The area, described as recently as 2004 in a Yellowknifer newspaper article as "a wide open area full of dunes, ponds and weathered rocks," is no longer anything of the sort.
Instead, it's a flattened-out and largely hard-packed surface. There are hints of what the area might once have been like in the deep, dry sandy fringes and outcroppings surrounding the soggy, sandy plain.
The sandpits are an 11,000-year-old deposit of glaciofluvial sediment formed where Glacial Lake McConnell once touched the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

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