Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast (2024)

Over the past few weeks, the news has been flooded with stories of countless graves of indigenous children, forgotten victims of Canada's Residential School system.

This has brought into clear focus the horrible indignities done to our first nations over the span of more than a century and has forced many of us to open our eyes and recognize the horrible legacy of colonization and cultural genocide.

As someone lucky enough to born into a life of privilege, I've always known about residential schools, but like many of us, I had no idea of the depth of abuse and sadness that was connected to these schools. This past week has hopefully opened the door for these forgotten voices to finally be heard and the process of true reconciliation to begin.

It struck me that I haven't even read the 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and so today, I'm going to use my voice to share them with you.

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This week we say goodbye to Wallace Smith Broeker, the groundbreaking climatologist that coined the term "global warming'. I also look at a cold war bunker near Canmore, Alberta that forms a stark reminder of a more dangerous time in our history. A propos

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This is a special episode that I wanted to get out right away. It's an important talk about the fire situation in western Canada, but more importantly, what we can do in townsites like Banff, Canmore, and Jasper…and with that said, let's get to it.

This presentation was organized through the Rockies Institute and featured Cliff White who worked for almost 4 decades with Banff National Park. He started as a park warden but rose through the ranks to positions including vegetation fire management specialist, manager of ecosystem research and restoration, as well as three years as the National Fire Management Officer.

Cliff knows forest fires. He understands the ecology surrounding fire ecology and has dedicated his career to working with government to help to bring wildfire back to the landscape while at the same time helping communities to better protect themselves from fires that threaten homes and properties.

In this program, he details the fire history of the Rockies while also showing how the lack of fire has altered the ecology for the worse. His message focuses not only on how the return of fire is critical to the landscapes of western North America, but also how communities can play a role in protecting their perimeter from the potential for Fort MacMurray style fires.

In the next episode, I'll be talking a lot more about fire. This year has created a situation where the mountain west has been defined by the threat of fire. Unfortunately, it is a bill that has been long due. The fires we've been experiencing have long been inevitable and I'll look at British Columbia and how the fires of 2003 helped to provide a prescription for a better future but unfortunately, little was done towards accomplishing those goals.

In the presentation, the Rockies Institutes Laura Lynes introduces the Institute and is followed by Karen Barkely, a program manager with the Rockies Institute who introduces Cliff.

This program is one that all residents of the Bow Valley and wider mountain landscape should listen to. I hope you enjoy it.

Mapping the Expansion of Coyote Range across the Continent In the mountain west, we simply accept the presence of coyotes on the landscape. They're simply a part of the mountain environment that we call home. For many places though, that isn't the case. Coyotes are one of the continent's most successful predators and have always been one of the first carnivores to explore potential new habitats. But just how native are they too much of their current range? If we were to look back...waaaaay back, would we find them in the same places we encounter them today? What can we learn from their range expansions that can help us predict where they might move in the future? In a report published in the Journal Zookeys in May of 2018, biologists James Hody and Roland Kayes looked to scientifically quantify both the historic range of the coyote over the past 10,000 years, but also to look at how the influence of civilization has aided them in dramatically increasing their range. Reintroduced Banff Bison Decide to Move Towards the Prairies Last episode I crowed triumphantly at the release of Banff's new bison herd from its paddock into its 1,200 sq km release zone. This was a very exciting time that was also filled with some trepidation. Bison have not roamed free on this landscape for some 130 years, and now, here they were, able to make their own choices of how to explore their new home. It was always a possibility that some may decide to push the boundaries once they were released from the paddock. I also talked about how the bison headed off in the wrong direction that parks staff had hoped and were literally headed off at the pass and encouraged to move further into their release zone where officials hope they will stay. The goal is to use a variety of techniques to guide them until they truly settle into their new landscape. This involves a combination of baiting them to get them to move into areas with rich food rewards while also using aversive conditioning to discourage them from heading towards the open prairies where support for the release is still quite low. These massive animals have been penned up for their entire lives, either in their Banff Park pen or in Elk Island National Park in the case of the original 16 reintroduced to the park. Once the gates opened up, one direction would seem as good as any other…"I wonder what's over there…or there…or there?" In the August 9 edition of the Rocky Mountain Outlook, we learned that one of the big bulls had decided to go on a walkabout and had bolted eastward towards the prairies. It was always a risk that some of the bulls might assert their dominance and begin to head in unwanted directions. This was complicated by the fact that they had no legal protected status once they left the protection of Banff National Park and stepped onto provincial lands. This first bull was followed by a second, and unfortunately, on Aug 16 Parks were forced to Euthanize one of the two bulls when it moved into much more high-risk landscapes within provincial lands. According to a release, they stated that they: "made the difficult decision to euthanize one of the bison bulls who had continued to move eastward toward private grazing lands and was posing a risk to public safety and to the safety of livestock." Park officials ask visitors to stop making rock sculptures or Inukshuks Ever since the Vancouver Winter Olympics adopted the Inukshuk as its logo, it seems that every time visitors see a bunch of rocks, they can't help themselves. They need to pile them up into either poor renditions of Inuit rock sculpture, or they simply make a tall pile trying to balance as many stones as possible in one spot. The problem has gotten out of control in the past few years as Instagrammers began to invade the mountain wilderness. Suddenly no wild place is immune. Take a long day-hike or multi-day backpack trip and these stone piles are there to greet you and remove any feeling of wilderness you might have been enjoying up until that point. Recently Kevin Gedling, the Partnering and Engagement Officer in Jasper National Park, has asked people to stop building these geological eyesores. For more details on the episode and detailed show notes, please visit the page at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep067

Parks Canada has just announced that it has opened the gates and finally allowed its growing herd of wild bison out of their enclosure and, for the first time, letting them wander somewhat freely within the park, at least within a 1,200 sq km release zone.

The release has happened a little later than planned. The calving season was delayed and while last year saw its first birth on Earth Day, this year calving only began on July 15. In a recent article in The Province, Banff's Resource Conservation Manager was quoted as saying:

“We’ve been expecting calves this spring, but it’s certainly been a little later than we saw last year, but because these are young cows, we also anticipated the calving dates might be stretched out over a longer period this year.

“The first two calves were born July 15 and the last of the three was born on the 19th.”

As of July 23, Park staff were hoping to see as many as 6 more additional calves.

All of that changed on August 1st when Parks Canada staff opened the gate to allow the growing herd to leave the enclosure and begin to explore their 1,200 sq. km soft-release zone.

Almost immediately, the bison zigged when the Park's staff wanted them to zag. According to the Rocky Mountain Outlook:

"The bison reportedly headed toward Scotch Camp, but were stopped on the Snow Creek Summit before being herded back towards the upper Panther River Valley."

Park staff realized they would need to guide the bison during the early part of their release. They don't want them to move east towards the plains because they have no legal status there.

All of that changed on August 1st when Parks Canada staff opened the gate to allow the growing herd to leave the enclosure and begin to explore their 1,200 sq. km soft-release zone.

Almost immediately, the bison zigged when the Park's staff wanted them to zag. According to the Rocky Mountain Outlook:

"The bison reportedly headed toward Scotch Camp, but were stopped on the Snow Creek Summit before being herded back towards the upper Panther River Valley."

Park staff realized they would need to guide the bison during the early part of their release. They don't want them to move east towards the plains because they have no legal status there.

Well, it's already happened this year! On Saturday, July 21 a mountain biker collided at high speed with a black bear at the Canmore Nordic Centre. Just last week, I warned that the buffaloberry season was upon us and that we need to begin to be extra vigilant.

According to a story in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Alberta Environment and Parks human-wildlife conflict specialist Jay Honeyman stated:

"They were coming downhill at a fairly good clip and came over a rise and there was the bear…He literally hit and flattened the bear and got knocked off his bike."

Luckily, the rider had bear spray on his person and he got ready to deploy it, but the stunned bear took off before he needed to spray it. He also saw a second bear that also ran away from the commotion.

Here are 10 tips for staying safe while riding and hiking during buffaloberry season:

1. Make lots of noise. Since bears are not paying attention to what's happening around them while they're busy mowing down their berry feast, it's important that we make lots and lots of noise; and not all noise is created equal. The best sound is the sound of your voice. Bears know that humans mean danger and if they know you're coming before you arrive, then they'll usually move away from the trail until you pass. You probably won't even know they were there. Bear bells are just marketing hype and they won't keep you safe. Just throw them in the garbage. You're more likely to be killed by your hiking companions for the sheer irritation they provide.
2. Remember that sound may not travel as fast as you do. Much like the sound of an approaching train, it isn't always as evident when the train is approaching. The bear may not hear you if you're flying down the hill. Slow down, and if possible, stop before the descent and give a loud "Hey bear" before you slowly go down the hill.
3. Learn to recognize buffaloberry. If you learn one plant in the mountains, make it buffaloberry. If the trail is lined with these tasty morsels, then the chance of meeting a bear goes up dramatically. If the trail is berry free, it doesn't mean there won't be a bear, but the odds at this time of year will have the bear focusing on berry-rich sites.
4. Make sure you have bear spray and know how to use it. It's also critical that the spray is on your person and not on your bike. This recent encounter really brings this to the forefront. The rider collided with the bear and was ejected from his bike. Had the spray been on the forks or handlebars of the bike, he would have been separated from it just when he needed it most. The same goes with spray on or in your pack. Encounters happen fast and without warning. Have it on your body and you'll have it when you need it. You also want to practice so you don't have to think about how to deploy it when the time comes.
5. Head to the high country. While this tip may not apply to mountain bikers, it definitely is a good one for hikers. Since the berries happen at lower elevations, this is a good time to go high. While the berries are more common in the valley bottom, they can extend into the subalpine as well. This is a great time to bag those peaks and passes. Trails like the Centennial Ridge Trail (the highest trail in the Canadian Rockies), Ha Ling (check the trail report as they are doing trail maintenance), and scrambles like the East End of Rundle are perfect choices. Keep in mind that the approaches will likely be at a lower elevation so keep an eye on the foliage and if buffaloberries are present, make a ton of noise.
6. Watch for droppings. When bears are mowing down massive quantities of berries, let's just say, it keeps them regular. Watch for dark red piles of former buffaloberries. If it looks fresh, then it's likely the bear may still be in the area.
7. Look for moving bushes. Very large bears can completely disappear behind a buffaloberry bush. Sometimes the easiest way to spot the bear is to not look for the bear. Look for something that doesn't belong - like one bush moving when none of the others are. On a still day, this can often be a sure sign that something is hanging out behind the bush.
8. Keep dogs on leash; or better yet, leave them at home. I know you want to hike with your dog, but every encounter with wildlife has a worse outcome when a dog is involved. They are likely to be perceived as a threat by a bear and now you are also perceived as a threat. Take Fido to the off-leash area and give him a good run there. Be aware though that the margins of the Grassi Lakes off-leash area are also a great habitat for buffaloberries so watch if he's playing too close to this area.
9. Leave your earbuds at home. One of the most dangerous things you can do in bear country is to wear earbuds when walking on trails - even within the townsite boundaries. When you wear earbuds, you're not aware of the sounds around you. You are not paying attention to what's happening around you. Earbuds put you at a much higher risk of a negative encounter, and you won't even hear it approaching. When you're out in nature, pay attention to nature, and stay safe.
10. Respect closures. During buffaloberry season, it's much easier to manage people than bears. Unfortunately, in the recent past, locals and tourists alike have violated closures with the mistaken belief that they don't apply to them. Alberta Environment and Parks, Parks Canada, and the Towns of Canmore and Banff take these closures very seriously. If you're caught you will be charged! Don't put a bear's life at risk simply because you were too lazy to walk around the closure. Always remember that you are also a risk by ignoring closure signs.

For the full show notes for this episode, visit www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep066

In this episode, I wrap up the story of Blackfoot Chief Crowfoot as he experiences life under Canada's Treaty 7. I also look at the implications of some recent government and court decisions regarding development in the Bow Valley.

For the complete show notes, please visit our show page at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep064. Here you'll find links to additional information and our show archive.

Before I reprise the story of Crowfoot, I wanted to give a shout out to an iTunes listener with the screen name Jul121314 in the U.S. for the kind review. The review is titled "Great Storytelling". They continue saying: "Love listening to the stories - current and historical. I love the Canadian Rockies and this podcast gives me a much deeper understanding. "

Thank you so much. Those that know me will tell you that I'm always trying to find the "story" hidden within a subject. Science and history are full of fascinating stories, and my goal with this show is to make sure that you always have a great story to enjoy.

In last week's episode, I introduced you to the Blackfoot Chief Crowfoot. He was born at a time when the Blackfoot ruled the plains from Cypress Hills to the Continental Divide and from Montana to the North Saskatchewan River.

If you haven't listened to that episode, you can enjoy it at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep062. When I wrapped the episode, the Northwest Mounted Police had marched westward to chase away whiskey traders that had invaded Canadian territory from Montana.

Crowfoot was happy the government would remove the whiskey that had ravaged his people, but he still wanted to better understand the role of the Mounties on Blackfoot territory.

Once the Mounties were settled into their camp at Fort MacLeod, Colonel Macleod requested a meeting with the leaders of the Blackfoot Nation. When the meeting finally took place, and the leaders of the Blackfoot, Blood, and Piegan were gathered, Crowfoot asked Macleod to help the people understand the role of the police in their territory.

By the time Crowfoot left Fort Macleod, he felt a strong affinity to the Colonel. Both understood the importance of peaceful relations and Crowfoot had already seen how the police were able to put an end to the trade of whiskey to his people.

Crowfoot also felt Macleod was a man of his word. It was a precarious time for the nations of the Confederacy, and trust was critical if they were to move forward.

Crowfoot saw this as a sign that the old ways had to change. He began to discourage his followers from raiding enemy camps to steal horses. The era of intertribal warfare would need to end.

On the short term, the fortunes of the nations of the Blackfoot improved. With the expulsion of the whiskey trade, the Blackfoot Nation began to rebound. Rather than booze, they once again began to trade for horses and other goods necessary for their people.

Despite this short-term feeling of complacency, Crowfoot saw disheartening changes within their territory. What had started as a trickle, was gradually becoming a flood of white men into Blackfoot territory. At the same time, the once plentiful buffalo were beginning to decline.

For a nation so culturally tied to the previously endless herds of bison, Crowfoot imagined a time when the buffalo may no longer roam the plains. As incomprehensible as it would have been to him a few years earlier, Crowfoot worried for the future of his people.

Reverend MacDougall, Crowfoots long-trusted friend explained that other First Nations had signed treaties with the Canadian government and that these treaties would ensure the rights of the Blackfoot by spelling out their claims to what must have felt like an endlessly shrinking landscape.

It's likely that Crowfoot could not have any real concept of what a treaty would mean for his people, as well as what they would be giving up. What he did know was that more whites came every year and along with them fewer buffalo were available to hunt.

It was only a matter of time before once endless herds were a memory and he knew there needed to be some agreement with the government of the whites.

There was ample reason to be sceptical of any treaty with the government. The southern members of the Blackfoot Nation signed a treaty with the American government in 1855.

It wasn't long before it became obvious it wasn't worth the paper it was written upon. Monies due were never on time, the quality of the promised supplies continually dropped over time, and more settlers meant the government continually insisted on changing terms of agreements already signed.

When gold was discovered in Montana in the 1860s, the trickle of white settlers became a torrent. This led the Bloods and Piegan to defend their territory prompting Americans to send in the cavalry. The "Blackfoot War" as the dispute became known was finally settled when the Cavalry slaughtered 173 Piegan in an undefended camp. Most of the victims were women and children.

When the Mounties arrived in the west, several of the Chiefs that would be asked to sign the Canadian Treaty were also signatories of the disastrous American one as well.

Late in 1875, Crowfoot called a council of chiefs to discuss the possibility of a treaty with the Canadians. Along with all five head chiefs representing the three tribes, an additional 10 minor chiefs took part. They created a petition which was presented at the newly built Fort Calgary.

They complained that white settlers were homesteading without restriction, usually in the best hunting grounds, and that incursions were increasingly common with Cree and mixed-blood Metis that were also hunting buffalo in their territory.

Since no Indian Commissioner had been sent to them, they insisted that one:

"visit us this summer at the Hand Hills and [state] the time of his arrival there, so we could meet with him and hold a Council for putting a [stop] to the invasion of our country, till our Treaty be made with the government."

South of the border, a treaty with the Sioux, like the Blackfoot Treaty of 1855, had been signed in 1868, giving them hunting rights along the North Platte River and east of the Bighorn Mountains. Whites were to be excluded as long as there was good hunting for the Sioux.

Well, all of that quickly fell apart when gold was found in the Black Hills in 1874. Prospectors flooded Sioux lands, and despite the pleas of the Sioux that the government honour the treaty, they were instead met with soldiers of the United States Cavalry.

When the Sioux rebelled, the cavalry led by General George Crook, descended upon a large gathering of Cheyenne and Sioux along the Powder River. The carnage forced many to surrender and return to their reservation, but it also radicalized many who moved west to gather their strength for the coming conflict.

Central to this was the great Sioux chief Sitting Bull. He sought to build a broad alliance, among both friend and enemy, to fight a common foe. Emissaries were sent to neighbouring tribes to seek allies in the coming conflict. One of these messengers was sent to the camp of Crowfoot. He offered a gift of tobacco, as well as horses, mules, and should they defeat the Americans, white women slaves.

They also promised that once the Cavalry were defeated, they would ride north to rid the plains of the white men. The police were few and the people of the plains were many.

Crowfoot needed little time to turn down offers of war with the whites, particularly with the Sioux who had long been their enemies. His message was met with a threat. The Sioux were strong and had a plan to destroy the soldiers; then they would come for the Blackfoot along with the police.

As is often the case, timing is everything. When the news of the threat arrived in Crowfoot's camp, Inspector Cecil Denny happened to be present. Crowfoot shared with him the entire story. Denny promised the protection of the police to the Blackfoot, and Crowfoot offered 2000 warriors should the Sioux march north.

The year was 1876 and Crowfoot stated:

"we all see that the day is coming when the buffalo will all be killed, And we shall have nothing more to live on… Then you'll come into our camp and see the poor Blackfoot starving. I know that the heart of the capital white soldier will be sorry for us, and they will tell the great mother who will not let her children starve.

We are getting shut in. The Crees are coming into our country from the north, and the white men from the south and east, and they are all destroying our means of living; but still, although we plainly see these days coming, we will not join the Sioux against the whites, but will depend upon you to help us."

This speech impressed Denny who sent a copy to Queen Victoria who personally responded to the chief to thank him for his loyalty. While this was playing out in Canada, Sitting Bull had already routed General George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in Montana.

However, rather than following up on their threats, the Sioux realized their time in American territory was finished and they fled north into the Cypress Hills within Canadian territory. Sitting Bull, who had threatened to wipe the Mounties from the landscape, instead assured these same Mounties that he would break no laws in Canada.

Again, Sitting Bull sent gifts of tobacco to Crowfoot's camp. This time the message was one of peace and friendship. The chief refused to smoke the tobacco until he understood Sitting Bull's true intentions. To his surprise, a party of Sioux, including Sitting Bull himself arrived at his camp. They both pledged peace and smoked the tobacco.

The following year, the Canadian Government arranged to negotiate a treaty with the Blackfoot. Colonel James Macleod and Lieutenant Governor David Laird were appointed as commissioners charged with negotiating a treaty with the nations of the Confederacy. The presence of Sitting Bull in Canadian territory helped hasten the urgency of cementing a positive arrangement with such a powerful nation.

At the same time, cattle were beginning to make their presence known on the plains and many envious eyes were looking westward towards the plentiful grasslands of Alberta, or what would eventually be Alberta.

To complicate matters, in 1872 the government had promised a railroad link to British Columbia to connect it with the rest of the nation. This meant that a ribbon of steel would have to cross the country; the territory of the Blackfoot lay smack dab along the future line.

As the various groups of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Sarcee, and Stoney nations gathered, Commissioner Laird summarized the changing conditions on the plains:

“in a very few years, the buffalo will probably be all destroyed, and for this reason, the queen wishes to help you to live in the future in some other way. She wishes you to allow her white children to come and live on your land and raise cattle, and should you agree to this she will assist you to raise cattle and grain, and thus give you the means of living when the buffalo are no more. She will also pay you and your children money every year, which you can spend as you please.”

His speech essentially asked them to share their hunting grounds in return for some land, cows, potatoes, ammunition and a whopping $5.00 per year. In return, they would be signing a treaty that would essentially strip them of their rightful ownership of their traditional territories; territories won through generations of war, blood, and sacrifice.

Laird had little empathy for these first nations and often belittled claims that, to the Blackfeet, were not trivial matters.

One of the Blood Chiefs, Medicine Calf had already signed one treaty - with the Americans. He saw that treaty continually broken and the terms ignored. He spoke:

“the Great Mother sent you to this country, and we hope she will be good to us for many years… The Americans gave at first large bags of flour, sugar, and many blankets; the next year was only half the quantity, and the following year grew less and less, and now they give only a handful of flour."

When he asked about compensation for firewood used by the police and settlers, Laird responded:

“Why, you Indians ought to pay us for sending these traders in fire water away and giving you security and peace, rather than we pay you for the timber used.”…

The negotiations were hard and contentious. The many leaders of the various nations all had different ideas of what would be necessary to sign a treaty.

According to one story, a white man spread a line of dollars on a table and informed Crowfoot that this was the currency by which the white man traded…not skins. Crowfoot took a handful of clay, made a ball, and placed it in the fire. He then looked to the white man and said: “Now put your money on the fire and see if it will last as long as the clay.”

When the white man responded that his money will burn, Crowfoot retorted:

"Oh your money is not as good as our land, is it? The wind will blow it away; the fire will burn it; water will rot it. Nothing will destroy our land. You don’t make a very good trade.”

The chief handed the white man a handful of sand and asked him to count the number of grains of sand. When the white man admitted that he couldn't possibly count every grain, Crowfoot replied:

“Very well, our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not perish as long as the sun shines and the water flows, and through all the years it will give life to men and animals, and therefore we cannot sell the land. It was put there by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not really belong to us. You can count your money and burn it with a nod of a buffalo’s head, but only the Great Spirit can count the grains of sand and the blades of grass on these plains. As a present, we will give you anything you can take with you, but we cannot give you the land.”

Crowfoot showed that he truly understood the idea of ownership, but it is debatable as to whether he truly comprehended what the loss of all their land would mean to the Blackfoot.

As negotiations continued to drag on, there were rumours that the northern Piegan were pondering massacring the government representatives. Crowfoot was against any violence towards the commission.

The situation began to improve when the remainder of the leaders of the Blood tribe finally arrived at the treaty site. As the last of the great chiefs of the Confederacy arrived, even though the negotiations were difficult, the presence of the entire nation in one place helped raise spirits.

Crowfoot consulted a medicine man for whom he had great respect. When asked if he should sign a treaty, the response was:

“I want to hold you back because I am at the edge of the bank. My life is at its end. I hold you back because your life henceforth will be different from what it has been. Buffalo makes your body strong. What you will eat from this money will have your people buried all over these hills. You will be tied down, you will not wander the plains; the whites will take your land and fill it. You won’t have your own free will; the whites will lead you by a halter. That’s why I say don’t sign. But my life is old, so sign if you want to. Go ahead and make the treaty.”…

In the end, the various chiefs trusted Crowfoot to make the final decision as to whether they should sign.

Finally, Crowfoot rose to speak:

“While I speak, be kind and patient. I have to speak for my people, who are numerous, and who rely upon me to follow that course which in the future will tend to their good. The plains are large and wide. We are the children of the plains. It is our home, and the buffalo has been our food always. I hope you look upon the Blackfeet, Bloods, and Sarcees as your children now, and that you will be indulgent and charitable to them. They all expect me to speak now for them, and I trust the Great Spirit will put into their breasts to be a good people into the minds of the men, women and children, and their future generations...

The advice given me and my people has proved to be very good. If the police had not come to the country, where would we all be now? Bad men and whiskey were killing us so fast that very few, indeed, of us would have been left today. The police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protected from the frosts in winter. I wish them all good, and trust that all our hearts will increase in goodness from this time forward. I am satisfied. I will sign the treaty.”

With Crowfoot's words, the other chiefs also made their mark upon the treaty. The next order of business was to decide where their reserves would be located.

Crowfoot believed that a single large reserve would help to keep their nation strong and strengthen their negotiating power with the whites. When there was no resistance he selected a long strip of land four miles wide extending some 320 km east into buffalo country.

While the whites wanted the Blackfoot to take up farming, Crowfoot could not see his people surviving by "scratching the land" to grow food. He picked rich hunting grounds, but poor land for farming.

Crowfoot was the first to sign. He expressed the concerns many of the Blackfoot had:

“Great Father! Take pity on me with regard to my country, with regard to the mountains, the hills and the valleys; with regard to the prairies, the forest and the waters; with regard to all the animals that inhabit them, and do not take them from myself and my children forever.”

After Crowfoot, all the other chiefs, true to their word to him, also made their mark on the treaty.

A missionary that was present at the signing, Father Scollen, was later asked if he thought the Blackfoot understood the magnitude of the document they had signed. He replied:

“Did these Indians, or do they now, understand the real nature of the treaty made between the Government and themselves in 1877? My answer to this question is unhesitatingly negative…

Crowfoot, who beyond a doubt, is considered the leading chief of the plains, did not seem to have a faint notion of the meaning of the treaty… All the other chiefs followed Crowfoot, and the substance of their speeches was that they agreed with him in all that he said…”

How could they understand the implications of the treaty? Interpreters whose job it was to explain the terms had no words that would help the chiefs truly understand the concept of giving up vast territories to be settled on tiny plots of land.

The Blackfoot would soon learn what signing this treaty meant.

For generations, they had relied on winter snows to force the bison towards their winter hunting grounds in the foothills. This year the snows didn't come. Instead, winter fires on the prairies forced the bison to stay north of the Cypress Hills.

The Blackfoot, as they had always done, had no choice but to follow the herds. Soon they found themselves on the edge of their territory and within spitting distance of their traditional enemies the Crees, Assiniboines, and Sioux.

The winter was very difficult and starvation was a regular visitor to the camps. Sitting Bull once again visited Crowfoots camp and, while Crowfoot had no issues with the great chief, he advised that the Sioux stay away from their camps in such stressful times. He was worried that he would not be able to control his warriors.

While spring brought a few buffalo back to the plains, Crowfoot could see that the future would no longer see them as master of territories occupied by vast numbers of buffalo. The bison were fewer and fewer and the many competing nations were all desperate for the same few animals.

Crowfoot also learned that his friend Red Crow, chief of the Bloods, had decided, against the advice of Crowfoot, that he wanted a reserve farther south. This meant the joint reserve Crowfoot hoped for would not happen, and the single voice they might have with the government would now be partitioned.

Crowfoot felt betrayed by his friend Colonel Macleod who had approved the request by Red Crow. He knew that this would weaken the power of the Blackfoot and was sure there was treachery on the part of the commission.

The next winter was no better. The bison were scarce and the Blackfeet began to starve. Instead of bison, in desperation, they began to kill anything that was edible, whether it was a rabbit, ground squirrel, mouse, porcupine, or even badgers. If it had meat, it was fair game.

Pleas to the government who had previously promised to feed the nation fell on deaf ears. Over the winter, they began to eat the camp dogs, and in time, began to eat anything made of leather, from moccasins, leather bags, and any piece of animal skin that might contain nourishment.

The winter was terrible. In addition to the starvation, a party of 1,000 equally weak Crees camped just a few miles away. After a heated argument led to one of the Cree being killed, they finally moved on.

Finally, in July of 1879, Edgar Dewdney was appointed as Indian Commissioner. He heard the pleas of Three Bulls and the other Blackfeet and brought beef along with flour and tea to offer relief to the starving. As he reported:

“On arriving there, I found about 1300 Indians in a very destitute condition and many on the verge of starvation. Young men who were known to be Stout and hearty fellows some six months ago, were quite emaciated and so weak they could hardly work; the old people and widows, who, with their children live on the charity of the younger and more prosperous, had nothing, and many a pitiable tale was told of the misery they had endured.”

That summer, the Blackfoot were advised by Dewdney and Colonel Macleod that many bison were being seen around the Cypress Hills. The Blackfoot followed their advice and sent the old and sick to Fort Macleod to be cared for by the police.

As it turns out, those headed to the fort would fare far better than the warriors that headed out to hunt as their forefathers had done before them.

As they approached Cypress Hills, Crowfoot met his foster brother Three Bulls who told him the animals that had previously been there had now moved out of the area. American hide hunters had set fires south of the border to prevent the normal northward migration of the buffalo, trapping them south of the border.

While Crowfoot had never taken his people south of the American border before, the southern Piegan had always hunted there. Crowfoot had no choice but to head south into unknown territory. Unfortunately, his reputation preceded him and his arrival was heralded by a scalding news story in the American media:

“Crowfoot has always been the leader of noted murderers, and is responsible for the death of more than one emigrant and prospector, yet this red butcher has been the pet of the Mounted Police ever since the latter arrived in the country”

It hurts me to share quotes like this, but it's necessary to show the difference between Canadian and American views towards First Nations. At the same time, it was the Canadian government, with whom the Blackfoot had signed treaties with the promise of fair treatment and supplies of food, that had forced them to be there in the first place.

The Americans resented the presence of so-called Canadian Indians and they had a good reason. Dewdney, in private correspondence, admitted as much:

“I advised them strongly to go and gave them some provisions to take them off. They continued to follow the buffalo further and further south until they reached the main herd and there they remained… I consider their remaining away saved the government $100,000 at least.”

Americans saw their territory swarmed by natives of every affiliation, from Blackfeet to Sarcee to Gros Ventres, and on and on. Each of these nations had no other choice, except starvation. The bison were quickly vanishing and these were all people of the bison.

In addition to the scorn and risk of cavalry attacks from travelling south of the border, suddenly they were back in the lands of the whiskey trader. No sooner were their bellies full, did the whiskey wagons arrive in their camps.

Suddenly, in addition to the whiskey, there was a new voice trying to whisper into their heads, a Metis by the name of Louis Riel.

Riel had been a leader of the Metis when confederation transferred the lands of the Red River Settlement to the fledgeling Canadian government. He understood that the transfer of lands would be done with little consultation to the first nations and Metis that were already living there.

In 1869, when the government sent surveyors to partition and run the area, Riel led his people in a rebellion. The government sent out soldiers and Riel fled to the U.S. to escape prosecution where he continued to promote mixed-blood rights.

His resistance led to the founding of the province of Manitoba, and despite living in exile, he was elected three times to the federal government in absentia.

Also in his absence, his colleague Father Nol Ritchot, managed to stare down John A. Macdonald and his Conservatives in negotiations and have the province of Manitoba established in May of 1870 while Riel was still in hiding.

It was just a tiny postage stamp in terms of its present size. While merely one-eighteenth the size of modern-day Manitoba, it accomplished its goals of protecting the Red River settlement and the Metis for whom Riel had fought.

Riel was gone from the political scene in Manitoba, but he was still working to coordinate a much larger rebellion that would take control of the Northwest Territories. While in Montana, Riel met with Crowfoot. As Crowfoot described the meeting:

“He wanted me to join with all the Sioux, and the Crees, and half-breeds. The idea was to have a general uprising and capture the North-West, and hold it for the Indian race and the Métis [mixed-bloods]. We were to meet at Tiger Hills, in Montana; we were to have a government of our own. I refused, but the others were willing…”

Riel had persuasive words, but Crowfoot could see they led only to ruin for his people. Like Sitting Bull a few years earlier, he was able to see past the passion and the fervour to the ruinous results.

Somehow, despite being starved into another country, he still had confidence in the Mounted Police. In his conversations with Riel, there was an interpreter present, a false-priest by the name of Jean L’Heureux. While L'Heureux had never been ordained as a priest, he roamed the plains preaching the gospel.

Despite this official stature as a false-priest, others like Father Lacombe hired him as an interpreter due to the very close relationship with the first nations of the plains, in particular, the Blackfoot. He was a confidant of Crowfoot and he described Riel's words:

“I soon learned the whole plan of the affair, which was nothing less than the invasion and taking possession of the North-West Territories, with the help of a general uprising of all the Indian tribes, united to the half-breeds… That R…was to be governor, and Riel the first minister of his cabinet, where a seat was to be given to the Indian chief who, with his people, would help the half-breeds most in the contemplated invasion…

Riel planned for his allies to meet at Tiger Hills and from there to march on the Canadians. Unfortunately, the Americans in whose territory Crowfoot's people were currently residing, also heard these stories of war parties.

Like Sitting Bull, Crowfoot didn't want anything to do with Riel's rebellion and soon Riel realized that with the Americans aware of his plans, it was best for him to make tracks for the Judith Basin in Montana and talk no more…for now of rebellion.

Oddly enough, Sitting Bull also met with Crowfoot in Montana. He had slipped south of the border as he had done numerous times to hunt. His people, like the Blackfoot, were also forced south of the Medicine Line in the quest for bison. He wanted no quarrel with the Blackfoot as he knew that he needed to return to Canada as soon as possible.

He said to Crowfoot:

“my children will be your children and your's mine. From now on we will never fight again and we will be on the same side at all times.”

He even named one of his children Crowfoot.

Unfortunately, within days, a Sioux war party raided Crowfoot's camp and stole numerous horses. The two men never spoke again.

While Sitting Bull's people were officially still in Canada, the situation for them got increasingly worse. Prime Minister John A Macdonald didn't like having the Sioux warrior on Canadian soil and he believed that Major James Walsh of the fort that bore his name in the Cypress Hills, was too lenient with Sitting Bull.

However, Walsh had gained a great respect for the old Chief, as long as he kept his people peaceful. Macdonald had Walsh transferred to Fort Qu’Appelle, some 250 km distant. He was replaced by an officious inspector Lief N.F. (‘Paddy’) Crozier. He was instructed to convince Sitting Bull to go back to the U.S.

Finally, in July of 1881, Sitting Bulls remaining followers rode south and surrendered at Fort Buford on the Yellowstone River. In the meantime, Walsh had taken vacation time and travelled to Chicago to meet with an American Indian Agent with whom he was friends. He pleaded for fair treatment for the Sioux.

Sitting Bull was imprisoned for 20 months at Fort Randall in South Dakota and was freed in May of 1883. The following year, while touring Canada and the U.S. he met Annie Oakley. The Minnesotan sharpshooter deeply impressed the old chief and he adopted her as his daughter, giving her the name "Little Sure Shot". She continued to use that name throughout her career.

He joined the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill Cody in 1885 but only stayed for four months before returning to his reserve at Standing Rock. Around this time, a new native religious movement called the ghost dance became popular. The military was fearful of it and became convinced that Sitting Bull was an instigator. They ordered him arrested and during the scuffle, the old chief, along with numerous other Sioux, were killed. The plains had lost another great chief and songs of mourning filled the air at Standing Rock.

Like Crowfoot, Sitting Bull was a man trapped in time. He was from a once proud and powerful nation that saw his way of life destroyed. While he chose a different path than Crowfoot, he did so with the conviction that he was doing what was best for his people.

Next week, I'll finish the story of Crowfoot and the Blackfoot as they are eventually forced back to Canada amidst Cavalry threats, sickness, and starvation.

A few episodes back, in episode 60, I talked about the Calypso orchid and how it tricked bumblebee queens into pollinating it without providing any nectar reward. This week, I want to look at another related orchid, the yellow ladyslipper orchid.

Orchids are a very old family of plants, and along with the dandelion or daisy family, represent the two largest plant families on the planet. There are more than 28,000 different orchid species on the planet today. Each one has evolved a slightly different strategy to attract their specific pollinator.

Few plant families have diversified as much as the orchids in order to attract a very specific insect to act as courier to transplant pollen from one flower to another. Orchids are also part of the major plant group called monocotyledon. This includes most of the grasses and sedges, along with lilies and irises.

Monocots, as they are commonly referred, usually have grass-like leaves, with the veins running parallel to the leaf margin. Their petals are also usually arranged in multiples of threes, for instance, three or six petals.

Most flowers reward pollinators with treats of nectar or pollen. Pollen is one of nature's most perfect foods. It contains everything that a honey bee needs to survive: sugar, proteins, enzymes, minerals and vitamins. The nectar is used to make honey to feed the larvae in the hive.

So many plants have evolved specifically to provide one or both of these as a reward for pollinators visiting the plant and taking a bit of pollen to another plant to assist in cross-pollination.

Across the orchid family, there are both nectar rewarding species and food deceptors like the Calypso which trick the bee into visiting but leave them hungry when they leave.

Most orchids have three petals and three sepals. Unlike most plants though, where the sepals are usually nondescript, in orchids, often the sepals look just like the petals. This is particularly true of the ladyslippers.

The yellow ladyslipper has three sepals that resemble the petals. One rises vertically above the plant and the other two fall behind and below the flower.

It also has three petals, although the third one is modified into the pouch so distinctive in ladyslipper orchids. The other two petals, which resemble the sepals, tend two twist and curve forward as if they were the shoelaces that would tie the slipper onto the imaginary foot was this really a slipper.

Above the pouch is a yellow triangular structure used to guide the bees into the pouch. Just in case they need further direction, there are purple markings that literally point down on the lip. To the bee, this means "follow this arrow to get pollen and/or nectar". Unfortunately for the bee, it gets neither.

Like the Calypso, the yellow ladyslipper doesn't produce any nectar for the production of honey. That's alright, then a feed of pollen will do just fine. Unfortunately for the bee, the pollen of these orchids is all packed together into a single sticky mass. This allows a single bee visit to produce thousands of tiny seeds.

When the bee follows the arrow on the lip into the pouch, it becomes trapped. Inside the pouch though, there's another series of purple lines that guide the bee towards the rear of the flower where there are two exit points for bees that are the right size. Too large and they may find themselves trapped in the pouch.

Tiny angular hairs also serve to nudge the bee in the right direction towards these exits…oh and yah…the orchids reproductive organs. First, it passes the stigma or female part of the plant. If the bee has visited another orchid previously, the sticky pollen mass will be deposited here. Then, just before it exits the flower, an additional pollen mass will be placed on its back where it can't access it for feeding purposes. It will just stick there on the hopes that the bee gets duped once again.

Without a pollen or nectar reward, there is little to motivate bees to keep visiting these orchids. That's why allowing a single visit to produce thousands of seeds is a good strategy - it makes every visit count.

Why do bees come back? In part because of the seductive fragrance of the flower. It resembles the bees own pheromones. In addition, any bees that have already visited and escaped, leave their scent as well. This also serves to attract other unwitting bees.

Once the flower is pollinated, it will produce a hard, vertical pod that contains thousands of tiny, wind-dispersed seeds.

Once the seeds are released, for most plants the story would end. They would hopefully find their way to a place with good soil and germination would take place. For orchids, the story is not quite that simple.

The seeds of the yellow ladyslipper are tiny and have very little in the way of food reserves. All plants need help in obtaining nutrients from the soil. Their roots need nitrogen and phosphorous to promote growth. Specialized fungi in the soil called mycorrhizal fungi are able to make these minerals available to the plants in return for a little of the sugar produced by the leaves.

The fungi wraps itself around and, in some cases, within the roots. The plant provides sugar in return for these essential nutrients.

Some 90% of all plants on the planet rely on these beneficial fungi for their growth. There are thousands of species of mycorrhizal fungi, and for most plants, they are not too fussy as to which species their roots associate with. They have sugar to trade, and the fungi have nitrogen. You give me yours and I'll give you mine.

Some plants, as in the case of orchids though, are very particular. The yellow ladyslipper only associates with a small number of fungi species. It also needs their help to even germinate. Each of the seeds of the orchid are tiny and lack any food reserves. They need to land on just the right soil, which contains just the right fungi.

Before they can germinate, the fungi have to wrap themselves around the seeds and provide not just nitrogen at this stage but also sugars. The plant seed has none so the fungus has to sustain the seeds until they can germinate. Essentially, at this time, the plant is parasitic to the fungus as it's not providing any sugars in return for the nourishment it is taking.

Later, as the fungus feeds the seed until it germinates and grows, a period that can take years, The plant will begin to reciprocate and provide sugars to the fungus. In most plant relationships. Essentially, the relationship varies between one of parasitism and one of mutual benefit.

Yellow ladyslippers also take hiatuses at different times in their lifespan where they won't sprout at all for several years. During these dormant times, it will, once again, rely on the fungi for nourishment.

Unfortunately, this intense reliance on very specific soil fungi means that you can't transplant ladyslippers. The plants produce thousands of seeds specifically because the chance of germination is very rare. Only those few seeds that land in the right place, which contains the right fungal partner, have any chance of survival.

It's important to think of orchids as a kind of compound species. The flower is only one component of the living plant. The fungi is intricately wound around and within its roots. One cannot exist without the other.

If you see people tempted to dig them up or pick them, please let them know just how fragile these flowers are and that picking them today may mean that we never again get the pleasure of seeing another flower in that location.

The more I learn about orchids and the orchid family, the more impressed I am. They are one of the most uniquely diversified group of plants on the planet. Because most don't offer nectar to their pollinators, they have to develop innovative ways of attracting them and making sure that each visit counts.

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for all things Rocky Mountain. We offer nature, hiking, step-on, and photography guides to make sure your visit is a memorable one. Expert guides share the stories behind the scenery.

If you'd like to reach out to me personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron, or drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com. Don't forget to check out the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep063 for links to additional information, and while you're there, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode

The First Nations of the plains were a diverse and powerful collection of Tribes that were often at war with one another. Wars over territory, the best hunting areas, the theft of horses, and many other grievances kept the borders of various nations constantly in flux.

