Originally prepared for the GSA Thompson Field Forum that ran from Terrace to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, this guide describes the geology along the Skeena River transect of the Coast Mountains batholith, the largest Cordilleran batholith of western North America and one of the largest continental-margin batholiths in the world. The last guide to this area was published in 1983 and this new volume is the only modern overview of the last decades of work. The authors use the transect as a basis to examine the growth of the Coast Mountains batholith as a whole, emphasizing commonalities and variations with the batholith and how these traits may reflect magmatic processes that create convergent-margin batholiths.

The Yukon-Tanana terrane lies within the North American Cordilleran accretionary orogen and contains strongly deformed, coherent eclogite-bearing units that are candidates for wholesale subduction erosion of large blocks of crust. The Yukon-Tanana terrane is a composite continental arc built on a peri-Laurentian substrate that experienced subduction on both sides before it was accreted back onto Laurentia in the Mesozoic. Along the present-day eastern margin of the terrane, eclogites are found as layers and lenses in quartzofeldspathic schist derived from both igneous and sedimentary protoliths, all metamorphosed together during the Permian. In the St. Cyr area, coherent slices of eclogite-bearing crust up to 30 km long and 1–2 km thick have been mapped. Phengite with Si = 3.3–3.4 per formula unit from the host schists indicates that they also record eclogite-facies metamorphism. Detrital zircon was recovered from six host-rock samples collected at three high-pressure (HP) localities (St. Cyr, Ross River, and Last Peak), and from two eclogite-free units. Samples from the eclogite-free units and Last Peak have detrital zircon signatures with prominent Mesoproterozoic and Paleoproterozoic peaks typical of the Snowcap assemblage, the peri-Laurentian substrate of the Yukon-Tanana terrane. Detrital spectra from the St. Cyr and Ross River HP localities contain Precambrian, mostly Mesoproterozoic, zircon with significant Paleozoic peaks that match ages of igneous events in the Yukon-Tanana terrane. The coherent slices of crust containing eclogite, meta-tonalite, and arc-derived metasedimentary rocks are interpreted as pieces of Yukon-Tanana terrane that were eroded from the arc during subduction of oceanic lithosphere and reaccreted to the arc prior to Mesozoic emplacement of the Yukon-Tanana terrane onto North America.