Taylor Roades (b. 1990) is a Canadian documentary photographer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Her work is grounded in place and the natural sciences, exploring our connection to land, culture, climate and the environment.






































































  
         





A Libary of Time

Locations: Hawaii, Yukon, British Columbia, Swiss Alps
Works In Series

Photographed: 2016-Ongoing
Published: Trails Magazine (In part)

Like the dead -seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. 
Time and place have had their say. - Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road


Striated bedrock is exposed beside the Mummery Glacier near Golden, British Columbia. The parallel lines or grooves on the right were cut as rocks frozen into the base of the glacier were dragged across the surface below, recording the direction of ice movement during periods of advance like the last Ice Age. 
Fossils are well preserved in the fine-grained sedimentary rocks at the base of the Stanley Glacier in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. The imprint likely records a marine invertebrate—possibly a trilobite—buried in soft mud on a shallow seafloor during the Cambrian Period, more than 500 million years ago. These sediments later hardened into stone and were uplifted as the Rocky Mountains formed, carrying traces of early ocean life into the alpine. 

Fossils from the Burgess Shale region (which Yoho lies within) document the foundations of animal life, capturing early relatives of groups that would later colonize land, and revealing that complex animals first evolved in the oceans. 

Charles Darwin had worried that the apparent absence of early fossils weakened his Theory of Evolution. Discoveries here helped resolve this, showing that the early history of animals was not missing, but hiding in the Canadian Rockies. 

Tombstone Territorial Park beneath peaks carved from some of the Yukon’s oldest rocks. The gentle slopes in the foreground are composed of softer sedimentary layers. What was once mud and silt settling on an ancient seafloor hundreds of millions of years ago are now steadily weathered by countless freeze-thaw cycles.

Above them, jagged ridges of syenite emerge: magma that crystallized deep underground more than 90 million years ago. Over tens of millions of years, tectonic uplift and relentless subarctic winters slowly eroded the overlying rock, leaving behind the spires that define the range today.

Molten lava spreads across the surface of Kīlauea Volcano during the 16th episode of its 2025 eruption. Fed by fluid basaltic magma rising from depth, the flow advances slowly, pooling, branching, and cooling as it moves. Kīlauea is reshaping its surroundings through sustained accumulation, building new ground in real time.