One of the most powerful groups were the Blackfoot Confederacy of southern Alberta and northern Montana. The Confederacy was formed by three nations, the Siksika or Blackfoot, Piikani or Piegan, and the Kainai or Blood Nation. The Piegans are further separated into their Canadian and American counterparts with the Northern Piegan or Pikani and the Southern Piegan known as Piikuni.

Later, they allied with the Tsuut'ina or Sarcee nation of Alberta, and the Atsina or Gros Ventre's from Montana.

Early life on the plains was centred around the bison. European contact across the American West changed the life of the Plains Indian dramatically. As horses and guns made their first appearances in the 17th and 18th centuries, those nations with larger quantities of each could alter the balance of power between tribes.

The Blackfoot Confederacy became masters of the horse and gun and used this to control large areas of southern Alberta and northern Montana. Their territory stretched from the North Saskatchewan River to the Yellowstone in Montana. East to west, they occupied areas from the Great Sand Hills in Saskatchewan to the Continental Divide.

Their alliance became incredibly powerful, but they were often at war with the First Nations that surrounded their lands. The Blackfeet also controlled the trade of guns to their enemies on the British Columbia side of the Continental Divide. Back in Episode 53, I shared the stories of David Thompson trading with the Kootenay or Ktunaxa in British Columbia and running for his life when the Piegans discovered he was violating their prohibition of trading guns. You can listen to that story at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep053.

Into this landscape was born one of the most influential leaders of the Blackfeet, a man that would later take the name of Crowfoot and who would be one of their greatest leaders at a time when they needed him most. Hugh Dempsey, in his book Crowfoot, offers an intimate glimpse into the world of this amazing leader.

The year was 1830. The buffalo were still plentiful on the plains, and while smallpox had decimated the Cree of eastern Saskatchewan, it was still unknown to the Blackfoot Nation.

In a tipi somewhere in the Piegan nation, a Woman known as "Attacked Towards Home", the wife of Piegan warrior "Packs a Knife", gave birth to a healthy little boy they named "Shot Close." In these First Nations, a child may have several names throughout their life as major events prompted a new identity. Shot Close was simply the childhood name of Crowfoot.

Names in Blackfoot culture were transient affairs. They changed with maturity, experience, and significant accomplishments. They were family possessions and had value. Great names could only be claimed by someone achieving something worthy of claiming the name.

At this time, white men were of little concern to the Confederacy. They avoided the territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, especially since David Thompson had narrowly escaped after trading with the Kootenay on the west side of the Divide. Additionally, a member of Lewis and Clark's expedition had killed a Blackfoot and so this also led them to exclude white men from their territory.

At the same time, the Blackfoot did want the guns and horses that trade with the whites provided. And unlike most of the other native groups, the fact that the Blackfoot had plentiful bison meat to trade meant that the whites didn't try to coax them into trapping as had been done to many other nations.

Crowfoot's father died when he was still an infant after joining a raid on the Crow Nation of Montana. Crowfoot was raised by his mother and his grandfather, "Scabby Bull." Crowfoot learned the history of his people and the skills needed to be a great warrior.

After a long period of mourning, Crowfoot's mother Attacked Towards Home married a Blackfoot known as "Many Names". Crowfoot, his younger brother and grandfather all joined their mother and they left the Piegan to became a part of the Blackfoot Nation.

With a new nation, Crowfoot was given a new Blackfoot name, "Bear Ghost."

Soon after Crowfoot's family arrived in the Blackfoot camp, the nation was introduced to the ravages of diphtheria. Crowfoot was just 6 years old, and this terrible disease spread from child to child throughout the camp, taking many of the youngest, but somehow Crowfoot and his brother survived.

Diptheria was followed by the Blackfoot's first experience with smallpox in 1837. The disease arrived on a steamer owned by the American Fur Company. First, it ravaged the Mandan, almost wiping them out, then it spread to the Assiniboine, and finally to the Blackfoot after a member of the nation was allowed to board the diseased steamer.

Smallpox hit the Blackfoot camp in a way never witnessed by them before. Before long, white traders noticed a lack of Blackfoot at Fort McKenzie on the Upper Missouri River. Chief Trader, Alexander Cuthbertson went to look for them. Dempsey shared:

"After travelling for a few days, he found a camp of about sixty lodges from the Piegan tribe. There was no sound and as he approached, a horrible stench permeated the air. When he came to the first tipi, he saw the grim results of the white man's disease. 'Hundreds of decaying forms of human beings, horses and dogs lay scattered everywhere among the lodges,' he recorded. 'Two old women, too feeble to travel, were the sole living occupants of the village.'"

The Blackfoot had been a proud people who had fought for the right to hunt buffalo for generations. In the course of a single year, some two-thirds of the nation, or six-thousand people, perished from this deadly plague. That's like the population of Calgary dropping from 1.2 million people to just 400,000 people in a single year.

For the Blackfoot, it was a population apocalypse from which they never fully recovered. Sure, those that survived and recovered continued on. Somehow the people close to Crowfoot survived, but they were one of few families left directly untouched by this pestilence.

In time, as Crowfoot grew into a young man, he was drawn to be a part of a war party heading out to challenge one of their enemies. With this raid, he earned the right to claim a man's name, and he immediately the name of his father: "Packs a Knife".

It took him little time to demonstrate his bravery in battle. To the nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy, brave acts were retold around the campfire. Counting coup was one of the greatest signs of bravery in many First Nations. It involved heading out into battle and instead of trying to kill your enemy, you simply try to touch them or their defences and then escape alive.

In the case of Crowfoot, the Blackfoot attacked a camp of Crow Indians along the Yellowstone River in Montana. In the camp, they recognized a Piegan tipi by its markings and realized that it had been captured in battle.

In Dempsey's account, the Blood Chief leading the raid said:

"See that painted lodge? Whoever gets to it and strikes it will be the future leader of his people in hunting and in war."

Crowfoot took this challenge to heart and when they attacked, he ran straight towards the camp, straight past numerous Crow warriors who fired at him. One of the balls hit his arm and, despite stumbling, he continued on.

He managed to touch the tipi before anyone else, and in doing so, gained great prestige among the warriors.

With this achievement, he chose a new name. "Crow Indian's Big Foot", which was later shortened to Crowfoot.

This was indeed a great name. Only one man had previously used it. As Dempsey put it:

"According to tribal tradition, only one person had previously held this honoured name. He was a relative of Many Names, perhaps an uncle or older brother, who had been a victim of treachery two years before the young Crowfoot was born. The first Crowfoot had been a brave man whose exploits had made him a chief. One day he and his companions in a war party found a camp which recently had been abandoned by the Crows. Prowling into the clearing, the Blackfeet saw a large footprint in the mud near the edge of a stream. Curiously, each of the other Indians placed his own foot within the imprint, but in each case his foot was too small. Then the chief tried. To the amazement and delight of his comrades, his foot fitted perfectly in the large imprint made by the unknown Crow Indian. Because of this incident, he took the name Crow Indian's Big Foot."

In 1828 though, as the original Crowfoot travelled to a peace summit with the Shoshone, he was ambushed and killed. His bravery as a man, when coupled with the deceitful way in which he was killed, left a name that could only be claimed by a great man.

During his lifetime, Crowfoot was a part of nineteen battles and was wounded 6 different times. He showed his bravery, but more importantly his leadership. To lead raids, you need to muster followers and he always had plenty of men willing to follow him into battle.

In one battle, Crowfoot was shot in the back, and while he recovered, it was a wound that stayed with him throughout his life as the ball was never removed.

Crowfoot gained a reputation as a formidable warrior. During the 1840's, it seemed that there were enemies in every direction. As Dempsey put it:

"To the north were the Crees, to the east the Assiniboins [sic], to the south the Crows, and across the mountains the Kutenais [sic], the Shoshonis, Nez Perces, Flatheads, and the Pend d'Oreilles. Other battles were fought from time to time with the Sioux, Ojibwas, and mixed-blood buffalo hunters."

The Blackfoot were wealthy and controlled some of the best Buffalo hunting grounds. They also had access to European trade goods and plenty of horses.

The Cree and Assiniboine usually had few horses and the Crow, along with the nations on the far side of the mountains, usually had few guns. Access to both horses and guns made the Blackfoot the most powerful nation on the plains.

As missionaries made their way onto the plain, Crowfoot didn't oppose them bringing their message to his people, although he never paid much attention to it. This tolerance for the whites helped to strengthen his reputation with them. He took every person, native or white, at their word. If you are true to your word then you had little to fear from Crowfoot.

During the 1850s there were three principal chiefs of the Blackfoot, each with a large number of followers. Crowfoot was led by Three Suns. The others were Old Sun and Old Swan. Time took their toll on these great men and gradually they passed away.

As each man's rule ended, they were succeeded by others. First, in 1858, Old Swan died and soon after, Old Sun also passed away. They were both replaced by much more warlike chiefs who saw white traders as enemies.

The forts of the prairies began to see more and more attacks from the Blackfoot. The Chief Factor of Fort Edmonton wrote in 1861:

"…the Blackfoot have been un-bearable [sic] for the last 3-years or more, always getting worse and worse destroying our crops, stealing our horses, and doing everything they could to annoy us, in order to provide a quarrel so as to kill us. They now threaten openly to kill whites, half breeds, or Crees wherever they find them and to burn Edmonton Fort…".

When Three Suns died, Crowfoot succeeded him. Unlike the two other high chiefs, he had built relationships with the traders and knew that his people needed the trade goods that the whites provided. To Crowfoot, as long as you are true to your word, you had nothing to fear.

Crowfoot did not care what colour you were. If you were a benefit to his people, you were a friend. You didn't want to be his enemy.

Crowfoot was fearless in battle but wise in his council, and these traits made him beloved by his people and respected by white traders. Crowfoot became so welcome at white trading posts, that he was treated as though he was the principal chief, regardless of his actual rank in the tribal hierarchy.

Over time, Crowfoot amassed a large herd of horses, making him a man of means among his people. At the same time, he was a man who was "one of the people". He was generous with his wealth and was always willing to help those in need.

This would be critical when smallpox once again visited his people in 1869. In an almost identical story to the outbreak that hit Crowfoot's camp when he was just seven years old, the disease arrived with an American steamer. The boat docked at the mouth of the Milk River and a Piegan crept aboard.

As a Montana newspaper wrote:

"to purloin a blanket from the couch of one of the smallpox patients, while the steamboat discharged its freight at the mouth of that turbid stream…the dreaded disease broke out among the copper-colored [sic] devils, and spreading like wildfire from tepee to tepee and from camp to camp, has made a great havoc in their strength and numbers - sending them to perdition in quicker time than bullets and bad bread could do the work. "

Once again, smallpox ravaged the camps of the Blackfoot. The death toll was unimaginable. As bands split up in a futile attempt to outrun the trail of death that followed them, one after another they fell to the dread disease.

Trading forts closed their doors to keep out the pestilence and neighbouring tribes were warned to stay far away lest they be routed as well.

The death toll began to wane the following spring and the three tribes of the Confederacy began to tally their losses. Hugh Dempsey described the devastation:

"The Piegans, who were the most severely affected, counted more than a thousand dead, the Bloods and Blackfeet over six hundred each, and the tiny tribe of fifty Sarcee lodges was reduced to only twelve."

Somehow, Crowfoot once again escaped the disease. But he lost a quarter of his camp. The Blackfoot were never the same. Their undisputed rain on the plains had been dealt a mortal blow. In time, perhaps they could recover, but time was not a luxury they were afforded.

The plains were changing, white settlers were moving in and their ability to stem the tide of incursions into their territory were never the same.

In the following years, while some Blackfoot continued to wage war on their enemies, Crowfoot tried to remain a largely peaceful man.

One of Crowfoot's sons died when out on a raiding party, but his wife Cutting Woman told him that she had met a young man that looked almost just like their lost son. While he was a few years older than their boy, as soon as Crowfoot met him, it was obvious that the similarities were remarkable.

Crowfoot had suffered so much loss in his life that he invited the young man named Poundmaker to visit his camp. While Poundmaker was a Cree, he became Crowfoot's adopted son. As was the way on the plains, before long the Blackfoot and the Crees were at war again. Eventually Poundmaker had to return to his people but before he left, Crowfoot gave him horses and gifts, but more importantly, he shared the importance of wisdom.

On the plains, so many wars were caused by tempers and emotion when wisdom could have brought peace instead. Crowfoot always seemed able to see beyond the emotion and look towards what was best for his people.

In 1867, the nation of Canada was created. Up until this time, the plains had been under the purview of the Hudson's Bay Company whose forts had provided the only semblance of white rule to the west.

By 1869, negotiations were in place to turn over these western lands, formerly known as Rupert's Land, to the fledgling nation of Canada. As the fur traders vacated the territory, it left a vacuum in terms of British control over the west.

Well, nature abhors a vacuum, and whiskey traders in Montana began to cast envious glances northward. The state had prohibited the sale of alcohol and so, if there was nobody there to patrol Canada's prairies, then they would take advantage of the opportunity.

Forts with names like Fort Whoop-Up began to open and sell whiskey to the members of the Blood tribe within who's territory it was built. Now when I say "whiskey", there was a bit of whiskey in those barrels, along with turpentine, strychnine, red ink, and red pepper.

Within a short time, the fort had grossed $50,000 and more posts began to open in other areas. Infamous forts like Slide Out, Standoff, and Robber's Roost spread the liquor to Blackfoot country. Along with whiskey, they also offered repeating rifles for trade.

As alcohol spread through the camps, fights between both friend and foe broke out. Even Crowfoot was not immune to the draw of whiskey. He visited forts at Blackfoot Crossing as well as Spitzee Post on the banks of the Highwood River.

The missionaries that witnessed the illicit whiskey trade urged the fledgling government of Canada to do something…and so they did…they created the Northwest Mounted Police, the pre-cursor of the mighty Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The march west of the Mounties is a story I'll share in another episode, but suffice it to say that the word of these red-coated policeman riding westward travelled far in advance of the columns.

When Reverand John McDougall met with Crowfoot to tell him of the impending arrival of the Mounties, he assured them that, although they would be building forts in Blackfoot territory, the Mounties were here to protect them from the whiskey. He also assured Crowfoot that white-man's justice would treat all people fairly, regardless of whether they were Indian or white.

Crowfoot replied:

"my brother, your words make me glad. I listen to them not only with my ears, but with my heart also. In the coming of the long knives, with their fire water and their quick-shooting guns, we are weak, and our people have been woefully slain and impoverished. You say this will be stopped. We're glad to have it stopped. We want peace. What you tell us about this strong power which will govern with good law and treat the Indians the same as the white man makes us glad to hear. My brother, I believe you, and am thankful."

Crowfoot had earned enough respect that the other chiefs supported his words. The first red-coats arrived in the fall of 1874. Colonel James Macleod was in charge and Crowfoot developed a strong relationship with him. Prior to meeting Macleod, Crowfoot sent his foster brother, Three Bulls to test the truth of Rev. MacDougall that the policemen were here to help them.

Three Bulls told Macleod of the whiskey trading post at Pine Coulee, and then led the police to the fort. The traders were arrested and from the first time Crowfoot met Macleod, he saw in him an ally. It was at this time that Crowfoot the warrior had to transition to Crowfoot the politician and peacemaker.

The presence of the police meant that the debauchery associated with the whiskey trade quickly waned and the powerful Blackfoot began to grow in numbers again. Instead of whiskey, valuable buffalo hides were traded for horses and within two years the Blackfoot had purchased more than 2,000.

Yet all was not rosy on the horizon. Crowfoot saw that with the police, more white men were moving onto their lands and, at the same time, the buffalo were becoming more and more scarce. When Crowfoot spoke to Rev. MacDougall, he was told that First Nations in other parts of the country had treaties that set down the rights of the tribes and the lands that belonged to them.

Crowfoot could not understand the implications of what a treaty might mean, but he did appreciate the fact that some form of accommodation would be made for them. He could also see how rapidly things were changing and that the lives of the Blackfoot would never be as they once were.

Next week, I'll look at how the expansion of white men and police, along with the loss of the buffalo, forever changed the Blackfoot Nation.

Next up…tracking track bears

For decades, train tracks have been graveyards for black and grizzly bears, as well as many hoofed animals unlucky enough to be struck while wandering the tracks. The area surrounding train tracks offers a number of benefits for both bruin and herbivore alike.

Train tracks mean openings in the forest canopy. Openings in the canopy mean opportunities for plants to grow. New growth attracts animals looking for forage. In the winter, train tracks offer easier travel corridors than walking through deep snow.

For bears, the area around tracks can be very attractive. In July, the open area allows buffaloberry bushes to thrive. These bushes are one of the key summer foods for black and grizzly bears. In the spring, dandelion blooms offer a similar enticement.

Trains all too regularly cost animals travelling them their lives. Their carcasses serve to attract other bears, coyotes, and other carnivores looking for an easy meal - unless they too don't recognize the danger that the tracks represent.

Canada's railroads have a single track running coast to coast with periodic sidings to allow opposing trains to pass. The longer a train sits on a siding, the more opportunity there is for grain to leak out of hopper cars. For bears, after meat, seeds and nuts represent the next most nutritious food source. This makes grain spills an irresistible attraction for bears and serves to attract bears back to the tracks after experiencing these easy calories.

Back in Episode 19, I mentioned a study that has shown that as much as 110 tonnes of grain is spilled along the tracks within Banff and Yoho National Parks annually. That's enough to supply the annual caloric needs of 50 grizzly bears.

With numbers like this, it's easy to see that bears would find the tracks to be an enticing place to explore. In Episode 46, I described a study that showed that while not all of our bears regularly use the tracks, those that do, like the Boss, use them a lot. Researchers satellite collared 21 grizzlies and they found that only 4 were regular users of the tracks, but they popped by the rail line on 20% of the days they were being monitored.

They also found that bears used the tracks much more in the fall. During autumn, 85% of scat samples near tracks contained grain as compared to only 14% in the summer and 17% in the spring.

This likely reflects the seasonal availability of other food options at other times of the years. Now, just because scat samples don't include grain, the bears that left these samples were still hanging out near to the tracks. They may have been looking for elk and moose carcasses or feeding on dandelions and buffaloberries that are also plentiful near the railroad right-of-way. In fact, this same study found that scat found near tracks had a much higher likelihood of containing the hair of elk, deer, or moose.

Banff's most famous bear, Bear 122, also known as "The Boss", is the current king of the tracks. His reign was almost cut short in 2010 when he was clipped by a passing freight train and somehow survived.

The Boss is one of the heaviest users of the major transportation corridors in the park, spending much of his time around the train tracks and the Trans-Canada Highway - often munching on dandelions along the highway fences in the spring.

He also spends time wandering near Highway 93S, through Kootenay National Park. This is another high-risk place to hang out, especially with cars exceeding the speed limits in some cases by as much as 30 or 40 km/h, all in a race to get to cottage country in the Columbia Valley.

More than 1,200 large animals have been the victim of train impacts in Banff and Yoho since 1982, and since 1998 they have represented the number one cause of death for grizzlies in both parks. In just one 80 day stretch over the winter of 2015-16, 26 animals were killed along the tracks through Banff. This included 14 white-tail deer, six elk, two moose and four mule deer.

During the last week of May of this year, two black bears died in separate incidents within Banff National Park.

Parks is also looking into particularly dangerous spots for bears along the tracks. Morant's Curve, near Lake Louise, along with Five Mile Bridge west of Banff are two of the worst.

Five Mile Hill represents a straight stretch after a series of curves have slowed the trains down. Here they begin to accelerate and this has resulted in at least 7 deaths. Three more grizzlies have died on Morant's Curve.

Parks is building additional travel corridors away from the tracks to encourage bears near these danger zones to take advantage of other convenient trails. The trails at Five Mile are finished and work is currently underway at Morant's Curve.

Fire is another tool that Parks staff will take advantage of this year, with an 800 ha burn planned for the Baker Creek area this fall. Numerous studies have shown that forest fire sites provide excellent forage for bears and the open canopy makes for a perfect home for buffaloberry bushes.

Canadian Pacific Railway has been working very closely with Parks Canada in terms of redesigning the areas adjacent to tracks in order to give animals more options to escape when they see an oncoming train. Hopefully, with this ongoing collaborative effort, we will see the numbers of fatal strikes of bears and other animals begin to diminish over the next decade.

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Next week, I'll carry on with the story of Crowfoot and his people as the Blackfoot Nation signs Treaty Seven is settled onto reserves and struggles with the disappearing buffalo.

As always, be sure to check out the show notes at www.MountainNature.com/ep062 for links to additional stories, as well as for a convenient way to subscribe to the show so that you never miss an episode. If you'd like to reach out to me directly, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron, or drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com. Don't forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for step-on, hiking, photography, and nature guides in the mountain west. Why not give us a call for your next mountain experience. We'd love to hear from you…and with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go hiking! I'll talk to you next week.

Sulphur Storms

This past week has marked the start of pollen season in the mountain west. The white spruce, in particular, released vast amounts of yellowish-green pollen, coating every car, patio set, pond, and puddle. The railings alongside trails and even the surfaces of leaves have been covered in this fine powder.

On my car, places I previously touched were dusted in a manner similar to fingerprint dust, leaving a yellowish outline of my fingerprint.

Spruce are part of the Pine Family of trees, and all the members of this group reproduce in a similar fashion. Rather than using insects to pollinate the female flowers, they have evolved to use the wind.

When a plant relies on something as random as a mountain breeze, it better produce a lot of pollen, and this past week we saw massive sulphur storms with clouds of yellowish pollen streaming from the trees and, in some cases, entire forests were blurred in a yellowish fog as the pollen spread its way across the landscape.

Members of the pine family in the central Rockies include the white and Engelmann spruce, lodgepole, limber, and whitebark pines, Douglas-fir, subalpine fir, and the alpine larch.

Every tree contains both the male and female cones with each taking a different role in the reproductive process.

Male cones form on the lower branches while the female cones grow higher up. The male pollen cones grow at the base of the current year's new shoots in early spring, which in this part of the mountains is usually around the latter part of May.

Different species produce different numbers of male cones, with a range between 15 and 140. Once the pollen has been dispersed by the wind, the male cones fall off the tree.

Each male cone is a smooth, oval structure that contains dozens of spore-producing bodies called microsporophylls. When the cone is ripe, it releases tremendous numbers of tiny pollen spores.

Each of these spores sport two tiny wings called sacci that help it stay airborne. When the sky turns yellow with this pollen, it's often referred to as a sulphur shower.

Conversely, female cones grow very slowly and usually take several years to mature. This leaves cones in differing stages of maturation on the same branch with newer cones forming towards the tips.

A first-year cone is soft and small, usually just a centimetre or two in size. Its main job is to collect the pollen and fertilize the cone.

Second-year cones are much larger in size, more woody, but still green in colour.

By the third year, the cones are hard and have turned brown and now contain fully-formed seeds ready for germination.

Female cones are also much larger than their short-lived male counterparts. The cones form in either pairs or clusters along the branch and they vary dramatically in size. Lodgepole pine cones are only around 5 cm long, while the cones of limber pine can exceed 20 cm in length.

Each cone is made up of alternating bracts and ovule-bearing scales. These scales accept the pollen and transform into winged seeds as the cone matures.

Wind pollination is an ancient strategy and was utilized by the earliest of plants. It was the go-to strategy used by plants some 125 million years before flowering plants began to conscript insects to transport their pollen to other flowers. Even this was still 50 million years before the Cretaceous, the age of the dinosaurs, arrived.

Almost all land-based non-flowering plants employ wind as their primary method of passing pollen from male cones to the ovaries hidden with the ovules of female cones.

The randomness of wind as a transport mechanism means that if a grain of pollen lands on just the right spot, the female ovule needs to have some way to catch it before it blows away,

They do this with a pollen droplet. This is a sugar-rich droplet exuded from the top of the ovule with the sole purpose of giving pollen grains a sticky surface to land on.

For the pollen to maximize its airborne flight, it has to be extremely light. To do this, it's heavily dehydrated before it's released. When it lands, it needs water and nutrition in the form of sugars and proteins to help it develop further in preparation for pollination. The droplet offers just what a dehydrated pollen grain needs.

There is some evidence that prior to the development of flowering plants that some insects adapted to seeking out these sugary pollen droplets. It may have been this attraction that prompted further diversification in plants to develop nectar-producing flowers. Some of the more ancient plant families, like the pines, continued to rely on wind for their pollination despite the success of insect-pollinated flowers.

As you marvel at the amazing clouds of pollen released this year, while at the same time cursing the fact that every outdoor surface is covered with it, know that it is part of an age-old strategy that maintains the world's most ancient trees.

Mismatching Colours

Whenever any bright-eyed university student begins to study ecology, they're quickly introduced to the pepper moths of Manchester, England. These common moths can be found in two different forms, a lighter more salt and pepper-coloured variety as well as a sooty, almost black variety.

Prior to the industrial revolution, the darker variety was unknown. It was only first described until 1811. A dark moth on a light tree meant that it was far more likely to be spotted by hungry birds and so they are estimated to have represented only 0.01% of the population.

These light moths almost exclusively occupied their range in 1760 when England's industrial revolution first began to darken the skies with the soot from endless coal fires. Increasingly, in industrial towns like Manchester, surfaces of buildings and trees began to reflect this sooty character and gradually darkened in colour.

By 1811 when the first dark variety of pepper moth was discovered, Manchester was beginning to look pretty dismal and dark with coal dust staining many of the trees. Coincidentally, pepper moths used those same trees to hide from predators.

For centuries, the light-coloured pepper moths could perch on the bark of trees and effectively disappear into the patterns of the tree's bark. As these same trees became increasingly darkened by coal dust, the moths began to lose their camouflage. Prey that can't hide, attracts predators and the light-coloured moths increasingly became the meals of hungry birds.

That was when something very interesting happened. A dark, sooty variety first made its appearance. Its dark appearance gave it a distinct advantage over the lighter variety, and by the end of the 1800s, industrial towns like Manchester and London were dominated by these dark varieties. By 1895 the dark variety had risen from 0.01% of the population in 1760 to 98%, eclipsing the more vulnerable light pepper moth variety.

Why am I wandering down this ecological memory lane? Because the same situation is happening around us right now, not due to soot pollution, but rather human-caused changes to the climate. The mountain west is home to a large number of animals that take advantage of the seasonal changes by turning white to help them vanish into winter landscapes.

These seasonal colour changes occur in a number of animals and birds including the willow and white-tailed ptarmigan; least, long-tailed and short-tailed weasel; and the snowshoe hare.

These adaptations to the annual cycle of winter snows and summer foliage have evolved to maximize their camouflage throughout the year. Predator and prey alike have evolved similar strategies to help them to stay hidden. While weasels are voracious predators, they're also on the menus of other, larger predators. The same pressures that forced snowshoe hares and ptarmigan to change colours, also affect them.

Changing your colour to take advantage of seasonal camouflage only works when the camouflage matches the season. Since historic weather trends varied only slightly from one year to the next, the timing of colour change for most of these diverse species was largely tied to the length of daylight in spring and fall. While in the past it may mean that a snowshoe hare, ptarmigan, or weasel might have a short period of mismatched colour, the majority of their season was ideally suited to the prevailing background colours.

Brown weasels and hares, along with mottled ptarmigan, simply disappear in the summer landscapes of the Rockies while white animals offer similar protection in snow-covered landscapes.

Many times I've been scared to death while cross-country skiing when a covey of ptarmigan, also called an "invisibleness" of ptarmigan, suddenly flush at your feet. These tiny grouse-like birds allow themselves to be completely buried by snow for warmth, only flushing when you're almost on top of them. A quiet cross-country ski is suddenly interrupted by an explosion of feathers.

Changing climates is wreaking havoc on many of these animals. A white ptarmigan against a snowless alpine meadow is just as dangerous as brown snowshoe hare against a snowy forest. If your colouration is in stark contrast to your environment, you are also far more visible to potential predators.

Climate change is causing many challenges to plants, animals, and birds in the north country. Warming climates can cause mismatches in reproduction schedules, emergence from winter hibernation, migration, and even connection to key food sources.

If a bird's migration is timed to allow it to nest just as certain insects emerge in the spring - and then those insects emerge several weeks earlier - than the bird's reproductive success is put at jeopardy. So many of nature's key events are timed to historically predictable connected events. Animals give birth when the maximum amount of food should be available. Birds migrate at the right time to take advantage of seasonal foods in their winter and summer ranges. Animals emerge from hibernation when new foods should be available to help them regain strength after a long winter sleep.

Just like the colour change schedule of animals, if the schedule changes then how flexible are the animals in their response to this change? So many annual cycles are hard-wired into plants and animals that their ability to respond to rapid changes can be very limited.

Back in episode 42, I talked about a discovery in Alaska where bears were choosing elderberries over salmon for the first time. Historically the berries ripened after the salmon run and offered grizzlies a nutritious food after a long period of feeding on salmon. With warming climates, the berries are now ripening at the same time the salmon are running. The bears have to choose one food and they picked the berries. This means they no longer have the same feeding period over the summer months. No longer do they have a long period of feeding on salmon, followed by time to munch down on elderberries. The foods are now out of sync with the bears historical feeding schedule.

When all of these evolutionary behaviours emerged, climates were, more or less, relatively stable. Days with snow varied year after year within a reasonable margin of error. When the climate changes so fast that winter arrives later and later, and spring arrives earlier than unless the animals can respond quick enough they'll find themselves with a contrasting coat that makes them far more visible to their predators.

Like the moths in 19th century England, they can't count on their colouration to help hide them from hungry hunters.

These colour mismatches have prompted numerous studies to look at how individual species are able to respond to these rapid changes. A 2012 study looking at snowshoe hares looked at their response to fewer snow-covered days each year. It found that since the colour change of hares is most likely connected to the length of day, their vulnerability to shorter winters would be a factor of their flexibility to alter the timing of their autumn and spring moults where they grow a coat of a different colour. Any hare that is white when the landscape is not, has a target on their back. Conversely, a brown hare is in danger against a snowy backdrop.

Populations of snowshoe hares, more so than most animals are absolutely tied to their level of predation. Lynx evolved to eat snowshoe hares almost exclusively while many other animals will also take a hare whenever possible. The simple fact that they were born delicious means they're on the menu of any carnivore lucky enough to see past their camouflage.

In the mountain west, the population of hares rises and falls in concert with predation from lynx. As the hare population rises, lynx produce more kittens which means they need more hares. As lynx increase their predation on hares, the hare population drops. Fewer hares result in a subsequent drop in lynx numbers. These two animals are connected like few others.

For an animal that lives and dies by its ability to hide, having the right match between colour and landscape provides huge advantages to appropriately coloured individuals. This means that, as climate changes, those hares who's pelts allow them to best hide will have the optimum opportunity to survive and, subsequently, pass those adaptations on to their young.

This study looked at the hare's ability to vary its colour phase based on changing climate realities. If individual hares are able to adjust to rapidly changing seasonal realities than those changes would be quickly passed on through the population. This study found that the fall moult which turned their coat to white had little flexibility in terms of timing. This meant it was likely hard-wired to its connection to the length of daylight. The spring moult though showed some signs of adaptation with a slight ability to slow or increase colour change based on local conditions.

Ptarmigan are in a particularly dangerous situation in the mountain west. Not only are climates warming, but these birds are specialized to live at the very highest elevations. As climates continue to warm, conditions will likely see them forced up higher and higher up the mountain until they literally run out of habitat.

Ptarmigan are also experiencing a similar mismatch between seasonal colour. While physiology can take too long to adapt to rapid changes in their environment, out of season white ptarmigan are known to work to soil their feathers after breeding to try to minimize their contrast to the background landscape.

Many weasels are experiencing similar challenges. Recent studies of the smallest predator in the country, the least weasel, have found that it's also finding itself moving from predator to prey due to its unexpected visibility caused by lack of snow. Almost all predators are also prey to larger animals and for this diminutive weasel, being visible means potentially being someone's dinner.

In a Polish study looking two varieties of least weasel, one that changes colour during the winter and one that doesn’t, it shows that climate change, like the moths of England, is showing rapid changes to populations.

In many colour changing animals, there are usually individuals who don't change colour. In northern climates, this usually means that the brown weasels have a lower chance of survival during snowy months.

For many weasels, predation from largely, birds of prey, can be the highest cause of mortality in a particular year. Like the moth study in England, this study found that camouflage was the most important factor determining predator detection in weasels.

As climate changes and winter snows dwindle, weasels may find that white winter weasels are more heavily predated than weasels that don't change colour. Southern brown populations will likely shift north as white weasels find themselves falling to the talons of hawks.

Changing climates are changing everything. The news stories often talk about what WILL happen with changing climates but the changes are happening right before our eyes.

Last fall I watched a red fox kill an arctic fox near Churchill Manitoba while working as a polar bear viewing guide. The red fox has migrated north and arctic fox are very vulnerable to invasive predators.

Alpine animals like ptarmigan and pikas are being forced higher and higher up the mountains until they simply run out of mountain. This makes them some of our most vulnerable animals.

The role of seasonal colour change will evolve over the next 50-100 years. Animals that are out of phase with the season will find themselves increasingly on the menu. Behavioural adaptations, like the ptarmigan soiling its white plumage, may help, but we may also see populations migrating, changing, and disappearing depending on each animals ability to react to unprecedented rates of change.

For now, marvel at every sighting of ptarmigan, hare, and weasel. They're dealing with intense climate challenges and only time will tell how they succeed to changes, not of their making.

Next up…Hollywood North

Hollywood North

The mountain west has long been the backdrop behind many successful movies. I get a kick out of the fact that the first silent movie filmed in the Rockies was called Cameron of the Royal Mounted, and Cameron is my last name.

In this early film, a Scottish immigrant becomes a member of the Mounties only to be accused of forgery. To clear his name, he had to capture a gang of train robbers and stop a band of rogue natives.

Yup, this is about as unlikely a story as you could imagine in Canada. However Hollywood fell in love with the landscape - not to mention the exchange rate on the dollar - and Hollywood has been returning every year since.

Movies like Son of Lassie filmed in 1944 and Emperor Waltz in 1948. 1953 was a big year. That year Jimmy Stuart filmed the Far Country, Shelly Winters and Alan Ladd filed a movie called Saskatchewan…in Alberta, Howard Keel and Ann Blyth did a remake of the classic film Rose Marie, and Marilyn Monroe almost died on the Bow Falls in the town of Banff during the filming of The River of No Return.

If you watch the movie, the characters portrayed by Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchem are fleeing from a group of renegade natives by taking a raft down the Bow River. While the movie is ostensibly set in the middle of nowhere Montana or Wyoming, it was filmed in and around the communities of Banff and Jasper.

One of the pivotal scenes in the movie has them rafting over the Bow Falls while a hail of arrows falls around them from the cliffs above. Since movie effects weren't as advanced as they are today, it's pretty obvious that it's two mannequins on the raft but the effect is still a good one.

Even though Marilyn was not actually on the raft, the crew had to do some close-ups of her near the actual falls so they could see the look of terror in her eyes. Unfortunately, while she was posing, she fell and almost did go over the falls. In the end, she was lucky to limp away with just a broken ankle. After this point, the bell staff at the Banff Springs Hotel got to draw lots to see who would get to push Marilyn around in her wheelchair.

A quick google search will turn up numerous photos of Marilyn relaxing around the hotel and golf course with her crutches during filming.

In one of the other classic films of 1953, Howard Keel and Ann Blyth did a remake of the classic Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald film Rose Marie. One of the biggest tourism myths in the Rockies is that the 1936 film with Eddy and MacDonald was also filmed in this area. At the Maligne Lake Chalet, they even have a canoe nailed to the ceiling with a carved wooden sign claiming to be the original canoe from the movie. Unfortunately, it’s a complete falsehood. Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald never filmed in Canada. Their scenes were filmed in the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada.

There were some scenes of Mounties training that were filmed in Canada but none of the major scenes was filmed here.

Today, few movies come to Banff and Jasper to film. Scenes like Bow Falls are photographed several million times each year making many of the panoramas simply too recognizable to sell the illusion that they are in Montana or Alaska.

They did continue to use the mountain parks in movies into the 1960's, including 1965's Doctor Zhivago. In that movie, one of the classic scenes takes place on the train to Yuriatin, ostensibly in Siberia, but it's actually filmed in the Spiral Tunnels in Yoho National Park. When the train emerges, a keen observer will recognize the distinctive peak of Cathedral Mountain rising above the valley.

According to the IMDB movie database, this scene used stock footage and none of the actual production was done in Canada. The Wikipedia page does suggest the train scene was actually filmed here with the cast members.

Another long-held myth was that the train station at Lake Louise was used in the movie. That's completely false, Almost all of the filming took place in Spain and Finland over a 10-month period.

Regardless of whether the actors were actually here, the Spiral Tunnels will live on in one of the most classic films of the 20th century. The film earned 111.7 million dollars in Canada and the U.S. and when adjusted for inflation, ranks it right up there with many of today's big screen blockbusters.

After Doctor Zhivago, the area around the Stoney Reserve near Morley began to be the focus of film crews. The mountain panorama that includes Mount Yamnuska is a constant presence in some classic films. Films that represent this area include my favourite Dustin Hoffman film, 1970's Little Big Man, and 1975's Buffalo Bill and the Indians starring Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster.

Before long, movies began to discover the wider Kananaskis Country landscape and it's now become one of the most filmed mountain locations in Canada. Films that kicked off the filming in this area include the 1980 film Death Hunt with Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, and 1988's Dead Bang with Don Johnson and Penelope Ann Miller. Others include 1993's The Last of the Dogmen with Tom Berenger, which also included footage of Takakkaw Falls in Yoho National Park and the classic film Legends of the Fall with Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt. This movie had locations in Calgary, Morley, and Vancouver.

More recent films have included 2010's Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio as well as another DiCaprio film, 2015's The Revenent.

The movies and TV series keep coming back to this amazing landscape. Popular TV shows like Hell on Wheels and Fargo were also filmed in and around Calgary. If you visit the mountain west this year, be sure to study the vistas around you. You may see them in your favourite movies.

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Don't forget to check the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep061. As usual, if you'd like to reach out to me directly, you can comment on the show notes or hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron. And with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go hiking.

Orchids tricking Bumblebees

Wandering trails around the Bow River valley, it seems like every day there are new and exciting changes taking place. The leaves have begun to emerge and the early season blooms are adding a splash of colour to the meadows and forest leaf litter.

Today I saw my first Calypso orchids of the season. These tiny, delicate orchids are one of the first forest flowers to emerge in the spring. The forest floor is still a tangle of pine needles with nary a hint of colour, other than the few green leaves and similarly coloured buffaloberry blooms, willow bushes, and bilberry.

Calypso, or Fairy Slipper orchids as they are also known, are one of the most beautiful of the mountain orchids. More intricately coloured than the showier Yellow Ladyslipper Orchid, it takes a keen eye to see the amazing detail in the bloom.

Each plant produces a single basal leaf close to the ground. In the spring, not long after the snows have melted, a single stem will emerge to produce a single, tiny flower. They rarely reach higher than 20 cm above the ground and the flowers are only around 3 cm across.

In some regions, it's nicknamed "Hider-of-the-north" because it's so easy to miss. While there are 4 species globally, there are only two found in the mountain west, Calypso bulbosa var. americana and Calypso bulbosa var. occidentalis.

On the eastern side of the great divide, you'll only see the americana variety while British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana and Alaska have both.

All of the flowers are similar in appearance. The first thing you'll notice on close examination is the typical ladyslipper appearance. Usually, 3 sepals and 3 identical petals rise vertically and to the side of the flower. The actual slipper has a pinkish cover and the pouch is intricately coloured with dark purple streaks. It sports a yellow beard which holds pollen, and a lower lip.

In the eastern slopes, the americana variety has a white to pinkish lip while the western occidentalis variety has a lip covered with darker purple spots.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable features of the Calypso orchid is that it doesn't provide nectar to the bumblebee queens that seek it out looking for a sugary reward. Instead, they get large amounts of pollen deposited on their body with no actual nectar for their effort.

This is not very common in nature. As you can imagine, providing a sugary treat is a huge motivator for bumblebees to come visit. Instead, the Calypso provides bright colouration that says, come over and say hi, and then provides little in return to the bumblebee.

Food deception, as this behaviour is known, has seen more intense study during the past few decades. Biologists have come up with a number of theories as to why it occurs. Food-deceptive orchids usually see fewer visits by bees for obvious reasons, but it can also help to ensure cross-pollination by making bees less likely to visit the same plant twice.

Two competing theories try to explain how food-deceptive orchids are able to attract pollinators even though they don't offer nectar.

The first focuses on the fact that they are often one of only a few bright flowers at this time of year, and this may increase their chances of being visited, despite the lack of nectar.

Alternatively, they may still benefit from other nectar-producing flowers nearby. Their blooming period overlaps with a few other pollen producers like willows and some bilberry plants. A 2015 study published in Scientific World Journal found Calypso pollen on 7% of bumblebee queens captured on willow plants, and 18.2% of those visited more than one flower.

Since flowering willows make an area attractive to bumblebee queens, the Calypso likely benefits from their proximity. On a smaller scale, the lack of a diversity of other flowering plants helps the Calypso to attract queens that may have been attracted to the area for willow or bilberry nectar.

Why not just provide nectar like other flowering plants? Quite simply, it's expensive. Calypso orchids save resources by not producing nectar. A single visit by a queen can take a lot of pollen and so they don't need too many repeat visits.

