Boulder Gardens Hiking Route
2-3 Hours — 4km Return Distance
Moderate Difficulty, Steep and Rocky in places.
Beginning near the Peace River Coal Mine this route will lead you into an amazing formation of Rock Pinnacles on the Southeastern slopes of Mount Babcock. A little further down the road you’ll find the trail to the magnificent Babcock Falls.
Babcock Mountain is capped by a thick layer of coarse-grained sandstone and conglomerate, once laid down in a high energy fresh-water environment in the Cretaceous Period. Beneath this layer are many other, older layers, some of them composed of softer siltstone or softer-still kaolinite, a type of clay . During the building of the Rocky Mountains, the rock layers of the mountain were subjected to immense forces and became tilted at an angle of about 15 degrees to the horizontal. At some point the top layers including the thick sandstone slid down along this this layer of kaolinite (geologists call this “translational movement”) and slowly slid off the edge of the mountain in many places.
I remember when I was in college, I had to write a paper about fresh-water environment in the Cretaceous Period. I did an extensive research and produced the best paper for that class.