British Columbia
The dramatic granite spires of the Bugaboos in British Columbia are the result of glaciation and erosion.
See those gray spires of rock jutting straight up from a snowy expanse southwest of Banff, in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia? You’ve just caught sight of the Bugaboos: a strange name for a majestic range of spiky granite peaks.
Dozens of monolithic towers rise thousands of feet above the surrounding glaciated terrain here, the highest of which top out at greater than 11,000 feet of elevation. The rock that makes up these spires is a type of very hard granite called granodiorite that dates to around 135 million years ago. The rock at the base of the spires is much older, up to a billion years old. The spires were born when a granite intrusion called a batholith forced its way up through the older, softer rock, slowly cooling underground and forming the large crystals that make this granite much harder than the surrounding rock. Millions of years of heavy glaciation and erosion then removed the surrounding weaker rock, exposing the spires.
The range is located in the heart of an interior wet belt, a mountainous zone of temperate rainforests and extensive ice fields in British Columbia, where moisture from the Pacific Ocean is released in the form of rain and snow. As much as thirty feet of snow falls here each winter, much of it accumulating year after year as ice that feeds the still-active and growing glaciers of the region.
The Bugaboos may seem an odd name, but it was inspired by back-breaking frustration. The first prospectors to explore this region in the late 1800s found rocks gleaming with gold. But after a minor gold rush to this isolated and rugged region, the gold turned out to be pyrite: fool’s gold. In their vexation, the miners christened this place the Bugaboos, a name they used for goldless dead-ends.
A few years later, the Bugaboos would become a mecca for another kind of gold rush. Mountaineers caught wind of the unusual collection of spires, and soon high-alpine experts from all over the world were traveling to the granite wonderland to put up first ascents of the seemingly insurmountable rocks. After hair-raising routes pioneered by famous mountaineers such as Yvon Chouinard (founder of the Patagonia clothing company) started attracting more climbers, the Canadian government established the Bugaboo Glacier Provincial Park and the Bugaboo Alpine Recreational Area to protect the fragile region.
Climbers ascend Snowpatch Spire in the Bugaboos, on Surf’s Up, a route requiring nine pitches (nine rope lengths).
The Bugaboos’ spires are visible in the northwestern extreme of the Purcell Mountains, in southeast British Columbia, perhaps en route to Calgary, Alberta. Calgary is about 150 miles due east of the Provincial Park. Heli-skiing is also popular in the park.