They still need to attract the queen though. Their bright yellow pollen beard and purple streaked pouch provide a visual attraction. They also have a strong smell similar to the smell of vanilla. Essentially, while the flower doesn't offer a reward, it still takes advantage of bright colours and a strong scent to attract a hungry bumblebee queen.

In the end, these tricky flowers are able to attract enough queens to ensure reliable pollination. That brings up another question: why just bumblebees queens. The simple answer is that the queens are the only bumblebees around when the Calypso blooms.

As summer begins to draw to a close, a bumblebee colony begins to prepare for the following year by producing a final brood of larvae that will contain several queens along with some males. It's those queens that will find a safe place to hibernate for the winter, usually around 20 cm below the surface. They produce glycol in their blood to keep them from freezing to death.

Other than these few queens, the rest of the colony dies at the end of every season. After a 6-month sleep, these groggy queens emerge to look for the very earliest spring flowers. In this area, Calypso are one of these wildflowers, along with willow, buffaloberry, and bilberry that greet their arrival.

It's this grogginess and the naivete of these newly emerged queens that is likely why the Calypso is able to fool them into pollinating them.

As she gathers strength and experience, she'll get to recognize Calypso and avoid them in the future. The next year, it'll be another naïve new queen and the process begins anew.

Her next order of business is to find a den. They're fond of mouse, ground squirrel, or weasel burrows. They'll even take advantage of an empty nest box as well. Once she finds a den, she begins the real job of preparing for a new brood of worker bees. Unlike honeybees that can have thousands of individuals, a bumblebee colony will only have a few hundred.

She starts by building a wax honeypot that she fills with nectar. This will offer her a food supply when the weather doesn't cooperate. They don't make hexagonal honeycomb-like honey bees, but instead, she makes waxy cups. Into these, she'll lay 5-15 eggs. These will pupate in about 20 days and emerge as adults after 4-5 weeks. From this point on her foraging days are over. These solely female workers will take over those duties and she'll spend the rest of her life in the den laying and tending to eggs.

At the end of summer, the colony begins to produce additional queens along with some males. They leave the nest and look for suitable mates. Once mated, the queens will try to feed on as much pollen as possible in order to store up reserves for the winter. She'll then look for a den to hibernate, waking up just in time for a new crop of Calypso to bloom.

Let's Talk Parks Canada

Way back in episode 26, I dedicated the entire episode to slamming some of the decisions that Parks Canada had made in the previous years that were putting the important ecological integrity of parks at risk. At that time, Parks Canada released the results of an intergovernmental panel that had listened to stakeholders looking into Canadians views on Parks Canada's management of the nation's parks.

Simultaneously, they were trying to force feed an $86.4 million dollar bike path from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields - while trails with decades of history were falling into disrepair. To their chagrin, a master of the Freedom of Information Act, Ken Rubin, managed to get all of the original internal documents from Parks Canada's own scientists that reflected the same concerns that many of us had - along with some that I hadn't even considered.

To the agencies credit, they didn't deflect the results of the report. They owned. It. Also in their defence, some of the decisions were a reflection of a decade of the Harper government's anti-science, anti-conservation policies. It was a decade of open the floodgates, spend money where it will return the most short-term returns and let the ecology be damned.

The Liberals have taken the time to listen to a decade of frustration on how Parks Canada has lost its way. I first came to the Canadian Rockies in 1980 along with my best friend, to hike the 176 km South Boundary Trail running from Nigel Creek in Banff all the way to Medicine Lake in Jasper National Park.

Today, routes like the north and south boundary trails are no longer viable backpacking routes. An April 16, 2018 document released by Parks Canada titled Backcountry Fact Sheet for Operators describes the routes as such:

"Users of the North and South Boundary trails should consider these more like wilderness routes and expect trees down, with a variety of un-bridged stream and river crossings. Campgrounds are primitive with little if any infrastructure apart from designated areas for cooking, camping and open pits for human waste."

When I visited in the 80's, Parks Canada was expanding the facilities at these backcountry sites by providing good toilets, trees for hanging food, and well-designated campsites. It was still a wilderness trail, simply due to the fact that it traversed long distances with little proximity to highways. At the same time, these were also the days of backcountry wardens and we regularly encountered them in the backcountry.

In 2018, once you leave the highway, fuggedabout seeing any representative of the Parks Canada Agency. The days of backcountry patrols are long gone. Even the warden cabins are falling into disrepair.

Now while the South and North Boundary Trails have always been considered wilderness trails, other trails like the Tonquin Valley Trail in Jasper National Park are not. Back in Episode 10, I talked about growing complaints about Jasper's most popular backcountry trails becoming virtually impassable due to decades of neglect.

Jasper's Fitzhugh Newspaper profiled the neglect. It quoted one particular example:

"When B.C. resident Philip McDouall set out with three friends to hike the Tonquin Valley Sept. 16, he expected to encounter challenging conditions typical of a backcountry trail. What he didn’t expect to find was appalling trail conditions, dilapidated infrastructure and facilities overflowing with excrement".

Of all the trails in Jasper, the Tonquin is one of the most iconic. The article continued:

"On top of the appalling trail conditions, he also said many of the campsites are in a state of disrepair with dilapidated cooking areas, broken bear poles and outhouses that were nearly overflowing.

At the cl*throe Campsite, in particular, he said the outhouse was so full there was evidence people had been defecating in other areas of the site. 'It was horrible,' said McDouall, 'The way the one chap described it, when you lifted the lid up and sat down you were literally sitting on the last person’s turd'."

Why do I dredge up these old stories again? Because this past week the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna published the government's response to the 2017 "Let's Talk Parks Canada" nationwide consultation.

The early results of the consultation, which I talk about in Episode 26 was just the first response from the government on the many challenges facing our parks and protected areas, as well as cultural, and aboriginal sites.

McKenna, in the government's official response to the consultations published just last week, has reaffirmed Parks Canada's commitment to making the protection of ecological integrity job one.

The government has taken a beating over the past few years over the increased development within the parks and the endless focus on bringing more and more cars through the park gates. Most of this was the legacy of the Harper years, but the Liberals are trying to chart a new course. While the words are comforting, we'll need to see whether the words result in action.

(I'll add a link to the report in the show notes for this episode). The report puts forward three priorities for Parks Canada going forward:

1. To protect and Restore our national parks and historic sites through focussed investments, working with Indigenous peoples, working with provinces and territories, and ensuring ecological integrity is the first priority in decision making.
2. Enable people to further discover and connect with our parks and heritage through innovative ideas that help share these special places with Canadians.
3. Sustain for generations to come the incredible value—both ecological and economic—that our parks and historic sites provide for communities. The value they bring to fighting climate change, protecting species at risk, and shaping our Canadian identity and jobs and economic opportunity for local communities.

These are all things that we have been fighting for for the past decade in the mountain west. During the engagement process, the number one concern voiced was simply that the parks were not being protected and that ecological integrity was NOT the first priority.

Respondents also voiced concerns over the reduced role of science and scientific funding in the decision-making process. Parks Canada has historically produced some of the most compelling wildlife research in the country and many of the respondents, myself included, reflected this disillusionment.

Along with reductions in scientific funding, rigor, and the freedom to publish, respondents lamented the lack of maintenance of existing facilities. I've covered this in the preamble to this story but the challenge remains. Decades of decline leave long lists for renewal.

In defence of Parks Canada though, many good things have begun to happen on this front. There have been huge investments in trailhead facilities in Jasper, along with dramatic investments into the Mount Edith Cavell day-use area. While the focus currently seems to be on repairing long-neglected front-country facilities, it's also important that funds are equally invested in even more decrepit backcountry campsites, trails, bridges, and signage.

The more backcountry facilities deteriorate, the more damage the use of backcountry trails generate. If trails are experiencing deep rutting or flooding, hikers will bypass these areas leading to widening or braiding of trails. If outhouses are not maintained than hikers will bypass them and backcountry sanitation is also compromised.

Parks has also realized that decisions have not been made transparently in the past. Decisions allowing the Glacier Skywalk, and tentatively an $86.4 million dollar bike trail from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields are only two examples. Other decisions allowing expansions to the Lake Louise Ski areas should also be coming into question.

The Icefields bike trail should be immediately cancelled and reviews into the Lake Louise Ski Hill Expansion properly assessed.

Participants in the study displayed a lack of trust in the transparency of decisions along with the ability of Parks Canada to really put ecological integrity on the top of their priorities. When stated goals simply don't match management decisions, trust gets eroded.

Minister McKenna also vowed to focus on both ecological integrity AND to "restore funding to research, ecological monitoring, and public reporting." The past decade has not been easy on Parks Canada and the nation's parks and reserves desperately need stable funding to ensure important research is ongoing.

The 30-year study of wildlife movement corridors and highway crossing structures is a great example. The global value of this study is largely based on its long years of study. Good science takes time, and this study shows dramatic changes in wildlife adaptation to crossing structures over time. Without stable funding, science like this would be lost.

We need the federal government to be a leader in research, ecosystem and facility restoration, and environmental assessments. These pillars can help to reduce some of the damage caused by a decade of neglect.

Traffic management in busy parks was also a key point in the feedback received by Parks Canada. Over the past decade or so, with deteriorating backcountry conditions and increased frontcountry development, some 95% of the traffic visits the same 2% of the park - the paved corridors.

As an example, traffic on Banff Townsite roads increased 17% between 2014 and 2017, increasing from 22,600 to 27,500 per day during July and August.

This weekend's Victoria Day holiday could see a repeat of last year. On the Sunday of the long weekend, Banff saw 31,600 cars moving in and out of the townsite. The roads are only designed to accommodate 24,000 cars per day.

The cars backed up at both entrances to town with delays in some cases stretching as much as 30 minutes.

This doesn't even take into account the increased transit service in the mountain parks. Local Roam Transit saw an increase of 25 percent during July and August. While the final numbers are not in, it's expected that some 700,000 riders will have taken advantage of the service.

In addition to this, vast numbers used shuttles from Calgary to Banff, Banff to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, and from the Lake Louise overflow campground to Moraine Lake and Lake Louise.

Last summer, ATS Traffic performed magic in terms of keeping vehicles moving, reducing traffic jams, and keeping people from parking for kilometres along busy roadways. While this is laudable, we need to ask ourselves an important question: how many visitors are simply too many?

If our focus is on bringing more and more and more people to the shore of Lake Louise, we may reduce traffic snafus, but we are also negatively impacting the visitor experience. Ten years of the Harper government trying to push as many cars as possible through the gates to cash in on the rush didn't factor in the importance of the experience.

Tourism is fickle. The experience is critical. Last summer, I was on a multi-day trip and was finishing my day at a hotel in the Village of Lake Louise. My most beautiful lady, Jules was coming to meet me to stay the night and have a nice dinner at the Station Restaurant.

She drove from Canmore to the Lake Louise exit. To meet me, she needed to take a left turn off of the exit, but the ATS Traffic staff forced all cars to turn right towards the ski hill. She complied, even though it was the wrong direction. When she had an opportunity, she did a u-turn to head back towards the village.

When she got to the village, no vehicles were allowed up the road towards the Chateau. Instead, they were all required to turn right to go towards the Station. She was becoming increasingly frustrated and was on the verge of heading home when she was finally allowed the right of way.

Essentially, they were stacking cars off of the highway. The roads don't have the capacity to accommodate so many vehicles trying to go up the hill to the Chateau, so the ATS staff were simply stacking the cars along any road that was available. This prevented cars from backing up into the busy traffic lanes of the Trans-Canada Highway.

It was one of the most painful tourism experiences I've witnessed, but safety was the primary concern. When we walked to the restaurant, we chatted with drivers stuck in the various stacking lanes and they expressed major frustration. Many had travelled long distances to see Lake Louise but instead were stuck in Toronto-style traffic.

Even if they eventually made it to the lake, along with the thousands of other visitors in their convoy, the experience was not a positive one. As a destination, we can't afford large groups of visitors flocking to sites like Trip Advisor and saying: "don't go to Banff…they've ruined it!".

We need to look at hard limits to the number of people that can visit sites like Moraine Lake and Lake Louise. As much as we need to appreciate the revenue that each additional car brings, we also need to think of the future. If tourists of today slam the experience, then how many visitors will come tomorrow?

This doesn’t even consider the impacts to wildlife and ecological integrity that comes about as a result of high-intensity, volume tourism.

Since park fees stay in the park they're collected, it forces the park to rely on those dollars for their operating costs. When parks depend on gate fees, it's hard to imagine they can focus on improving visitor experiences and ecological integrity when doing so requires them to give up large amounts of important operating income.

The funding of the park should NOT require the park to compromise its mandate in order to have the cash to keep the lights on.

One of the final topics covered by Minister McKenna has to deal with expanding opportunities for new people to experience Canada's Parks. She repeatedly mentions "new Canadians" as a group that, as the future of Canada, need expanded opportunities to explore and learn from our natural landscapes.

I totally agree that new Canadians can play a huge role in the future of our parks but we need to facilitate the experiences in a way that will help them understand the ecology, sensitivity, and uniqueness of the parks.

When literature is only available in two arbitrary languages, we're not facilitating the experiences of visitors whose first language is not English or French. Canada has huge numbers of tourists arriving from countries like Germany, Japan, India, Taiwan, Korea, and increasingly, China.

Many of these visitors don't come from places with intact wilderness or truly WILD life. We read about wildlife habituation and other park management challenges, and often the names in the articles reflect the potential for language barriers. We need to make sure that the literature we provide to visitors is in a language they can understand.

If we want visitors to the National Parks to respect and appreciate nature, we have to help them understand just how delicate wilderness really is. That is best done without artificial barriers. All literature should be available at least in English, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic.

I would also argue that Parks Canada should reach out to diverse communities through outreach as a way to help bring the messages of conservation to these same communities in their native language.

Let's make sure our visitors have all the tools they need to have the best, and safest, visit possible. The landscape will thank us for it.

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Don't forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for step-on, hiking, and photography guides in the Canadian Rockies. You can find us online at www.WardCameron.com or visit our Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/WardCameronEnterprises. If you'd like to reach out to me on Twitter, you can hit me up @wardcameron. Don't forget to visit the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep060 for links to additional information as well as an easy subscribe button so you'll never miss an episode…and with that, the sun's out and it's time to go hiking. I'll talk to you next week.

Local Photographers

If you're a regular listener, you'll already know that I am both a photographer and author. It was through both of these rolls that I'm feeling very sad today to hear of the passing of Doug Leighton.

Doug was a visionary photographer who introduced countless numbers of people to the magic of the Canadian west. His coffee table books and calendars were widely collected. I remember a particular favourite was a large format 11 x 14-inch calendar which thousands of people bought simply so they could frame the images.

We were both published by Altitude Publishing in Canmore and I had a great appreciation for the work that Doug produced for them. It was an especially appropriate relationship for Doug. Altitude publishing was created by another pioneer photographer from Banff by the name of Byron Harmon. For the larger part of a century, Altitude Publishing represented the very best of mountain imagery, and Doug wore that mantle well.

Doug left the Bow Valley in 2005 and moved to the Blaeberry Valley near the mountain community of Golden, B.C. where he passed with his family on March 28, 2018.

Doug was born in Banff in 1953 and the mountains were his inspiration for all of his life. Rest well, Doug. You helped us all see the Rockies just a little bit clearer.

Another local photographer, John E. Marriott has recently been honoured by the League of Landscape Photographers for his long practice of ethical wildlife photography. League magazine is a collective of photographers for whom ethical image capture is their first priority.

As they state on their website:

"Rather than a top-down, formal structure, the League of Landscape Photographers is a grassroots group comprised of photographers with similar values. It transcends borders both physical and digital. Ifyour arthas something personal to say about the world, if you photograph with care and respect for other people and the environment around you, if youpost these values (or yourown ethical values) to the world – then you are the League."

John was awarded The Best of the League for 2018. The advent of digital cameras has seen tens of thousands of so-called wildlife photographers explode onto the scene. Those of us that photograph WILD life understand that the well-being of the animal or bird is what matters - not the photograph.

John has been an advocate for wildlife for decades. He not only refuses to photograph captive or baited animals, he is a powerful opponent of such practices.

Here in the Rockies, every year we see more and more people crowding animals, baiting and enticing them, offering food, and even illegally using wildlife tracking equipment to locate research subjects.

Way back in episode 6, I shared a story of Banff Park Wardens finding evidence of photographers using antennas designed to help researchers keep track of animals fitted with radio collars just so they could photograph them.

I've been a wildlife photographer for many years and I've seen many indefensible actions by unethical photographers, but this is a new level of low. You can listen to the story at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep006.

Social media is full of photographs of distressed animals, baited owls, and all means of creating situations dangerous for the photographer, but all too often, more dangerous for the animal.

Photographers like John call out this practice. He has made a career of raising the bar and educating photographers on how to capture ethical images. No photograph is worth the life of a grizzly bear, or wolf, or owl.

As the League puts it:

"Not only does John practiceethical wildlife photography, but he is also an activist for wildlife causes. His YouTube video series,Exposed with John E. Marriott, highlights wildlife conservation concerns with ideas for concrete results. John is not a complainer but one who points out the facts with solid background research and then puts his knowledge into positive action. John also takes his wildlife ethics and philosophy for conservation on tour with him when heteaches other photographers. Anyone who has been on aJohn Marriott tourwill come away not only with great pictures but also with a bigger appreciation of the issues and the ethics around wildlife and nature photography."

Congratulations John. Keep on helping us all to be better photographers. If you'd like to see more of John's work, check him out at https://wildernessprints.com/. You can purchase his amazing images, wildlife photography books, or join him on one of his incredible workshops.

Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold was one of the fathers of conservation in the U.S. and was a forester, educator, writer, and lover of the outdoors. According to the Aldo Leopold Foundation, he was a true believer in the development of a "land ethic" based on an ethical, caring relationship between people and nature.

In 1933, he published the very first textbook about wildlife management. Throughout his life, he focused on understanding ecology and the relationships that made up complex ecosystems.

While I'm working on this podcast week in and out, I spend countless hours reading long scientific journal articles. More often than not, I have three windows open on my computer:

• Two windows of the same article. One I use to highlight the important aspects of the study and another one so I can search for the definitions of acronyms without losing my place in the main article.
• Then I have another Google search window open to help me translate the arcane jingo that allows scientists to be precise but serves to exclude vast numbers of readers from understanding the value of the research.

Aldo Leopold understood natural systems, but more importantly, he understood how to share that knowledge. When you read his words, you instantly are transported to a new world full of wonders and magic.

I often joke that my job is to take the important science being done by ologists, whether they are palaeontologists, biologists, geologists; the list goes on - and make it cool. Aldo understood the clash between science and ecology.

In his most important work: A Sand County Almanac, ironically published more than a year after he passed away, offers an insight that has remained with me for the past 30 years:

"There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.

A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets."

That last line struck me like a hammer when I first read it decades ago. The study of ecology was slowly starting to become more mainstream. I've never forgotten the concept that the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.

Ecology is all about understanding all of the instruments. Every strand in the ecological web, just like in an orchestra, is critical to the functioning of that system. Leopold helped millions of people to suddenly see that the orchestra was more than just a collection of instruments - it was the harmony that they create when combined in just the right way.

Whirling Disease

If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll already know that whirling disease has been spreading across the river systems of Alberta over the past year or so.

I first spoke about it in episode 7 when it was first discovered in Canada in Banff's Johnson Lake. It is a parasite that affects most trout species and can result in massive losses. For additional background information, check out episodes 008, 020, and 029

In the past year, the parasite has been discovered across Alberta's most iconic river systems including the Bow, Oldman, Red Deer, and most recently, the North Saskatchewan River systems.

Johnson Lake, where the discovery first took place, is particularly important. At first look, it's a tiny mountain lake with intensive human use. On a large scale, it doesn't seem like one lake among many watersheds would matter, but Johnson Lake is unique.

The Bow River watershed is a blue-ribbon trout stream. It is also home to critical populations of endangered west slope cutthroat trout.

Cutthroat trout have been decimated over the past few decades as introduced species like brook, brown, and rainbow trout have become the dominant fish in the mountain west.

Native trout like the bull, or dolly varden, and west slope cutthroat trout can be outcompeted by these more aggressive invaders. Johnson Lake forms a transition zone between the wider Bow Valley river system and the upper portions of the watershed where the most important populations of cutthroat trout are found.

The original plan for Johnson Lake involved a winter draining of the lake to kill all the trout contained within it as well as to kill the alternate host of the parasite, bottom-dwelling tubifex worms.

At this point, 2,700 kg of fish has been removed from the lake along with 15,000 other fish from adjacent creeks.

At the same time, they were able to reduce the water level in adjacent creeks which feed into Johnson Lake and capture additional fish there.

Recently, as Park officials continued their work on the lake, it became apparent that there were a lot of streams feeding the local wetland which in turn fed into Johnson Lake. To remove the fish from the lake, it's critical to make sure that new migrants aren't just replacing those recently removed.

Draining the lake was seen as premature as they focused on reducing reinfection. Instead, they left nets in the lake to catch as many remaining fish as possible. They've also installed a barrier to prevent fish from re-entering the lake from tributaries.

For now, the focus has moved to the wetlands feeding the lake. If need be, once this work has been done, they can drain the rest of the lake if need be. It's now apparent that this will be an ongoing project as opposed to a short-term assault.

The goal is to prevent the parasite from moving further upstream into already vulnerable populations of cutthroat trout. Whirling disease can be responsible for vast losses within populations and when you have an already stressed one, it can be terminal.

If you visit Johnson Lake this year, please pay close attention to the warning signs. Whirling disease is not only easily transported on the soles of boots or boat paddles, it can remain viable for years. This means that you can wade into the lake today, put your waders in the garage for years, and then still infect a new body of water once you dust them off and wear them into a new water source.

Let's help keep our most sensitive trout healthy.

Kananaskis Grizzly Updates

First up…it's bear season in the Rockies again. While deep snows may have led a few of our bears to have a bit of a lay-in this year, Bear 122 was confirmed to be up and at-em by at least March 22 this year. He's merely the bellwether of all the other bears so if you're out on the trails, be sure to carry your bear spray from now on.

Grizzly bears have had a lot of challenges in the past few years, but today I'm bringing some good news. In a recent DNA study in Kananaskis Country, it seems things are currently OK for grizzly populations.

The most recent study looked at a vast 10,000 square km area stretching from the Trans-Canada Highway all the way to the Crowsnest Pass in southern Alberta.

DNA testing has revolutionized wildlife research. Because bears are predictable and are drawn to rub trees where bear after bear take the time to stop, rub and in many cases, leave a hairy howdy do.

Researchers can visit these trees and collect these furry follicles, test the DNA and get a good idea of individual bears that were using a particular territory.

One of the best illustrations of this was a time-lapse video published by Kananaskis Country that showed a great example of how many individual bears visit rub trees. Not only is it an awesome example of science in actions, it's just fun - and very Jungle Bookey. I'll leave a link in the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep059

Bears are driven by their noses and scent posts are visited by one and all as they travel through an area. In some cases, researchers added a bit of extra cologne in the form of bear lure to help attract newcomers to the trees.

Motion activated cameras helped to make sure that every dance was captured but more importantly, the DNA in the form of hair samples.

According to the study, they found 16 grizzlies per thousand square kilometres within the northern part of the region that includes Kananaskis Country. The southern region is still doing well with 12 bears/1,000km2.

So how many bears are calling the Kananaskis home? According to this study, there are approximately 96 individuals with 52 females and 43 males in the northern section and 22 females and 22 males in the south.

Yup! They can get this specific in terms of numbers. DNA doesn't lie.

Hair samples will continue to be an important way to track bear populations in the future. These results will vary with the local conditions for the bears though.

Grizzlies populations reflect the ecology of the landscape they call home. If food conditions vary due to drought or other conditions, the bears will follow the food. Essentially, over time, results may vary but continued research will help to determine trends in bear movement.

As important as rub trees are, and as much of a traffic hub they form, they're not a place that the bears hang out. It's more of a pass by, spend a few minutes saying I've been here, and then moving on to leave the tree vacant for the next visitor.

The longest that researchers witnessed bears hanging around the rub trees was 9 minutes. Many bears just spent a few seconds to a few minutes…a quick rub to say they were here and then on their way.

This latest study was good news for Kananaskis Country. While grizzlies are a threatened species in Alberta, Kananaskis Country as a whole seems to be at its carrying capacity for bears.

Along with this good news was the discovery that slightly more than half of the bears were females.

When this happens Kananaskis Country ecologist John Paczkowski said, they encounter more cases of cubs being killed by other bears. It's nature's way of regulating their population.

Even as far back as 2009, I witnessed the first documented case of a female grizzly killing the cub of another female. Both of these females are favourite bears in Kananaskis. Bear 94 attacked and fatally injured the cub of Bear 104.

It has always been a puzzle as to why the attack occurred. Perhaps this might lend a clue.

Banff's population has also remained steady at 13 bears per 1,000 km2.

Grizzlies remain a threatened species, but this is very good news.

Bears are one of the truest symbols of the mountain wilderness. They are one of our most iconic animals. With more and more and more people visiting the parks, we need to keep on trying to educate visitors on the importance of enjoying wildlife safely.

The tourist season is getting ready to kick off once again. Let's all do our part to keep the bears and the people that want to view them, safe.

David Suzuki Honored by the University of Alberta

One of Canada's most beloved naturalists, Dr David Suzuki is set to receive an honorary doctorate of science for his years of environmental work. He has been a steady voice for decades on the importance of ecology and been a constant warrior for nature.

This is a story that has opened up a floodgate of introspection among interpreters, guides, naturalists, and scientists. Many of us have been really conflicted about our own personal feelings about this most reverent of Canadian figures.

Dr Suzuki spoke out at times when it wasn't cool. He never pulled a punch when conservation was on the line. He helped a generation of Canadians to recognize that nature has value. He made us focus on the natural landscape and the importance of keeping it both healthy and intact.

His television program The Nature of Things is seen in more than 40 countries and has focused the world's attention on the challenges facing our oceans and fisheries, climate change, and clean energy.

He is a member of the Order of Canada, our nation's highest civilian honour, and placed 5th on a list of the greatest Canadians to ever live.

This impending honour has made many of us come to grips with our conflicting opinions of Dr Suzuki.

I first heard him speak some 20 years ago in Canmore. I booked the tickets months in advance and couldn't wait for the chance to meet a man that had had a significant impact on my career as a naturalist.

His presentation left me absolutely flat. It wasn't a presentation as much as it was a rant. It was doom and gloom and government inaction with little prescription for positive actions.

It didn't make me want to go out and act at all. It seemed that all the actions had already been done. The planet was finished and all that was left was for the multi-nationals to carve up the profits.

I began to realize that we all suffer fatigue when we try to protect something that's, not just important, but critical to our sense of being. I understood his frustration as ecological understanding seemed to be ignored from the larger political discourse.

I decided to forget the event and remember David as I had imagined him before the presentation. Few people have done so much for the environment, even if just in terms of awareness, as Dr David Suzuki.

Recently, an article in the Calgary Herald by University of Alberta environmental economist Andrew Leach caught my eye, in part because it was shared by another person for whom I have great respect, former Banff National Park Superintendent Kevin Van Tighem.

In the article, Leach outlines why he would never share a stage with Dr Suzuki. Now before I move forward, Andrew Leach is no ordinary economist. He's the architect of Alberta's climate change plan.

I know. For some of you, I've just lost all credibility…Alberta and climate change policy…what folly is this? For many people in British Columbia at the moment, as wars of words fill the airwaves, Alberta is nothing but an oil-hungry, tar sands purveyor of doom trying to force an unwanted pipeline down the throats of more environmentally friendly B.C.

Forget the fact that our neighbour's number one export is coal, the current war of words is not moving either province forward. I'm not here to defend either one, but rather to try to understand a part of my challenges with Dr Suzuki.

In this modern world, everything has a value, whether we want it to or not. Natural ecosystems and their processes contribute to the natural world. Intact ecosystems help to protect watersheds by storing water in terms of glaciers, lakes, and aquifers.

Intact ecosystems help to provide connection to the creatures that call it home, allowing them to move between seasonal habitats free from disturbance.

Today, intact ecosystems also help to offer protection in times of changing climates. It also allows ecosystems to change more slowly than already stressed environments where increases in temperature can become the final stressor that causes ecosystem collapse.

Keeping ecosystems intact requires political will. More and more, economists are one of the most important tools helping politicians sell the importance of conservation to a province or a nation that may not see the financial return on investing in ecosystem protection.

Dr Suzuki has, has for years, referred to economics as a form of brain damage. To him, all economists do is find the most efficient way to clear-cut a mountain or farm salmon, nature be damned.

He has gone so far as to call it a "pretend science". Today, some of the greatest climate warriors are economists. National governments understand numbers, and a well-versed ecological economist that can quantify the risks behind environmental choices can be worth their weight in gold.

Natural ecosystems help to regulate climates and provide resources that were, and are, critical to our modern lives. Critical to these discussions today are the economists! If we agree that nature has value, then just what are those values? Economists that specialize in natural systems help organizations and government to see beyond the quarterly balance sheet and hopefully, make better policy decisions.

Very dear to our heart in the central Rockies has been British Columbia's choice to end the trophy hunt for grizzly bears. This decision wasn't just a spur of the moment decision. It was a culmination of huge public outcry, along with economics. Every study of the value of live bears as compared to trophy bears has overwhelmingly supported the ban on hunts.

Economics showed that the viewing of live bears is worth orders of magnitude more than the value of the commercial hunt. It is the work of economists that help to quantify those numbers.

As a nation, we've made grand promises as part of the Paris Accords to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This is no small task. If we can agree that climates are warming and that Canada, and all of its component parts, need to work together to accomplish any goal towards this reduction than we can also agree that it's a monumental challenge.

These goals can only be accomplished as a nation. Alberta has been working very hard to reduce its emissions and has started a phase-out of coal-burning power plants. Its carbon levy is also a powerful tool to help push the province towards a gradual phase-out of carbon-based fuel sources.

Economists help to show the value of these changes on ecosystems. Bickering between provinces is not going to get the job done. Let's get it together Canada.

Time to take down your bird feeders Now that spring is, well, technically upon us. It's time to take down your bird feeders. Communities like Banff and Jasper, located within the national parks, already ban bird feeders. While Canmore is outside of the mountain parks, it has a bylaw that forbids bird feeders between April 1st and October 31st. While maintaining bird feeders can provide hours of amusem*nt in the winter months when chickadees and nuthatches gather for sunflower seeds, there is no need to have bird feeders during the summer months. While I don't have stats for Canadian bird feeders, some 40% of Americans regularly put out food for their feathered friends. It's important to distinguish back-yard feeders from visiting wild places to feed ducks and geese. Even in Canmore, it's important never to feed bread to ducks. In one study in Massachusetts, in a one month period, some 38,500 people fed ducks the equivalent of 7,800 loaves of bread. This didn't take into account the soda crackers, cheezies, popcorn, pretzels, cookies, peanuts, and other calorie-rich but nutrient poor foods. Feeding ducks encourages large flocks to congregate in areas that may not be able to naturally support such high numbers. It can cause increased stress, and provide a vector for disease to enter a population. Any time there are unsustainable numbers of any species, nature will find a way to take advantage of that, whether through the introduction of insects, parasites, or disease. That doesn't mean that all feeding has to be bad. This past week, I've begun to wake up to the song of our resident robin outside our window. We have the loudest, most persistent robin in Canmore…every time I have the opportunity to sleep in that danged…oh wait, that's another story. Proper feeding of birds during the winter months can provide some great entertainment Choosing the right seed mixture can do two things. It can help to improve your chances of attracting local birds and reduce the cleanup in the spring. Many cheap bird seeds include fillers that are not popular with some birds. Take the time to find out the best seed mixtures in your area so that the seeds you put out pack the best combination of calories and nutrition for the birds that may rely on them. Whatever strategy you choose, if you feed them, you need to clean up after them. Now is the time, at least if the snow ever melts, to clean up the remnants of your winter feeding. The ground beneath your feeder may be littered with empty sunflower hulls, faeces, and a great deal of seed kicked out of the feeder. Many years ago, I had a feeder on a second story balcony. I had a vast number of finches that invaded my feeders. What kind of finches? It was a very long time ago, but I think they were grey-crowned rosy finches. They simply took all the seeds from the feeder and kicked them to the ground where they preferred to feed. Time and again they emptied the feeder of sunflower seeds. When spring arrived, so many seeds had been ejected that the entire eavestrough around the balcony was clogged and rainwater couldn't flow through. That was the first time I realized that feeding in the winter means cleaning up in the spring. Living in a landscape with bears offers an additional reason to make sure that any feeders you fill in the winter are emptied in the spring and the area around it well cleaned. Even in areas where attracting unwanted wildlife isn't an issue, there are plentiful reasons to take spring cleaning seriously. Seed on the ground can rot, begin to smell, cause damage to grass and garden plants, allow mildew to grow, and even spread disease. Like feeding ducks, bird feeders allow birds to congregate at a single location which can help in the spread of disease. Birds can also suffer when bird seed mildews and rots. Always make sure your feeder is clean and dry. If you notice any adverse behaviour of birds, or signs of ill-health in your yard, dump, disinfect, and clean your feeder. It may not have anything to do with your feeder, but it only takes a few minutes to ensure that any seeds you offer are free of disease or toxins like salmonella. It's also helpful to remove your feeder if you notice any kind of outbreak of disease so that the birds disperse and reduce the level of contact found at most feeders. As the ground dries, check out the area beneath your feeder. There may be significant collections of seeds and seed husks, along with faeces. This is where a good, old-fashioned shop vac can be helpful. Take a rake to the ground and then suck the detritus up. If you can place your winter feeders above hard surfaces like sidewalks or wooden decks, you also have a much easier cleanup in the spring. Be especially cautious of having feeders above flower beds where rotting seeds can have negative impacts on the garden. If you plan your winter feeding around the spring cleanup, you can really reduce both the work and the risk that your feeding will negatively impact the birds your helping. The bears are up and exploring. Bird feeders need to be taken down so that inadvertent seed acts as an attractant. Bears in the Rockies don't have a lot of early season food choices. After meat, the next most nutritious food category for bears are seeds and nuts. A bird feeder full of sunflower seeds is an irresistible attraction. If you don't believe this, then check out the images on this page. Bears are very persistent when there is an easily available, high calorie food available. As communities, it's our job to keep the wild in wildlife and to keep our yards clear of attractants that may bring unwanted visitors. Next up…that ain't no lynx! Bobcats moving north It's no secret that climates are warming, winters are shorter, and snowpacks are thinner….bahahaha just kidding. This year has been epic for snow, cold, and persistence. In terms of climate change though, this winter is just simply a single data point on an ascending line on a graph of long-term average temperatures. Like most of us, other than the hardcore skiers and boarders with their cherry red spring skiing complexions, I'm absolutely tickled to see spring. By the way, if you're Canadian, and the chances are good based on my demographic, you may have seen the final Rick Mercer Report tonight. For 15-years Mercer has been poking fun at politics while bringing Canadians closer together. Over the years he had many highlights. As the story commented: "The self-proclaimed political junkie said some of the highlights from the show have been bungee jumping with his childhood hero Rick Hansen, interviewing every living prime minister, flying with the Snowbirds and dangling off the CN Tower." On the show, he recapped a session that poked fun at Environment Canada's weather forecasting that seems particularly apropos this year. Have you noticed that on every 7-day forecast there was a glimmer of hope on day-7? He joked that on every 7-day forecast, day 7 would show nicer weather. Of course, 7-day forecasts are mostly bogus, but he poked fun at the forecasters always giving us a glimmer of hope when the nights were cold and the cars were frosty. We'll miss you Rick. Oops. Sorry, back to bobcats moving north. Way back in Episode 16, I talked about a wide variety of species moving north with warming climes. You can check out that episode at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep016. I love cats and dogs. When I started my career as a naturalist way back in 1982, I hoped to encounter cougars and lynx in my explorations. I've been lucky to view lynx on numerous occasions, and followed their tracks on even more occasions. Cougars continue to evade me. I've seen tails disappearing into the trees, found fresh tracks, and even stumbled upon a kill site, but I've yet to be able to definitively say that I've seen a wild cougar. Bobcats? Back in the 80's, they were a thing of myth. I was trained with the understanding that lynx and bobcats were the only two animals that respected the 49th parallel. Lynx are truly Canadian. They evolved in our deep snowpacks and long winters. As snowshoe hares evolved bigger and bigger feet to allow them to escape predation, the lynx simply followed suit. Their feet also grew significantly bigger over time. Biologists call this coevolution. As one species adapts, so must its predators. Along with the massive feet, the lynx has distinctive tufts of hair on its ears. If you see a cat with sasquatch-like feet and ear tufts in snow country, you've found yourself a lynx. Bobcats on the other hand are much more diminutive. They lack the ear tufts of lynx and, because they evolved in shallower snowpacks and warmer winters, they lack the snowshoe-like feet of the lynx as well. Their bodies are also heavier. Small feet and heavy bodies makes for a sinky cat in deep snows, like the conditions historically found in the mountain west. So then what the heck are they doing in Canada? Apparently following the sun! While this winter is an anomaly, on a long-term trend, winters are getting steadily warmer. The snows arrive later and the spring arrives sooner…so what's a cat to do? Bobcats headed the same direction so many other animals have - north! A tracking study of the eastern Bow Valley conducted in 2010 found plenty of evidence that bobcats had followed the warming trends and moved right in. Over the past decade or so, reports of bobcats in southern Alberta and British Columbia began to pop up more and more regularly. Signs of bobcat were still rare, but they first began to show up in tracking studies in 2004. If this is news to you, it was to me as well. I had no idea that bobcats had made the move this far north as early as 2004. Like all the wild cats, they spent most of their time in the valley bottoms, preferring to stick to the more sun-exposed south side of the valley. Without the snowy adaptations of the lynx, bobcats took advantage of the landscape and the warmth of the sun to help guide them in their explorations. In a series of track studies conducted between 2004 and 2009 in the eastern Bow Valley, bobcat tracks were discovered 15 times, as compared to 81 times for cougar, and 153 for lynx. The eastern Bow Valley at that time was rarely used by wolves due to the fragmented habitat. In fact, there was no evidence of wolves in the eastern part of the valley between 2004 and 2009. Move a little further west, towards the north side of Canmore, and signs of wolves became more prevalent. For carnivores moving through the Valley of the Bow, the area from Heart Creek to Mount McGillivray is a critical pinch point for wildlife movement. The valley narrows, and high cliffs limit the movement options for animals through this area. Add to the mix the busy Trans-Canada Highway, Bow River, Canadian Pacific Railway, and industrial development on the north side of the valley, and the pinch is especially tight. One curious result in this study was that, in the most fragmented habitat around the town of Exshaw and the hamlet of Lac des Arcs. This narrow corridor, despite its cement plant, railway, and river forming barriers, the bobcat was the only wild feline to take advantage of the landscape. This may have shown that the bobcats are much more adaptable than lynx and cougar to urban environments. Like coyotes, these medium sized felines are showing a great ability to live in close quarters with people. Curiously, the first direct evidence in the Kananaskis Valley was in a photo captured by a wildlife camera in 2009. All it showed was a slightly blurry foot. As biologists studied the spot pattern, the apparent gait, and the size of the foot, they concluded that it had to be a bobcat. A recent article on the CTV news site, reports that Calgary is receiving hundreds of calls to its 311 city services hotline reporting bobcats wandering around urban and rural neighbourhoods alike. This article states that Calgary has: "two big areas where bobcats thrive; one in the southwest near Deer Run, the Weaselhead and Fish Creek Park and another in the northwest community of Varsity." Bobcats get along quite well in urban environments. Cities like Calgary are alive with red and gray squirrels, white-tailed jackrabbits, and other small mammals and birds. Bobcats are, in many ways, a large house cat. They are incredibly flexible in the prey they select, but they are bigger and so instead of mice and small songbirds, they can tackle jackrabbits and some of the very large urban gray squirrels. Although called gray squirrels, the urban squirrels of western Canada are almost as big as a house cat and usually jet black in colour. Warming climates are letting more and more plants, animals, birds, parasites, insects, and even diseases, to move north. There are many advantages to a cold climate, and we are losing some of those natural barriers to movement that helped to create the ecology that we have taken for granted for so long. In a study published in May of 2017 in the journal Phys.org, bobcat populations in the U.S. have begun to explode, becoming visible around some of the largest cities in the country, including Las Angeles. More and more, they are gaining coyote like boldness in communities. They have also benefitted from protections that have been afforded predators in the last few decades when biologists began to realize the importance of top level carnivores in keeping rodents, deer, and other potential pest animals in check. They found that the numbers of bobcats had tripled since the 1980s. As the study states: "The bobcat's success also reflects its ability to eat almost anything and thrive almost anywhere, from cornfields to swamps to suburban parks. With cottontail rabbits declining in New Hampshire, they shifted to preying on plentiful wild turkeys and squirrels." In British Columbia, biologists are seeing similar trends. T.J. Gooliaff, a Masters student at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, has been tracking the northern expansion of bobcats in B.C. He asked people to submit photos of lynx and bobcat across the province. He looked at more than 3,000 photos. They now have evidence of bobcats as far north as Prince George, much farther north than they have been found in Alberta. It's even slightly farther north than Edmonton, Alberta. Bobcats are here to stay. They are adaptable and in some areas, have been seen to simply wander from bird feeder to bird feeder looking for easy meals. Our communities are evolving, and coyotes are not the only carnivore roaming the trails at night. They are adaptable and can get just about anywhere. Unlike coyotes, a fence is little barrier to a bobcat. In the first story of this episode, I talk about cleaning up your bird feeders at this time of year. Bobcats might give us a reason to be vigilant even in the middle of winter. Also like coyotes, unattended pets are vulnerable and leaving pet food or other attractants can help to bring carnivores into your neighbourhood. Have you ever seen a bobcat in the Rockies? If so, I'd love to hear your story. Leave a comment in the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep058. Next up…return of the bruins The Bears are Back Well, after a long, hard, cold winter, I'm welcoming every sign of spring that I can. Since the weather has proven to be unreliable as an indicator of spring this year, why not use some of the more reliable signals that the season is here if not the weather. Just last week, robins began singing outside my home in Canmore. Canada geese are beginning to return to the north, much to the chagrin of many urban parks and golf courses, and while Balzac Billy might predict the length of winter, in the Bow Valley, we rely on our own indicator - the Boss! Bear 122, better known as the Boss, was first seen on March 24 of this year. Last year, he was spotted on March 5, but who wouldn't sleep in a bit given this winter's persistence? Just in case you've been living under a rock, Bear 122 is the top bruin in the Bow Valley. He's usually the first to be seen in the spring and the last to enter his den in the fall. He has a fearsome reputation but he's a bear that is a master of living in and around people. In all of his many encounters with hikers, he's not acted aggressively. Last summer I was guiding a group of hikers at Stanley Glacier. We stopped just before the first creek crossing to do a bear safety talk. As my colleague, Dave Honeyman of Canadian Rockies Alpine was going through the importance of bear safety, the Boss suddenly showed up on the other side of the creek. Since Dave was facing the group, he didn't see the Boss until one of the clients mentioned it. At this point, I just arrived to the location and, sure enough, Bear 122 was about 20 feet away following the creek. Safety being the priority, we got the guests to put away their cameras and head back towards the trailhead. The Boss, well he just meandered up the trail following the footsteps of countless groups that had headed out ahead of us. Our group, we decided to explore one of the many other fabulous trails in the Kootenay valley. Some bears can thrive close to people by combining a disinterest in them with an understanding of how to avoid the danger spots. Bear 122 essentially owns the CPR mainline and that's usually where he's first sighted in the spring. Most commonly, I've encountered him between Castle Junction and Lake Louise. When he first emerges from the den he's very lethargic. There is not much food available at this time of year and his main goal is to conserve energy and take advantage of any easy foods that might be available. Train tracks are often a good place to find food. There may be train or winter killed elk, deer, moose, or sheep that he can munch on, along with grain spills that might not have been cleaned up. Usually, the emergence of 122 marks the start of bear season. His disappearance in the fall marks its end. Every day, more and more bears are going to be lazily emerging from their dens to begin another summer of feeding, fattening, raising cubs, and mating. The boys usually emerge well ahead of females with cubs. Generally, we start to see the mom and kids out in early May. By that time, although the cubs look tiny, they are around 5 months old and keen to explore their world. On years like this one, when the landscape is still covered in a blanket of white, the bears will be looking for easy food sources. Again, it's a reason to clean up not just feeders, but any potential attractants in your yards. At this time of year, they become fairly visible along roadways as the heavy snows force them into the valleys where the roads dominate the landscape. While they are more visible at this time of year, they're also in a vulnerable condition. They've lost an incredible amount of weight over the winter and any added stresses can cause added challenges to them. If you're lucky enough to see one, please stay in your car. Enjoy the sighting from a good distance and try not to force the bear to move on. Every phone comes with an amazing camera these days and you can zoom in to incredible detail even from a distance. Our wildlife is our legacy. Please help us to ease the bears into their new summer season. Soon thoughts will turn to romance as females that do not have cubs emerge and the start of the mating season begins. Spring is a time of rebirth, renewal, and love. Birds are singing to attract mates, bears are going to be looking to hook up, and many of the creatures of the mountains, from insects to amphibians to birds will soon brighten up our landscape for yet another summer season. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so that you never miss another great story. Don't forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for step-on, hiking, photography, and snowshoe guides. We specialize in the mountain west and our guides are experts on the natural and human history of the Rockies. If you'd like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron. You can also follow us on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/WardCameronEnterprises…and with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go hike-a-shoeing…or is that show-a-hiking…whatever, I'll talk to you next week.

