Local expert on team studying huge cave
A local geologist is part of a group of experts studying a recently discovered cave in B.C.
Canmore resident Chas Yonge is part of the team that will return to the cave by 2020 — a site that he said features one of the largest cave entrances in Canada.
The cave in British Columbia’s Wells Gray Provincial Park was spotted by a helicopter crew surveying caribou populations last spring.
They gave it the unofficial name of Sarlacc’s Pit, a reference to the Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi.
A team went to the site in September. Yonge was supposed to go, but an ankle injury prevented him.
Yonge noted the cave is going to be technically difficult to explore, due to the amount of water sinking into the pit.
“The lowest flow is going to be in the middle of winter, but then you’ve got some humongous avalanche slopes above you,” he said.
Caver Lee Hollis managed to descend about 75 metres into the cave in September, Yonge noted.
“Then the water was thundering under this snow pile,” he said.
Despite the challenges of the water flowing into the cave entrance and views obscured by mist, “still, they’re seeing some 180 metres into this cave,” Yonge said.
He described the cave as a “project in the making ” that he expects will take years to explore.
“Every few years, and especially in that metamorphic belt in B.C., we’ve found some excellent (caves),” he said, including one in Rogers Pass.
“We’re finding these types of caves — we call it a striped karst. Striped karst was originally defined in Norway … and we’re finding them over in B.C., so it’s a new type of karst that we find in these caves.”
Caves have “great scientific value,” Yonge added, in dateable deposits that contain glacial climate information.
“They’re natural underground laboratories,” he said. “The problem with the glacial scenery is that the glaciers tend to scrape away any information, so you get lots of information about the last glaciation, but then the prior, say four global glaciations, that information is very hard to determine. But caves actually protect those earlier glacial sediments.”
Yonge expects the team of experts will return to Sarlacc Pit’s in 2020, but will need to acquire helicopter permits to get there, as the site is remote.
“I think we’re looking at a couple of years in the planning,” he said.