A bison bone found high in the alpine near Maligne Lake is opening doors of discovery for paleo-environmental researchers in Jasper National Park.

In 2016, Parks Canada historians surveying an ice patch near the headwaters of Trapper Creek were surprised to find what looked to be a bison humerus melting out of the snow. While the large bone’s location indicated that bison would have visited high alpine ice features in the Rockies several hundred to several thousand years ago—an interesting discovery, to be sure—Todd Kristensen with the Archaeological Survey of Alberta says what’s even more exciting is the potential for more discoveries in the ice itself; researchers are viewing the ice patch where the bone was discovered as a beautifully-preserved repository of centuries-old data. 

“We now have confirmation that these ice features are more than 6,000 years old and loaded with interesting information,” Kristensen said.

This past summer, Kristensen’s team, which included project partners from Parks Canada and the Royal Alberta Museum, revisited the Trapper Creek ice features to tap into that information. The team extracted ice cores, from which they’ll be able to form a more complete picture about the ecology in the Rocky Mountains thousands of years ago.

“This is a really stable ice feature that has about 6,000 years of levels of ice, inside of which there’s information about pollen, what kind of plants were around, where the treeline was moving up to and retreating from…there’s volcanic ash in there…it’s just a fascinating look at the paleo-environment,” Kristensen said.

The repositories are relatively small snow and ice patches which typically form on the north side of mountain ridges. Because they don’t move downslope like a massive glacier, they don’t churn up whatever’s inside them. This makes them valuable not only to scientists who are looking for intact isotopes and vegetation samples, but also to archaeologists looking for clues of human-animal interactions. Large mammals which used the ice patches to take refuge from predators, bugs and the summer heat would, theoretically, be followed by ancient hunters. 

“In understanding how the bison were moving we can understand how people might have glommed onto that pattern,” he said. 

Four years ago, working from this hypothesis, Kristensen and his fellow archaeologists discovered a leather strip on the border of Jasper National Park and Mount Robson Park. They eventually carbon-dated the artifact to approximately 270 years ago. The strip—possibly a piece of a moccasin or part of a snare—was left behind by humans who were moving on this landscape not long before David Thompson mapped Athabasca Pass, in 1811.

“To produce a date that puts it right on the cusp of when Europeans are arriving in the province gets everybody excited about an important time in Alberta’s history,” Kristensen said in 2015.

During this most recent expedition, Kristensen and his team were once again scouring ice patches for melted-out artifacts, but there was one problem: the patches had grown, not shrunk. The cold, wet summer of 2019 put a damper on the search by covering up potential cultural caches. 

“It was a challenge to find things but it’s just a matter of time before we’re back to the normal steady melt,” Kristensen said.

In fact, time may be running out to make these important discoveries. All across North America, as the climate warms, archaeologists are racing to survey high alpine ice patches before they disappear. As the ice melts and exposes potential artifacts, those artifacts, having been encased in ice for thousands of years, become susceptible to degradation. 

“In some cases you only have a couple years after it melts out to find it, otherwise it’s gone forever.”

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com