Welcome to episode 57 of the Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast, I'm your host, Ward Cameron and I'm recording this on April 1, 2018. This week I look at three amazing fossils that are teaching palaeontologists about the evolution of some of the world's oldest creatures. I also look at the return of red fox to the Rocky Mountains. It's an action-packed episode so with that said, let's get to it. Some wisdom from John Muir I wanted to start today with a fabulous quote by John Muir. As a hiking guide and naturalist, I see too many people striding through the wilderness, eager to reach a destination, or bag a peak, yet they miss the beauty that's all around them. For me, the best way to enjoy nature is to simply bathe in it. Spend time in the wilderness and let the energy and the ambience wash over you. If you really want to experience the mountain west, then stop, sit down and listen. Wander slowly along trails while filling all of your senses with endless stimulation. Feel the bark of a tree; listen for the sounds that make up the unique chorus of each location; get down on your knees and look at the tiniest things you can find; and become a part of something far bigger than you. John Muir was one of the greatest naturalists, nature writers, and activists that the U.S. has ever produced, along with the likes of Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold. He explored the American west during the mid to latter parts of the 19th century and was instrumental in helping to protect landscapes like Yosemite, Sequoia National Park, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Muir first arrived in California in 1868 and soon after made a pilgrimage into the Yosemite Valley. Muir wrote that: "He was overwhelmed by the landscape, scrambling down steep cliff faces to get a closer look at the waterfalls, whooping and howling at the vistas, jumping tirelessly from flower to flower". He was one of the first people to recognize the action of glaciers on the landscape and helped debunk the existing beliefs that the vistas were the result of earthquakes as opposed to glaciers. Muir was instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park, first as a state park in 1890, and then as a national park in 1906. In 1892, he helped found the Sierra Club and served as its first president. By the time he died in 1914, he had published some 300 articles and 12 books. John Muir spent his entire life exploring, bathing in, documenting, and fighting to protect natural, intact ecosystems. The John Muir Trail is one of the U.S.'s most beloved trails, yet had you asked what he thought of hiking, this was his response: "I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word 'saunter?' It's abeautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, 'A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them." - John Muir I couldn't agree more. Next up more Burgess wonders New Burgess Shale Discoveries The various exposures of the Burgess Shales in Yoho and Kootenay National Parks continue to provide new and exciting discoveries. It seems that each year introduces us to species never before described, or spectacular new fossils of old friends that allow palaeontologists to reclassify them based on new evidence revealed. One such fossil is the newly described Habelia optata. This fossil is not new to palaeontology. In fact, Charles Walcott, the original discoverer of the Burgess Shales, described the first specimen in 1912, only three years after he first stumbled on this bonanza of ancient life. A recent study published in BMC Evolutionary Biology has shed some amazing new light on this unique creature according to lead scientist Cédric Aria. In a recent CBC article, he stated: "It's like a centipede or perhaps an insect that would have not one pair of mandibles, but five." One of the challenges with fossils of the Burgess Shales is that they are found between two layers of shale. This leaves a flattened, reflective film in the rock layers. Think of them as a two-dimensional black and white photograph of an ancient creature. This means that each fossil may represent an image of a different angle or aspect of the animal and thus reveal details not visible in earlier samples. It's this constant evolution of understanding that helps fossils to eventually be classified in a much more exacting way. At a minimum, palaeontologists need to see fossils samples that show the side, top, and front views in order to begin to get a better idea of the structure. As new fossils reveal new details, scientists get a deeper understanding of how the animal fits within classic scientific categories. Charles Walcott knew that Habelia was an arthropod, but he didn't have enough information to pin down where it fit within this huge group of animals. Arthropods are one of So, what would you be willing to endure to make it home for Christmas In these modern times? These days trips home usually involve expensive plane fares or long drives on winter roads made safer by winter tires, interior heaters, and modern clothing. What if you were faced with a 112 km snowshoe trek on an unbroken trail in a blizzard - you know, just like your parents told you what it was like to walk to school in the days of yore! Well, Tom Wilson was more than just a mountain man. He was the personal assistant of "Hells Bells Rogers" during his railroad surveys through the Rockies and later started the first guiding operation in the mountains. In December of 1904, Tom was determined to be home for Christmas dinner with his family. His route began at Kootenay Plains where he had his horse ranch. Today it's located along the David Thompson Highway east of the Saskatchewan River Crossing in Alberta. His route would have followed the Siffleur River Valley up and over Pipestone Pass. He then followed the Pipestone River towards its confluence with the Bow River, and then followed the Bow into Banff. He wasn't the first to follow that route. In August of 1859, James Hector of the Palliser Expedition had passed this way. He wrote in his journal: "After camping to the south of the pass, “…opposite to a waterfall which forms the source of Pipe Stone Creek, and where the stream leaps and rushes down a gutter-like channel, from a height of 450 feet,” they set out to, “ascend to the height of land by a steep rocky path that led at some places close by snow that was still lying from last winter. After five miles we got above the woods, and passed over a fine sloping prairie, with big bald mountains on either side. Plants with esculent roots were very abundant here, and many parts of the sward looked as if it had been ploughed, where the bears had been rooting them up like pigs….Two miles further we passed over a bleak bare “divide,” where there was no vegetation, and elevated about 2000 feet above last night’s encampment.” Others had also passed that way. They included Normal Collie, Hugh Stutfield, and Herman Wooley in 1898 as they headed north on an expedition that saw them discovering the Columbia Icefields. Just a few months after Hector had passed through, the Earl of Southesk, James Carnegie, also traversed the pass. These men were all seasoned travellers, but none of them attempted the route in winter. Tom, like all of his contemporaries, would have been kitted out in heavy woolen clothing with leather boots and snowshoes. Here is how Tom described his experience in a letter to pioneer surveyor and founder of the Alpine Club, A. O. Wheeler: "There is not much to tell of my trip over the Pipestone Pass. It was simply the case of a man starting on a seventy-mile snowshoe trip across the mountains to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife and family, and getting there and eating dinner, the pleasure being well worth the trip. I rode to within eight miles of the summit and started early the next morning on snowshoes to cross the pass (8,300 feet). It was snowing a little and very cold when I started and when I got opposite the Clearwater Gap, a blizzard came up. I could not see more than six or eight feet ahead in that grey snow light that makes everything look level. I was on the trail alongside a mountainside, and was afraid of falling down into one of those steep side collars (which you remember on that side), and of breaking my snowshoes, so I turned and went down the mountain to the creek bottom. The snow was seven or eight feet deep and I fell through a snow bridge, getting both feet wet. It was below zero and a long way up to timber whichever way I turned, but I'd never liked hitting the back trail. It was eight o'clock at night before I crossed the summit of the pass and reached the first timber. I got a fire started, but it was drifting and snowing so hard that the snow covered my socks and moccasins as fast as I could wring (sic) them dry, and, owing to the fierce wind, the flames leap in every direction , making it impossible to get near the fire, so at half past nine I gave it up, put on my wet foot gear and snowshoes and started down the valley. I could not see and felt my way with a stick. By daylight I had made three and a half miles; not much, but it kept the circulation going. In the heavy timber I made a fire and dried out. My feet were beginning to pain as they had been thawed out twice already. I made three miles more that day and finished the last of my grub. The big snowshoes sank fifteen inches in the soft new snow and were a big drag on my frozen toes. I saw it meant three or four more days tramping without grub to make Laggan. I made it in three, but the last day I could only make about fifty yards without resting, and my tracks did not leave a very straight line. The chief trouble I had was to keep from going to sleep; it would have been so much easier to quit than to go on. " Wheeler tried to bring some clarity to Tom's adventure. He wrote: "Think for a moment what it really meant; that every time he put on his snowshoes, his toes got frozen owing to the tight shoe straps; that every time he took them off, his feet had to be thawed out; that every step had to raise a load of ten to fifteen pound of soft snow; that wood had to be collected and cut to keep alive during the night; that the fierce pain would drive away sleep; that he had no food, and always before him those interminable, slow, dragging miles of snowy wilderness. It must have required iron determination to make it to the end of the never-ending track, to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife and family. " Like any winter backcountry traveller that has suffered from frostbite, Tom made his way to see Dr. Brett, Banff's resident physician. He is rumoured to have stated: "I hope I won't have to loose(sic) them Doc. I've hade(sic) 'em a long time and I'm sort of used to 'em." Tom was very lucky. He did lose several toes on each foot but he liked to joke that since the doc had removed the same number on each foot, he was still well balanced. I want to thank Roger Patillo for sharing this story in his book The Canadian Rockies Pioneers, Legends and True Tales.Click the title of the book if you'd like to purchase a copy. Tom was one of many early and modern mountain wanderers to lose toes to frostbite. Even today, it is a real danger for people out on snowshoes, as well as backcountry and cross-country skis. Always plan for changes in weather and remember, unlike Tom, you can always turn back if conditions change for the worse. Are wolves returning to the Bow Valley? The Bow River valley has not been a good home for wolves. Over the years, pack after pack has become established only to gradually get whittled away by vehicle and train impacts, and more recently, human food conditioning. The summer of 2016 was particularly bad for the Bow Valley wolf pack. The summer began on a very high note its 5 adults being joined by 6 new pups making for a total of 11 wolves in the pack. Unfortunately, this situation changed for the worse with four of the pups killed in two separate incidents with trains. The alpha female and another young female were both shot by Park Wardens after becoming accustomed to handouts from campers in the Two Jack Lake Campground. By the end of the season, none of the pups had survived. In a separate incident, one of the remaining wolves was shot by a hunter in B.C. By 2017, there were only two wolves remaining and they dispersed. As of Sept 2017, the alpha male had joined a pack in the southern part of Banff known as the Spray Pack. The surviving female had joined another male and possibly moved out of the area. Paul Paquette is a well-respected biologist who headed the largest wolf study ever undertaken in the Bow Valley. In recent years he was quoted as stating the following about the challenges for wolves in the Bow River valley: “It’s a wildlife ghetto. People need to understand, the Bow Valley has two townsites that are growing, two highways, a corridor for high transmission power lines, dams, golf courses, ski hills … They’ve got all that in the valley, so you can imagine the responses for the wolves and wildlife – it’s a ghetto for them and they’re trying to survive in there.” We are in a constant battle with developers and the town to try to make sure that we can keep wildlife like wolves and grizzly bears on the landscape. Recently, there seems to be a reason for cautious optimism. The Bow Valley is great habitat for wolves when you consider the high numbers of potential prey animals available to them. In a recent interview on CBC, Jesse Whittington, a wildlife ecologist with Parks Canada stated: "We're curious about what's going to happen," said Whittington. "Either the old male and the pack from the Spray could move back into the Bow Valley, or one of the neighbouring packs might slide in." In October of 2017, three wolves were spotted west of Banff near Castle Mountain. These were previously unknown wolves that may be looking for a new place to call home. As Jesse Whittington stated in an interview with the Rocky Mountain Outlook: "If you have a male and female who hook-up and have pups, all of a sudden you could have a pack of seven wolves, and if those pups survive and have pups again, you get a pretty large pack" The Bow Valley has not been kind to its wolves, but we still need them. They play a key role in keeping elk and deer populations in check. It's too easy to look at Banff today and point out the world-class wildlife crossings along the highway and assume that wolves will have an easy time coexisting with people. This couldn't be further from the truth. The section of highway that is fenced is primarily through Banff and a little to the east and west. Wolves cover vast ranges and the crossing structures only protect them in a small part of their range. The train tracks and Bow Valley Parkway also remain unfenced. Just this past November, two wolves were killed on the Trans-Canada Highway east of Canmore. It was trains that killed 4 of the pack's cubs in 2016. Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific Railway have been conducting ongoing research around the idea of fencing and other wildlife warning systems in areas of highest danger. We also have rampant development in areas like Canmore which can hamper movement through the valley to the east and south into Kananaskis and beyond. And finally, we have the challenge of people on the landscape. More than 90% of the use of our designated wildlife corridors in and around Canmore was by people. If the corridors are viewed as just another recreational trail, then eventually, the wildlife will simply avoid the corridor altogether. In the past, we've been lucky enough to have several wolf packs adjacent to the Bow Valley, for instance in the Cascade and Spray Valleys, but the Bow Valley Pack has come and gone repeatedly due to the many hazards that face them when they arrive in the valley. Let's keep our fingers crossed that these wolves do stick around. We need to do our part to make sure they have the best possible opportunity to survive and thrive. Here are a few things that we can do to help keep our wolves safe: Slow down on highways like the Trans-Canada, Bow Valley Parkway, Highway 40, and Spray Lakes Road Never ever feed wildlife or stand idly by while other people offer food. Keep your distance. Moving ever closer for that selfie puts your life, and the life of the animal, at risk. Obey trail closures. They are there for a reason. If we all make a point of doing what we can to keep wildlife safe and help to educate visitors who may not be aware of the consequences of their actions, then we may be able to help keep wolves on the landscape. Next up 10 New Years Resolutions for the Mountain Parks New Years Resolutions for the Mountain Parks The mountains are more than just a place to hike, bike and explore. They are home to 53 species of mammals, 260 species of birds, 996 species of vascular plants, 407 lichens, 243 mosses, and 53 liverworts (source: http://canadianparks.com/alberta/banffnp/page3.html). There are also almost 90 species of fungi in the mountain parks (source: http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pubwarehouse/pdfs/11896.pdf). Everything we do in the mountains has an impact and here are some resolutions that will help you to better appreciate this beautiful place. Explore less busy sites. More than 95% of visitation to the mountain parks visits the same 2 or 3% of the park, essentially the paved corridors. Many of the attractions along these roads are in serious need of upgrades to help prevent the masses of tourists from creating permanent damage. Quiet Times are the Best Times. If you really want to get the experience that you saw on the brochure, get an alarm clock. The sun comes up early in the mountains during the summer months. If you're on the shores of Lake Louise or Moraine Lake at 6 am, you'll likely have the view all to yourself…and don't tell anybody, but those two sites are best when the sun first hits the mountains. Don't forget the evening though as well. Once the hordes head back to their hotels, the landscape quiets down again and you can have that great experience. Keep track of your sightings. If you see something exciting like a grizzly bear, wolf, cougar, or wolverine - report it. Park managers are always looking to keep tabs on wildlife and sightings helps to add another data point to their wildlife research. Support organizations like the Friends of Kananaskis and Friends of Jasper. These not for profit groups do an amazing job in helping to raise awareness of park issues, run educational programs, offer volunteer opportunities to make a difference on the ground and even operate gift shops and other facilities designed to raise money for their ongoing operation. Read a good book. Our connection to our sense of place always improves with knowledge and understanding. What once was an unknown wilderness suddenly becomes a community of plants, animals, birds, and other living beings - each with an important role to play in the maintenance of the community. Every book that helps you to understand the place you call home can only enhance your ability to feel an even stronger connection to that place. Meet your neighbours. The next time you walk one of the local trails, take the time to learn the story of one new plant, animal, bird, or other residents of the mountain landscape. I say "learn the story", because each one is much more than just their name. Why are they there? What role do they play? What's the coolest thing about them? As you repeat this process, the mountain landscape becomes much more familiar and ever more welcoming as you look forward to the acquaintances you've made and begin to mark the seasons by the comings and goings of old friends. Start up a neighbourhood watch. By this I mean keep an eye on your mountain community and look for changes. Are there new plants on the landscape that weren't there in the past? New birds? Changes in the community often reflect changes in the environment. Every resident of a particular community is there because that habitat offers all the essential requirements they need to survive. Plants need the right amount of moisture, sunlight, soil, nitrogen, and perhaps even a particular neighbour with whom they have a dependent relationship. Every plant will have a different list of needs, as will every bird and animal. A small change to the ecology will be reflected in changes to the individual plants and animals in that community. Simply sit down. We hike, mountain bike, cross-country ski, and snowshoe along the mountain trails season after season and year after year. Sometimes, the best experience can be had by simply sitting quietly and absorbing everything that's around you. Take off your shoes and socks (in the summer of course), and feel connected to the landscape. Listen to the sounds. Can you recognize all the birds around you? Watch the fish rising in the water to eat insects hatching on the surface. Smell the air. Are their particular smells that spark a memory? Smell is the sense most tied to memory and often a strong smell will instantly transport you to a particular place or time in your personal history. For me, the pungent sweet smell of wolf willow represents the smell of home. Talk to a senior. Our sense of place is more than just learning the natural history. To understand the natural history, we also have to understand the ways that people have interacted with it in the past. Somebody that's been on the land for 50 years can share insights that only come with the passing of the years and the experiences that those years brought. The elders are the keepers of the stories. They are a wealth of knowledge and wisdom and time spent talking with elders about their lifetime of adventures and understanding will always help guide you to a new appreciation of the world around you. Be a tourist now and then. Take a tour. Visit a museum or attraction. Fly in a helicopter. Often, we learn more about places we visit then we do about our own backyard. Make a point of seeing the mountains like visitors see them. Spending time with people that are seeing the Rockies for the first time is one of the things that I love the most about being a guide. Every tourist sees something different. They bring a new perspective born of a lifetime of experiences in their past. I'm constantly guided towards new perspectives simply because they are looking at a scene with fresh eyes. Why not make 2018 a year where we commit to understanding and connecting to the mountain landscape around us? If at the end of the year, you've learned a few new plants, or birds, or animals, and how they both benefit and are benefitting other members of the community, then you will have started on an exciting role that will deepen your personal sense of place. I hope to see you out there. Next up, what determines success when bears are relocated outside of their home range? Success of Relocating Grizzly Bears This past summer, people were stunned when Bear 148 was moved far from her home range. Unfortunately, she subsequently wandered across the British Columbia border and was legally shot by a hunter. The media covered this story extensively and in many cases used the wrong terminology. When wildlife managers move a bear to an area within its current home range, we call it relocating the bear. This term refers to moving a bear simply to another area that is still within its territory and within which it can comfortably survive. In cases, such as with 148, where the bear is moved far from its home range, the preferred term is translocated. This means that the bear is moved to completely unfamiliar territory where it doesn't know the seasonal food patterns or their locations. It doesn't know the landscape and it doesn't know the other resident bears into whose territory it has just been placed. As you can imagine, this puts the bear in a very high-risk situation, but just how high risk? What are its chances of surviving so far from its home range? This is one area of study that has been largely neglected until recently. There really had not been any peer-reviewed analyses of the factors that affected survival when a bear was translocated. An article published in the January 2018 issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management evaluated 110 different grizzly translocations within the Alberta Rockies and looked to determine what factors impacted successful movements and looked for ways to increase the success of future translocations. Biologist Sarah Milligan and her fellow researchers defined a successful translocation as one that required no additional management intervention and showed the bear surviving one entire year without returning to its home range. It's well known that the odds are not in favour of the non-resident bear when it is moved to unfamiliar territory. Of the 110 translocations examined, a full 70% were failures. A 30% success rate is still much higher than generally reported in the media. Translocations are never popular, but unfortunately, with some bears, the only other alternative is to shoot it. Conservation officers never make the decision to move a bear lightly. They know the dangers that it will face in its new home but their first priority is the safety of the community. While Bear 148 never injured anyone, it got to the point where conservation officers simply had to make the difficult decision to move her. In order to determine the success of bears in new habitats, biologists needed to better understand how bears currently living in the area use the landscape. Researchers tagged resident bears to learn how they used the landscape, feeding habits, and denning areas. Alberta also has a long history of monitoring bear movement with satellite and radio collars and this historical data is also helpful in studies like this one. One of the biggest challenges with translocating bears is their homing instinct. Many bears will simply abandon their new homes and travel back towards their home range. It is for this reason that Bear 148 was moved north of Jasper National Park. The further the movement, the lower the likelihood that the bear will return home. The quality of the habitat into which a bear is released can also have a strong bearing on reducing the homing instinct. Ideally, the release location should match, as much as possible, the home range in terms of available foods, movement corridors, and denning sites. The study found that the success rate was highest if bears were moved as early as possible in the season. Unfortunately, in many cases, the highest potential for human-grizzly conflicts occurs during buffaloberry season between mid-July and mid-September. Translocated bears also tended to have ranges some 3.25 times larger than resident bears. This shows they needed to cover more territory in order to find sufficient forage to survive. This is likely connected to their being unfamiliar with the landscape. While their home ranges did decrease over time, they continued to be larger than resident bears. Of the translocations that were considered failures, the primary causes were homing, new incidents of conflict, and mortality. Of the 77 failed translocations, 28 bears were killed because of management actions, and 30 failed due to homing. Bears translocated more than 200 km reduced the odds of homing by 95%. When it comes to the timing of winter denning, the study showed no significant difference between resident and translocated bears. The study concluded: "Repeated conflict and mortality were the greatest causes of translocation failure. Our results suggest that the most important factors for translocation success are the level of human-caused mortality risk at the release site and the time of year when the translocation occurred. Specifically, we found that the odds of translocation success decreased with increasing levels of mortality risk surrounding the release site. This result is likely related to the large post-release movements that are typical of many wide-ranging species, which can bring individuals near areas of conflict or mortality risk." Translocation remains an important management tool. Studies like this one help wildlife officers to make the best decisions to increase the opportunities for a successful movement. It's never an easy decision to move an animal away from its home range but the more we understand ways to increase their chances of success, the more the pendulum can move towards reduced mortality. In the central Rockies, people are the biggest problem. We need to work harder to coexist with bears and to respect closures. When people violate closures, it's always the bears that pay the price. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for snowshoe, nature, hiking, and photography guides across the mountain west. We've been sharing the stories behind the scenery for more than 30 years. Don't forget to check out the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep054 for links to additional information. You can also comment on the stories and subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. If you'd like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron and with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go snowshoeing. I'll talk to you next week.

So, what would you be willing to endure to make it home for Christmas In these modern times? These days trips home usually involve expensive plane fares or long drives on winter roads made safer by winter tires, interior heaters, and modern clothing. What if you were faced with a 112 km snowshoe trek on an unbroken trail in a blizzard - you know, just like your parents told you what it was like to walk to school in the days of yore! Well, Tom Wilson was more than just a mountain man. He was the personal assistant of "Hells Bells Rogers" during his railroad surveys through the Rockies and later started the first guiding operation in the mountains. In December of 1904, Tom was determined to be home for Christmas dinner with his family. His route began at Kootenay Plains where he had his horse ranch. Today it's located along the David Thompson Highway east of the Saskatchewan River Crossing in Alberta. His route would have followed the Siffleur River Valley up and over Pipestone Pass. He then followed the Pipestone River towards its confluence with the Bow River, and then followed the Bow into Banff. He wasn't the first to follow that route. In August of 1859, James Hector of the Palliser Expedition had passed this way. He wrote in his journal: "After camping to the south of the pass, “…opposite to a waterfall which forms the source of Pipe Stone Creek, and where the stream leaps and rushes down a gutter-like channel, from a height of 450 feet,” they set out to, “ascend to the height of land by a steep rocky path that led at some places close by snow that was still lying from last winter. After five miles we got above the woods, and passed over a fine sloping prairie, with big bald mountains on either side. Plants with esculent roots were very abundant here, and many parts of the sward looked as if it had been ploughed, where the bears had been rooting them up like pigs….Two miles further we passed over a bleak bare “divide,” where there was no vegetation, and elevated about 2000 feet above last night’s encampment.” Others had also passed that way. They included Normal Collie, Hugh Stutfield, and Herman Wooley in 1898 as they headed north on an expedition that saw them discovering the Columbia Icefields. Just a few months after Hector had passed through, the Earl of Southesk, James Carnegie, also traversed the pass. These men were all seasoned travellers, but none of them attempted the route in winter. Tom, like all of his contemporaries, would have been kitted out in heavy woolen clothing with leather boots and snowshoes. Here is how Tom described his experience in a letter to pioneer surveyor and founder of the Alpine Club, A. O. Wheeler: "There is not much to tell of my trip over the Pipestone Pass. It was simply the case of a man starting on a seventy-mile snowshoe trip across the mountains to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife and family, and getting there and eating dinner, the pleasure being well worth the trip. I rode to within eight miles of the summit and started early the next morning on snowshoes to cross the pass (8,300 feet). It was snowing a little and very cold when I started and when I got opposite the Clearwater Gap, a blizzard came up. I could not see more than six or eight feet ahead in that grey snow light that makes everything look level. I was on the trail alongside a mountainside, and was afraid of falling down into one of those steep side collars (which you remember on that side), and of breaking my snowshoes, so I turned and went down the mountain to the creek bottom. The snow was seven or eight feet deep and I fell through a snow bridge, getting both feet wet. It was below zero and a long way up to timber whichever way I turned, but I'd never liked hitting the back trail. It was eight o'clock at night before I crossed the summit of the pass and reached the first timber. I got a fire started, but it was drifting and snowing so hard that the snow covered my socks and moccasins as fast as I could wring (sic) them dry, and, owing to the fierce wind, the flames leap in every direction , making it impossible to get near the fire, so at half past nine I gave it up, put on my wet foot gear and snowshoes and started down the valley. I could not see and felt my way with a stick. By daylight I had made three and a half miles; not much, but it kept the circulation going. In the heavy timber I made a fire and dried out. My feet were beginning to pain as they had been thawed out twice already. I made three miles more that day and finished the last of my grub. The big snowshoes sank fifteen inches in the soft new snow and were a big drag on my frozen toes. I saw it meant three or four more days tramping without grub to make Laggan. I made it in three, but the last day I could only make about fifty yards without resting, and my tracks did not leave a very straight line. The chief trouble I had was to keep from going to sleep; it would have been so much easier to quit than to go on. " Wheeler tried to bring some clarity to Tom's adventure. He wrote: "Think for a moment what it really meant; that every time he put on his snowshoes, his toes got frozen owing to the tight shoe straps; that every time he took them off, his feet had to be thawed out; that every step had to raise a load of ten to fifteen pound of soft snow; that wood had to be collected and cut to keep alive during the night; that the fierce pain would drive away sleep; that he had no food, and always before him those interminable, slow, dragging miles of snowy wilderness. It must have required iron determination to make it to the end of the never-ending track, to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife and family. " Like any winter backcountry traveller that has suffered from frostbite, Tom made his way to see Dr. Brett, Banff's resident physician. He is rumoured to have stated: "I hope I won't have to loose(sic) them Doc. I've hade(sic) 'em a long time and I'm sort of used to 'em." Tom was very lucky. He did lose several toes on each foot but he liked to joke that since the doc had removed the same number on each foot, he was still well balanced. I want to thank Roger Patillo for sharing this story in his book The Canadian Rockies Pioneers, Legends and True Tales.Click the title of the book if you'd like to purchase a copy. Tom was one of many early and modern mountain wanderers to lose toes to frostbite. Even today, it is a real danger for people out on snowshoes, as well as backcountry and cross-country skis. Always plan for changes in weather and remember, unlike Tom, you can always turn back if conditions change for the worse. Are wolves returning to the Bow Valley? The Bow River valley has not been a good home for wolves. Over the years, pack after pack has become established only to gradually get whittled away by vehicle and train impacts, and more recently, human food conditioning. The summer of 2016 was particularly bad for the Bow Valley wolf pack. The summer began on a very high note its 5 adults being joined by 6 new pups making for a total of 11 wolves in the pack. Unfortunately, this situation changed for the worse with four of the pups killed in two separate incidents with trains. The alpha female and another young female were both shot by Park Wardens after becoming accustomed to handouts from campers in the Two Jack Lake Campground. By the end of the season, none of the pups had survived. In a separate incident, one of the remaining wolves was shot by a hunter in B.C. By 2017, there were only two wolves remaining and they dispersed. As of Sept 2017, the alpha male had joined a pack in the southern part of Banff known as the Spray Pack. The surviving female had joined another male and possibly moved out of the area. Paul Paquette is a well-respected biologist who headed the largest wolf study ever undertaken in the Bow Valley. In recent years he was quoted as stating the following about the challenges for wolves in the Bow River valley: “It’s a wildlife ghetto. People need to understand, the Bow Valley has two townsites that are growing, two highways, a corridor for high transmission power lines, dams, golf courses, ski hills … They’ve got all that in the valley, so you can imagine the responses for the wolves and wildlife – it’s a ghetto for them and they’re trying to survive in there.” We are in a constant battle with developers and the town to try to make sure that we can keep wildlife like wolves and grizzly bears on the landscape. Recently, there seems to be a reason for cautious optimism. The Bow Valley is great habitat for wolves when you consider the high numbers of potential prey animals available to them. In a recent interview on CBC, Jesse Whittington, a wildlife ecologist with Parks Canada stated: "We're curious about what's going to happen," said Whittington. "Either the old male and the pack from the Spray could move back into the Bow Valley, or one of the neighbouring packs might slide in." In October of 2017, three wolves were spotted west of Banff near Castle Mountain. These were previously unknown wolves that may be looking for a new place to call home. As Jesse Whittington stated in an interview with the Rocky Mountain Outlook: "If you have a male and female who hook-up and have pups, all of a sudden you could have a pack of seven wolves, and if those pups survive and have pups again, you get a pretty large pack" The Bow Valley has not been kind to its wolves, but we still need them. They play a key role in keeping elk and deer populations in check. It's too easy to look at Banff today and point out the world-class wildlife crossings along the highway and assume that wolves will have an easy time coexisting with people. This couldn't be further from the truth. The section of highway that is fenced is primarily through Banff and a little to the east and west. Wolves cover vast ranges and the crossing structures only protect them in a small part of their range. The train tracks and Bow Valley Parkway also remain unfenced. Just this past November, two wolves were killed on the Trans-Canada Highway east of Canmore. It was trains that killed 4 of the pack's cubs in 2016. Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific Railway have been conducting ongoing research around the idea of fencing and other wildlife warning systems in areas of highest danger. We also have rampant development in areas like Canmore which can hamper movement through the valley to the east and south into Kananaskis and beyond. And finally, we have the challenge of people on the landscape. More than 90% of the use of our designated wildlife corridors in and around Canmore was by people. If the corridors are viewed as just another recreational trail, then eventually, the wildlife will simply avoid the corridor altogether. In the past, we've been lucky enough to have several wolf packs adjacent to the Bow Valley, for instance in the Cascade and Spray Valleys, but the Bow Valley Pack has come and gone repeatedly due to the many hazards that face them when they arrive in the valley. Let's keep our fingers crossed that these wolves do stick around. We need to do our part to make sure they have the best possible opportunity to survive and thrive. Here are a few things that we can do to help keep our wolves safe: Slow down on highways like the Trans-Canada, Bow Valley Parkway, Highway 40, and Spray Lakes Road Never ever feed wildlife or stand idly by while other people offer food. Keep your distance. Moving ever closer for that selfie puts your life, and the life of the animal, at risk. Obey trail closures. They are there for a reason. If we all make a point of doing what we can to keep wildlife safe and help to educate visitors who may not be aware of the consequences of their actions, then we may be able to help keep wolves on the landscape. Next up 10 New Years Resolutions for the Mountain Parks New Years Resolutions for the Mountain Parks The mountains are more than just a place to hike, bike and explore. They are home to 53 species of mammals, 260 species of birds, 996 species of vascular plants, 407 lichens, 243 mosses, and 53 liverworts (source: http://canadianparks.com/alberta/banffnp/page3.html). There are also almost 90 species of fungi in the mountain parks (source: http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pubwarehouse/pdfs/11896.pdf). Everything we do in the mountains has an impact and here are some resolutions that will help you to better appreciate this beautiful place. Explore less busy sites. More than 95% of visitation to the mountain parks visits the same 2 or 3% of the park, essentially the paved corridors. Many of the attractions along these roads are in serious need of upgrades to help prevent the masses of tourists from creating permanent damage. Quiet Times are the Best Times. If you really want to get the experience that you saw on the brochure, get an alarm clock. The sun comes up early in the mountains during the summer months. If you're on the shores of Lake Louise or Moraine Lake at 6 am, you'll likely have the view all to yourself…and don't tell anybody, but those two sites are best when the sun first hits the mountains. Don't forget the evening though as well. Once the hordes head back to their hotels, the landscape quiets down again and you can have that great experience. Keep track of your sightings. If you see something exciting like a grizzly bear, wolf, cougar, or wolverine - report it. Park managers are always looking to keep tabs on wildlife and sightings helps to add another data point to their wildlife research. Support organizations like the Friends of Kananaskis and Friends of Jasper. These not for profit groups do an amazing job in helping to raise awareness of park issues, run educational programs, offer volunteer opportunities to make a difference on the ground and even operate gift shops and other facilities designed to raise money for their ongoing operation. Read a good book. Our connection to our sense of place always improves with knowledge and understanding. What once was an unknown wilderness suddenly becomes a community of plants, animals, birds, and other living beings - each with an important role to play in the maintenance of the community. Every book that helps you to understand the place you call home can only enhance your ability to feel an even stronger connection to that place. Meet your neighbours. The next time you walk one of the local trails, take the time to learn the story of one new plant, animal, bird, or other residents of the mountain landscape. I say "learn the story", because each one is much more than just their name. Why are they there? What role do they play? What's the coolest thing about them? As you repeat this process, the mountain landscape becomes much more familiar and ever more welcoming as you look forward to the acquaintances you've made and begin to mark the seasons by the comings and goings of old friends. Start up a neighbourhood watch. By this I mean keep an eye on your mountain community and look for changes. Are there new plants on the landscape that weren't there in the past? New birds? Changes in the community often reflect changes in the environment. Every resident of a particular community is there because that habitat offers all the essential requirements they need to survive. Plants need the right amount of moisture, sunlight, soil, nitrogen, and perhaps even a particular neighbour with whom they have a dependent relationship. Every plant will have a different list of needs, as will every bird and animal. A small change to the ecology will be reflected in changes to the individual plants and animals in that community. Simply sit down. We hike, mountain bike, cross-country ski, and snowshoe along the mountain trails season after season and year after year. Sometimes, the best experience can be had by simply sitting quietly and absorbing everything that's around you. Take off your shoes and socks (in the summer of course), and feel connected to the landscape. Listen to the sounds. Can you recognize all the birds around you? Watch the fish rising in the water to eat insects hatching on the surface. Smell the air. Are their particular smells that spark a memory? Smell is the sense most tied to memory and often a strong smell will instantly transport you to a particular place or time in your personal history. For me, the pungent sweet smell of wolf willow represents the smell of home. Talk to a senior. Our sense of place is more than just learning the natural history. To understand the natural history, we also have to understand the ways that people have interacted with it in the past. Somebody that's been on the land for 50 years can share insights that only come with the passing of the years and the experiences that those years brought. The elders are the keepers of the stories. They are a wealth of knowledge and wisdom and time spent talking with elders about their lifetime of adventures and understanding will always help guide you to a new appreciation of the world around you. Be a tourist now and then. Take a tour. Visit a museum or attraction. Fly in a helicopter. Often, we learn more about places we visit then we do about our own backyard. Make a point of seeing the mountains like visitors see them. Spending time with people that are seeing the Rockies for the first time is one of the things that I love the most about being a guide. Every tourist sees something different. They bring a new perspective born of a lifetime of experiences in their past. I'm constantly guided towards new perspectives simply because they are looking at a scene with fresh eyes. Why not make 2018 a year where we commit to understanding and connecting to the mountain landscape around us? If at the end of the year, you've learned a few new plants, or birds, or animals, and how they both benefit and are benefitting other members of the community, then you will have started on an exciting role that will deepen your personal sense of place. I hope to see you out there. Next up, what determines success when bears are relocated outside of their home range? Success of Relocating Grizzly Bears This past summer, people were stunned when Bear 148 was moved far from her home range. Unfortunately, she subsequently wandered across the British Columbia border and was legally shot by a hunter. The media covered this story extensively and in many cases used the wrong terminology. When wildlife managers move a bear to an area within its current home range, we call it relocating the bear. This term refers to moving a bear simply to another area that is still within its territory and within which it can comfortably survive. In cases, such as with 148, where the bear is moved far from its home range, the preferred term is translocated. This means that the bear is moved to completely unfamiliar territory where it doesn't know the seasonal food patterns or their locations. It doesn't know the landscape and it doesn't know the other resident bears into whose territory it has just been placed. As you can imagine, this puts the bear in a very high-risk situation, but just how high risk? What are its chances of surviving so far from its home range? This is one area of study that has been largely neglected until recently. There really had not been any peer-reviewed analyses of the factors that affected survival when a bear was translocated. An article published in the January 2018 issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management evaluated 110 different grizzly translocations within the Alberta Rockies and looked to determine what factors impacted successful movements and looked for ways to increase the success of future translocations. Biologist Sarah Milligan and her fellow researchers defined a successful translocation as one that required no additional management intervention and showed the bear surviving one entire year without returning to its home range. It's well known that the odds are not in favour of the non-resident bear when it is moved to unfamiliar territory. Of the 110 translocations examined, a full 70% were failures. A 30% success rate is still much higher than generally reported in the media. Translocations are never popular, but unfortunately, with some bears, the only other alternative is to shoot it. Conservation officers never make the decision to move a bear lightly. They know the dangers that it will face in its new home but their first priority is the safety of the community. While Bear 148 never injured anyone, it got to the point where conservation officers simply had to make the difficult decision to move her. In order to determine the success of bears in new habitats, biologists needed to better understand how bears currently living in the area use the landscape. Researchers tagged resident bears to learn how they used the landscape, feeding habits, and denning areas. Alberta also has a long history of monitoring bear movement with satellite and radio collars and this historical data is also helpful in studies like this one. One of the biggest challenges with translocating bears is their homing instinct. Many bears will simply abandon their new homes and travel back towards their home range. It is for this reason that Bear 148 was moved north of Jasper National Park. The further the movement, the lower the likelihood that the bear will return home. The quality of the habitat into which a bear is released can also have a strong bearing on reducing the homing instinct. Ideally, the release location should match, as much as possible, the home range in terms of available foods, movement corridors, and denning sites. The study found that the success rate was highest if bears were moved as early as possible in the season. Unfortunately, in many cases, the highest potential for human-grizzly conflicts occurs during buffaloberry season between mid-July and mid-September. Translocated bears also tended to have ranges some 3.25 times larger than resident bears. This shows they needed to cover more territory in order to find sufficient forage to survive. This is likely connected to their being unfamiliar with the landscape. While their home ranges did decrease over time, they continued to be larger than resident bears. Of the translocations that were considered failures, the primary causes were homing, new incidents of conflict, and mortality. Of the 77 failed translocations, 28 bears were killed because of management actions, and 30 failed due to homing. Bears translocated more than 200 km reduced the odds of homing by 95%. When it comes to the timing of winter denning, the study showed no significant difference between resident and translocated bears. The study concluded: "Repeated conflict and mortality were the greatest causes of translocation failure. Our results suggest that the most important factors for translocation success are the level of human-caused mortality risk at the release site and the time of year when the translocation occurred. Specifically, we found that the odds of translocation success decreased with increasing levels of mortality risk surrounding the release site. This result is likely related to the large post-release movements that are typical of many wide-ranging species, which can bring individuals near areas of conflict or mortality risk." Translocation remains an important management tool. Studies like this one help wildlife officers to make the best decisions to increase the opportunities for a successful movement. It's never an easy decision to move an animal away from its home range but the more we understand ways to increase their chances of success, the more the pendulum can move towards reduced mortality. In the central Rockies, people are the biggest problem. We need to work harder to coexist with bears and to respect closures. When people violate closures, it's always the bears that pay the price. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for snowshoe, nature, hiking, and photography guides across the mountain west. We've been sharing the stories behind the scenery for more than 30 years. Don't forget to check out the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep054 for links to additional information. You can also comment on the stories and subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. If you'd like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron and with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go snowshoeing. I'll talk to you next week.

