A capacity tour bus from Weyburn, organized by Knights of Columbus Council member Frank Porte, took a tour of the Missouri Coteau badlands in the Big Muddy on July 5.

The tour approached the escarpment on the Maxim road; the escarpment is the moraine material that was semi-floated in front of the last ice cap, named the Wisconsin.

This escarpment extends from south of Edmonton to nearly Pierre, S.D.

As some of the waters seeped across the lakebed of a previous ice cap, drying reduced its height by 10 to 30 per cent. Coteau is French for hillside, and North Dakota uses the French wording.

This higher land separates mid-continent drainage, with one side going to the Missouri River system, the other to Hudson Bay. Facing the 500-foot ridge west of Maxim makes it easy to realize that the native trail from the Dakotas toward Old Wive's Lake and west was an easier route than the undulations of the hills and sloughs in the Coteau.

The traders, the Boundary Commission suppliers, the North West Mounted Police and both the CNR and CPR valued the slope of the route northwest as the lake waters floated a large section of the escarpment in both the Ceylon and Pangman areas.

The tour visited a non-glaciated site that had been displaced from near Stoughton and transported by the ice to rest 100 feet from the bottom of the moraine at a slight angle. That one-third of a square mile that is exposed is what all of Canada and the agricultural part of the U.S. looked prior to an ice cap of 650,000 years ago, when 67 per cent of North America was cover in ice from compacted snow.

There have been three major ice caps that have scoured about 1,500 feet of eroded, layered soil exposing Canada's bedrock named on old maps as the "Canadian Shield."

A high ridge of land was also visited. Geologists of a 1927-28 trek from North Dakota to southern Alberta claimed there were only two places in the world where loosened moraine material was pushed above the slurry and water long enough to set in place above the water level.

The tour also saw a buffalo rubbing stone in the deepest trample hole known. A drive northwest of Radville was taken for a quick view of the first cement bridge built in Saskatchewan. (Prior to this they would have been in the Northwest Territories.)

A pause was made in Ceylon to view a fieldstone garage of a doctor, and this garage was converted to a house. This was made while passing through the 300-foot deep four-mile-wide gap in the moraine where glacial lake waters had floated the hills southwest to the Missouri River via Plentywood valley.

A buffalo kill site northwest of Minton was seen, where herds were gathered and driven over a sandstone ledge to drop 45 feet and roll down a steep incline where braves were on hand for the slaughter. A stone marked effigy of a turtle was also seen, with a rock pile said to represent a turtle's carapace.

A scenic drive was taken into the Big Muddy Valley south of Bengough to view a lone remnant of land that the current swirl of drainage of the Assiniboia, Mossbank, Gravelbourg glacial lake left intact in the 200-foot deep valley.

On the tour, guide Jay Larsen explained that the Pleistocene epoch that we are in is a substage in the Cenozoic era, not yet named, because it is not known when this stage will end. The group found out as well that the self-guided tour of the Missouri-Coteau has been discontinued, due to actions by some tourists on their own, and there have been severe restrictions placed on the buffalo kill site.

All persons who leave a road in the area are trespassing, and the danger from range fires could be very severe.