107

Plains, South of Peace River

Very little is known of the Wapiti group”south of Peace River in the
region described in this report. Williams and Bocock (1932) placed
massive sandstones with lenses of coarse grit, on Bear Mountain, south of
the Dawson Creek-East Pine Road, in the Wapiti group. They also
mapped several small areas of the group in the vicinity of Dawson Creek
and Pouce Coupé.

Liard River Valley

“Overlying the Kotaneelee formation at several localities are medium-
grained grey sandstone and fine pebble-conglomerate beds. On Pretty
Hill, 720 feet above the river, are 25 feet of medium-grained, banded
sandstone and pebble-conglomerate. Along the east bank of Liard River,
2 miles above the mouth of Kotaneelee River, a sandstone bed at least 25
feet thick occurs 400 feet above river level. The sandstone is banded,
medium to coarse grained, feldspathic, buff weathering, calcareous, and
both massive and thinly bedded. It is overlain by a seam of low-grade
coal 15 inches thick. Coal of better quality was observed in a slump block
20 inches thick, close to river level and below the other seam. The slumped
coal is believed to have come from the concealed interval below the sandstone
outcrop. No fossils were found in the upper sandstone beds, but a non-
marine origin is indicated by the coal and carbonaceous material present.
The stratigraphic position of this non-marine assemblage above the marine
Kotaneelee formation indicates that it is correlative with the Wapiti
group” (Hage, 1945).

Age and Correlation
(See Figure 12)

The upper stratigraphic range of the Smoky group is about the same as
that of the Alberta group. The overlying Wapiti beds, therefore, begin at
an horizon similar to that of the Belly River of the central and southern
Foothills. How high stratigraphically this thick freshwater group extends
is not known; it may, in some areas, extend as high stratigraphically as the
Paskapoo formation of the central Foothills and Plains of Alberta, but
probably not so high in northeastern British Columbia. In terms of
European chronology, it begins in about late Santonian or early Campanian
time and ends in some areas in Paleocene time.

UPPER CRETACEOUS AND (OR) PALEOCENE
SIFTON FORMATION
Definition
Many years ago McConnell (1896) mapped and described some coarse
sedimentary rocks, chiefly conglomerates, in the Rocky Mountain Trench,
extending from near the mouth of Ingenika River to beyond Sifton Pass.

Much later, in 1941, Hedley and Holland (1941) placed these beds in a
formation to which they gave the name of Sifton.

Finlay River Valley

An area of outcrop of the Sifton formation, about 3 miles long and 4
mile wide in the Rocky Mountain Trench, appears on the Aiken Lake map
(Armstrong and Roots, 1948).