Edward Abbey Quote I stumbled upon a quotation recently from the great ecological activist Edward Abbey. It was shared on Facebook by Kevin Van Tighem, a former Banff National Park Superintendent. He was talking about how tiring it can be to be a public advocate for nature and ecology. Abbey was highly regarded as one of the great authors on conservation and was a militant protector of wild spaces. He also strongly opposed what he called: "industrial tourism", something the mountain west is suffering at the moment. One of Van Tighem's Facebook followers offered this gem. “One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; you will outlive the bastards.” ― Edward Abbey I think we can all take heart in these words. Being an advocate is hard. Sometimes we need to say things that people don't want to hear, but our wild places are at risk at the moment; risk of being loved to death by the very people that espouse their appreciation for the wilderness. We all need to be vigilant and continue to fight for the rights of wilderness, watersheds, and the importance of keeping the wild in wildlife…but as Abbey so eloquently states: "ramble out yonder and explore the forests" and "breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air." Bison Release Plans Over the past year, I've spoken at length about the reintroduction of wild bison into Banff National Park. Back in Episode 27, I cheered when the first bison born in the park in 130 years first showed its face on Earth Day of 2017. I looked at the fascination of biologists when the first grizzly tracks were found circling the enclosure and in the same episode, investigated how the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in 1995 changed the ecology of the regions wolf population. Once again, in Banff, we have a population of both grizzly bears and wolves that have never encountered a wild bison. This gives biologists an incredible opportunity to study the interactions between these massive ungulates and two apex predators as they interact and evolve over time. The lives of the newly established bison population is set to change this June when their small pens are opened up to a much larger territory stretching over 1,200 sq km of Banff National Park. For the first time, they'll find themselves on the menu. They'll also have an opportunity to wander over a much larger landscape, and in doing so, make decisions that biologists cannot predict using the very best computer models. The bison will no longer be wooed by daily deliveries of food and water by Parks Canada staff. They'll explore a much larger landscape and make decisions based on their own whims. Will they like their new home? Parks Canada selected their release area very carefully. The Panther Valley is very different from many areas of Banff National Park. It is less steep and more rolling and has the potential to support much more grassland. This is the moment where Parks Canada staff will begin to see whether the success or failure of their reintroduction will be one of smooth integration or one of the difficult challenges. Bison are animals of open landscapes and not artificial boundaries. Their 1,200 sq km release zone would use both landscape and fences to try to keep them contentedly contained. But in the end, the bison will decide their fate. The landscape is much more challenging than it was when they ruled the plains and wandered the mountain valleys. When Park staff first reintroduced the bison, the hope is that by bringing pregnant females, that they would bond with the Panther Valley region. They were kept in a smaller enclosure so, as the females give birth, they will bond to the landscape. In June, we'll get the first indication of the success of that bonding. By that time, many of the females will have added a second calve to the mix. When the gate is opened, what will they do? On the short term, it's likely they'll make the most of their new territory. Prior to the original release, Parks Canada did a prescribed burn, much like first nations did for generations, to promote the growth of grasses to sustain the herd once it is released. Karsten Heuer, the Parks Canada biologist in charge of the reintroduction will be constantly re-evaluating his mental math. Will they stay faithful to the landscape, or will they eventually turn east towards the plains where their future is far more uncertain? Not everybody was in favour of this reintroduction. People like Heuer are hoping that the bison take advantage of the ecological niche they are offering in Banff and avoid the temptation to wander eastward towards a landscape that is now strewn with hazards for bison. Once they leave the park, even their status is uncertain. They aren't even legally considered "wildlife" once they leave the park boundary. At this moment, the provincial government doesn't consider them to be wildlife, but rather livestock. Officially, the plains bison, known by its Latin moniker Bison bison bison, is considered to be extirpated, or locally extinct. It has been so long since bison have been "wild" in Alberta that the legislation hasn't kept pace with the conservation. Any bison wandering out of the park, at this point, are not considered to have any official legal status. It's important that Banff National Park's bison are given official recognition for what they are…a newly established, wild population of an animal that has been missing from the landscape since shortly after the first cow arrived n Alberta. Cattle and the fences that contain them have only been a part of the Alberta landscape since 1882 while bison were the dominant prairie herbivore for more than 10,000 years. However, the politics of the situation are never that simple. If they were, the members of Alberta's Treaty 7 would have a much better deal than they do today. In the real world, the land dominated by wealthy special interests and glacial political landscapes, the bison remain a relict; an animal lost in time that by some magic, may reappear without status or recognition that would ensure its protection. In order to formally protect the bison outside of Banff National Park, it would need an update on its status according to the Alberta Endangered Species Conservation Committee or ESCC. Then there is also the political hot potato that once recognized, then the provincial government is legally mandated to provide a management and recovery plan. They would also have to extend the hand during these discussions to the many first nations of the plains for whom bison represented life for thousands of years. We still don't know whether bison were simply seasonal visitors or permanent residents of the foothills and eastern slopes of the Rockies. To try to answer this question, biologists turned to a technique called isotope analysis. Like many biological tests, it works on the assumption that we are what we eat. Bison that spend their entire lives feeding on prairie grasslands, would have a different isotope measurement in their bones than home-grown mountain bison. Based on tests of 6 bison skeletons found in the Panther Valley area of Banff have led Parks biologists like Karsten Heuer to conclude that for some bison, the mountains were their year-round home. The bison currently waiting for the gate to open in Banff are not those bison. They are a new population, a population that still has to find its connection with the landscape. Parks can steer them with fences and natural barriers, but in the end, it will be the bison who decide where they decide to call home, and up to the province to make sure they are protected when they wander outside of the park borders. Huge scale reintroductions like this one are rare, simply because the implications are huge, the media attention is incessant, and the odds of success are not 100%. I'm not a bettin' man but I'm sure rooting for the bison of Banff. Let's wish them all a great deal of luck, but more importantly, fidelity to this carefully chosen mountain landscape. In time, the area they are free to wander will continue to increase as their population hopefully swells. If you're listening to this, keep the pressure on our provincial government to block any acts that would limit the ability of bison to continue to thrive in the Panther Valley and beyond. Woodpecker Headaches In the dead of winter, many of the iconic birds of the mountain west are basking in warmer climes either to the south or in the case of birds like harlequin ducks and some bald eagles, to the west coast where there are more winter options for food. Left behind to entertain us are the many members of the jay family like the gray, blue, and Steller's jay, Black-billed Magpie, and Raven. Add to the jays, several species of chickadees, the red-breasted nuthatch, and most of our woodpeckers. The loud tapping sound of woodpeckers makes them easy to find. In the Canadian Rockies, look for the Red-naped Sapsucker, Downy Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, American Three-toed Woodpecker, Black-backed Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, and my personal favourite, the Pileated Woodpecker. The pileated is special for a number of reasons. First, it is by far, the largest woodpecker in the Rockies, and it has a fondness for the base of trees as opposed to places higher in the forest canopy. Perhaps my favourite aspect though is it's connection to Woody the Woodpecker. That zany cartoon character was a favourite when I was a kid and Woody was largely based on the pileated woodpecker. Woodpeckers are perfectly designed for pecking trees and catching insects hiding in the bark and wood. Every component of their physiology is focussed on the task of perching on the sides of trees, pecking through the bark and surface wood, and feeding on insects Woodpeckers feet are called zygodactyl, with two toes facing forward and two back. It is a unique adaptation for birds that perch along the sides of trees, but also includes some owls and even osprey. The same claw pattern that makes it easy to clasp the sides of tree trunks, makes it easy for osprey to clasp slippery trout. The next time you see a woodpecker take a look at their toes. Their two up and two down arrangement of toes is different from the vast majority of birds which are Ansiodactyl, with three toes facing forward and one back. Now good feet are only the first of many adaptations that woodpeckers boast. Their tails are also stiffened in order to provide a third point of contact with the tree. It helps to stabilize the bird so that it can have maximum leverage for pecking the tree. Next, we have a chisel-shaped beak. Just like a carpenter will choose the perfect chisel for the piece of wood they are working, the beaks of woodpeckers are uniquely designed for the type of feeding that they do. The beaks are extremely strong and the cells at the tip are constantly replaced so the beaks don’t get worn down as the bird ages. Once we look at the beaks, we also have to examine the tongues. Woodpeckers eat insects that have bored into trees. Once their beak has given them access, it's the work of the tongue to reach in and lap up these tasty morsels. There are two main adaptations that help them accomplish this. They have a lengthened hyoid apparatus. I know…a lengthened what? They have a collection of muscle, cartilage and bones that help to extend the length of their tongue so they can reach into the crevices of the tree and, with its sticky and barbed tip, slurp out the insects. In the case of the Pileated Woodpecker, its main food is carpenter ants, and it will make large rectangular holes near the bases of trees that have already been infested or killed by these ants. In between feasting on ants, they also munch on berries, other insects and larvae. Now any carpenter will tell you that before you plug in your circular or table saw, you need reliable eye protection. It's important to avoid the risk of a sliver of wood-damaging your eyesight. Woodpeckers have also evolved a similar type of eye protection - a nictitating membrane. This is essentially a second, transparent eyelid. It sweeps across the eye from one side to the other both cleansing the eye while at the same time protecting it. Now we get to the final challenge woodpeckers need to contend with - brain damage. Their livelihood requires them to constantly bang their beaks against hard surfaces in order to excavate the insects they need to survive. Clearly, constant head-banging would be something that any sports medicine doctor would be concerned with, in particular, the danger of concussions. Birds like Pileated Woodpeckers can strike a tree more than 10 times a second with a force of 1,200 g each time, and up to 12,000 times in a single day. Like Sydney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins, head traumas usually come with concussions, and eventually brain damage. How do Pileated Woodpeckers avoid similar maladies with their incessant headbanging? Woodpeckers have evolved to withstand these constant impacts. Concussions result from shaking of the brain, usually from hard impacts. Woodpeckers have learned to cushion the brain by protecting it with thick, spongy bone. In addition, there are extensive networks of tiny bones that form a kind of woven mesh to give the brain added support. The hyoid bones, which I mentioned earlier, add an extra layer of protection. They are a series of 5 bones that make up the bones of the tongue along with the connective tissue, cartilage, muscles, and skin of the tongue. It anchors the tongue and helps it extend out to collect insects. In woodpeckers though, the hyoid bone also helps to cushion the brain. In many woodpeckers, the hyoid structure, and therefore the tongue, wraps around the skull towards the rear, and even around the eye socket. This allows the tongue to reach in and collect insects exposed by the tapping. When the tongue extends out during tapping, the hyoid structure compresses around the brain and helps further protect the brain from jarring movements. Even the beak plays a role in protecting it from the impact. The upper beak is longer and softer than the lower beak. This unevenness helps to divert stress towards the lower beak and away from the brain. Earlier I mentioned the nictitating membrane that covers the woodpeckers eyes during tapping, but it also helps to keep the eyes inside the skull. The high impact of constant tapping could lead to a tearing of the retina, or in extreme cases, cause the eyes to pop right out of the skull. The grand total of all these adaptations means that only about .3% of the impact is absorbed by the head and brain. That .3% can cause the brain to heat up though, but by tapping in short bursts, woodpeckers give their noggins time to cool down between tapping sessions. There is some recent evidence that woodpeckers may not escape completely unscathed in terms of brain injury from their incessant headbanging. A newly published study by George Farah, et al looked at the preserved brains of 10 woodpeckers to look for evidence of brain injury. In order to examine the impacts of tapping on woodpecker brains, it's important to understand what doctors look for in human brains when trying to diagnose traumatic brain injuries. Until this recent study, there had only been a single investigation into woodpecker brains. The study looked at samples but didn't describe their microscopic results, yet they determined that woodpeckers don't experience any ill effects from tapping trees. This single study has been cited more than 100 times and has been used to model woodpeckers as the ideal template for the design of protective sports equipment and technology. The authors of this study felt that it was time to look more closely at this claim. They examined the brains of 10 woodpeckers as well as several red-winged blackbirds. The blackbirds, being non-tapping birds, were considered the control. Any results that were consistent between the two birds, could not be related to the tapping which is unique to woodpeckers. As they removed and sectioned the brains, they were looking at numerous characteristics. In human brains, the protein tau is often associated with other symptoms of brain injury, in particular, chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. That's a fancy term for people with progressive, degenerative brain disease associated with repeated brain trauma. In a study undertaken by Boston University, researchers found CTE in the brains of 110 of 111 retired NFL football players. The same traumas can be found in hockey, soccer, rugby, and other athletes where repeated head impacts are a regular part of the sport. The protein tau is usually associated with CTE and brain injuries, however, the exact relationship has not been fully explained. Unfortunately, CTE can only be diagnosed by examining microscopic sections of brain tissue in deceased individuals. In this study, the brains of woodpeckers and red-winged blackbirds were sectioned in the same way scientists would look at the brain of a football player. Microscope slides were stained with a Gallyas stain. This is a stain used to identify damage to neurons and brain tissue. In 8 of the 10 woodpecker brains, the Gallyas test showed positive results, while none of the blackbird brains showed any result. In addition, the staining appeared more prevalent in the front portion of the brains where the impact from tapping would be expected. Identifying the actual tau protein takes another step and requires more detailed investigation of the brain samples. Several of the brains were not in great physical condition, so they were only able to complete the test on three of the samples, and two of them tested positive for tau in the same areas of the brain that was highlighted by the earlier Gallyas test. None of the blackbird brains showed any signs of in either the Gallyas test or the test for tau. The combination of these two tests showed consistent results that identify proteins often related to brain injury only in the woodpecker brains Now, what does this mean? Are woodpeckers slowly cross-checking themselves into brain injuries? This study can't offer any definitive answers. This was a tiny, tiny study. In addition, there are many types of tau proteins, and each may have a different impact on the bird's welfare. There is even a possibility that the proteins actually help the bird rather than harm it. Tau proteins can also show up as a normal part of the ageing process. In this study, one of the woodpeckers was a juvenile and it showed the same distribution of tau proteins. If a juvenile exhibits this protein, it helps to disprove the potential that tau proteins are solely the result of age. Essentially what this study did was to support the idea that we really need to do more study. With only 10 birds in the sample, it's difficult to claim definitive results. One of the things I love about science is the simple fact that each study is merely a doorway to focus the research into new directions. Few studies are a conclusion, but rather a crossroads tantalizing scientists to move further along the highway of knowledge. As you wander the trails around the mountain west from now on, I want you to marvel at the at these truly unique birds. Every cell of their body is designed to help them focus on one thing, excavating insects from trees. With all this armour, woodpeckers are heavy set birds. They'll fly away, flapping their wings, and after a few strong beats, which helps them climb, they'll coast for a bit and their heavy bodies will drop. This gives them an undulating, up-and-down movement that is easy to spot long before you've identified a particular type of woodpecker. The mountain west contains a huge variety of woodpeckers so why not spend a bit of time with a field guide to help recognize a few of our local residents. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Don’t' forget to hit that subscribe button on whatever podcast program you use to listen to podcasts. For an easy way to subscribe, simply visit www.MountainNaturePodcast.com and click the subscribe button on whatever device you normally use. It will detect the device and get you subscribed right away - so you never miss another episode. While you're there, check out the show notes for this episode at www.MountainNature.com/ep055. Here you'll find links to additional information as well as a comment section where you can share your thoughts or even your story ideas for future episodes. Remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for all things Rocky Mountains. Visit us at www.WardCameron.com. And with that, the sun's out and it's time to go snowshoeing. I'll talk to you next week.

Home for Christmas - Tom Wilson has a close call

So, what would you be willing to endure to make it home for Christmas In these modern times? These days trips home usually involve expensive plane fares or long drives on winter roads made safer by winter tires, interior heaters, and modern clothing.

What if you were faced with a 112 km snowshoe trek on an unbroken trail in a blizzard - you know, just like your parents told you what it was like to walk to school in the days of yore! Well, Tom Wilson was more than just a mountain man. He was the personal assistant of "Hells Bells Rogers" during his railroad surveys through the Rockies and later started the first guiding operation in the mountains.

In December of 1904, Tom was determined to be home for Christmas dinner with his family. His route began at Kootenay Plains where he had his horse ranch. Today it's located along the David Thompson Highway east of the Saskatchewan River Crossing in Alberta. His route would have followed the Siffleur River Valley up and over Pipestone Pass. He then followed the Pipestone River towards its confluence with the Bow River, and then followed the Bow into Banff.

He wasn't the first to follow that route. In August of 1859, James Hector of the Palliser Expedition had passed this way. He wrote in his journal:

"After camping to the south of the pass, “…opposite to a waterfall which forms the source of Pipe Stone Creek, and where the stream leaps and rushes down a gutter-like channel, from a height of 450 feet,” they set out to, “ascend to the height of land by a steep rocky path that led at some places close by snow that was still lying from last winter. After five miles we got above the woods, and passed over a fine sloping prairie, with big bald mountains on either side. Plants with esculent roots were very abundant here, and many parts of the sward looked as if it had been ploughed, where the bears had been rooting them up like pigs….Two miles further we passed over a bleak bare “divide,” where there was no vegetation, and elevated about 2000 feet above last night’s encampment.”

Others had also passed that way. They included Normal Collie, Hugh Stutfield, and Herman Wooley in 1898 as they headed north on an expedition that saw them discovering the Columbia Icefields. Just a few months after Hector had passed through, the Earl of Southesk, James Carnegie, also traversed the pass.

These men were all seasoned travellers, but none of them attempted the route in winter. Tom, like all of his contemporaries, would have been kitted out in heavy woolen clothing with leather boots and snowshoes.

Here is how Tom described his experience in a letter to pioneer surveyor and founder of the Alpine Club, A. O. Wheeler:

"There is not much to tell of my trip over the Pipestone Pass. It was simply the case of a man starting on a seventy-mile snowshoe trip across the mountains to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife and family, and getting there and eating dinner, the pleasure being well worth the trip.

I rode to within eight miles of the summit and started early the next morning on snowshoes to cross the pass (8,300 feet). It was snowing a little and very cold when I started and when I got opposite the Clearwater Gap, a blizzard came up. I could not see more than six or eight feet ahead in that grey snow light that makes everything look level. I was on the trail alongside a mountainside, and was afraid of falling down into one of those steep side collars (which you remember on that side), and of breaking my snowshoes, so I turned and went down the mountain to the creek bottom.

The snow was seven or eight feet deep and I fell through a snow bridge, getting both feet wet. It was below zero and a long way up to timber whichever way I turned, but I'd never liked hitting the back trail. It was eight o'clock at night before I crossed the summit of the pass and reached the first timber.

I got a fire started, but it was drifting and snowing so hard that the snow covered my socks and moccasins as fast as I could wring (sic) them dry, and, owing to the fierce wind, the flames leap in every direction , making it impossible to get near the fire, so at half past nine I gave it up, put on my wet foot gear and snowshoes and started down the valley. I could not see and felt my way with a stick.

By daylight I had made three and a half miles; not much, but it kept the circulation going. In the heavy timber I made a fire and dried out. My feet were beginning to pain as they had been thawed out twice already. I made three miles more that day and finished the last of my grub.

The big snowshoes sank fifteen inches in the soft new snow and were a big drag on my frozen toes. I saw it meant three or four more days tramping without grub to make Laggan. I made it in three, but the last day I could only make about fifty yards without resting, and my tracks did not leave a very straight line. The chief trouble I had was to keep from going to sleep; it would have been so much easier to quit than to go on. "

Wheeler tried to bring some clarity to Tom's adventure. He wrote:

"Think for a moment what it really meant; that every time he put on his snowshoes, his toes got frozen owing to the tight shoe straps; that every time he took them off, his feet had to be thawed out; that every step had to raise a load of ten to fifteen pound of soft snow; that wood had to be collected and cut to keep alive during the night; that the fierce pain would drive away sleep; that he had no food, and always before him those interminable, slow, dragging miles of snowy wilderness. It must have required iron determination to make it to the end of the never-ending track, to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife and family. "

Like any winter backcountry traveller that has suffered from frostbite, Tom made his way to see Dr. Brett, Banff's resident physician. He is rumoured to have stated:

"I hope I won't have to loose(sic) them Doc. I've hade(sic) 'em a long time and I'm sort of used to 'em."

Tom was very lucky. He did lose several toes on each foot but he liked to joke that since the doc had removed the same number on each foot, he was still well balanced. I want to thank Roger Patillo for sharing this story in his book The Canadian Rockies Pioneers, Legends and True Tales.Click the title of the book if you'd like to purchase a copy.

Tom was one of many early and modern mountain wanderers to lose toes to frostbite. Even today, it is a real danger for people out on snowshoes, as well as backcountry and cross-country skis. Always plan for changes in weather and remember, unlike Tom, you can always turn back if conditions change for the worse.

Are wolves returning to the Bow Valley?

The Bow River valley has not been a good home for wolves. Over the years, pack after pack has become established only to gradually get whittled away by vehicle and train impacts, and more recently, human food conditioning.

The summer of 2016 was particularly bad for the Bow Valley wolf pack. The summer began on a very high note its 5 adults being joined by 6 new pups making for a total of 11 wolves in the pack. Unfortunately, this situation changed for the worse with four of the pups killed in two separate incidents with trains. The alpha female and another young female were both shot by Park Wardens after becoming accustomed to handouts from campers in the Two Jack Lake Campground.

By the end of the season, none of the pups had survived. In a separate incident, one of the remaining wolves was shot by a hunter in B.C.

By 2017, there were only two wolves remaining and they dispersed. As of Sept 2017, the alpha male had joined a pack in the southern part of Banff known as the Spray Pack. The surviving female had joined another male and possibly moved out of the area.

Paul Paquette is a well-respected biologist who headed the largest wolf study ever undertaken in the Bow Valley. In recent years he was quoted as stating the following about the challenges for wolves in the Bow River valley:

“It’s a wildlife ghetto. People need to understand, the Bow Valley has two townsites that are growing, two highways, a corridor for high transmission power lines, dams, golf courses, ski hills … They’ve got all that in the valley, so you can imagine the responses for the wolves and wildlife – it’s a ghetto for them and they’re trying to survive in there.”

We are in a constant battle with developers and the town to try to make sure that we can keep wildlife like wolves and grizzly bears on the landscape. Recently, there seems to be a reason for cautious optimism.

The Bow Valley is great habitat for wolves when you consider the high numbers of potential prey animals available to them. In a recent interview on CBC, Jesse Whittington, a wildlife ecologist with Parks Canada stated:

"We're curious about what's going to happen," said Whittington. "Either the old male and the pack from the Spray could move back into the Bow Valley, or one of the neighbouring packs might slide in."

In October of 2017, three wolves were spotted west of Banff near Castle Mountain. These were previously unknown wolves that may be looking for a new place to call home. As Jesse Whittington stated in an interview with the Rocky Mountain Outlook:

"If you have a male and female who hook-up and have pups, all of a sudden you could have a pack of seven wolves, and if those pups survive and have pups again, you get a pretty large pack"

The Bow Valley has not been kind to its wolves, but we still need them. They play a key role in keeping elk and deer populations in check. It's too easy to look at Banff today and point out the world-class wildlife crossings along the highway and assume that wolves will have an easy time coexisting with people.

This couldn't be further from the truth. The section of highway that is fenced is primarily through Banff and a little to the east and west. Wolves cover vast ranges and the crossing structures only protect them in a small part of their range. The train tracks and Bow Valley Parkway also remain unfenced.

Just this past November, two wolves were killed on the Trans-Canada Highway east of Canmore.

It was trains that killed 4 of the pack's cubs in 2016. Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific Railway have been conducting ongoing research around the idea of fencing and other wildlife warning systems in areas of highest danger.

We also have rampant development in areas like Canmore which can hamper movement through the valley to the east and south into Kananaskis and beyond.

And finally, we have the challenge of people on the landscape. More than 90% of the use of our designated wildlife corridors in and around Canmore was by people. If the corridors are viewed as just another recreational trail, then eventually, the wildlife will simply avoid the corridor altogether.

In the past, we've been lucky enough to have several wolf packs adjacent to the Bow Valley, for instance in the Cascade and Spray Valleys, but the Bow Valley Pack has come and gone repeatedly due to the many hazards that face them when they arrive in the valley.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that these wolves do stick around. We need to do our part to make sure they have the best possible opportunity to survive and thrive. Here are a few things that we can do to help keep our wolves safe:

• Slow down on highways like the Trans-Canada, Bow Valley Parkway, Highway 40, and Spray Lakes Road
• Never ever feed wildlife or stand idly by while other people offer food.
• Keep your distance. Moving ever closer for that selfie puts your life, and the life of the animal, at risk.
• Obey trail closures. They are there for a reason.

If we all make a point of doing what we can to keep wildlife safe and help to educate visitors who may not be aware of the consequences of their actions, then we may be able to help keep wolves on the landscape.

Next up 10 New Years Resolutions for the Mountain Parks

New Years Resolutions for the Mountain Parks

The mountains are more than just a place to hike, bike and explore. They are home to 53 species of mammals, 260 species of birds, 996 species of vascular plants, 407 lichens, 243 mosses, and 53 liverworts (source: http://canadianparks.com/alberta/banffnp/page3.html). There are also almost 90 species of fungi in the mountain parks (source: http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pubwarehouse/pdfs/11896.pdf).

Everything we do in the mountains has an impact and here are some resolutions that will help you to better appreciate this beautiful place.

1. Explore less busy sites. More than 95% of visitation to the mountain parks visits the same 2 or 3% of the park, essentially the paved corridors. Many of the attractions along these roads are in serious need of upgrades to help prevent the masses of tourists from creating permanent damage.
2. Quiet Times are the Best Times. If you really want to get the experience that you saw on the brochure, get an alarm clock. The sun comes up early in the mountains during the summer months. If you're on the shores of Lake Louise or Moraine Lake at 6 am, you'll likely have the view all to yourself…and don't tell anybody, but those two sites are best when the sun first hits the mountains. Don't forget the evening though as well. Once the hordes head back to their hotels, the landscape quiets down again and you can have that great experience.
3. Keep track of your sightings. If you see something exciting like a grizzly bear, wolf, cougar, or wolverine - report it. Park managers are always looking to keep tabs on wildlife and sightings helps to add another data point to their wildlife research.
4. Support organizations like the Friends of Kananaskis and Friends of Jasper. These not for profit groups do an amazing job in helping to raise awareness of park issues, run educational programs, offer volunteer opportunities to make a difference on the ground and even operate gift shops and other facilities designed to raise money for their ongoing operation.
5. Read a good book. Our connection to our sense of place always improves with knowledge and understanding. What once was an unknown wilderness suddenly becomes a community of plants, animals, birds, and other living beings - each with an important role to play in the maintenance of the community. Every book that helps you to understand the place you call home can only enhance your ability to feel an even stronger connection to that place.
6. Meet your neighbours. The next time you walk one of the local trails, take the time to learn the story of one new plant, animal, bird, or other residents of the mountain landscape. I say "learn the story", because each one is much more than just their name. Why are they there? What role do they play? What's the coolest thing about them? As you repeat this process, the mountain landscape becomes much more familiar and ever more welcoming as you look forward to the acquaintances you've made and begin to mark the seasons by the comings and goings of old friends.
7. Start up a neighbourhood watch. By this I mean keep an eye on your mountain community and look for changes. Are there new plants on the landscape that weren't there in the past? New birds? Changes in the community often reflect changes in the environment. Every resident of a particular community is there because that habitat offers all the essential requirements they need to survive. Plants need the right amount of moisture, sunlight, soil, nitrogen, and perhaps even a particular neighbour with whom they have a dependent relationship. Every plant will have a different list of needs, as will every bird and animal. A small change to the ecology will be reflected in changes to the individual plants and animals in that community.
8. Simply sit down. We hike, mountain bike, cross-country ski, and snowshoe along the mountain trails season after season and year after year. Sometimes, the best experience can be had by simply sitting quietly and absorbing everything that's around you. Take off your shoes and socks (in the summer of course), and feel connected to the landscape. Listen to the sounds. Can you recognize all the birds around you? Watch the fish rising in the water to eat insects hatching on the surface. Smell the air. Are their particular smells that spark a memory? Smell is the sense most tied to memory and often a strong smell will instantly transport you to a particular place or time in your personal history. For me, the pungent sweet smell of wolf willow represents the smell of home.
9. Talk to a senior. Our sense of place is more than just learning the natural history. To understand the natural history, we also have to understand the ways that people have interacted with it in the past. Somebody that's been on the land for 50 years can share insights that only come with the passing of the years and the experiences that those years brought. The elders are the keepers of the stories. They are a wealth of knowledge and wisdom and time spent talking with elders about their lifetime of adventures and understanding will always help guide you to a new appreciation of the world around you.
10. Be a tourist now and then. Take a tour. Visit a museum or attraction. Fly in a helicopter. Often, we learn more about places we visit then we do about our own backyard. Make a point of seeing the mountains like visitors see them. Spending time with people that are seeing the Rockies for the first time is one of the things that I love the most about being a guide. Every tourist sees something different. They bring a new perspective born of a lifetime of experiences in their past. I'm constantly guided towards new perspectives simply because they are looking at a scene with fresh eyes.

Why not make 2018 a year where we commit to understanding and connecting to the mountain landscape around us? If at the end of the year, you've learned a few new plants, or birds, or animals, and how they both benefit and are benefitting other members of the community, then you will have started on an exciting role that will deepen your personal sense of place. I hope to see you out there.

Next up, what determines success when bears are relocated outside of their home range?

Success of Relocating Grizzly Bears

This past summer, people were stunned when Bear 148 was moved far from her home range. Unfortunately, she subsequently wandered across the British Columbia border and was legally shot by a hunter.

The media covered this story extensively and in many cases used the wrong terminology. When wildlife managers move a bear to an area within its current home range, we call it relocating the bear. This term refers to moving a bear simply to another area that is still within its territory and within which it can comfortably survive.

In cases, such as with 148, where the bear is moved far from its home range, the preferred term is translocated. This means that the bear is moved to completely unfamiliar territory where it doesn't know the seasonal food patterns or their locations. It doesn't know the landscape and it doesn't know the other resident bears into whose territory it has just been placed.

As you can imagine, this puts the bear in a very high-risk situation, but just how high risk? What are its chances of surviving so far from its home range? This is one area of study that has been largely neglected until recently.

There really had not been any peer-reviewed analyses of the factors that affected survival when a bear was translocated.

An article published in the January 2018 issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management evaluated 110 different grizzly translocations within the Alberta Rockies and looked to determine what factors impacted successful movements and looked for ways to increase the success of future translocations.

Biologist Sarah Milligan and her fellow researchers defined a successful translocation as one that required no additional management intervention and showed the bear surviving one entire year without returning to its home range.

It's well known that the odds are not in favour of the non-resident bear when it is moved to unfamiliar territory. Of the 110 translocations examined, a full 70% were failures. A 30% success rate is still much higher than generally reported in the media.

Translocations are never popular, but unfortunately, with some bears, the only other alternative is to shoot it. Conservation officers never make the decision to move a bear lightly. They know the dangers that it will face in its new home but their first priority is the safety of the community.

While Bear 148 never injured anyone, it got to the point where conservation officers simply had to make the difficult decision to move her.

In order to determine the success of bears in new habitats, biologists needed to better understand how bears currently living in the area use the landscape. Researchers tagged resident bears to learn how they used the landscape, feeding habits, and denning areas.

Alberta also has a long history of monitoring bear movement with satellite and radio collars and this historical data is also helpful in studies like this one.

One of the biggest challenges with translocating bears is their homing instinct. Many bears will simply abandon their new homes and travel back towards their home range. It is for this reason that Bear 148 was moved north of Jasper National Park. The further the movement, the lower the likelihood that the bear will return home.

The quality of the habitat into which a bear is released can also have a strong bearing on reducing the homing instinct. Ideally, the release location should match, as much as possible, the home range in terms of available foods, movement corridors, and denning sites.

The study found that the success rate was highest if bears were moved as early as possible in the season. Unfortunately, in many cases, the highest potential for human-grizzly conflicts occurs during buffaloberry season between mid-July and mid-September.

Translocated bears also tended to have ranges some 3.25 times larger than resident bears. This shows they needed to cover more territory in order to find sufficient forage to survive. This is likely connected to their being unfamiliar with the landscape. While their home ranges did decrease over time, they continued to be larger than resident bears.

Of the translocations that were considered failures, the primary causes were homing, new incidents of conflict, and mortality. Of the 77 failed translocations, 28 bears were killed because of management actions, and 30 failed due to homing. Bears translocated more than 200 km reduced the odds of homing by 95%.

When it comes to the timing of winter denning, the study showed no significant difference between resident and translocated bears.

The study concluded:

"Repeated conflict and mortality were the greatest causes of translocation failure. Our results suggest that the most important factors for translocation success are the level of human-caused mortality risk at the release site and the time of year when the translocation occurred. Specifically, we found that the odds of translocation success decreased with increasing levels of mortality risk surrounding the release site. This result is likely related to the large post-release movements that are typical of many wide-ranging species, which can bring individuals near areas of conflict or mortality risk."

Translocation remains an important management tool. Studies like this one help wildlife officers to make the best decisions to increase the opportunities for a successful movement. It's never an easy decision to move an animal away from its home range but the more we understand ways to increase their chances of success, the more the pendulum can move towards reduced mortality.

In the central Rockies, people are the biggest problem. We need to work harder to coexist with bears and to respect closures. When people violate closures, it's always the bears that pay the price.

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for snowshoe, nature, hiking, and photography guides across the mountain west. We've been sharing the stories behind the scenery for more than 30 years. Don't forget to check out the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep054 for links to additional information. You can also comment on the stories and subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. If you'd like to reach out personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron and with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go snowshoeing. I'll talk to you next week.

