Canada
2019
Although not a
caving holiday, Sandra and I did visit
some areas of limestone which hopefully might be of interest.
A two day
drive north of Calgary took us to Northwest Territories, and Wood Buffalo
National Park. There are many sinkholes and flooded dolines,
indeed we camped next to Pine Lake which is a flooded uvala
(no, I'd never heard that word before!). The best walk we did here included the
short "Karstland Trail" as part of a much
longer hike. The Karst area wasn't particularly
impressive, it was heavily forested, which meant there were no vistas.
Indeed, compared to the other sights on that day hike, the karst
paled into insignificance, Grosbeak Lake with its salt plains sprinkled with
thousands of erratics was far more impressive. The
100m diameter Angus Sinkhole is perhaps the most famous and visually impressive
limestone feature in the park.
A few days
later we were in Jasper NP, and the majestic Rockies. We visited Maligne
Canyon, a 10m wide 50m deep limestone gorge with several footbridges offering
walks of various length. The paths follow the rim of the gorge and on the walk
down I noticed several resurgences. One of the information boards said that in
the space of 3km from the top to the bottom of the canyon, the river increases
tenfold. In the dry months (or when the water is frozen?) it is possible to
enter some of the caves. Ten miles up the valley is Medicine Lake, formed when
a landslide blocked the valley. The valley floor has many sinkholes, but in the
spring there is too much melt water to sink in the holes, and so the lake fills
up, to the size of Thirlmere. By autumn, the lake
gradually drains to just a few pools. It is these sinkholes under Medicine Lake
which feed the resurgences seen in Maligne Canyon.
The other
province we visited was British Columbia and in the south east we visited
Ainsworth Hot Springs. This commercial hot spring resort is fed by hot water
resurging from a cave. The natural cave is a 2m diameter tunnel 50m long, it
has been dammed so that it's thigh deep 40 Celsius mineral water. There is dim
lighting, below the water line, very tastefully done. At the end is a flowstone
blockage where the hot water flows from.
So, actually,
we did go caving in Canada, albeit in our bathing cossies.
Johnny Baker