varieties of sedimentary rock and, here and there, thin sheets and masses of igneous rocks, which at one time were molten.

In the mountains themselves rivers and streams are busily carving their valleys even deeper at the present time. High 2 in the mountains the great bowl-shaped depressions, called ‘cirques’, commonly with small lakes in their bottoms, remind us of the glaciers that covered the whole of this area in the very recent geological past.

Thus, for the traveller who has time to look and the knowledge to see, Waterton Lakes National Park has, in addition to lovely scenery, many features of geological interest in the rocks into which the scenery is carved. In this book we will talk about the scenery and how it was made from the time the rocks were first formed to the present day. We will see that the beauty of the view is the result of a thousand million years of geological processes not unlike those we can see going around us in different parts of the world even now. But before we look into the ancient history of the park let’s examine its boundaries to see exactly where it is. Because some of the park boundaries are divides, we should first find out what divides really are.