Eric Mountjoy: Geologist for Everyone
Ben Gadd
Verdant Pass Ltd., Jasper, AB, Canada
It was the summer of 1982, and all the park naturalists were gathered around a slight man in a ball cap. The location was Highway 16, west of Jasper, Alberta, and the man was Eric Mountjoy. In the Rockies for another season of fieldwork, Eric had taken a full day out of a very busy schedule to host a field trip for ten Parks Canada employees who were going to be talking to park visitors about the geology of the Canadian Rockies. Among the people listening intently as the traffic whizzed by, there were only two geologists
. I was one. The chief park naturalist was the other. Everyone else had a much better acquaintance with wildflowers and birds than they had with rocks. By the end of the day, though, all those non-
geologists
had learned about Precambrian turbidites, Devonian reefs, thrust faults, unconformities, overturned anticlines and back-rotated synclines -- the amazing and spectacular geology of Canada’s most-loved mountain range. This is how I met Eric Mountjoy. In the years that followed, there was more. More from someone extraordinary: a scientist who not only felt that the public needed and deserved to know what he and his associates were doing with their tax dollars, but who was willing to make sure that they found out by working closely with a writer such as me. Eric is a scientist who has shared his science with all of us, academic and professional or not. Our world is richer for that.
AAPG Search and Discover Article #90078©2008 AAPG Annual Convention, San Antonio, Texas