Driftwood Canyon's Eocene Fossil Beds

The shales on this cliff face were laid down in an intermontane lake more than fifty million years ago, and the leaves, fish, and insects pressed into them have made Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park one of the most important Eocene fossil sites in North America.

The park sits on the east side of Driftwood Creek, about ten kilometres northeast of Smithers, in the asserted traditional territory of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation. It came into being in January 1967, when Gordon Harvey, who lived from 1913 to 1976, donated the land to protect the fossil beds that had been discovered here around the beginning of the twentieth century.

A short interpretive trail crosses the creek and leads to the cliff face. You are walking past the northernmost site in North America with fossilized Eocene insects. Among them: water striders, aphids, leaf hoppers, march flies, scorpionflies, fungus gnats, snout beetles, ichneumon wasps, and a green lacewing species named Pseudochrysopa harveyi in 2013 to honour the park's founder.

The fish include Eosalmo driftwoodensis, an ancestor of today's salmon and trout, alongside Amia and Amyzon. Plant fossils number up to twenty-nine genera: dawn redwood, the floating fern Azolla primaeva, alder, pine, golden larch, cedars, redwood, and rare ginkgo and sassafras leaves. A permineralized pine cone, Pinus driftwoodensis, was described from this site in the 1980s.

In 2014 two fossil mammal jaws came out of these beds: an early tapir relative, and a tiny hedgehog relative named Silvacola acares, meaning small forest dweller, the first Eocene records of those animals in North America outside the Arctic or Colorado and Wyoming. A volcanic ash exposed in the shales has been radiometrically dated to 51.77 million years ago.

In 2010 BC Parks, the Bulkley Valley Naturalists, and the Smithers Rotary Club redeveloped the trail and rebuilt the bridge over Driftwood Creek. Personal fossil collecting by the public is no longer permitted, partly for visitor safety under the shale cliff and partly because dislodged soil and rock enter the creek and can smother salmon spawning habitat downstream.