Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hornby Island
Islands always have their own flavor. Much of it comes from such disparate
elements as topography, climate, vegetation, and fauna. But the human in-
habitants also subtly (or not so subtly) change the feel of an island, especially
if it becomes a haven for the iconoclasts who sometimes make this world so
interesting. Hornby Island of the Canadian Gulf Islands is definitely such a
place. It is situated between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British
Columbia, a medium-sized isle about 5 miles across. Like so many other of
the islands in this region, it lies in rain shadow and hence enjoys some of the
best climate (and least rainfall) of any region of British Columbia. And per-
haps for that teason alone it attracted a great throng of the attists, hippies,
nonconformists, radicals, and dropouts who have made this and the other is-
lands in the lee of Vancouver Island the California of Canada.
My own first visit to the place was in 1974. Along the north shote of
Hornby Island, a thick assemblage of nearly flat-lying mudstones contains
some of the best-preserved ammonite fossils in the world, and I longed to see
these famous beds, with their famous fossils. I was not disappointed. Never
really common, the ammonites from Hornby Island occur in nodules, or
concretions, and the way to find them is to crack open these nodules. Un-
fortunately, only one nodule out of many holds an ammonite (or some other
fossil).
They are young for ammonites. The quiet muddy sea bottom from
whence they come was deposited some time after the Sucia Islands beds and
perhaps—perhaps—about 5 million years prior to the great comet impact
that wrecked the Mesozoic world, killing dinosaurs, ammonites, and much
else in the process. Yet that event was still far in the future when the am-
monites lived and died in the Hornby region. The Hornby Island ocean was
an ammonite heyday, a last hurrah. On land the great dinosaurs still held
sway, and the first
Tyrannosaurus rex
and
Triceratops
were evolving as the
Western Interior Seaway of Notth America gradually receded from the con-
tinent. In the contemporaneous late Mesozoic oceans, shelled cephalopods and
mosasaurs, archaic fish and bizarre flat clams, tropical reefs made of clams in-
