Mount John Laurie is a

mountain A mountain is an elevated portion of the Earth's crust, generally with steep sides that show significant exposed bedrock. Although definitions vary, a mountain may differ from a plateau in having a limited summit area, and is usually higher t ...

in the

Canadian Rockies The Canadian Rockies (french: Rocheuses canadiennes) or Canadian Rocky Mountains, comprising both the Alberta Rockies and the British Columbian Rockies, is the Canadian segment of the North American Rocky Mountains. It is the easternmost par ...

, located in

Alberta Alberta ( ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Ter ...

's Municipal District of Bighorn No. 8.

Various names

Officially named Mount John Laurie in 1961, it is also known as Mount Laurie, or by the Nakoda name ''Mount Yamnuska'', or simply ''Yamnuska''. ''Yamnuska'' translates to "wall of stone" and is derived from the Stoney Nakoda word that describes steep cliffs or "the flat faced mountain." John Lee Laurie, 1899–1959, was a founder of the

Indian Association of Alberta The Indian Association of Alberta is a province-wide First Nations rights organization. It was founded by John Callihoo and John Laurie in 1939, after splitting off from the League of Indians in Western Canada. Origins and expansion Before 1946, ...

. The mountain's 1961 renaming came at the request of the Stoney Nakoda First Nation. Laurie, an educator and political activist, served as secretary of the Indian Association of Alberta from 1944 to 1956, promoting the causes of First Nations in Alberta.

Peak and climbing

Standing at approximately above sea level, Mount John Laurie is the last mountain on the north side of the

Bow River The Bow River is a river in Alberta, Canada. It begins within the Canadian Rocky Mountains and winds through the Alberta foothills onto the prairies, where it meets the Oldman River, the two then forming the South Saskatchewan River. These ...

valley (

Bow Valley Bow Valley is a valley located along the upper Bow River in Alberta, Canada. The name "Bow" refers to the reeds that grew along its banks and which were used by the local First Nations people to make bows; the Blackfoot language name for ...

) as it exits the mountains for the foothills and prairie of Alberta. Located close to

Calgary Calgary ( ) is the largest city in the western Canadian province of Alberta and the largest metro area of the three Prairie Provinces. As of 2021, the city proper had a population of 1,306,784 and a metropolitan population of 1,481,806, maki ...

, it is a popular "great scramble". It is also a popular rock climbing destination, with over 100 routes of all difficulty levels spread out across its face.

Geology

Mount John Laurie is the result of the McConnell Thrust Fault, which put the resistive, cliff-forming

Cambrian The Cambrian Period ( ; sometimes symbolized Ꞓ) was the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 53.4 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran Period 538.8 million years ag ...

carbonate rock Carbonate rocks are a class of sedimentary rocks composed primarily of carbonate minerals. The two major types are limestone, which is composed of calcite or aragonite (different crystal forms of CaCO3), and dolomite rock (also known as doloston ...

of the

Eldon Formation The Eldon Formation is a stratigraphic unit that is present on the western edge of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin in the southern Canadian Rockies of southwestern Alberta and southeastern British Columbia. It is a thick sequence of massi ...

on top of the much younger and weaker

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of ...

aged,

clastic Clastic rocks are composed of fragments, or clasts, of pre-existing minerals and rock. A clast is a fragment of geological detritus,Essentials of Geology, 3rd Ed, Stephen Marshak, p. G-3 chunks, and smaller grains of rock broken off other rock ...

Belly River Formation The Belly River Group is a stratigraphical unit of Late Cretaceous age in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. It takes the name from the Belly River, a tributary of the Oldman River in southern Alberta, and was first described in outc ...

McMechan, M.E., 1995, Geology, Rocky Mountain Foothills and Front Ranges in Kananaskis Country, Alberta. Geological Survey of Canada. Map 1865A, scale 1:100 000. The fault, which sits at the base of the cliff face, represents an age difference of around 450 million years.

Spirituality

In 1987 Mount John Laurie was listed into a global network of natural spiritual places, which also included

Mount Fuji , or Fugaku, located on the island of Honshū, is the highest mountain in Japan, with a summit elevation of . It is the second-highest volcano located on an island in Asia (after Mount Kerinci on the island of Sumatra), and seventh-highes ...

in Japan,

Stonehenge Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, west of Amesbury. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around high, wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connecting ...

Mount Shasta Mount Shasta ( Shasta: ''Waka-nunee-Tuki-wuki''; Karuk: ''Úytaahkoo'') is a potentially active volcano at the southern end of the Cascade Range in Siskiyou County, California. At an elevation of , it is the second-highest peak in the Cascade ...

Machu Picchu Machu Picchu is a 15th-century Inca citadel located in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru on a mountain range.UNESCO World Heritage Centre. It is located in the Machupicchu District within Urubamba Province above the Sacred Valley, whi ...

in Peru, Australia's

Uluru Uluru (; pjt, Uluṟu ), also known as Ayers Rock ( ) and officially gazetted as UluruAyers Rock, is a large sandstone formation in the centre of Australia. It is in the southern part of the Northern Territory, southwest of Alice Springs ...

, and the pyramids of the Yucatán. (PhD dissertation)

References

External links

{{Canadian Rockies, state=collapsed

John Laurie John Paton Laurie (25 March 1897 – 23 June 1980) was a Scottish actor. In the course of his career, Laurie performed on the stage and in films as well as television. He is perhaps best remembered for his role in the sitcom '' Dad's Army'' (19 ...

Alberta's Rockies