A Brief history of investigations of the Foothills Erratics Train

The boulders of the Foothills erratics train and their distribution along the eastern margin of the Foothills were known for centuries by the aboriginal peoples of southern Alberta. They accounted for them through stories of the creator, Napi, who brought a large boulder to life.

The first geologist to view and report on rocks of the Foothills erratics train was Dr. James Hector with the Palliser Expedition of 1857-1860 who is also known for naming Kicking Horse Pass and Kicking Horse River in adjacent British Columbia. Hector saw the massive Okotoks erratic (and misidentified it as granite). The most thorough early study of the erratics was by the renowned GSC geologist and explorer Dr. George Mercer Dawson in the 1880s. He suggested that their origin was along the western edge of the Canadian Shield hundreds of kilometres to the northeast. Sixty years later, Dr. Stalker was to revisit this hypothesis and find it to be false when he demonstrated a source for the erratics within the Rocky Mountains. The huge size of the Okotoks erratic was sufficient to cause one geologist to suggest that it was the erosional remnant of a thrust sheet from the Rocky Mountains.

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