David Thompson heads west Last week, I ended the story of David Thompson with his leaving the employment of the Hudson's Bay Company, and joining the rival Northwest Company. As Thompson began his journey to the west, he described the landscape of the great plains: "The climate is good, the winters about five months, the summers are warm, and autumn has many fine days. The soil is rich and deep, and [there is] much vegetation mould from the annual decay of the leaves of the forest trees, and the grass of the meadows: civilization will no doubt extend over these low hills; they are well adapted for raising of cattle; and when the wolves are destroyed, also for sheep; and agriculture will succeed to a pastoral life, so far as markets can be formed in the country, but no further; for Canada is too distant and difficult of access. The only port open to them is York Factory on the dismal shores of Hudson's Bay, open four months in the year. And to go to York Factory and return will require all that part of the summer which cannot be spared: but when a civilized population shall cover the countries, means will be found to make its produce find a market." Thompson, better than most, recognized the vastness of the Canadian wilderness. In time, the prairies would become settled, and many more ports would become open to Canadian products. As he continued his journey west, he described the tranquillity of the Bow River. "The Bow River flows through the most pleasant of the plains, and is the great resort of the bison and the red deer (or elk), and also of the natives; the soil appears good along its wholes extent, but for the most part is bare of woods, and those that remain are fast diminishing by fire." He continued: "The rivers that roll through this immense unbroken body of land of plains and forests, are so beautifully distributed; all their banks so admirably adjusted to the volumes of water that flow between them, that neither the heaviest rains nor the melting of the snows of the mountains inundate the adjacent country. In all seasons, the Indians, the bisons, and deer repose on their banks in perfect security. Whoever calmly views the admirable formation and distribution of the rivers so wonderfully conducted to their several seas; must confess the whole to have been traced by the forger of the Great Supreme Artificer for the most benevolent purposes, both to his creature man, and the numerous animals he has made, none of whom can exist without water." Thompson was a deeply religious man and his journal is filled with his reflections on how the landscape was shaped by both the powers of nature, but also from the hand of God. Thompson was also charged with looking for fossils of dinosaurs and mammoths during his travels. While he succeeded in many things, this was one area where he failed. He writes: "Not a single fossil bone of an Elephant, Rhinocerous, or Mammoth has been found in all Canada nor about any of the Great Lakes, and valley of the [St.] Lawrence, and north-ward to the Arctic Circle, although almost all these countries are sufficiently known; nor has the travels of Captain Franklin in the Arctic Regions been attended with any success on this subject. On the west side of the Rocky Mountains, I passed six years of discovery, yet not a vestige that these great Animals once existed in those parts could be found. " Despite his not finding any fossil evidence, the first nations believed that the mountains were still the home of mammoths. Thompson described the first nations of the plains: "THE Indians of the Plains are of various Tribes and of several languages which have no affinity with each other. The Stone Indians are a large tribe of the Sieux Nation, and speak a dialect, differing little from the Sieux tongue, the softest and most pleasing to the ear of all the indian languages. They have always been, and are, in strict alliance with the Nahathaways, and their hunting grounds are on the left bank of the Saskatchewan and eastward and southward to the upper part of the Red River, and their number 400 Tents each containing about eight souls, in all 3200" Thompson was referring to the Stoney and Cree Indians. The Stoney's were part of the Sioux nation but had become separated from their eastern relatives and had since allied with the Cree. He continued: "THE Peeagans, with the tribes of the Blood, and Blackfeet Indians, who all speak the same language, are the most powerful of the western and northern plains, and by right of conquest have their west boundary to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, southward to the north branches of the Missisourie, eastward for about three hundred miles from the Mountains and northward to the upper part of the Saskatchewan. Other tribes of their allies also at times hunt on part of the above, and a great extent of the Plains, and these great Plains place them under different circ*mstances, and give them peculiar traits of character from those that hunt in the forests. These latter live a peaceable life, with hard labor, to procure provisions and clothing for their families, in summer they make use of canoes, and in winter haul on sleds all they have, in their frequent removals from place to place. On the other hand the Indians of the Plains make no use of canoes, frequently stay many days in a place, and when they remove have horses and dogs, both in summer and winter to carry their baggage and provisions: they have no hard labor, but have powerful enemies which keep them constantly on the watch and are never secure but in large camps" The Peagan, Blood and Blackfeet were all closely allied and over time, they displaced the Kootenays, Salish, and the Snake Indians. Thompson also mentions the Fall Indians, today known as the Gros Ventre, which were driven out of the area by the Stoney and Cree Indians. Thompson described the war chief of the Peigan, a solid man by the name of Kootenae Appe or Kootenay Man: "his stature was six feet six inches, tall and erect, he appeared to be of Bone and Sinew with no more flesh, than absolutely required; his countenance manly, but not stern, his features prominent, nose somewhat aquiline, his manners kind and mild; his word was sacred, he was both loved and respected, and his people often wished him to take a more active part in their affairs but he confined himself to War, and the care of the camp in which he was, which was generally of fifty to one hundred tents, generally a full day’s march nearer to the Snake Indians than any other camp… Kootanae Appe by his five wives had twenty-two sons and four daughters. His grown-up sons were as tall as himself and the others promised the same. He was friendly to the White Men, and in his speeches reminded his people of the great benefit of [which] the Traders were to them, and that it was by their means they had so many useful articles, and guns for hunting, and to conquer their enemies. " Thompson continues: "He had acquired his present station and influence from his conduct in war. He was utterly averse to small parties, except for horse stealing, which too often brought great hardships and loss of life. He seldom took the field with less than two hundred warriors but frequently with many more; his policy was to get as many of the allies to join him as possible, by which all might have a share of the honour and plunder, and thus avoid those jealousies and envyings so common amongst the Chiefs. He praised every Chief that in the least deserved it, but never appeared to regard fame as worth his notice yet always took care to deserve it, for all his expeditions were successful." Unlike so many white men that saw only savages when dealing with first nations, Thompson could see the entire cross-section of society within Peigan villages: "The character of all these people appear[s] to be brave, steady and deliberate, but on becoming acquainted with them there is no want of individual character, and almost every character in civilized society can be traced among them, from the gravity of a judge to a merry jester, and from open hearted generosity to the avaricious miser. This last character is more detested by them, than by us, from their precarious manner of life, requiring assistance from each other, and their general character. Especially in provisions is great attention [paid] to those that are unfortunate in the chace, and the tent of a sick man is well supplied." Thompson described the various languages of the Plains Indians: "The Languages of this continent on the east and north sides of the Mountains as compared with those of Europe may be classed as resembling in utterance. The Sieux and Stone Indian to the Italian. The Nahathaway and Chipaway with their dialects to the French. The Peeagan with their allies, the Blood and Black feet Indians to the English, and the northern people, the Dinnae, or Chepawyans to the German." The Peigan patrolled the mountain front in order to keep their enemies, the Kootenay, today known as the Ktunaxa, from crossing the mountains and trading with the white men for guns. Fortunately, in 1807, the expedition of Lewis and Clark was travelling along the Missouri River and Lewis shot two Peigan Indians. The Peigan abandoned the mountains in order to head south to seek revenge. Thompson and his men took advantage of this temporary absence. After leaving Rocky Mountain House on May 10, Thompson, along with his wife Charlotte Small, and their children made their way to the pass. While Finan McDonald took a canoe with supplies, Thompson road along the north side of the river, reaching Kootenay Plain, at the south end of Abraham Lake on June 3, and just 3 days later they were at the forks of the North Saskatchewan River near present-day Saskatchewan River Crossing. Here he had to head inland towards the pass. As Thompson wrote: "the murder of two Peagan Indians by Captain Lewis of the United States, drew the Peagans to the Mississouri to revenge their deaths; and thus gave me an opportunity to cross the Mountains by the defiles of the Saskatchewan River, which led to the head waters of the Columbia River, and we there builded Log Houses, and strongly stockaded it on three sides, the other side resting on the steep bank of the River: the Logs of the House, and the Stockades, Bastions &c were of a peculiar kind of a heavy resinous Fir, of a rough black bark. It was clean grown to about twenty feet, when it threw off a head of long rude branches, with a long narrow leaf for a Fir, which was annually shed, and became from green to a red color. The Stockades were all ball proof, as well as the Logs of the Houses." Thompson was forced to abandon the canoes just a few miles beyond the forks and they had to continue on horses, packing their supplies with them. They reached the pass on June 25, and descended the Blaeberry River to its confluence with the Columbia River. The previous season, Thompson had sent Jaco Finlay across the pass and he had built a canoe and left it for Thompson. Unfortunately, it had been destroyed by the winter and Thompson and his men spent several days building new canoes and repacking their supplies. With the canoes built and loaded, they continued down the Columbia River to present day Windermere Lake. He paddled just a few kilometres south of the lake and built Kootenae House, the first trading post on the Columbia River. He spent the rest of the season here trading with the Kootenay Indians and capturing wild horses which were plentiful in the region. Thompson knew there would be consequences for violating the Piegan blockade and sure enough, in mid-November, two Peigans crossed the pass, as he put it: "to see how I was situated; I showed the strength of the Stockades, and Bastions, and told them I know you are come as Spies, and intend to destroy us, but many of you will die before you do so; go back to your countrymen and tell them so; which they did, and we remained quiet for the winter; I knew the danger of the place we were in, but could not help it: As soon as the Mountains were passable I sent off the Clerk and Men with the Furrs collected, among which were one hundred of the Mountain Goat Skins with their long silky hair, of a foot in length of a white color, tinged at the lower end with a very light shade of yellow. Some of the ignorant self sufficient partners of the Company ridiculed such an article for the London Market; there they went and sold at first sight for a guinea a skin, and half as much more for another Lot, but there were no more. These same partners then wrote to me to procure as many as possible, I returned for answer, the hunting of the goat was both dangerous and laborious, and for their ignorant ridicule I would send no more, and I kept my word. I had now to prepare for a more serious visit from the Peagans who had met in council, and it was determined to send forty men, under a secondary Chief to destroy the trading Post, and us with it, they came and pitched their Tents close before the Gate, which was well barred. I had six men with me, and ten guns, well loaded, the House was perforated with large augur holes, as well as the Bastions, thus they remained for three weeks without daring to attack us. We had a small stock of dried provisions which we made go as far as possible; they thought to make us suffer for want of water as the bank we were on was about 20 feet high and very steep, but at night, by a strong cord we quietly and gently let down two brass Kettles each holding four Gallons, and drew them up full; which was enough for us: They were at a loss what to do, for Kootanae Appee the War Chief, had publickly told the Chief of this party, (which was formed against his advice) to remember he had Men confided to his care, whom he must bring back, that he was sent to destroy the Enemies not to lose his Men: Finding us always on the watch, they did not think proper to risque their lives, when at the end of three weeks they suddenly decamped; I thought it a ruse de guerre, I afterwards learned that some of them hunting saw some Kootanaes who were also hunting, and as what was done was an act of aggression, something like an act of War; they decamped to cross the mountains to join their own Tribe while all was well with them: the return of this party without success occasioned a strong sensation among the Peeagans. The Civil Chief harangued them, and gave his advice to form a strong war party under Kootanae Appee the War Chief and directly to crush the white Men and the Natives on the west side of the Mountains, before they became well armed, They have always been our slaves (Prisoners) and now they will pretend to equal us; no, we must not suffer this, we must at once crush them. We know them to be desperate Men, and we must destroy them, before they become too powerful for us; the War Chief coolly observed I shall lead the battle according to the will of the Tribe, but we cannot smoke to the Great Spirit for success, as we usually do, it is now about ten winters since we made peace with them, they have tented and hunted with us, and because they have guns and iron headed Arrows, we must break our word of peace with them: We are now called upon to go to war with a people better armed than ourselves; be it so, let the Warriors get ready; in ten nights I will call on them. The old, and the intelligent Men, severely blamed the speech of the Civil Chief, they remarked, “ the older he gets, the less sense [he possesses].” On the ninth night the War Chief made a short speech, to have each man to take full ten days of dried provisions, for we shall soon leave the country of the Bison, after which we must not fire a shot, or we shall be discovered: On the tenth night he made his final speech, and exhorting the Warriors and their Chiefs to have their Arms in good order, and not forget dried provisions, he named a place; there I shall be the morrow evening, and those who now march with me, there I shall wait for you five nights, and then march to cross the Mountains; at the end of this time about three hundred Warriors under three Chiefs assembled; and took their route across the Mountains by the Stag River, and by the defiles of another River of the same name, came on the Columbia, about full twenty miles from me; as usual, by another pass of the Mountains, they sent two Men to see the strength of the House; I showed them all round the place, and they staid that night. I plainly saw that a War Party was again formed, to be better conducted than the last; and I prepared Presents to avert it: the next morning two Kootanae Men arrived, their eyes glared on the Peagans like Tigers, this was most fortunate; I told them to sit down and smoke which they did; I then called the two Peagans out, and enquired of them which way they intended to return. They pointed to the northward. I told them to go to Kootanae Appee and his War Party, who were only a days journey from us, and delivering to them the Presents I had made up, to be off directly, as I could not protect them, for you know you are on these lands as Enemies; the Presents were six feet of Tobacco to the Chief, to be smoked among them, three feet with a fine pipe of red porphyry and an ornamented Pipe Stem; eighteen inches to each of the three Chiefs, and a small piece to each of themselves, and telling them they had no right to be in the Kootanae Country: to haste away; for the Kootanaes would soon be here, and they will fight for their trading Post: In all that regarded the Peeagans I chanced to be right, it was all guess work. Intimately acquainted with the Indians, the Country and the Seasons, I argued and acted on probabilities; I was afterwards informed that the two Peeagans went direct to the camp of the War Party, delivered the Presents and the Message and sat down, upon which the War Chief exclaimed, what can we do with this man, our women cannot mend a pair of shoes, but he sees them, alluding to my Astronomical Observations; then in a thoughful mood he laid the pipe and stem, with the several pieces of Tobacco on the ground, and said, what is to be done with these, if we proceed, nothing of what is before us can be accepted; the eldest of [the] three Chiefs, wistfully eyeing the Tobacco, of which they had none; at length he said, You all know me, who I am, and what I am; I have attacked Tents, my knife could cut through them, and our enemies had no defence against us, and I am ready to do so again, but to go and fight against Logs of Wood, that a Ball cannot go through, and with people we cannot see and with whom we are at peace, is what I am averse to, I go no further. He then cut the end of the Tobacco, filled the red pipe, fitted the stem, and handed it to Kootanae Appee, saying it was not you that brought us here, but the foolish Sakatow (Civil Chief) who, himself never goes to War; they all smoked, took the Tobacco, and returned, very much to the satisfaction of Kootanae Appe my steady friend; thus by the mercy of good Providence I averted this danger; The next spring, Thompson and his family returned over Howse Pass, but had to eat several of their horses when they couldn't find any wildlife to shoot for provisions. After crossing the Pass, Thompson and some of his men continued all the way to Rainy Lake, Ontario where they delivered the furs they had collected and then stocked up on trade goods. Thompson was also ordered to bring 2 kegs of alcohol with him, but he had always forbidden the trade of whiskey in his presence. He wrote: "[We] embarked the Furrs, and with five men set off for the Rainy River House and arrived July 22, where we landed our cargo of Furrs, then made up an assortment of Goods, for two Canoes, each carrying twenty pieces of ninety pounds weight; among which I was obliged to take two Kegs of Alcohol, over ruled by my Partners (Mess” Dond McTavish and Jo McDonald [of] Gart[h]) for I had made it a law to myself, that no alcohol should pass the Mountains in my company, and thus be clear of the sad sight of drunkeness, and it’s many evils: but these gentlemen insisted upon alcohol being the most profitable article that could be taken for the indian trade. In this I knew they had miscalculated; accordingly when we came to the defiles of the Mountains, I placed the two Kegs of Alcohol on a vicious horse; and by noon the Kegs were empty, and in pieces, the Horse rubbing his load against the Rocks to get rid of it; I wrote to my partners what I had done; and that I would do the same to every Keg of Alcohol, and for the next six years I had charge of the furr trade on the west side of the Mountains, no further attempt was made to introduce spirituous Liquors." Thompson returned to Kootenai House and in the winter of 1808-09, he stayed through the winter. The snow also brought safety from the Peigans as the snow was too deep for a war party to cross the Pass in winter. After briefly crossing Howse Pass again in the spring of 1809, Thompson returned to the west side of the mountains and headed south towards Idaho and built Kullyspell House near present-day Sand Point, where he traded with the Salish, Skeetshoo, and Kootenay Indians in the area. He wrote: "Our arrival rejoiced them very much, for except the four Kootanaes their only arms were a few rude lances, and flint headed Arrows. Good bowmen as they are, these arrow heads broke against the Shield of tough Bison hide, or even against thick leather could do no harm; their only aim was the face: these they were now to exchange for Guns, Ammunition and Iron headed arrows, and thus be on an equality with their enemies, for they were fully their equals in courage: but I informed them, that to procure these advantages they must not pass days and nights in gambling, but be industrious in hunting and working of Beaver and other furrs, all which they promised" He continued: "All those who could procure Guns soon became good shots, which the Peeagan Indians, their enemies in the next battle severely felt; for they are not good shots, except a few; they are accustomed to fire at the Bison on horseback, within a few feet of the animal, it gives them no practice at long shots at small marks. On the contrary, the Indians on the west side of the Mountains are accustomed to fire at the small Antelope at a distance of one hundred and twenty yards, which is a great advantage in battle, where everyone marks out his man." In the fall of 1809, Thompson built a small trading post that he called Saleesh House, near present-day Thompson Falls, Montana. He spent the winter of 1809-10 there and in the spring made several exploratory trips in the area around the post. Over the winter, the hottest trade item had been in weaponry. He writes: "The Saleesh Indians during the winter had traded up-wards of twenty guns from me, with several hundreds of iron arrow heads, with which they thought themselves a fair match for the Peeagan Indians in battle on the Plains." Over the summer, Thompson aided the Salish in a skirmish with the Peigan. Although the battle was pretty much a draw, the change in the balance of power brought on by Thompsons weapons made the Peigan even more determined to punish the traders that crossed the mountains to trade with their enemies. In the summer of 1810, David crossed back into Alberta over Howse Pass for the last time. As he approached the pass, he came across tracks left behind by Peigan scouts that were just a few hours old. They managed to slip through undetected. He travelled all the way to Rainy Lake where he reprovisioned for another trip to the Columbia. He returned to the Saskatchewan River to make his way over Howse Pass. Thompson writes: "The manner of furnishing the Men with Provisions, was by hunting these animals, and bringing their meat by Horses to the Canoes a supply for full three days; when we appointed a place to meet them with a fresh supply; thus the Canoes proceeded to within twenty miles of the east foot of the Mountains; we had given them a full supply for three days, and Mr William Henry, the two Indians and myself proceeded to the foot of the Mountains , where we killed three Red Deer, made a Stage and placed the meat on it in safety to wait the Canoes. This was on the 13th October 1810, and we expected the Canoes to arrive late on the 16th or early on the 17th at latest, but they did not make their appearance; our oldest Hunter of about forty years of age as usual rose very early in the morning and looking at the Stage of Meat, said to me, I have had bad dreams, this meat will never be eaten, he then saddled his Horse and rode off. Somewhat alarmed at his ominous expression and the non-arrival of the canoes, I told Mr Henry and the Indian to proceed thro’ the Woods down along the River in search of the Canoes, and see what detained them, with positive orders not to fire a shot but in self defence; about eight in the evening they returned, and related, that a few miles below us they had seen a camp of Peeagans on the bank of the River, that a short distance below the camp, they had descended the bank to the River side, and found where the Canoes had been. They had made a low rampart of Stones to defend themselves, and there was blood on the stones; they went below this and fired a shot in hopes of an answer from the Canoes, but it was not returned: I told them they had acted very foolishly, that the Peeagans would be on us very early in the morning, and that we must start at the dawn of day, and ride for our lives; on this we acted the next morning, and rode off, leaving the meat: the country we had to pass over was an open forest, but we had to cross, or ride round so many fallen trees that active Men on foot could easily keep up with us; the Peeagans had very early arrived at the Stage of meat and directly followed the tracks of the Horses, and would in the evening have come up with us, but providentially about one in afternoon snow came on which covered our tracks and retarded them; about an hour after, as they related, they came on three grizled Bears direct on the track (they were smelling the tracks of the Horses) they were fully perswaded that I had placed the Bears there to prevent any further pursuit; nor could any arguments to the contrary make them believe otherwise and this belief was a mercy to us: we rode on through the Woods until it was nearly dark, when we were obliged to stop; we remained quiet awaiting our fortune, when finding all quiet, we made a small fire, and passed the night with some anxiety; my situation precluded sleep, cut off from my men, uncertain where to find them, and equally so of the movements of the Indians, I was at a loss what to do, or which way to proceed; morning came and I had to determine what course to take, after being much perplexed whether I should take to the defiles of the Mountains and see if the Men and Horses were safe that were left there; or try and find my Men and Canoes. I determined upon the latter as of the most importance; on the second day we found them about forty miles below the Indians, at a trading Post lately deserted; here after much consultations, we fully perceived we had no further hopes of passing in safety by the defiles of the Saskatchewan River, and that we must now change our route to the defiles of the Athabasca River which would place us in safety, but would be attended with great inconvenience, fatigue, suffering and privation; but there was no alternative." They reached the Athabasca River on Nov 29. By Dec 4, the winter conditions made it impossible to continue on horseback. Thompson and his men set about the task of making snowshoes and sleds to cross the mountains, as well as log huts for the supplies and a shelter for them stay warm as they prepared for their journey. The temperature dropped to -35 C as the winter set in. He writes: "Our whole attention for the present was turned to hunting and securing provisions; having now made Snow Shoes, and Sleds, on the 30th day of December we commenced our journey to cross the Mountains and proceeded up the Athabasca River, sometimes on it’s [sic]shoals and ice, and at times through the woods of it’s [sic]banks. The soil was sandy and a Gale of Wind drifted it to lie on the low branched pines, of wretched growth, for Snow does not lie on Sand Hills; On the 31st December we proceeded but slowly and I had to reduce the weight of the Loads of the Dogs to less than two thirds, and make a Log Hoard to secure what we left…" It was the 5th of January 1811 when they began their push for the summit of Athabasca Pass: "by 11 AM set off with eight Sleds, to each two dogs, with goods and Provisions to cross the Mountains, and three Horses to assist us as far as the depth of the Snow will permit. We are now entering the defiles of the Rocky Mountains by the Athabasca River, the woods of Pine are stunted, full of branches to the ground, and the Aspin, Willow &c not much better: strange to say, here is a strong belief that the haunt of the Mammoth, is about this defile, I questioned several, none could positively say, they had seen him, but their belief I found firm and not to be shaken. I remarked to them, that such an enormous heavy Animal must leave indelible marks of his feet, and his feeding. This they all acknowledged, and that they had never seen any marks of him, and therefore could show me none. All I could say did not shake their belief in his existence." By the 10th of January, they were approaching the pass, and warm winds from the Pacific began to moderate the temperatures: He writes: "the view now before us was an ascent of deep snow, in all appearance to the height of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, it was to me a most exhilarating sight, but to my uneducated men a dreadful sight, they had no scientific object in view, their feelings were of the place they were; our guide Thomas...

Last week I talked about David Thompson's arrival in Canada and some of his adventures during the earliest part of his long career in Canada. They were just the start of a 40+ year adventure across the wilderness of this nation and the northern United States.

This week, I planned to talk about his explorations in the Canadian Rockies and along the course of the Columbia River in British Columbia, but quite frankly, his story is just too important to rush. So this week, I talk about the period between last week's episode of a young David Thompson until he made the decision to join the Northwest Company in 1797.

If we start from the 18-year old Thompson we left last week, then for the next 10 years, he settled into a routine as both a fur trader and surveyor. To be a Hudson's Bay man meant that you had to put trade above all else, including surveying. Thompson continued his gruelling schedule of travel during these intervening years, travelling to and from the forts of present-day northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

Thompson's true love was surveying. He was an admirable fur trader but the more time he spent in the wilderness, the more he began to admire the traders of the Northwest Company. They seemed to have the freedom to explore and were less tied to distant forts like Hudson Bay.

He was under the command of Joseph Colen of York Factory. Colen was a cautious trader who focused his energy on getting more and more furs to Hudson Bay and didn't believe in wasting manpower and money to explore more distant areas, like the country surrounding Lake Athabasca. This, however,was completely counter to directives given to him from London.

In 1778-79, Peter Pond of the Northwest Company had significant success trading at Lake Athabasca, and the Hudson's Bay Company directors wanted a piece of that action.

Some 10 years later, In 1790, Philip Turnor was charged by the Hudson's Bay Company to lead an expedition to the lake and investigate the possibility of a route to the Pacific. During the previous winter, Turnor had trained David Thompson and Peter Fidler (another explorer of note), the skills of surveying.

Turnor's experiences at Lake Athabasca showed that it was a potential bonanza for trade, despite the presence of the Northwest Company Traders that had preceded them.

He described it as "the Grand Magazine of the Athapiscow Country," and believed that it would be an extremely profitable venture if the HBC were to build a fort there.

The Directors in London were very excited and continually urged Colen to send Malcolm Ross and Thompson to follow-up on Turnor's explorations.

While the London Directors were keen to expand trade inland, some of the local managers, like Chief Factor William Tomison and Resident Chief Joseph Colen, blocked any efforts to extend a permanent presence so far inland.

While Ross and Thompson were sent out several times to retrace the route via Cumberland House, they were repeatedly unsuccessful.

In 1792 they headed out, and after overwintering at Sipiwesk Lake in northern Manitoba, Thompson attempted to push on to Lake Athabasca but was forced to retreat when he couldn't find any native canoemen to accompany him.

The next summer, 1793, Ross and Thompson were again sent up to Cumberland House and then on to another fort called Buckingham House. Ross and Thompson never attempted to travel to Lake Athabasca.

It is likely that the Resident Factor at York Factory, Joseph Colen, may have also neglected to order the group to continue to Lake Athabasca, and instead directed them to Buckingham House, a fort to the NW of present-day Edmonton.

Thompson returned to York Factory in the summer of 1794 and in the meantime, Colen and his associates at York wrote to England as follows:

“Notwithstanding the steps pursued last fall to ensure the success of the Athapascow Expedition, we are sorry to remark it was again set aside at Cumberland House this Spring. As these transactions happened many hundred miles distance from us, and with much secrecy, we cannot from our own knowledge inform your honours the real cause, and it is from letter and hearsay we form our judgment.

It, however, appears surprising, for when Mr. Colen accompanied the men and boats up Hill River, with trading goods, many volunteers offered their service for the Athapascow Expedition, and said they were ready to have gone from Cumberland House with Messrs. Ross and Thompson, but Mr. Tomison refusing to pass his word for the advance of wages promised by the Honourable Committee it of course stopt the Expedition in question and the considerable loss of your honours.

Indeed we find this business involved in mystery, and as are many other transactions inland. . . . We have already remarked on the overthrow of the Athapascow Expedition this season. The repeated disappointments so much disheartened Mr. Ross determined him to return to England had not Mr. Thompson prevailed on him to pursue some other track into the Athapascow country, for they declare it will be impossible to carry it on from Cumberland as the Honourable Company’s affairs at present stand, as every obstacle is thrown in the way to prevent its success.

In order to suppress similar obstructions Mr. Ross took men and one canoe cargo of goods with him from Cumberland House and built a house to the northward near to a station occupied by a Mr. Thompson, a Canadian Proprietor whose success of late years in collecting of furs has been great. Mr. David Thompson has been fitted out with men and three canoe cargoes from this place to supply Mr. Ross by proceeding up Nelson River track.”

The response from London reaffirmed their confidence in Ross and Thompson. They wrote:

“ We are perfectly satisfied with the conduct of Messrs. David Thompson, Ross, and others…" They continued

“Obstacles are again, we perceive, thrown in the way of the Athapascow Expedition, but we trust all difficulties which occur and impede the Company’s success will soon be removed.”

In 1795, Thompson visited York Factory for the last time. At this point, he had been collecting astronomical and temperature data everywhere he travelled for the previous decade. Despite this, the Hudson's Bay Company offered no encouragement to him to continue to explore further into the wilderness and add more data points to the map of what would later become Canada.

Thompson headed out again in 1796 to push through to Lake Athabasca, but rather than properly outfitting him with canoes and supplies, he was forced to engage two natives that were completely unfamiliar with the territory. They weren't even given a canoe and so had to take the time to build their own.

They set out on Jun 10th with:

"one fowling gun; forty balls, five pounds of shot, three flints and five pounds of powder, one Net of thirty fathoms; one small Axe, a small Tent of grey cotton; with a few trifles to trade provisions, as beads, brass rings and awls, of which we had little hopes; our chief dependence next to good Providence, was on our Net and Gun."

As they continued north, the trees began to disappear. It was hard country, without wood to burn. He wrote:

"The Natives, when they hunt on the North East parts of the Rein Deer’s Lake, cannot stay long; the Moss, when dry, makes a tolerable fire; but in wet weather, which often happens, it holds the rain like a sponge, and cannot be made to burn; this want of fire often obliges them to eat the meat raw, and also the fish; the latter I have seen them by choice; especially the pike, and a Trout is no sooner caught than the eyes are scooped out and swallowed whole, as most delicious morsels."

Manito Lake (now Wolloston Lake), lies just to the north of Reindeer Lake. Thompson had great respect for the first nations of the Canadian north. He lamented the way in which they were so ill-treated in areas far to the south:

"By civilised men, especially those of the United States, who have a mortal antipathy to the North American Indian; or, as he is now called the, “Red Man”; it is confidently predicted, that the Red Man, must soon cease to exist, and give place to the White Man; this is true of all the lands formerly possessed by the Red Man, that the White Man has thought it worth his while to seize by fraud or force; but the Stony Region is an immense extent of country, on which the White Man cannot live; except by hunting, which he will not submit to. Here then is an immense tract of country which the Supreme Being, the Lord of the whole Earth, has given to the Deer, and other wild animals; and to the Red Man forever, here, as his fathers of many centuries past have done, he may roam, free as the wind; but this wandering life, and the poverty of the country, prevents the labors of the Missionary to teach them the sacred truths of Christianity."

As he got closer to Lake Athabasca, the country got increasingly barren:

"A civilized man may never travel this way again; there is nothing to tempt him; a rude barren country that has neither provisions nor furrs, and there are no woods of which he could build a warm hut; and at best his fuel, of which a large quantity is required, could be only of small poles, which would burn away, almost as fast as he could cut them. In the winter the Natives do not frequent these countries but hunt to the westward."

In late June, they made it to Lake Athabasca but spent only a few days there. The forests had returned and the country was much more pleasant.

On the return trip, Thompson went over a 3-metre waterfall and almost all of their supplies were lost. They managed to salvage his sextant and instruments as well as his papers but:

"We had no time to lose, my all was my shirt and a thin linen vest, my companions were in the same condition, we divided the small tent into three pieces to wrap round ourselves, as a defence against the flies in the day, and something to keep us from the cold at night…

It was now our destitute condition stared us in the face, a long journey through a barren country, without provisions, or the means of obtaining any, almost naked, and suffering from the weather, all before us was very dark, but I had hopes that the Supreme Being through our great Redeemer to whom I made my short prayers morning and evening would find some way to preserve us."

Things looked very bleak for the party as their physical condition continued to deteriorate: Thompson wrote:

"We continued our voyage day after day, subsisting on berries, mostly the crowberry, which grows on the ground; and is not nutritious. To the sixteenth of July; both Paddy and myself were now like skeletons, the effects of hunger, and dysentry from cold nights, and so weak, that we thought it useless to go any further but die where we were. Kozdaw now burst out into tears, upon which we told him that he was yet strong, as he had not suffered from disease. He replied, if both of you die, I am sure to be killed, for everyone will believe that I have killed you both, the white men will revenge your death on me, and the Indians will do the same for him; I told him to get some thin white birch rind, and I would give him a writing, which he did, with charcoal I wrote a short account of our situation, which I gave him, upon which he said now I am safe."

Later that day, they met a group of Chipewyan (now Dene) Indians who took pity on them and gave them food, drink, and a meagre amount of supplies to continue their journey.

They spent the winter at Reindeer Lake, a lake that crosses the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border slightly above 57° N. Thompson was finding that the extreme cold of the northern winter was making his thermometre less accurate than it should be. He had a custom one made for him that would go as low as -79°C.

Temperatures in December dropped as low as -40°C and the northern lights were dazzling in the sky at night. He wrote:

"Hitherto I have said little on the Aurora Borealis of the northern countries; at Hudson’s Bay they are north westward, and only occasionally brilliant. I have passed four winters between the Bay and the Rein Deer’s Lake, the more to the westward, the higher and brighter is this electric fluid, but always westward;but at this, the Rein Deer’s Lake, as the winter came on, especially in the months of February and March, the whole heavens were in a bright glow. We seemed to be in the centre of its action, from the horizon in every direction from north to south, from east to west, the Aurora was equally bright, sometimes, indeed often, with a tremulous motion in immense sheets, slightly tinged with the colors of the Rainbow, would roll, from horizon to horizon.

Sometimes there would be a stillness of two minutes; the Dogs howled with fear, and their brightness was often such that with only their light I could see to shoot an owl at twenty yards; in the rapid motions of the Aurora we were all perswaded (sic) we heard them, reason told me I did not, but it was cool reason against sense.

My men were positive they did hear the rapid motions of the Aurora, this was the eye deceiving the ear; I had my men blindfolded by turns, and then enquired of them, if they heard the rapid motions of the Aurora. They soon became sensible they did not, and yet so powerful was the Illusion of the eye on the ear, that they still believed they heard the Aurora.

What is the cause that this place seems to be in the centre of the most vivid brightness and extension of the Aurora: from whence this immense extent of electric fluid, how is it formed, whither does it go. Questions without an answer. I am well acquainted with all the countries to the westward. The farther west the less is this Aurora. At the Mountains it is not seen."

Those of us who live in the mountain west will recognize his error in saying that the aurora are not seen in the mountains. It's a regular visitor, especially during the dark skies of winter. His narrative though, brings this beautiful phenomenon to life, and his description of it as an "electric fluid" is one of the most apt that I have ever come across.

After all he had suffered through, and done for the Hudson's Bay Company, in the Spring of 1797, he received a letter from Joseph Colen, the Resident Chief at York Factory that:

"however extensive the countries yet unknown yet he could not sanction any further surveys."

Thompson decided to leave the service of the Bay Men and On May 23, 1797 simply wrote:

"This Day, left the service of the Hudson's Bay Company, and entered that of the Company of the Merchants from Canada. May God Almighty prosper me."

He also wrote the best resignation letters I have ever read. It was addressed to Joseph Colen. He was, if anything, brutally honest:

DEERS RIVER, June 1, 1797. “Mr. COLEN.

“SIR: I take this opportunity of returning you my most respectful thanks for your loan of two guineas to my mother. I have enclosed a bill to you for the above amount.

“My friends belonging to York inform me that you are very desirous to find out who was the author of those letters that were wrote to H. B. Co. and militated against you 1795. I will give you that satisfaction. When I came down that year the other gentlemen were waiting my arrival in order to assist them in drawing up their grievances; as you were then absent I accepted the office with some hesitation, but as the letters were to be delivered to you on your landing at York for your inspection, and that you might have time to answer them, I considered you in a manner as present. Those letters were drawn up by me, assisted by my friend Dr. Thomas, and not one half of the evils complained of were enumerated.

“You told Mr. Ross that when in England you were endeavouring to serve those, who behind your back were trying to cut your throat. Before you went to England I had always a Letter and Books from the Co., since that neither the one nor the other, and I have been put the whole winter to the greatest inconvenience for want of a Nautical Almanac.

“Many of us acknowledge with readiness that you have some good qualities, and I had once the greatest respect for you; I have some yet, but . . . it is not my wish to say those things which I know you do not wish to hear. How is it, Sir, that everyone who has once wished you well should turn to be indifferent to you, and even some to hate you, altho’ they are constant in their other friendships, - there must be a defect somewhere.

“The fact is, that from your peculiar manner of conduct, you are also one of those unfortunate men who will have many an acquaintance, but never never a real friend.-Your humble Servant,

“ D. THOMPSON.”

In his narrative, Thompson describes his move from the Hudson's Bay to the Northwest Company in a very matter of fact way:

"My time was up, and I determined to seek that employment from the Company Merchants of Canada, carrying on the Furr Trade, under the name of the North West Company: With two Natives I proceeded to their nearest trading House, under the charge of Mr Alexander Fraser; and by the usual route of the Canoes arrived at the Great Carrying Place on the north shore of Lake Superior, then the depot of the merchandise from Montreal; and of the Furrs from the interior countries. The Agents who acted for the Company and were also Partners of the Firm, were the Honorable William McGillvray and Sir Alexander McKenzie, gentlemen of enlarged views; the latter had crossed the Rocky Mountains by the Peace River and was far advanced by Fraser River towards the Pacific Ocean, when want of Provisions and the hostility of the Natives obliged him to return. From the Great Slave he had explored the great River which flowed from it into the Arctic Sea, and which is justly named McKenzie's River"

Thompson was greeted with open arms. His extensive knowledge of the north country, along with his extensive records of astronomical measurements, helped them to determine the true locations of their various forts.

Thompson was set free to do what he truly loved - survey and explore. He was charged with finding the position of the 49th parallel between the American and Canadian territories. Long before the Oregon treaty of 1849 established the 49th parallel as the international border, the Paris Treaty of 1782 established an interim boundary between Canadian and American Territories.

As a result of his surveys, some of Northwest Companies most important sites, like Grand Portage ended up in American territory (now in Minnesota), and had to be moved north to Canadian territory.

Fort William (now Thunder Bay, Ontario) replaced Grand Portage as the main depot of furs for the Northwest Company on Lake Superior.

Thompson was also charged to:

"if possible to extend my Surveys to the Missisourie River; visit the villages of the ancient agricultural Natives who dwelt there; enquire for fossil bones of large animals, and any monuments, if any, that might throw light on the ancient state of the unknown countries I had to travel over and examine. The Agents and Partners all agreed to give orders to all their Trading Posts, to send Men with me, and every necessary I required [was] to be at my order.

How very different the liberal and public spirit of this North West Company of Merchants of Canada; from the mean selfish policy of the Hudson’s Bay Company styled Honorable; and whom, at little expense, might have had the northern part of this Continent surveyed to the Pacific Ocean, and greatly extended their Trading Posts"

The day that David Thompson the fur-trader joined the ranks of the Northwest Company, he became David Thompson the explorer.

Next week, I'll look into David Thompson as he cracks the mountain barriers to the fur trade.

Next Up…What's wrong with climate change research?

Errors in Climate Science

Needless to say, there are few areas of science more dangerous to discuss these days than climate science. Back in episode 31, I shared a presentation by Bob Sandford titled: The Hard Work of Hope: Scientific Fact vs Politicized Fantasy in the Post-Truth Trumpocene. You can check out the episode at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep031.

In this presentation, Bob describes the challenges of communicating science in a political environment where high profile dismissers of climate science, including current president Donald Trump, simply won't listen to the science behind climate change.

Anyone spending time in the glacier-filled landscapes of the mountain west has watched our icy heritage disappearing at an alarming pace over the past 100 years.

Many people like to sow dissent into the discussion by saying that there is NO consensus amongst the many researchers that are investigating climate science. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

In a 2013 peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Research Letters, John Cook and 8 other researchers studied the abstracts of 11,944 scientific papers published between 1991 and 2011 that matched the subjects 'global climate change' or 'global warming'.

The papers were specifically selected to limit the study to papers published by researchers that specifically identify as climate scientists. They omitted studies from people that did not claim to have a particular speciality in climate science.

The media is full of speculative papers with a flawed scientific methodology that professes many different opinions. For the purpose of this study, it was limited to specifically peer-reviewed papers that were produced by climate scientists.

Not all of the papers express an opinion on the cause of global warming. This paper wanted to look at, in particular, human-caused global warming. So they broke down the papers based on whether or not they made a determination as to whether climates were warming because of human changes to the environment.

Of the papers, 66.4% did not make any claims as to the cause of global warming, 32.6% endorsed human-caused climate change and 0.7% rejected a human connection to warming climates.

Of the scientists expressing an opinion on whether or not humans responsible, 97.1% were in agreement that humans are the cause of global warming.

It's important to note that this study did NOT include papers by scientists publishing outside of their discipline. A petroleum geologist may have a very different opinion on climate change. It focused solely on climate specialists.

A quick review of the bios of many papers will show their authors are not climate specialists and their results should be carefully examined. This doesn't discount interdisciplinary research, it just means that the methodologies need to be screened to remove any outside bias that may interfere with the results.

The scientific method is one of the wonders of knowledge. Every scientific paper needs to start with a Theory, develop a methodology to test that theory, examine external factors that may influence the results, and then submit their results to other scientists for review - all before being published.

It's then the duty of future researchers to test, and perhaps expand or disprove, those results. When multiple, independent studies come up with the same results, knowledge is advanced, and a new emergent truth arises.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson, a world-renowned astrophysicist states in a video titled Science In America he states:

"When you have an established, scientific, emergent truth, it is true whether or not you believe in it, and the sooner you understand that the sooner we can get on with the political conversations on how to solve the problems that face us".

I'll link to the video in the show notes at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep052.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MqTOEospfo

In the future, new research may disprove or improve previous knowledge and lead us into new directions.

So if 97% of papers support human-caused climate change than why do some disagree?

In another paper, published in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology, researchers examined the papers that found no human connection to climate change and attempted to recreate them in order to confirm their results.

They looked at the 38 papers from the previous study that did NOT agree with human-caused climate change. When they attempted to recreate the studies in order to confirm their findings, a critical part of the scientific process, they found errors in their methodologies that, when corrected, would provide very different results.

The papers were grouped into categories based on errors discovered in their methodologies.

Many started with false assumptions or used erroneous analysis. Another common mistake was ignoring any research that was contrary to your assumptions. Other papers used models that were Ill-suited to the research and essentially, fit the research to the curve.

Others pre-processed the data in order to focus on certain features while others ignored negative tests in order to cherry pick the desired results.

In some cases, the papers were published in journals not connected to climate change and so the reviewers may not have had sufficient understanding to properly peer review them.

The scientific method is very rigorous and every paper must survive the scrutiny of future researchers questioning the methodology, assumptions, analysis and the results.

In November of 2016, the U.S. National Science and Technology Council released a draft report called Our Changing Planet, which integrated scientific data collected across 13 Federal agencies.

The very first paragraph states:

"The global environment is changing rapidly. This century has seen 15 of the 16 warmest years since adequate thermometer records became available in the late 1800s; globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous record, which was set in 2014; and 2016 is on track to break the 2015 record. Arctic sea ice extent continues a dramatic, decades-long decline. Many independent lines of evidence show a long-term warming trend driven by human activities, with cascading impacts that may outpace the ability of human and natural systems to adapt to change."

How's that for an opener?

You can view the full report here (for the time being): (http://www.globalchange.gov/browse/reports/our-changing-planet-FY-2017).

Despite the important message of the report, the U.S. Government in August dissolved the advisory committee responsible for creating it, so it's unlikely that it will be adopted as policy - even though it's still available on the government website. If you'd like to read it, go now, before it is removed from government websites.

Most recently, Trump disbanded a cross-agency group designed to help communities protect their residents against extreme weather and natural disasters.

In June, he dissolved the Environmental Protection Agencies Board of Scientific Counselors.

Science IS science. As Canadians, we suffered through a dark era in terms of environmental stewardship during the Harper years. Stephen Harper, while pro-business and anti-environment, was tame compared to the rabid hatred of all things environmental that Trump has expressed.

First, he forbid climate scientists to publish their findings, then other government-funded scientists. Eventually, the ban on communication trickled all the way down to the local National Park Warden. In the end, the most innocuous media interview request to Parks Canada had to be forwarded to the Prime Minister's Office and was rarely rewarded with an interview.

Thankfully, we are now in a new era of climate change leadership. Some of the brain drain that began during the Harper administration is reversing as American scholars look to Canada to avoid the scientific chill sweeping the U.S.

There are many arrows in the anti-climate change quiver that also extend beyond potential government policy.

In a paper Published on Nov. 29, 2017, in the journal BioScience, researchers led by Jeffrey Harvey looked at the influence of blogs in influencing popular opinion.

Having just returned from Churchill, Manitoba, I'm very aware of the challenges facing polar bears in the future as warming climates limit their time feeding for seals on winter pack ice.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that 2016 was the warmest year on record, followed by 2015, and then 2014.

As I've already stated in this story, there is little scientific debate as to what causes global warming - at least within the scientific community.

In the wider community, there is growing scepticism as to the human cause of warming climates. This recent study looks at the influence of non-scientific social media, in particular, blog posts in framing the public consciousness when talking about climate change.

Nobody can dispute the power of websites like Breitbart in the U.S. and Rebel Media in Canada, but this paper looked to objectively look at the impact media like these were having on public perception.

While blog sites like these aggressively try to muddy the water in terms of denying climate science and scientific consensus, even mainstream media are often afraid to overemphasize the human nature of climate change for fear of alienating readership or advertisers.

The paper states:

"Recent evidence shows that climate-change denial involves a growing labyrinthine network of corporations, conservative foundations, think tanks, and the mainstream media. Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media outlets also provide powerful voices in the battle for public opinion, and Internet blogs have become major conduits for disseminating various views on AGW (anthropogenic or human-caused global warming)."

One of the democratizing characteristics of the Internet is that literally anyone can set up shop and promote their own opinions, regardless of the scientific validity of such opinions.

Recent examples of malicious misinformation include anti-vaccination sites or others promoting folly like the idea that the Earth is flat…and come on! If it really was flat, the cats would have knocked everything off of it by now.

Humour aside, sites like www.Wattsupwiththat.com which promotes itself as the "world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change", which gets some 2 million unique views per month, makes claims for which there is absolutely no scientific backing. Other sites like Climate Depot and Junk Science follow suit.

The challenge with climate change dismissal sites is that they cross-link to each other creating, as the report states: "a large echo chamber, making them what one journalist described as 'foot soldiers' of AGW (human-caused global warming) denial".

One of their favourite techniques is to use hot-button topics and turn the science upside down to support their completely fabricated view of reality.

Polar bears are one classic example. Since their entire life is based upon their need to feed on seals using winter pack ice as a platform, these blogs simply ignore the peer-reviewed science and create their own alternate realities.

As the report states:

"Because the evidence is so overwhelming, it would be virtually impossible to debunk; the main strategy of denier blogs is, therefore, to focus on topics that are showy and in which it is therefore easy to generate public interest. These topics are used as 'proxies' for AGW (human-caused global warming) in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominos that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW (human-caused global warming). By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of 'dismissal by association'."

The case with polar bears is absolutely undeniable. With warming climates, their potential season for feeding is reduced every year as the ice forms later and melts sooner. There is no scientific debate that polar bears are one of the most at risk mammals based on predicted models of climate change.

Of 90 blogs specifically dealing with polar bears and climate change, the views expressed fell solely into two camps. The 45 science-based blogs took completely opposite views from the 45 denier blogs.

