Roy Banta told me about a thing called a soaphole. I had never heard of a soaphole before. Roy described a soaphole as a boggy area which, when dry on top, could not be distinguished from the local terrain. He said that if you rode your horse over it, the top crust could break and your horse could drop a leg into this soupy hole. He also said that an entire animal could sink out of sight in this, sort of, quicksand.

Ted and Linda Davies were the owners of the Lone Star lands in the '80s. They told Roy and I that, indeed, there were several soapholes in the coulees of the Red Deer River. They said that at one time an entire cow was consumed by a soaphole. This event was brought to Ted’s attention when he noticed birds flocking around one of the coulees, obviously feeding, and when he went to investigate, he found only the top of a cow’s skeleton. I thought, "This place is a little scary – quicksand? We saw three rattlesnakes that day, and now soapholes!"

I asked Ted to show me one of these soapholes. He escorted Roy Banta and I to a place in a coulee at the foot of a sandstone cliff. The coulee ran a quarter mile up to the plateau on the south side of the Red Deer River. A spring in the coulee fed a small creek that ran down the ravine. Between the creek and the sandstone cliff was a slope (colluvial fan) that seemed to be consolidated sand. Ted walked up to a dark spot, perhaps three feet across. He stuck his shovel into the dark spot, broke the dried crust, and revealed a pocket of what looked like quicksand. Although this soaphole was small, only a couple of feet deep, it really intrigued me. These things were probably a hazard to men and animals around the ranch. Roy and Ted told me that these soapholes used to appear and disappear, and seemed to move around, depending on who knows what. Very mysterious.

I made a couple of more field trips to look at the soapholes in the Lone Star country in 1989 and 1990 and I wrote a paper for a University of Lethbridge course on them.

Apparently, the regional bedrocks are the Upper Cretaceous sandstones. These are porous. Water travels laterally through the various layers of the more porous rocks. These sandstones dip in a southwesterly direction. Various formations, or stratified layers, were laid down during successive inundations (depositional periods) by the Bearpaw Sea. This sometimes resulted in the laying down of clays amongst the sandstones and these compressed into shales. These shale layers are quite impervious to water. Water travels through the porous sandstones down to the beds of shales and along the shale layers.

If an aquifer is charged from somewhere on the plateau above the Red Deer River valley by snow melt or rainfall, and depending upon how long it takes to charge the aquifer, that would determine the timing of when the soapholes would appear.

The materials in the soapholes were of three components: water, large-grain sand and a greasy material, probably a clay called bentonite. A greasy emulsion is formed when water mixes with the bentonite.

Rocks and boulders near the soapholes were eaten and decomposed by a kind of acidic action. This reminded me of the Karst Topography in Western England and Europe, where caves and canyons and fissures have been eaten away in the limestone country rock. These are famous places for spelunkers.

The soapholes turned out to be places where the regional aquifer is charged by rainwater, this water descends to the shale layers, and the shales are breached at elevations near the bases of the coulee floors. Hydrostatic pressure causes the water to break through at weaker points on the colluvial fans. Water percolates through coarse sands and even transports some of this sand. Some of the formations around Jenner have layers of volcanic ash that were laid down 50 to 80 million years ago. These Kneehills Tuffs and other volcanic ashes formed bentonite. Bentonite is a very slippery alumina clay. It mixes with water and forms an emulsion.

The bentonite clay dries hard in the sun. If you step on the soaphole and break through the top crust, you are really falling into an artesian well, filled with wet sand and the greasy bentonite clay. This is quicksand and these holes could become quite large.

The soapholes seemed to move around. This is probably because when the weather is a bit different from year to year. The severity of the cold in southeast Alberta determines how much frost action there is and how and where the water-laden sands and shales are fractured. The location of the soapholes also probably depends on whether there is enough hydrostatic pressure in the aquifer system to cause a break through in a particular area.