I have tickets to visit the Burgess Shale (Wolcott quarry) next month, but the timing is not ideal with the rest of our plans… so is it worth it? Is the Mount Stephen version as good? (it is shorter and cheaper.) I will be doing it with a 12 and 14 year old budding scientists for what it’s worth.
I have never been to the area previously so I don’t really know what to expect. But I am hoping to blow their minds… or will they be unimpressed? We are reading Wonderful Life in anticipation.
It a spectacularly beautiful hiking area that is worth visiting for the mountains and lakes alone.
My anecdote: I’m a retired molecular/evolutionary biologist who happens to share a name with that place. So, of course I knew what it was, and it’s importance; I just had no idea where it was. I was visiting Yoho NP just to go hiking, saw a sign, and… WTF?!1!. You can only go with a guided group, the exact location is kept semi-secret, and they were full on short notice; but I explained the situation and convinced them to let me join the group as a “guide” since I had some knowledge and happened to have Wilderness First Aid qualification!
So, as I say, the hiking up there is through a beautiful area. The site itself won’t blow your mind just to look at it - it’s a dig in a mountainside. Although there are lots of trilobite fossils and some other things just lying around that are easy to find. The main appeal of the visit comes from knowing its significance. The Simon Conway Morris book Crucible Of Creation is a fairly short and fun read to get people into it beforehand. Hallucigenia is a great story. Some of the stuff in the book is actually out of date, I believe, so after the book your budding young scientists could scour the web for the most recent research on some of the strange beasts.
eta: I haven’t been to Mt Stephen