As expected science-based blogs used logical arguments backed up by peer-reviewed articles. Denier blogs did just the opposite, focusing on any uncertainties they could find while discounting the vast amount of evidence that did not support their viewpoints.

Unfortunately, 80% of the denier blogs cited a single blog, that of Susan Crockford called Polar Bear Science. Not surprisingly, the report states:

"Notably, as of this writing, Crockford has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears. However, she has published notes and 'briefings' through a conservative think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), and is described by them as 'an expert on polar bear evolution.' Similarly, the Heartland Institute, another conservative think tank that downplays AGW (human-caused global warming), describes her as 'one of the world's foremost experts on polar bears.'"

Blog posts by Crockford insist that polar bears are highly adaptable and will easily adapt to any changes we make to the environment.

Other strategies used by deniers like Crockford include personally attacking actual researchers and suggesting that they overstate their findings and that their work is both lame and dangerous. This helps to evoke fear and feed the denier's belief that the scientists are the enemy and that there is actually something called "fake science".

The report continues:

"Denier blogs that downplay the threats of AGW (human-caused global warming) to Arctic Ice and polar bears rely heavily on arguments that it has been warmer in the past, that temperature and seasonal ice extent vary naturally over time, and that it is therefore difficult or even impossible to predict what will happen in the future.

While climates have varied in the past, summer ice didn't disappear completely as it will under current models. The current situation cannot be reversed without reducing the release of greenhouse gases.

Also, when we are talking about natural fluctuations in climate change, we are talking about changes that took place over millennia - not the changes that are taking place over decades in the current reality. Ecosystems, and the wildlife that call them home can adapt to a certain extent given a few millennia, but over a few decades, there is little opportunity for adaptation.

So how do you know if you're reading a reputable site?

1. Follow the science. Denier blogs rarely overemphasize the science or provide methodologies or peer-reviewed information.
2. Follow the money. In many cases, when you find out where the money comes from, you may find them supported by conservative think tanks, oil and gas concerns, or other groups with a vested interest in downplaying current science.
3. Follow the credentials. If you see someone touted as an expert, do a google search and look for peer-reviewed publications that help to support their claims. With pundits like Susan Crockford, you'll find no evidence of peer-reviewed publications, or for that matter, any other evidence of her stated expertise on polar bears.
4. Follow the language. Denier sites often don't spend much time focusing on the science but are quick to personally attack academics and other researchers whose views they discount. Real scientists don't use personal attacks. They use peer-reviewed science to back up their arguments. Any scientist that publishes a peer-reviewed article instinctively knows that it is the job of other scientists to disprove his findings. When subsequent research actually confirms the findings of previous studies, you get the emergent truths I spoke about earlier.

As more and more people get their news from blogs as opposed to mainstream media, it's even more important that we evaluate the sites we visit. Anyone who spends time on Facebook has had friends share ludicrous claims that a quick search on sites like Snopes.com will show as false.

I would argue that simply because a site does not have peer-reviewed publications to support their argument, that you shouldn't simply dismiss their value. Take time to evaluate both their message and the science they quote.

I look at myself as an example of this. While I am not a field researcher, I spend countless hours reading, highlighting, translating and educating listeners to the most current, relevant science.

If the science changes, so will the message that I promote.

Look to blogs that reflect real science, and always be sceptical of claims that seem counter to the scientific literature. It is great when scientists take advantage of the personal nature of blogs, but currently, the sheer number of fact-free opinion blogs on any number of subjects will continue to overwhelm the ability of researchers to counter.

I hope that podcasts like this help to provide ways to evaluate sites so that you can make truly informed decisions. Hey, as a polar bear viewing guide, I wish wild polar bears were going to be just fine, regardless of future changes to climate - but it just ain't so!

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. You can check out the show notes for this episode at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep052, or drop me a line by visiting the contact page on the same site. If you'd like to reach out personally you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron.

If you're heading to the mountain west, Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for step-on, hiking, snowshoe, and photography guides. Check us out at www.WardCameron.com. We look forward to helping you make the most of your mountain adventure…and with that, the sun's out and it's time to go hiking. I'll talk to you next week.

Melting Mountain Glaciers For many years it has been believed that Canada's western mountain glaciers, also known as the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, melted some 12.5 thousand years ago. A new study published in the Journal Nature by researcher Brian Menounos and his team is shedding new light on just when our mountains became ice-free. Deciphering the story of ice melt across western Canada's mountain has far-reaching implications. By understanding how ice melted thousands of years ago, we can also build better models to predict how current alpine ice sheets, like the one in Greenland, may melt in the future. It also helps to understand the challenges of previous theories of an "ice-free corridor" in terms of human migration to the North American Continent. And finally, it also is an important part of the story of ocean level fluctuations as a result of the increased meltwater. When we talk about landscapes we need to understand two concepts, inheritance and consistency. When we look at changing climates over the millennia, we also need to look at the associate landforms that each climate typically creates. In the mountain west, for instance, the mountain landscape was first carved by the power of water. Water dissects the land in a very specific way. It takes advantage of the contours as well as weaknesses in the rocks to guide its flow. Water passes over rocks of varying hardness including soft shales and harder limestones. Softer rocks will be worn down more quickly while harder rocks remain more resistant to the power of water. Cracks or fissures will be widened and over time, the landscape begins to be divided by mountain summits and intervening v-shaped valleys carved by water. When glaciers later inherited this water forged landscape, they inherited the same valleys previously carved by water and began to renovate them. Narrow V-shaped valleys were renovated into broad u-shaped valleys typical of valley glaciers. High on the mountains, glaciers also formed on cliff ledges and any area where snow could accumulate. As these glaciers moved, they enlarged the ledges upon which they sat and in many cases created round bowl-shaped depressions called cirques. I often refer to cirques as glacial nurseries as the ice usually formed there and then would overflow down the valley as it exceeded the ability of these bowls to contain the ever-increasing volumes of ice. Rock and debris fell onto the ice and some hitched a ride, just like a modern-day conveyor belt. It would later be deposited along the ice margins in linear ridges called moraines. Most of the rock becomes incorporated into the glacier and gets scraped and scoured along the base of the glacier. It's this action that allows glaciers to modify the landscape. Today, water has re-inherited this ice-modified mountainscape and is once again altering the cirques and u-shaped valleys. Consistency refers to the simple fact that processes acting on the landscape within a particular climate are the same processes that acted on the landscape at other periods of similar temperature and moisture. The way water changes the mountains today is the same way it would have done thousands or even millions of years ago. Each climate creates its own types of landforms but is always working with vistas carved by successive climatic periods. As a naturalist, this is what I love to look for in the surrounding peaks. Where can I find the impacts of previous climates and how are the current changes in climate affecting how water will shape the mountains long into the future. Brian Menounos' study helps climatologists to not only more accurately understand how our mountain glaciers melted, but also how similar landscapes today may react in the future. Just like looking at a star in the sky represents light that may have traveled for thousands or millions of years before it reached your eye, our mountains may represent a time capsule of how other mountain glaciers may melt in the future. One of the challenges facing this study was the fact that most previous studies found that the glaciers in western Canada only melted around 12.5 thousand years ago. This date was the result of Carbon dating. Carbon dating has been a tried and true way of dating materials for decades, but once you get into high mountain landscapes, it runs into problems; there's not a lot of carbon at high elevations. The carbon used for dating comes from ancient plants and once you hit the upper alpine environment, you find yourself in a land of rock and ice with little to no plant life. This may have added significant error to the dating. If you take a walk to the far end of Lake Louise in summer, you'll enter a land where winter is still king, and where glaciers have only recently revealed the landscape that was previously hidden by ice. You'll also notice that there is little regrowth on much of the lower valley as you hike up to the Plain of Six Glaciers Teahouse. Once glaciers disappear from a mountain valley, it may take a millennia or more before it becomes fully reclaimed by plant communities. This means that the carbon that was being measured in previous studies may have represented plants that colonized the valley long after the glaciers had disappeared. Newer dating methods that don't rely on carbon offered some additional ways to get a better date. Beryllium is a mineral most of us have never heard of. It's a highly toxic and carcinogenic mineral, but it's also one of the lightest metals in the world and has a correspondingly high melting point. These characteristics make beryllium very important in today's cell phones, aeroplanes and even missiles. One isotope, beryllium 10, like carbon 14 is radioactive. The radioactivity is created by cosmic rays colliding with atoms on Earth. In the case of beryllium 10, it's caused when cosmic rays hit oxygen atoms in the bedrock. A layer of ice acts to stop these rays and so measuring how much beryllium 10, which is found in the quartz rocks so common in the mountains, can help to tell us when the rocks were exposed by melting glacial ice. Menounos and his team measured 76 samples from 26 locations to see if dates could be more accurately determined using this new dating method. They visited glacial moraines across British Columbia in order to test the theory that many areas may have been ice-free much earlier than previously believed. The great ice age, the Pleistocene, ended some 14,700 years ago when climates suddenly warmed. At the peak of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, the amount of ice was similar to what can be found in present-day Greenland. The results showed that the moraine samples fell into two age ranges, 12,800 to 15,000 years for the older locations and 9,800 to 13,000 for the younger sites. If we work with the average ages of 13,900 and 11,400 years respectively, the study showed that large areas of the mountain glaciers had already melted prior to earlier estimates of 12,500 years ago. It also shows that ocean waters off the coast of British Columbia would have risen by approximately 4C between 15,500 and 14,000 years ago. This would have melted most of the low-elevation glaciers, leaving only the highest mountain regions ice-free. Also during this period, meltwater would have contributed to sea level increases of 2.5 to 3 metres. In other terms, the mountain glaciers lost half of their mass in less than 400 years. This also changed the ice sheet into a series of interconnected alpine glaciers, and icefields, gradually leaving us with the landscape we recognize today, just on a much much more extensive scale. This study shows that vast amounts of ice had been lost from the mountain landscape at least 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. It also shows that ice sheets as large Greenland's can also melt at a very fast rate. Essentially, once the melt starts, it can take place very quickly. While it may seem that this actually adds to the possibilities of human migrations towards a possible "ice-free corridor", the study shows evidence that low elevation travel routes would have remained ice-choked until long after the migrations would have needed to occur. Way back in episode 6 I talked about some of the new evidence that was rendering the ice-free corridor to the dustbin of history. You can check it out at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep006. The most recent archaeological evidence shows that people had already arrived in North and South America as far back as 14,500 years ago. Assuming that early migrants made it across the ice-free corridor even 13,000 years ago, there is little chance they would have spread to Monte Verde in southern Chile by 14,500 years ago, yet there are archaeological sites that date to that period. Essentially, it's out with the ice-free corridor and in with the kelp highway. What the heck is the kelp highway you ask? Well, it refers to a coastal migration rather than an inland one. It wasn't long ago that this was considered fringe science. All the archaeological eggs were in the ice-free corridor camp and there was little research into an alternative option. Over time though, ancient sites began to appear across the coastal areas of North and South America that kept pushing the tenure of first nations further and further back. Currently, the oldest sites are 14,500 years old in places like the Page-Ladson site in Florida. As far south as this site seems today, this underwater site revealed evidence of mastodon bones that showed signs of human butchering. Even much further south, on the southern end of Chile, lies the Monte Verde site. In 1975 the remains of a Gomphothere, an animal considered to be ancestral to modern-day elephants was found and this spurred further investigations. These revealed amazing artefacts well preserved in a peat bog that included butchered Gomphothere bones, stone hearths, the remains of other local animals, wooden house posts and even bits of animal skin clothing. To most archaeologists used to having to deal with hearths and stone tools, this site was incredibly rich, largely due to the preserving qualities of peat. Again, the dates stretch back to some 14,500 years. Prior to sites like this, the Clovis culture was considered to the be the oldest North American indigenous culture, but these and many more sites are now pre-dating the Clovis culture which was believed to have arrived via the ice-free corridor between 12,900 and 13,200 years ago. So how exactly did these pre-Clovis cultures find themselves in the New World - well that's the kelp highway? Essentially it refers to a coastal migration of peoples confident in traveling by boat along coastal areas taking advantage of plentiful supplies of kelp and seafood that was available. The ice-free corridor Clovis migration has been suffering a death by a thousand cuts over the past few years. Doubtless, Clovis people did take advantage of a corridor across the Bering Strait but it is now clear that they were the followers and not the leaders. They would still have arrived several millennia after the coastal regions had already been settled. In Episode 37, I talk about a new site off the coast of British Columbia that begins to add fuel to the kelp highway migration theory. One of the Achilles heels of this potential migratory route in the past has been the lack of evidence of a coastal migration. A newly announced site on Triquet Island has revealed artefacts at least 14,000 years old. This makes it the oldest archaeological site in Canada and helps to finally build a trail of breadcrumbs to support a coastal migration. We still need to push the chronology back further if we are to bring well-established populations of humans to the southern tip of South America by 14,500 years ago, but perhaps this is a good start. One of the great aspects of science is that until you actually look for something, it may be hiding in plain sight. Some science is the result of just plain luck…looking for one thing, and discovering another. Sometimes, we're just looking in the wrong place. With renewed interest in a coastal migration, there will be more and more resources focused on examining sites that might have been visited by our very oldest ancestors. While part of me laments the loss of a good story on an ice-free corridor migration right past my doorstep, another part of me loves the fact that an entirely new archaeological story is now unfolding. Just to throw another wrinkle into the equation. We're still assuming a migration across the Bering Strait that hugged the Pacific coast of North America. What if these paleo sailors were more adept than we give them credit for? We know that Aboriginal Australians were there by 50,000 years ago. They would have had a more challenging, open-water voyage in order to discover this new continent. Maybe we're just beginning to scratch the surface in a new whodunnit of New World migration. A really unique site in California shows the potential for some kind of early human as far back as 130,000 years ago. The site was found in 1992 beside a highway site near San Diego California. While archaeologists are quibbling about a few hundred years here and there when dating sites, this site has come in more than 100,000 years before anyone thought humans could be in the new world. The site features a partial skeleton of a mastodon that appears to have been butchered by paleo-humans. The outrageous preliminary dating of the site kept it on the fringes until new dating techniques to confirm early dating. This resulted in the new research being published in the Journal Nature just in April of 2017. Every new discovery leads to new rabbit holes of investigation, confirmation, peer review, and then new questions. This site is so wacky early that if it's confirmed by subsequent research, then all human migration theories on the planet will be up for grabs. It's so old that we would be talking about hominids as opposed to humans. I can't wait to see how this story ends. Perhaps we are just at the beginning of a new mystery? Stay tuned. Next up - The greatest land geographer to ever live David Thompson's early years The history of the exploration of Canada is filled with the names of great men. Names like Simon Fraser, Alexander Mackenzie, Samuel Hearne, Anthony Henday, and David Thompson. All of these men were great explorers but in the final tally of simple achievement, none could hold a candle to David Thompson, or as the first nations knew him, the man who looks at stars. Thompson was born on April 30, 1770, in Westminster, England. His family was poor and after his brother was born two years later, his father died leaving the family even the more destitute. The day before his 7th birthday he was enrolled in the Grey Coat School in Westminster. At the time, it was a school devoted to educating poor boys. Its goal was "to educate poor children in the principles of piety and virtue, and thereby lay a foundation for a sober and Christian life". By all accounts, Thompson was an able student and this brought him to the attention of the School Board. In the minutes of their December 30, 1783, meeting it states: "The Master also reports that application was made by the Secretary belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company, to know, if this Charity could furnish them with 4 boys against the month of May next, for their settlements in America. The Master, by order of the Treas (sic) wrote a letter informing the Governor and Directors that there were but two boys that had been taught navigation in the school, which two boys they desire may be qualified for them, vis: Samuel John McPherson and David Thompson." What an adventure for a boy of only 15…or was it? Apparently, Samuel McPherson didn't think so as he did a runner the following day rather than be packed off to the new world. Thompson, on the other hand, embraced the opportunity and on the minutes of the Grey School dated June 29, 1784, he was apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company. The minutes state: "On the 20th of May David Thompson, a mathematical Boy belonging to the Hospl (sic) was bound to the Hudson's Bay Company and the Trear then paid Mr Thos. Hutchins, Corresponding Secretary to the said Company, the sum of five pounds for taking the said Boy apprence (sic) for seven years". I can imagine that when the Company ship the Prince Rupert departed London in May of 1784 that many things must have been going through the mind of this bright 15 year old boy. Part of him must have been terrified to leave the only home he had ever known for a vast wilderness. Thompson reflected on his years at the Grey School writing in his journal: "Books in those days were scarce and dear and most of the scholars got the loan of such books as his parents could lend him. Those which pleased us most were the Tales of the Genii, the Persian, and Arabian Tales, with Robinson Crusoe and Gullivers Travels : these gave us many subjects for discussion and how each would behave on various occasions." Doubtless, stories of the hardships awaiting him must have reached his young ears, yet he embraced his fate and soon after, the new world for the rest of his life. As the ship approached the coast of North America he wrote: "We now held our course over the western ocean ; and near the islands of America saw several icebergs, and Hudson's Straits were so full of ice, as to require the time of near a month to pass them ; this being effected the three ships separated, one for Albany and Moose Factories, another for York Factory, and the third for Churchill Factory at which last place we arrived in the beginning of September 1784." Thompson continued: "Hudson's Bay, including Jame's Bay, may be said to be an inland sea, connected to the Atlantic Ocean by Hudson's Straits…On its west side it receives Seal, Churchill, the Kissiskatchewan (now known as the Nelson), Hayes, Severn, Albany, and Moose Rivers; on the east side Ruperts and several other Rivers, the names of which are unknown as they come from barren, desolate, countries." What a first impression it must have been for Thompson? Fort Churchill was isolated at what must have seemed like the end of the world, especially when he learned: "The Factory is supplied once a year with goods and provisions, by a Ship which arrives on the last days of August, or early September, and in about ten days is ready for her homeward voyage; the severity of the climate requiring all possible dispatch." Thompson saw adventure along with hardship. In autumn, just like they do today for the viewing pleasure of thousands of tourists, the polar bears arrive at Churchill. Thompson wrote: "The polar Bear now makes his appearance, and prowls about until the ice at the sea shore is extended to a considerable distance ; when he leaves to prey on the Seal, his favourite food : during his stay he is for plunder and every kind of mischief, but not willing to fight for it." While the cold and the wind bothered all, there was little snow until the latter part of December when: "a north east snow storm of three days continuance drifted the snow to the height of the stockades and over them, and filled the whole yard to the depth of six to ten feet, which could not be cleared, and through which avenues had to be cut and cleared of about four feet in width ; and thus remained till late in April, when a gradual thaw cleared the snow away. From the end of October to the end of April every step we walk is in Snow Shoes. The Natives walk with ease and activity, and also many of us: but some find them a sad incumbrance, their feet become sore and their ankles sprained; with many a tumble in the snow from which it is sometimes difficult to rise." The winds of Hudson Bay are legendary. Any snow that falls quickly forms in huge drifts. After spending three weeks on the Bay this fall, I can see how the stockades would catch the drifting snow and how it would fill the enclosed yard as well. The climate is the great arbiter in the north and he wrote: "The country, soil, and climate in which we live, have always a powerful effect upon the state of society, and the movements and comforts of every individual, he must conform himself to the circ*mstances under which he is placed, and as such we lived and conducted ourselves in this extreme cold climate. All our movements more, or less, were for self-preservation : All the wood that could be collected for fuel, gave us only one fire in the morning, and another in the evening…" "The interior of the walls of the House were covered with rime to the thickness of four inches, pieces of which often broke off, to prevent which we wetted the whole extent, and made it a coat of ice, after which it remained firm, and added to the warmth of the House, for the cold is so intense, that everything in a manner is shivered by it" When the summer sun arrived, so did the swarms of mosquitoes. Thompson wrote: "Summer such as it is, comes at once, and with it myriads of tormenting Musketoes ; the air is thick with them, there is no cessation day nor night of suffering from them. Smoke is no relief, they can stand more smoke than we can, and smoke cannot be carried about with us. The narrow windows were so crowded with them, they trod each other to death in such numbers, we had to sweep them out twice a day ; a chance cold northeast gale of wind was a grateful relief, and [we] were thankful for the cold weather that put an end to our sufferings. " "different Persons feel them in a different manner ; some are swelled, even bloated, with intolerable itching ; others feel only the smart of the minute wounds ; Oil is the only remedy and that frequently applied ; the Natives rub themselves with Sturgeon Oil, which is found to be far more effective than any other oil. All animals suffer from them, almost to madness, even the well-feathered Birds suffer about the eyes and neck. The cold nights of September are the first and most steady relief." At one point, Thompson began to wonder why he had been brought at all: "It had been the custom for many years, when the governors of the factory required a clerk, to send to the school in which I was educated to procure a Scholar who had a mathematical education to send out as Clerk, and, to save expenses, he was bound apprentice to them for seven years. To learn what ; for all I had seen in their service neither writing nor reading was required, and my only business was to amuse myself, in winter growling at the cold ; and in the open season shooting Gulls, Ducks, Plover and Curlews, and quarelling with Musketoes and Sand flies." After spending a year at Churchill, he was sent to York Factory after the supply ship had arrived at Churchill in 1785. He was sent out, accompanied by two natives, on foot, without provisions, to walk 240 km in the cold of autumn to bring mail that had arrived on the ship to another fort. He was accorded a single blanket to keep him warm at nights. At the same time, two natives would be sent from York Factory to Churchill. This would give each fort current information about the state of the other while also forming as a ready means of communicating between the forts. They were dropped at Cape Churchill and while Thomson was given a blanket, his guides were given a gallon of strong whiskey. Alas, the day was lost as they quickly set down to consume the spirits. Thompson always opposed the use of whiskey in the fur trade and banned it from any post that he was in control of. The next day they walked all day without breakfast or lunch, and in the evening his guides shot a goose and three ducks. He arrived on Sept 13 and spent the winter in the fort and quickly settled into a new routine. The natives that walked with him were given 3 gallons of brandy and 4 pounds of tobacco. The fall and winter are spent collecting all manner of food, fishing, snaring hares, hunting geese in the fall and ptarmigan in the winter, and basically trying to stay warm. The forts had to be completely self-sufficient. March and April seem to be the months when snow blindness is most prevalent. Thompson writes: "As I never had it, I can only describe the sensations of my companions. Accustomed to march in all weathers, I had acquired a power over my eyelids to open, or contract them as circ*mstances required, and to admit only the requisite quantity of light to guide me, and thus [I] prevented the painful effects of snow blindness. In the case of those affected the blue eye suffers first and most, the gray eye next, and the black eye the least ; but none are exempt from snow blindness ; the sensations of my companions, and others, were all the same ; they all complained of their eyes, being, as it were, full of burning sand ; I have seen hardy men crying like children, after a hard march of four months in winter. Three men and myself made for a trading post in the latter part of March. They all became snow blind, and for the last four days I had to lead them with a string tied to my belt, and [they] were so completely blind that when they wished to drink of the little pools of melted snow, I had to put their hands in the water. They could not sleep at night. On arriving at the trading Post, they were soon relieved by the application of the steam of boiling water as hot as they could bear it, this is the Indian mode of cure, and the only efficient cure yet known, but all complained of weakness of sight for several months after." The Bay men had mastered the north country. As they expanded their influence further west, they encountered the peoples of the Blackfoot Confederacy, in particular, the Peigan. He wasn't the first to visit the Blackfoot, that honour was reserved for Anthony Henday who visited the area in 1754. Henday was trying to sell an impossibility though. He was trying to convince them to go to the Bay to sell their furs. This was pretty much a non-starter for a population of the grasslands. He learned that, rather than travel long distances to the Bay, the Blackfoot would sell their furs to the Cree, who would, in turn, trade them to the Company at York Factory for a profit. An additional wrinkle was that the rival Northwest Company had built forts far more convenient to the Cree and they would get the best furs long before the remaining poorer quality pelts made their way to the Bay. The Northwest Company sent men out, onto the land, to meet, live with, learn the languages of, and in some cases, intermarry with the indigenous people of the hinterlands. The Blackfoot, while they enjoyed the whiteman's trade goods, they really didn't need them, and they definitely didn't want trading posts in their territory. They also were in a position to manage trade across the continental divide to British Columbia. Essentially, any Hudson's Bay Man wanting to visit B.C. would have to go through them. To negotiate with the Blackfoot, the company sent James Gaddy who spent three winters living with the Peigan in the foothills west of Calgary. In 1787, 17-year old David Thompson accompanied him. At this point, nobody had realized that David was no ordinary teenager. He kept a careful journal and decades later would use it to write his memoirs. Thompson described the people that he stayed with and the stories shared with him by them: "The Peeagan in whose tent I passed the winter was an old man of at least 75 to 80 years of age ; his height about six feet, two or three inches, broad shoulders, strong limbed, his hair gray and plentiful, forehead high and nose prominent, his face slightly marked with the small pox, and alltogether his countenance mild, and even, sometimes playfull ; although his step was firm and he rode with ease, he no longer hunted, this he left to his sons ; his name was Saukamappee (Young Man) ; his account of former times went back to about 1730…" Saukamappee was not of the Peigan, today referred to by the name Pikani. He was part of a Cree nation known as the Nahathaway with whom the Pikani were closely allied. Both nations were constantly at war with the Snake or Shoshone Indians to the south. Usually, they were very well matched in terms of weaponry and few people died in their skirmishes…at least in the early days. Saukamappee related how the arms race began to alter the balance of power as horses and guns began to appear. "By this time the affairs of both parties had much changed ; we had more guns and iron headed arrows than before ; but our enemies the Snake Indians and their allies had Misstutim (Big Dogs, that is Horses) on which they rode, swift as the Deer, on which they dashed at the Peeagans, and with their stone Pukamoggan (war clubs) knocked them on the head, and they had thus lost several of their best men. This news we did not well comprehend and it alarmed us, for we had no idea of Horses and could not make out what they were. Only three of us went and I should not have gone, had not my wife's relations frequently intimated, that her father's medicine bag would be honored by the scalp of a Snake Indian." Guns and horse began to change the landscape of the plains. The Pikani won with the help of the Nahathaway guns. Thankfully, the Snake Indians didn't have any horses with them in this battle. A few days later, Saukamappee saw his first horse, a dead one that had been killed in a different skirmish. The Peigan were able to keep the Snakes gun-poor as they were able to control access to the Hudson's Bay and Northwest Company supply of trade goods. This allowed the Peigan to expand greatly across the plains until they encountered an unstoppable foe - Smallpox. "While we have these weapons, the Snake Indians have none, but what few they sometimes take from one of our small camps which they have destroyed, and they have no Traders among them. We thus continued to advance through the fine plains to the Stag River when death ca

Welcome to Episode 50 of the Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast. I'm your host, Ward Cameron and I'm recording this on November 25, 2017. I can't believe this is actually episode 50. When I started this project almost a year and a half ago, I'm not sure I believed I would actually ever get 50 shows recorded. All I could do was focus on the next episode. Each new episode triggered a new round of research, reading, scripting, recording, editing, and uploading. For me, it's been about the process. Those of you that know me, know that I will always talk about finding the story in the science. Stories are everything to me and I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by an endless number of very talented scientists, historians, park managers, conservation officers, and other lovers of the mountain west. Stories help us to learn, understand, and care for the amazing landscape and culture that surrounds us. Before I started this project, I considered myself a naturalist and guide, and never really got involved in controversial issues. When I really began to do the research though, there were many things that simply needed to be called out. Some of these included: • ill-advised bike trails in Canmore and Jasper National Park • free park passes in National Parks already bursting at the seams • the loss of Bear 148 in Canmore due to flagrant violations of bear closures • and Canmore's wildlife corridor challenges. At the same time, I was amazed by some of the incredible science that is taking place that sheds new light on our landscape and the plants and animals that call it home. A few highlights include: • amazing research on Columbian ground squirrels taking place in Kananaskis Country • revelations on the importance of gravel river ecosystems • a new climate change research centre in Canmore • the reintroduction of bison after 130 years in Banff National Park • new discoveries on dinosaurs across parts of Alberta and British Columbia • the dismantling of the concept of an "ice free corridor" migration to the new world for our earliest indigenous ancestors • a study showing grizzlies will choose berries over salmon if given the opportunity • New insights into ancient Neanderthal medicine and most recently, • A study showing that cougars are not as solitary as scientists once thought. I've also had the opportunity to share a number of historic stories as well including: • The story of outfitter and guide Bill Peyto who's image graced the town entrance for years • The story of the search and discovery of the lost Franklin Expedition ships • The history of snowshoeing • The story of the man behind Waterton Lakes National Park's name • The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, including the stories of surveyors Walter Moberly and A.B. Rogers, and railroad chief William Cornelius Van Horne. • The trials and tribulations of gold seekers during the Caribou goldrush and in this episode • The history of scurvy and its impact on Canadian exploration. I'm going to keep looking for new discoveries to keep you up to date on all of the great stories behind the scenery. I hope you'll be with me to celebrate 100 episodes in another year or so. What stories would you like to hear? You can send your suggestions by visiting the show page at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep050 and enter your suggestion in the comment field at the bottom of the show notes. I love hearing from listeners and this is your opportunity to influence the direction of future episodes. Thanks for being a part of the story…and with that said, let's get to it. New Directions for Wildlife Crossing Structures Back in episode 34, I talked about the great success that Banff National Park has had with its highway mitigation program of wildlife fences, over and underpasses, and highway twinning. The park has pioneered the use of these structures to both reduce the number of animals being killed along our highways while also improving connectivity across the Bow River valley. If you'd like to check out that episode, you can hear it at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep034. I also mentioned that new designs were being investigated to help the program evolve as it expands to new locations across North America. A design contest was held by Arc Solutions and it invited companies to submit new designs using a wide diversity of materials and construction methods. As more and more destinations adopt similar methods of protecting connectivity and wildlife, it's important that the structures evolve to fit the location, the species being protected, and in some cases, the available budget. We need to avoid looking at a wildlife overpass as if it was a bridge. While they are both structures designed to span some form of crossing, the similarities end there. Bridges are usually narrower and usually much longer. This means they need to be engineered in a very different way. Wildlife overpasses are usually wider and span much shorter distances, such as a few lanes of highway. The more squat design of wildlife overpasses provides more opportunities to alter the design to solve unique challenges. Since they don't have to be over-engineered like a long span bridge, they can incorporate more innovative designs and use lighter materials. In addition to the ability to vary the materials, they could also use more flexible or modular components. While Banff gets a lot of credit for its extensive work on expanding the use of connecting structures in North America, the first wildlife overpass was built in France in the 1950s. A number of European countries have followed that lead, in particular the Netherlands, where they have more than 600 crossing structures. They also boast the longest overpass, the Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailo, which spans 800 metres and crosses a canal, a highway, and a rail line. In Europe, wildlife overpasses are generally referred to as Ecoducts. The goal for the future is to avoid one-size fits all solutions and to be able to take better advantage of material design and landscape contours. New highways, and upgrades to older roads with a history of animal-vehicle impacts are all candidates for considering connectivity as a key component of the planning process. According to Arc Solutions, crossing structures should be: • "considered as early as possible in the transportation planning process so as to avoid the more costly problem of retrofitting or rebuilding; • cost-effective in terms of materials, construction and maintenance; • ecologically responsive to current and anticipated conditions; • safe for humans and wildlife alike; • flexible or modular for possible use in other locations; • adaptive, to facilitate mobility of wildlife under dynamic ecosystem conditions; • sustainable in terms of materials and energy use, and responsive to climate change; • educational, revelatory and communicative to the public; and • beautiful, engaging and remarkable." One of the other benefits of the crossing structures in Banff National Park has been their ability to continue to teach us about how wildlife use the landscape. By constant monitoring of their usage over decades, we begin to understand our wildlife populations, and in some cases, how individual animals move through their territory. Banff is also unique in its focus on making sure the structures are also effective for large carnivores. While elk and deer were quick to adapt the underpasses, it took years for our more wary carnivores to begin to regularly use them. It was largely for this reason that the decision was made to build the first two overpasses when Banff began its second phase of highway twinning in 1996. In order to spur innovation in overpass construction, Arc Solutions sponsored a design competition in 2010. It brought together landscape architects, engineers, ecologists and an array of other professionals to focus on new ideas on how to improve connectivity across landscapes. The goal was to design a structure in Colorado's West Vail Pass along I-70. The competition spurred designers to look beyond a simple function only focus, and to try to push the envelope to create something entirely new. The competition attracted more than 100 firms on 36 teams. The judges narrowed down the entries to 5 finalists. The teams created some incredibly beautiful, yet innovative designs that were functional in achieving the goals of wildlife connectivity. There was a wide variety of materials used, varying from laminate timber, steel, glass-reinforced plastic, and wood-core fiberglass, amongst others. They all took modularity into account in order to create scalable designs that can vary with the landscape and either be extended or have components that can snap together. Also critical is how they all incorporate real-time opportunities for monitoring for both research and educational purposes. Cameras integrated into the structures can connect with phone apps, websites, schools, or kiosks. Unfortunately, the winning design has yet to be built on West Vail Pass. The wildlife still die in large numbers on the pass. Unfortunately, this section of highway has the reputation for killing every species of wildlife in Colorado save three. Whitetail deer, elk, grizzly and black bear, bighorn sheep, wolf, and even wolverine are regularly lost. Locally, it's referred to as the "Berlin Wall" for wildlife. Hopefully, like Banff, funds can be found to build this and many more structures across the mountain west in Canada and the U.S. Vail Pass may be called the "Berlin Wall" today, but just 30 years ago the Trans Canada between Banff and Lake Louise was referred to as the "meat grinder" for the same reason. Today it's a source of inspiration for destinations across North America dealing with challenges of animal impacts and connectivity. Hopefully new designs help to reduce the costs associated with building more and more crossing structures. In a related story, a recent study has found that female grizzlies with cubs have a definite preference for wildlife overpasses as opposed to underpasses when crossing the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff. The study showed that while male grizzlies seem to use both kinds of structures, females with cubs have a definite preference. The study looked at 17 years of crossing data over 5 of the 44 structures within Banff National Park. All of the bears preferred the more open structures like open-span bridges and overpasses as opposed to the more narrow box culverts and tunnels. Males would use the more confined structures, but definitely preferred a bit more space. Despite their preference for open structures, males still made many crossings on the box culvert style underpasses. It may be possible to create crossings focused on male bears which would help reduce the likelihood of females with cubs encountering males while using the crossings. In Canmore, a long underutilized underpass at Stewart Creek is seeing some renewed interest by both grizzly bears and wolves. This underpass is on one of the previously approved wildlife corridors in Canmore. While the corridor is used by a variety of animals, the underpass under the Trans-Canada Highway has not seen a great deal of wildlife traffic. Part of this may be the high level of human use in the corridor, with many of those people being accompanied by off-leash dogs. In recent months though, wildlife cameras have revealed a significant uptick in wolves and bears crossing through the underpass. In the period between Sept 24 and Nov 23, there were 8 wolf crossings - the first evidence of wolves using the underpass in the 20 years since it was first built. 2017 has also seen 8 separate crossings by grizzly bears so far as compared to 22 crossings in total since 2009. This year represents 36% of the total crossings in that timeframe. Banff also saw a slow adoption of underpasses by carnivores when they were first built, but in time, they became comfortable traversing them. Of the 8 wolf crossings, several were repeat visitors. It's believed that there are at least 3 wolves that have been counted more than once. In particular, collared wolf 1501, the former alpha male of the now disbanded Bow Valley Wolf Pack. With repeated use, the underpasses can become a typical part of their natural travel patterns. In Banff, the historic movement of wildlife determined the location of the 44 over and underpasses built through the park. In Canmore, the wildlife corridors are being designed by people and not the by the animals that have traversed the valley for centuries. We build house after house in the traditional movement corridors and then pull out crayons on a map and say "let's put the corridor here!". Wildlife don't read maps. They read landscapes. In Banff, the crossing zones are often terrain traps, places where habitat and landscape naturally funnel animals to potential highway crossings. Years of winter track surveys of carnivores helped park managers to locate the most important crossing areas for wildlife. They didn't try to force them to go anywhere, rather they let the animals tell them where they wanted to cross. Wildlife corridors and the crossing structures associated with them are critical to the long-term success of the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor. Canmore still has a lot of battles to help ensure the safety of the corridors within its town boundaries. An uptick in use at one underpass does not signal a win for what companies like Three Sisters and Silvertip would like the community to think is due to their efforts. We all need to keep the pressure on to make sure that Canmore doesn't turn into a cul-de-sac in the greater north-south movement corridors for wildlife. Let's celebrate the increased interest by some of our iconic animals, while continuing to push to make sure that it is a trend and not an anomaly. Next up - the scourge of scurvy Scurvy through the Ages In the 21st century, it seems almost inconceivable that someone could contract scurvy, a debilitating disease caused by a lack of vitamin C. With today's modern medicine, scurvy seems to have joined diseases like polio and smallpox in the dustbin of history. That being said, a story in the Canadian Press dated June 9, 2016 talked about an abused teen in Calgary that was likely suffering from scurvy at the time of his death at the age of 15. It was a horrific story of abuse and shows that even ancient, almost forgotten diseases can reappear if basic nutritional needs are not met. When we turn back the pages of time, scurvy really was one of the most devastating scourges affecting travelers throughout history. It seems to strike people when they were far away from home, and correspondingly, away from good nutrition. The cause of scurvy was not proven until 1747 when a Scottish doctor named James Lind showed through a controlled experiment that the use of citrus fruits would cure the disease. This could have, should have, ended the story of scurvy, but alas, history is often not so forgiving. The cause of scurvy has been repeatedly discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered time and time again over the ages. Even the Greek Physician Hippocrates who died in 370 BCE talked about the disease, as did Egyptians more than 1,000 years earlier. Move the clock forward to the 13th century and Crusaders were regularly plagued by scurvy. However by 1497, Vasco de Gama's crew were well aware of the benefits of citrus fruits. Alas, had the Internet existed so long ago, maybe the local discoveries of cures might have been more widely known. The common denominator seemed to be soldiers, explorers, or mariners traveling far from their homes and lacking the fresh fruits and meats that would have been part of their normal diets. The longer they relied on stored, preserved foods, the more likely that the symptoms of scurvy would strike them. Even Canadian history is riddled with tales of scurvy. One of the earliest explorations in Canada was that of Jacques Cartier in 1535-36 (the same man responsible for giving Canada its name). By November of 1535 Cartier's crew, along with a large group of Iroquois were suffering terribly from the disease. By February, 50 of his 110 member party were beyond all hope of recovery and 8 had already died from the disease. According to his journal, the disease: "spread itselfe amongst us after the strangest sort that ever was eyther heard of or seene, insomuch as some did lose all their strength, and could not stand on their feete, then did their legges swel, their sinnowes shrinke as blacke as any cole. Others also had all their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour: then did it ascend up to their ankels, knees, thighes, shoulders, armes and necke: their mouth became stincking, their gummes so rotten, that all the flesh did fall off, even to the rootes of teeth, which did also almost fall out". The crew was losing hope, and it seemed that only prayer could help. Cartier had one of the recently deceased crew autopsied to see if a cause might be determined. His heart appeared rotten and when cut into, issued a great deal more rotten blood. His lungs were black. There was no answers in the autopsy, only more questions. The crew continued to dwindle until only three healthy men were left on the ships. When all seemed lost, Cartier encountered a native by the name of Domagaia who: "not passing ten or twelve dayes afore, had bene very sike with that disease, and had his knees swolne as bigge as a childe of two yeres old, all his sinews shrunke together, his teeth spoyled, his gummes rotten, and stinking. Our Captaine seeing him whole and sound, was therat marvelous glad, hoping to understand and know of him how he had healed himselfe...He answered, that he had taken the juice and sappe of the leaves of a certain Tree, and therewith had healed himselfe: For it is a singular remedy against that disease." Domagaia immediately: "sent two women to fetch some of it, which brought ten or twelve branches of it, and therewithall shewed the way how to use it... to take the barke and leaves of the sayd tree, and boile them togither, then to drinke of the sayd decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon his legs that is sicke: moreover, they told us, that the vertue of that tree was, to heale any other disease: the tree in their language called Ameda or Hanneda..." "The Captain at once ordered a drink to be prepared for the sick men but none of them would taste it. At length one or two thought they would risk a trial. As soon as they had drunk it they felt better, which must clearly be ascribed to miraculous causes; for after drinking it two or three times they recovered health and strength and were cured of all the diseases they had ever had. And some of the sailors who had been suffering for five or six years from the French pox [syphilis] were by this medicine cured completely. When this became known, there was such a press for the medicine that they almost killed each other to have it first; so that in less than eight days a whole tree as large and as tall as any I ever saw was used up, and produced such a result that had all the doctors of Louvain and Montpellier been there, with all the drugs of Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as did this tree in eight days; for it benefitted us so much that all who were willing to use it recovered health and strength, thanks be to God." Other translations refer to the tree as Annedda. Unfortunately, Cartier did not list a careful description or proper name of the tree in his Journal. More recent research suggests that it might be the eastern white cedar, white spruce, or the white pine. All are very high in vitamin C and can make a rejuvenating tea for those suffering from scurvy. The lack of a proper identification, meant that scurvy would continue to plague future explorers. In 1609, Marc Lescarbot's History of New France talks about another expedition: "Briefly, the unknown sicknesses like to those described unto us by James Cartier, in his relations assailed us. Fore remedies there was none to be found. In the meanwhile the poor sick creatures did languish, pining away by little and little, for want of sweet meats, as milk or spoon-meat for to sustain their stomachs, which could not receive the hard meats by reason of let proceeding from a rotten flesh, which grew and overabounded within their mouths; when one thought to root it out, it did grow again in one night's space more abundantly than before. As for the tree called annedda, mentioned by the said Cartier, the savages of these lands know it not… There died of the sickness 36 and 36 or 40 more that were stricken with it recovered themselves by the help of the spring". Soon after, the voyages of Samuel de Champlaine were also ravaged by the disease. In 1613 he wrote: "During the winter there was a certain sickness amongst several of our men, called sickness of the country, or scurvy…There died 35…We could not find any remedy to cure this sickness… "We passed by a bay where there are a quantity of islands and saw large mountains in the west, where is the home of a savage captain called Aneda; which I think is near the Quinibequy River. I was persuaded by this name that here was one of the race who found the herb called Aneda, that Jacque Cartier said had so much power against the sickness called scurvy…which torments these men, savages as well as our own, when they arrive in Canada. The savages knew nothing about this herb, nor know what it is, even though their language contains the name." Had Cartier only taken a little more time to describe the plant so that future explorers could benefit from his good fortune at finding a cure. It was 1747 when James Lind finally issued a cure in his publication A Treatise of Scurvy, where he described the cure. Unfortunately, the book attracted little attention. As a result, scurvy continued to kill. During the Seven Years War which lasted from 1756 until 1763, the Royal Navy records showed 134,708 men listed as either missing or died from disease. Of that number, the vast majority succumbed to scurvy. Scurvy continued to plague explorers as they expanded across Canada. Even during the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In Pierre Burton's book, The National Dream, he writes: "No life was harsher than that suffered by members of the Canadian Pacific Survey crews and none was less rewarding, underpaid, overworked, exiled from their families, deprived of their mail, sleeping in slime and snowdrifts, suffering from sunstroke, frostbite, scurvy, fatigue and the tensions that always rise to the surface when weary dispirited men are thrown together for long periods of isolation, the surveyors kept on, year after year" In one of my favourite books detailing the surveys of Walter Moberly's party, one of his men, R.M. Rylatt kept a journal for his mother. It was published under the title Surveying the Canadian Pacific. I highly recommend it if you can find a copy. At one point Rylatt wrote: "My mouth is in a dreadful state, the gums being black, the teeth loose, and when pressed against any substance they prick at the roots like needles. At times the gums swell, almost covering the teeth. To chew food is out of the question and so have to bolt it without mastication. My legs also becoming black below the knee...My breath is somewhat offensive and I am troubled with a dry cough. In fact I feel like an old man" Rylatt was lucky. He survived the ordeal, but scurvy would continue to afflict other surveyors stranded for long periods in the wilderness with little access to modern medicines. Ironically, Rylatt was also surrounded by a myriad of coniferous trees that would have solved his problems with just a simple tea. If only Cartier had been a little more clear with his journal descriptions. In 1867, England's Merchant Shipping Act required every ship in the British Navy to serve daily rations of lime juice. As news spread, the Brits became known by the ubiquitous term "Limeys". Today, scurvy still persists, in particular amongst impoverished nations and within homeless populations. It constantly amazes me how a simple vitamin deficiency was responsible for the deaths of so many thousands of people over the centuries…all for the want of a little vitamin C. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. As I begin to work towards the next 50 episodes, I'm happy to have you along on the journey. For me, I'm always looking to find the stories in the science, the history and the culture. If you know of a good story, drop me a line in the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep050. You can also send me an email by using the contact page on the site. If you're looking for a snowshoe, hiking, step-on, or photography guide for your mountain adventure, look no further than Ward Cameron Enterprises. We have been sharing the stories behind the scenery for the past 35 years and would love to help you make the most of your mountain adventure. If you'd like to connect personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @ Ward Cameron. I'm excited to say, that's a wrap for the first 50 episodes, and the Chinook has melted a lot of the snow from the mountain valleys so it's time to go hiking. I'll talk to you next week.

In this episode I look at some of the reasons so many people flock to Churchill every year to see polar bears. I also look at a new research study that has shown that cougars are not nearly as solitary as biologists once believed. Finally, I examine a stu

Pika in a time of Climate Change The Rocky Mountains are known around the world as a great place to spot wildlife. Although most visitors to the area are looking for iconic animals like elk, bighorn sheep and bears, some of our tinier residents can be equally exciting. One of the more fascinating alpine animals is the pika. If you’ve never seen a pika —relax, you’re not alone. I remember my first sighting. I was nearing the summit of Nigel Pass in Banff Park, when all of a sudden I started hearing some strange sounds. They could only be described as a sort of bleating ‘Eeenk’. I would have quickly discounted them as a ground squirrel or marmot had they not come from the middle of a large, seemingly lifeless rock slide. Somewhere within this maze of boulders was an invisible animal. The problem was only compounded when I moved in for a closer look. That single ‘Eeenk’ suddenly became several —I was surrounded. I assured myself that I wasn't going crazy and became determined to discover the maker of these strange noises. As I watched and listened, I was astounded at how the sound of a single call seemed to come from all directions—almost like a ventriloquist throwing his voice. This must work very well to confuse predators; after all, it confused me. After about ten minutes, I resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to find my strange beast. I struggled on with my pack and was about to continue down the trail when a flash of movement caught my eye. About thirty metres away was a small gray animal. It resembled a guinea pig and blended in so well with the limestone that I almost lost it in the rocks. Out came the binoculars for a closer look. It was hunched on a rock and I could see that it was about 20 cm long with short rounded ears and no visible tail. When I finally returned home to my field guides, I flipped through the pages until, right after the rabbits, I found him. He was a pika and was part of the order Lagomorpha. This meant that they weren’t rodents, as I had suspected, but were more closely related to the snowshoe hare (who is also a member of this group). Unlike most other small members of the alpine community, the pika does not hibernate. It spends most of the summer months collecting plants and building large hay piles (some of which may be as large as a bushel) and leaving them to season, much like a farmer leaving out his bales. It will be these stores that will get it through the eight or nine months of winter. Often, it must leave the security of its rock or talus slope in order to collect these plants. Recognizing its vulnerability, it spends as little time in the meadow as possible. Quickly gathering plants, it places them cross-ways in its mouth and returns to the talus. Being related to hares and rabbits makes the pika a hindgut fermenter. Like all herbivores, the digestion of cellulose is done by bacteria in the gut. Unlike animals like elk, moose, and deer, which sport a four-chambered digestive system means that the fermentation process takes place prior to reaching the actual stomach. This also means that they need to essentially cough up their partly digested meals and re-chew them to help further break them down and allow for additional digestion. Unfortunately for animals like snowshoe hares and pikas, the fermentation process takes place beyond the stomach, in the Cecum. They will also have an intestinal tract that can be up to 13 times the length of their body. Once the food passes through the stomach, the fermentation takes place in the cecum and the large intestine before being coated with mucus and being excreted. These are referred to as cecotropes and are eaten again to allow the food to pass through the digestive system a second time to absorb additional nutrients. After this second passing, so to speak, they produce the hard pellets that we would normally associate with animals like rabbits, hares, and pikas. Regardless of which system vegetarians have to deal with, for me, I'm just happy to be a carnivore and not need to chew my cud or my - you know what. Cellulose be damned - give me a juicy steak! Pikas are very carefully tied to the environmental conditions in their homes. They have a fairly high body temperature (around 40 C) and a rise of just a few degrees can be fatal. This narrow range forces them to live in cooler areas, usually at elevations above 2000 metres. The prospect of warming climates and changing weather patterns are likely to have some very detrimental impacts on animals like the pika. In fact, research done in the Yukon in 2011 by Dr. David Hik of the University of Alberta looked at populations of collared pika in Kluane National Park, in the Yukon. The collared pika is closely related to the American pika that is so common through the Canadian Rockies and has been experiencing some of these climate-related challenges. The fact that pikas don't hibernate means that they rely on several things to make it through the winter, as well as to have reproductive successes. Believe it or not, they need good snowpacks. Snow is a blanket. It never gets cold beneath the snow. If you doubt this, just ask anyone who has spent a night in an igloo or snow cave. For pikas, warm winters with little snowpack mean population declines. The cold is able to penetrate into their subnivean or under the snow world leading to population declines. In the Alberta Rockies, another study done by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute in 2014 found that the American pika was the second most vulnerable animal. Pika live on mountaintops. This means that their homes are isolated from populations on adjacent mountaintops. They can't simply migrate into new habitats when the conditions in their home range change in such a way that it's no longer suitable. As an example, if you think about Lake Louise. Pika found around Lake Agnes cannot simply get to Mount Fairview, even though it is just on the other side of Lake Louise. To do so would involve a long migration into low elevation habitats prior to making their way up to the alpine zone of Mount Fairview. Pika live in the alpine because they cannot tolerate the warmer temperatures in the lower, warmer subalpine. Pikas are limited to survive in the habitats they have…as the saying goes: "there's no place like home". Unfortunately for them, it's also the only place that's home. They may be able to see a new potential home, but they won't be able to get there. Despite this, a report by Chris Shank entitled: Understanding and Respecting the Effects of Climate Change on Alberta’s Biodiversity indicated that they may not be at risk in the near future, at least in Alberta. This belief comes with many conditions, unfortunately, some of them requiring a reduction in greenhouse gases. With the current environmental situation south of our border, as well as Canada's slow pace of change, this seems unlikely to occur. It also assumes that snowpacks continue to be sufficient to support strong pika populations, that meadow plant populations remain consistent, those summer temperatures remain cool enough, and that loose rock, or talus slopes, that the pika call home also remains constant. With warming climates, the forests of the subalpine are beginning to migrate upwards into the alpine. The alpine is a finite habitat. Eventually, you run out of mountain. As long as meadows migrate upwards along with forests, and snow packs migrate uphill as well, and so on, our pikas may be able to stick around. While pikas are on the frying pan locally, they are slipping into the fire in more southerly populations. The further south you go, climate changes are resulting in the two things that make it difficult for pikas to survive - reduced snowpacks and an upward migration of the subalpine. If you travel south to California's Sierra Nevada mountains, pikas have completely disappeared from a 425 km2 portion of their range. Currently, this is the largest area of local extinction or extirpation, so far recorded. In California, the problem has been warmer summer temperatures, resulting in these very heat sensitive pikas overheating. When it's too hot, the pikas seek the shade. When they are in the shade, they're not collecting plants to add to their winter larder. While pika do still exist in areas adjacent to this study, forecasts predict a drop of 97% in pika numbers around Lake Tahoe by 2050. There is one light at the end of this very dark tunnel. For pika, there are very few options in a world of warming climates and reduced snow packs: move, adapt, acclimate, or die! In a recent study in Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment, biologists looked at over 200 studies looking into how amphibians, birds, fish, invertebrates, mammals, and reptiles responded to warming climates. Behavioural responses can occur in much shorter time spans then physiological ones. According to this study, some individual pika populations have managed to adapt to changes by varying their foraging habits, calling new environments home, and finding novel ways to prevent overheating. Pika are found over a huge territory, but individuals don’t tent do move more than a kilometre from the rock pile that they were born. Lack of movement means that individual populations remain isolated from each other, meaning each population may adopt different strategies to dealing with warming temperatures. Some have sought out new micro-environments, taking advantage of deadfall logs, logging debris and forests. If the location is cool enough in the summer, and the snowpack deep enough, they may be able to survive. Some isolated populations in the Columbia River Gorge have managed to obtain as much as 63% of their calories from mosses, which are plentiful both winter and summer. This allows them to be less rigorous in terms of building haypiles during the summer months. Behavioural flexibility may be the catchword for the 21st century. If plants, animals, and birds cannot adapt physiologically to the rapid changes in their ranges then behavioural adaptation is their only option. At least a few populations of pika are taking the challenge and beating the odds. I don't ever want to find myself wandering the loose rock talus slopes of the mountains in summer and not be challenged to find these most perfectly camouflaged critters. Ancient Aspirin I spend a lot of time showing visitors to the mountains signs of animals recorded in the landscape and plant life. Most animals are not designed to be seen. They're designed to blend into the mountain landscape and so, to untrained eyes, they often remain invisible. One thing they can't hide though is the signs that they leave behind. This may be tracks, scats, bits of hair, or even signs of feeding. If you take a look at any trembling aspen tree in the central Rockies and you'll notice that the lower portions of the trunk are heavily scarred. This is due to the fact that the scarring represents mouth level for an elk standing on snow. During the lean winter months, aspen bark is a famine food for elk and they'll peel strips of bark off the lower portions of the trunk. If you look higher up the trunk, you may get a surprise. Sometimes you can find additional marks ascending the trunk, and upon closer inspection, you may find claw marks from a black bear or two that climbed the tree in previous years. Aspen and poplar bark is very easily scarred. Once a bear climbs the tree, the tree will bear the scars for the rest of its life. Once you find a bear-climbed aspen, you'll take special notice as you wander the mountain landscapes looking for additional trees with similar scars. Looking for animal signs helps to make us more aware of the wildlife that is around us but often hidden from view. Our first nations also used the bark of the aspen tree. They would use the inner bark as a medicine, and they would take that for everything from headaches to tummy aches. When we non-natives arrived on the landscape, we scoffed at their heathen witch doctor medicine - heck, they didn't even know what it was good for. They took it for everything. Well today we know that the bark of aspen trees, and its relatives in the willow family, contain a chemical called Salicylic Acid. To us non- natives, we refer to this chemical as aspirin. They were taking it long before we ever rediscovered its medical magic. Modern aspirin can be traced back to Edward Stone, an 18th-century clergyman who wrote that a powdered mixture of willow bark helped 50 patients with malaria-like diseases as well as other illnesses. The modern aspirin we use can be traced back to 1899 when Felix Hoffmann, a chemist at Bayer in Germany used acetylsalicylic acid to help treat his father's rheumatism. I've been telling my guests that first nations have used it for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before modern medicine caught on. Willow bark was taken by ancient Egyptians to treat aches and pains and even the great Greek physician Hippocrates mentioned its use. Well a new study takes its use way back, and I mean waaaaaaay back - to several Neanderthal skeletons dated from between 42,000 and 50,000 years ago. As it turns out, Neanderthals didn't have great dental hygiene. For archaeologists, this has always been good news. In time, plaque accumulating on teeth will harden into something called calculus, a hard surface made up of minerals and the remains of bacteria along with other microorganisms. Calculus can accumulate, layer upon layer, offering a time capsule of Neanderthal diets. Previous studies of Neanderthal teeth showed that humans and Neanderthals interbred. They also showed that localized populations dined on dramatically different menus. Some were Ward friendly with a high meat diet including animals like reindeer, woolly mammoths, and woolly rhinoceros, while others dined at restaurants that I would never frequent - offering a mostly plant-based menu. Recently a group of scientists analyzed the DNA in the calculus of four European Neanderthals. Two were from Belgium, and two from Spain. They varied in age from 42,000 to 50,000 years old. The tests confirmed that the Belgian Neanderthal was my kind of caveman - dining mostly on woolly rhinoceros, wild sheep, and wild mushrooms. The Spanish Neanderthal were more vegan, eating primarily pine nuts, moss, mushrooms and tree bark. The most interesting result came from one of the skulls from El Sidrón cave in Spain. His teeth showed that he had signs of salicylic acid. Now, this was one sickly Neanderthal. He had dental abscesses and DNA analysis showed that he would have suffered from severe diarrhea from intestinal parasites. If he only had something stronger, like penicillin! This miracle drug was only discovered accidentally in September of 1928 by Dr. Alexander Fleming. After returning from vacation he encountered a messy lab and the mold Penicillium notatum had contaminated some of his Petri dishes. While the rest is history, it's the prehistory that is fascinating in terms of this story. This same 48,000-year-old Neanderthal had traces of Penicillium mold. This means that hominids that predate humans were taking versions of Penicillin at least 48,000 years ago, and likely much longer. This story is a combination of daily guiding meeting podcast curiosity. It's common knowledge in local guiding literature that our First Nations used aspen bark as medicine. However, had I not started this podcast, I wouldn't have been on the constant quest for new scientific studies to share with listeners like you. Aspirin and Penicillin are usually considered "modern" medicines, but this one skull from a cave in Spain has helped us to realize that everything new is old again! Mining our Rivers Way back in episode 15, I talked about the importance of gravel-bed rivers in the Canadian Rockies. You can listen to the episode at mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep015. It's a really cool story and it's worth checking out the show notes or taking a listen prior to continuing this episode if you'd like to get the background material. Recent studies by Dr. Richard Hauer, a professor at the University of Montana, have focused on the unique ecology of gravel-bed rivers in the Rocky Mountains. Hauer recognized that streams in mountain valleys are NOT limited to the narrow channel at the bottom of wide U-shaped glacial valleys. In fact, the actual channel of the river extends from valley bottom to valley bottom, with water percolating across the valley through the gravels. Over millennia, the river has been moving back and forth across its valley, eroding here and depositing sediments there, but never staying the same. If you could take an x-ray of the valley bottom, you would see a mosaic of sediments including cobbles, gravels, and finer sediments. Above ground, the valley shows various levels of succession with flowing channels, ponds, old and new channels, dry gravel beds and vegetation varying from mountain avens flowers to old-growth spruce. Water though, does not see these boundaries, and flows from one side of the valley to the other, quietly flowing between the cobbles and other sediments, allowing for an entire ecosystem of aquatic life to persist far away from today's river channel. The mountain ecology around us has been built by 10,000 or more years of rivers changing, migrating, eroding and depositing. It's this change that is the dynamic lifeblood of the river valley ecosystem Now what might happen if you decide to mine that gravel-bed river? If we accept that a gravel-bed river IS really an entire valley and not just a river, then the consequences of disrupting any part of that ecosystem can be significant. In a story in Alberta Views Magazine, former Banff Park Superintendent Kevin Van Tighem talks about a well drilled a kilometre away from the Flathead River in Montana. It wasn't surprising that it produced beautifully clean water, but what was surprising was that it also produced stoneflies. These aquatic insects are found in fast-flowing mountain streams, but they were not expected this far from the river. Well as Dr. Hauer has shown, rivers are not a channel, but a valley-wide ecosystem. The stoneflies lived in the gravels, a long way from the active channel. So let's take a more detailed look at the Bow River Valley as an example. The Bow River occupies just a narrow ribbon in the centre of the valley. On either side, the valley stretches from Silvertip to Quarry Lake. Is the river just the river? Not at all. The river is the valley. Anything we do to the gravels of the valley will affect the river itself. In fact, there's far more water in the gravel then there is in the river channel. Just because it looks like land, it doesn't mean that it IS land. Unfortunately, in Alberta, gravel is a commodity. As far as industry is concerned, gravel is known as "aggregate" and it is a hugely valuable commodity. Gravel mining companies employ lobbyists who extol the benefits of cheap gravel to ill-informed politicians, who look at campaign donations, and, well you get the story. According to Van Tieghen's article, prior to 2011, Alberta regulators rarely approved gravel mines on floodplains, however the provincial Conservatives approved the Alberta Surface Water Body Aggregate Policy in January of 2011. This new policy signaled open season on gravel pit mining in the province. The floods of 2013 really helped to bring the folly of gravel pit mining to the forefront. Water flows, it's unrelenting and continuous. Add additional flow to the channel, and water will also percolate throughout the entire gravel river ecosystem. Three common problems that gravel-river mines cause include depletion of aquifers, losses to the fishery, and in particular, "pit capture". If you dig a gravel pit near to a gravel river channel, the river will tend to be drawn towards the gravel pit with the potential of essentially 'capturing' the pit. This can end up cutting a new channel causing unexpected erosion, destruction of property, and the loss of fish stocks. Essentially, if you build it, it may come! You can see how inchannel gravel mining ant pit capture works. At one mine on the North Saskatchewan River, operated by Mixcor, a company whose website boasts of "a history of caring", their Dahm gravel pit on the North Saskatchewan River was inundated during the 2013 floods. This flood was fast and relentless, just as it was through the Bow River Valley. As the groundwater inundated the mine, followed by the surface water until the entire river course was drawn towards the mine. Very quickly, mine machinery was buried and toxins from the mine began to leach into the 'new' river channel. Along with the toxins, the excessive sediment drowned spawning beds and damage the gills of adult fish. Fish stocks declined by up to 50% from this one case of pit capture. Keith Rae, the owner of Get Hooked Fishing Adventures carefully documents his companies catch rates. Before the flood, he recorded 2,851 catches, but after the flood, he only recorded 1,197. In 2014, it was even worse with only 1,305. Upstream from the pit capture, the numbers remained consistent. As Van Tighen relates in his story, glaciers were great purveyors of gravel, distributing vast amounts in areas far from gravel-bed rivers. The problem is that it is more expensive to mine. As Kevin states: "Glaciers left lots of upland gravel in Alberta. There is no need to steal it from our rivers. The only reason mining river floodplains is profitable is because gravel operators don’t pay for the dead fish, depleted water wells, diverted river channels and downstream siltation. We do." So far the provinces NDP government has not moved to change the regulations. Alberta is glacier country. It's full of gravel. Let's just start to take it from areas outside of these underground channels. That's what we used to do prior to 2011. Water is the issue of the 21st century. Scientists like Dr. Hauer are helping us to better understand the delicate ecosystems that we call home. Naturalists like Kevin Van Tighem have also been helping visitors to the Canadian Rockies understand and experience the mountains for some 30 years. His newest book entitled Our Place: Changing the Nature of Alberta is now available from Rocky Mountain Books. You can also order it from Amazon.ca at the following link: http://amzn.to/2xQlA3Y. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Don't forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is YOUR source for step-on, hiking, and snowshoe guides as well as workshop facilitators and keynote speakers focusing on all things related to the mountain west. If you'd like to reach out personally, you can contact me through the contact link on this page or hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron. You can also visit our Facebook page at Facebook.com/wardcameronenterprises. If you'd like to check out the shown notes at www.mountainnature.com/ep048, you can find additional links as well as videos that help illustrate the concept of mining gravel-bed rivers. And with that said, I'm off to Churchill to guide polar bear viewing trips for the next few weeks. I'll be really busy with the bears between the 23rd of October and November 10th so please bear with me if you don't see an episode for a few weeks. This podcast is here to stay so I'll post as my time permits but be back full-time upon my return in November. And with that said, it's an awesome day today so I'm off to go hiking.

Canada 150 Visitation Unless you've been living under a rock this past year, you know that 2017 represents the 150th birthday of Canada. As a nation, we were born just 150 years ago on July 1, 1867. Now this wasn't the Canada we know today, but a teeny tiny Canada with a lot of well, wilderness. Canada, such as it was, was made up of Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and that's it. Upper Canada then became Ontario and Lower Canada, Quebec. Looking at the rest of what would become the rest of Canada, in the far west, there was the Crown Colony of British Columbia, but it would be 4 more years before it became a province on July 20, 1871. The vast majority of what is now Canada though, remained as either Rupert's Land or the Northwest Territories. If the water's flowed into Hudson Bay, it was part of Rupert's Land, and if it flowed north into the Mackenzie River system, it was part of the Northwest Territories. Alberta and Saskatchewan did not join Canada as full provinces until 1905. Canada's National Park system began with the 10 sq km Banff Hot Springs Preserve in 1885, with just a tiny section protected around the Cave and Basin Hot Springs. It sowed the seeds of Canada's National Park system though and was the third National Park in the world behind only Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. and Royal National Park in Australia. Today Canada's National Park system includes 47 National Parks and 970 National Historic Sites. These include the Cave and Basin, Abbots Pass Refuge Cabin, Banff Park Museum, Banff Springs Hotel, Howse Pass, Skoki Ski Lodge, and the Sulphur Mountain Cosmic Ray Station. Other sites across the Mountain National Parks include Athabasca Pass, Yellowhead Pass, the Jasper Park Information Centre, and the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton. Across Alberta, you can add Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Calgary City Hall, Nordegg, Atlas No. 3 Coal Mine, Coleman, Fort Edmonton, Fort Macleod, Fort Whoop-Up, and the Turner Valley Gas Plant. 2017 was a year steeped in history but also steeped in tourism. The Trudeau Government decided to make all visitation to National Parks and National Historic Sites free for 2017 and this led to huge fears that the parks would be inundated. I have been a strong critic of Parks Canada's focus on bringing more and more cars through the park gates for the past decade while allowing the backcountry to wither. All the marketing has focused on 4-5 million visitors pointing their cars and buses towards the same 2% of the park. Over the past few years, I have watched the park get swarmed by more and more and more visitors. In iconic locations like Lake Louise, Moraine Lake, and Peyto Lake, I've witnessed the crowds growing to levels unimaginable just a decade ago. Many of the park roads, like Sulphur Mountain, Lake Louise, and Moraine Lake, are one lane in and one lane out. This creates finite limits on the amount of traffic the roads can accommodate. In past years, I experienced wait times as long as 2-1/2 hours driving the 3 km or so between the Village of Lake Louise and the actual Lake. With traffic jams like these, nobody is having a good experience. Over the past year, after the announcement that park passes would be free this year, there was well-justified fear that these delays would just get longer and longer. Parks was regularly criticized by Banff and Jasper town counselors for their lack of transparency and discussion on how to deal with the influx of traffic. As the season approached, though, the pieces began to fall into place. Parks Canada made some very bold moves that dramatically reduced the congestion within Banff National Park. Some of these moves included: Permanent parking boundaries along narrow roads such as the approach to Moraine Lake, Johnston Canyon and Lake Minnewanka. These reflective pylons made sure that narrow sections of road weren't choked by cars parking in the driving lanes and making it very difficult for cars and buses to negotiate the road. Free shuttle buses between Banff and Lake Louise, Banff and the Lake Minnewanka Loop as well as from the Lake Louise Overflow Campground and both Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. These buses proved to be incredibly effective with some 280,000 people using these new shuttles. An additional half a million people took advantage of the local Roam bus routes during July and August. The Calgary to Banff bus averaged 260 people per day when it was running. This brought it into Banff where visitors could connect with other regional options. The free Lake Minnewanka shuttles average 470 people/day The free shuttle between Banff and Lake Louise has been averaging 200 people/day while The shuttles between the Lake Louise Overflow Campground and Lake Louise has moved over 150,000 people this summer. In an interview with Gord Gillies of Global News, Park Superintendent Dave McDonough indicated that Parks Canada was planning: "to continue and improve that shuttle service as we go forward because as we continue to see we anticipate we'll continue to see increases in visitation over time, and this is a great way to get people out of their cars and eliminate some of that congestion issues that are associated with those increases." This was just one prong of the traffic management in the park this summer. Parks also had an army of traffic control personnel at all the intersections in the Lake Louise area this summer. They were part of ATS Traffic from Calgary and they did a superhuman job of keeping the vehicles flowing. Not once this years did I experience the huge delays that I have had in past years trying to get from the Village of Lake Louise to the actual Lake. Moraine Lake Road was much easier to negotiate without miles of cars parked half-way into the traffic lanes. On most days, by 9 am, the Moraine Lake Road was simply closed to most vehicles. Buses were given a priority but most private cars where SOL by 9 or 9:30 am. With all of the shuttles, traffic cones, flag people, and free park passes, what are the actual numbers this year? In the end, the increases were lower than many of us anticipated. In July and August, Banff had 1.7 million cars enter and exit the park. This was up 7% over 2016 and overall the vehicle numbers are up 3.5%. The town of Banff counted 4.6 million cars so far this year which is an astounding increase of 21% over 2014. A full 1.7 million of those were during the summer. While the maximum vehicle count was 34,275 on July 2, the average count was 27,512. This means that almost every day was above the congestion point of 24,000 cars. The town helped to alleviate this by manipulating the traffic lights to bias busier sections of road. The main bottleneck within the town of Banff is Sulphur Mountain Road. Cars come into Banff, drive Banff Avenue, cross the Bow River Bridge and then head up Sulphur Mountain. On the way down, they descend the road and hit a traffic light on Spray Ave where the traffic begins to stack. They then turn left for a short distance to wait to turn right onto Banff Avenue. The traffic continues to back up here. The challenge of biasing the lights to move this traffic up and down the mountain means that the Mount Norquay exit into Banff can backup. I June this year, I had to call the Park Wardens as the offramp coming from the east had backed up into the traffic lanes of the Trans Canada, setting up a dangerous situation. For 2017, as much as I didn't think I'd be able to do this, I need to give Parks a gold star for pulling some rabbits out of their hats at the eleventh hour. They were pilloried in the media for the simple fact that they didn't communicate with local communities, nor offer any additional support to help them deal with the realities of massive potential increases in tourism. Overall, it looks like Banff will see no larger increase in numbers then it has over the past few years. Visitation has been growing at a rate of around 5%/year and this year will fit right into that trend. Visitors seem to have gotten the message that things would be busy and so they are taking advantage of early and late season to try to avoid the biggest crowds. Did everything go smoothly, nope! However, I was impressed with most of the traffic control. With tightly controlled traffic at sites like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, the parking at Lake Louise and the road to Moraine were simply closed when they reached capacity. This meant that all the cars that wanted to visit were simply turned away. They had the option to head back to the highway and use the shuttles, and thousands took advantage of that option. To a certain extent, it actually reduced the number of bodies swarming the shoreline of these two iconic sites. Here is my call to action! There is a fear that much of the critical work that ATS Traffic did this year may have been a one-off, with funding coming from the Canada 150 funds. We simply can't go back to the chaos of past years. If you support the work this amazing group did this year, be sure to contact Parks Canada and make your voices heard. I for one, want to make sure that, at the very least, this is the new norm. Why were the increases in visitors not even higher? It has to do with the simple fact that there are only so many hotel rooms in the region. As the season got busier, so did the hotels get more expensive. There is a point at which there is simply no way for more people to access the mountains. When the rooms and campsites are gone, then people are limited to day trips from larger centres like Calgary. That being said, the current 4% increase in visitation still represents an additional 200,000 people visiting Banff this year. These are unsustainable growth numbers. At some point, park managers will need to begin to say yes to saying no! We are nearing the moment when we need to begin to say "NO, you can't visit Lake Louise". We are too close to beginning to love this place to death! Farewell to Bear 148 If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you've heard me talk time and again about grizzly 148. This 6-1/2-year-old daughter of Bears 66 and 122, better known as the Boss, ran out of luck this summer when she wandered outside of Banff National Park just one too many times. This summer, the buffaloberry crop in Banff was not very strong, but in Canmore, we had fabulous berry patches. This attracted 148 out of the park and into the area around Canmore. In episode 38, I talk about the translocation of Bear 148 to northern Alberta and Kakwa Provincial Park. You can listen to the episode at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep038. Essentially, after returning back to Canmore she had another run-in with people illegally violating a closure and bluff-charged them. This was the final straw for Alberta Environment and Parks, and she was trapped, trucked and translocated far from her home range. With a distant translocation like this, the odds of her surviving were very slim in the first place. Bears become intimately connected to their home ranges. They need to know where all their seasonal foods can be found and at what time of year. Moving them to a new territory is like being forced to shop in a new grocery. Not only is it difficult to find things that you usually eat, but it may not even have the same foods. There may also be other shoppers pushing you away from the best selections. Near the end of September, 148 wandered across the border with British Columbia, likely in search of late season foods, when she was legally shot by trophy hunters. Ironically, B.C. is set to ban grizzly hunting permanently as of Nov. 30. She had the misfortune of crossing the border just over a month too early and it cost 148 her life. Over the past few years, 148 became a symbol of what's wrong in Canmore. What good are wildlife corridors if animals are punished for using them? What good are corridors if people ignore the closures and put themselves and the wildlife in jeopardy? On Oct 7, well over 100 Canmore residents came out to say goodbye to 148 and to pledge to do better in the future. This has also become a major election issue and many of the presentations really focused on the need for political will if we are to keep grizzlies on the landscape. I was lucky enough to record the presentations during the event and I want to present them here. Please keep in mind that I was recording speakers using an old-fashioned bull-horn so the audio quality is not perfect - but their message is! First up was Harvey Locke, co-founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon and long-time conservationist. Following Harvey was Bree Todd, Bree is one of the co-creators of the Bear 148 Appreciation Page on Facebook and has been a strong voice advocating for viable wildlife corridors. Local NDP Member of the Legislature, Cam Westhead followed Bree. He vowed to help the province work harder to improve the situation for bears in the Bow Valley. Following Cam's presentation, the group marched through Canmore towards the Civic Centre for the final two speeches. First was Bill Snow of the Stoney Nakoda. He is the Stoney Consultation Manager and was instrumental in spearheading a Stoney grizzly study in 2016. The last speaker was Kay Anderson, another outspoken advocate of bears and corridors in Canmore, and one of the main organizers of the march. In addition to the presentations, I had the opportunity to speak to a few people outside of the presentations. First up is Mayoral candidate Ed Russell. Finally, I had the opportunity to ask Jeff Laidlaw a few questions. Jeff is looking to be elected to Canmore's town council in the upcoming election. Overall, this was a great event for Canmore. I showed that local people really care about our bears and keeping our corridors wild. This is our last chance to make the right decisions for wildlife. Let's hope that Bear 148 is the last bear to die because of local apathy. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. Don't forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises can offer you the expertise and local knowledge to make your visit to the Rockies a memorable one. Don't forget to check out the show notes for links to additional information and photos from this week's event. Drop me a line using the contact page on this site if you'd like to book a step-on or hiking guide, workshop facilitator or speaker. If you'd like to connect with me personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron or at www.facebook.com/wardcameronenterprises. And with that said, the hills are snowy white so it's time to tune up the snowshoes - snowshoe animal tracking season is just around the corner. I'll talk to you next week.

Look Out Bears, There's a Train Coming

In episode 34 I talked about the incredible success that Banff National Park has had in terms of reducing the number of animals, such as grizzly bears, that are being killed along our highways. The system of over and underpasses that have been pioneered here are now serving as a template for many new areas that are trying to emulate Banff's successes.

You can listen to the full episode at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep034.

While the highways have been getting safer and safer as the system of fencing and crossing structures are expanded, the one area that still shows little improvement is the Canadian Pacific Railway line through the mountain parks.

Canadian Pacific has worked closely with Parks Canada over the years to look at a variety of ways to try to reduce the numbers of animals that perish along tracks. Back in episode 19, I described some of the principle research being done on bear impacts along the tracks. You can listen to it at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep019.

In this episode, researchers looked into the timing and location of fatalities. They found that, while more bears use the tracks in the western end of Banff, more bears were being killed in the eastern portions of the park.

One of the conclusions was that the eastern portions are often closer to the busy highways which may have made it difficult for bears to hear the approach of trains. The bears also may need to have better sightlines so that they can see approaching trains from a greater distance.

Another study proposed another theory as to why bears in the west edge of the park fare better than those farther east - The Boss - Bear 122. The Boss is a regular visitor to the tracks in the western portions of Banff and into Yoho National Park and he's even been bounced off a freight train and walked away unharmed.

One theory is that the Boss is so protective of the tracks that other bears simply don't feel safe approaching his turf. Since he has been patrolling the tracks, no confirmed bear death has occurred since 2012. However, between 2000 and 2012, 14 grizzlies were killed along the tracks within Banff's east border and the west end of Yoho. Perhaps the Boss is helping to keep the tracks safer.

Another study that I discuss in Episode 19 showed that an estimated 110 metric tonnes of grains are spilled along the tracks within Banff and Yoho every year - enough to support the annual food needs of some 50 grizzlies!

This week, I want to look at a new study that has been looking into just how much bears use the tracks as well as what foods were making the tracks so attractive. While there are obvious attractants, like grain spills and carrion, researchers did not know what the relative importance of each of these were to the bears.

Between 2011 and 12, they placed satellite collars on 21 different bears. The collars provided information on their position every 2 hours. In addition, they analyzed 230 grizzly scats collected between May and October over the years 2012 to 2014.

Surprisingly, of the 21 grizzlies, only 4 were regular visitors to the CPR main line. These bears visited the tracks in excess of 20% of the days on which their movements were monitored.

Scat samples from these four bears all occasionally contained grain. In fact, 43% of all grizzly scat samples found within 150 m of the tracks contained some grain. Beyond 150 m, the incidence of grain dropped to a mere 7%.

It appears grain is a more important food in the fall, as 85% of the scat samples found near the tracks contained grain at this time as compared to only 14% in the summer and 17% in the spring.

This makes sense when we look at the seasonally available food sources and behaviour of bears during the summer. Earlier in the season, there is a wider variety of available foods. In late summer, the buffaloberry crop disappears with the first frosts and then food becomes more scarce for the remainder of the season.

An easy feed of grain would be a strong attractor for bears, just like unharvested crabapple and cherry trees in communities can serve to attract bears.

Grain wasn't the only thing bringing these 4 bears to the rail lines, scat found close to the tracks was also more likely to contain the hair of elk, deer and moose.

According to the study's results, three of the four bears visiting the tracks were quite young. researcher Cassady St. Clair was quoted in a CBC news story:

"We learned that eating grain is something only a few bears specialized in doing." Cassady St. Clair says, "Three could be put into one category, they were teenagers and skinny and probably having a tough time making a living."

The fourth bear, the Boss was being attracted, not by grain, but by the carcasses of elk, deer and moose that had been killed by the trains.

This report shows that it's especially important to reduce or remove grain spills later in the season, as well as removing the carcasses of other rail killed animals.

Since 1982, 1,256 large animals have been killed by trains in Banff and Yoho National Parks including five different types of hoofed animals and four different carnivore species.

Since 1998, train collisions have become the number one cause of death for grizzlies within these parks. This most recent study has provided some great additional information as to what is attracting the bears, and just how important those foods are on a season by season basis.

Researchers are now getting a much better understanding about the role train tracks play in attracting animals and at the same time, some of the challenges that animals face when suddenly encountering a rapidly moving train.

Some animals freeze when they see the train, others futilely try to outrun the train. Better sightlines can help, but what if there was another way - a wildlife alarm that sounded early enough to startle the animals off of the tracks, before the train becomes a danger?

Johnathan Backs is a PhD student and he is working on just such a system. He has developed an innovative way to create an loud shrill beeping sound for a full 30 seconds before a train approaches.

The battery operated device senses the vibrations of an oncoming train and then emits its warning sound. While this may not frighten a bear, the hope is that the bears will learn from experience that the sound indicates that a train is approaching and that they should move away from the tracks.

The fact that small numbers of bears are regular visitors may also help to increase the devices effectiveness. Since bears learn through experience, a repetitive warning may help to give them plenty of time to move to safety.

It's so important that research like these studies continue to be supported within the mountain west. The more we understand the behaviour of our local animals, the better we will be able to coexist with them.

Perhaps one of the most useful things that would help reduce animal mortality would be to slow trains down as they move throughout the parks, just like we do with cars. However, that's a decision that would come with a great deal of resistance by CP who's tracks are ever-busier.

Next up…The Cariboo Gold Rush becomes a Bonanza

The Cariboo Part 2

Last week I introduced you to the first discoveries of gold in British Columbia, and described how it led to the creation of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, while also necessitating the development of the first wagon roads into the interior of the future province.

By the summer of 1860, there were more and more seasoned miners arriving on the scene. These were miners that had been part of earlier rushes and learned the tricks of the trade, including how to read the signs and had a great sense for where to look for gold.

George W. Weaver, William Ross Keithley and John A Rose arrived on the Fraser this same year and convinced Ranald MacDonald to guide them into the area where gold had been discovered.

As they explored the area north of Cariboo Lake, they found gold along a small creek that they dubbed Keithley. While Rose and MacDonald decided to move on, Keithley and Weaver remained to work the creek.

In the end, they decided that the creek just wasn't yielding enough and left the area to follow their comrades. While they were on the creek though, less experienced miners began to crowd the creek with claims and before long, a small hamlet called Keithley sprang up.

Today, it's yet another ghost town left behind when the last miners moved on to other sites. For Keithley and Weaver, they followed the creek for a while and then crossed a small divide to another creek where they caught up with MacDonald and Rose. The creek became known as Antler Creek.

They were beaming from ear to ear about the potential of the creek and showed them some rusty-coloured gold nuggets. For the moment, they had this spot to themselves. It was only a matter of time before others arrived at the site because secrets never stayed secret in the Cariboo.

They were each entitled to one claim, as well as a second 30 x 30 metre claim as the discoverers of the site. They decided to survey the area for the best sites, stake their eight claims, and then work the other areas until they began to run short of supplies.

Keithley and Weaver were selected to head back to Keithley Town to gather winter supplies. They had to be very careful though. If word slipped out about the new discovery, they would be inundated with gold-hungry greenhorns all looking to strike it rich.

The gold from this new creek had a definitely reddish colour, so they would use gold leftover from Keithley Creek to buy the supplies. They didn't want the gold's colour to betray their plans.

They put on their best poker faces and headed to Keithley Town. Unfortunately, they were too well known. Heading back to a town named after you it turned out was a poor way to remain unnoticed. A large group of men already kitted out and wearing snowshoes was waiting for them as they tried to sneak out of town.

At the same time, fresh snow had made sure that it would be easy for scads of miners to follow their fresh tracks in the snow and so it was that the Antler Creek discovery became known far and wide. Antler Creek produced fabulous amounts of gold with some claims being as high as $450/day and another bearing $300/day per miner.

By June of 1861, Antlertown had 60 buildings including a sawmill, saloons, stores, homes and many tents.

With gold comes robberies. On August 17, 1861, a story in the British Colonist reported:

“Robberies are not infrequent in Antler. Recently, $130 in gold dust and two pistols were taken from Cameron’s Golden Age Saloon. A slight stabbing affair is also noted. Watson and Taylor’s Minstrels are still performing at Antler.”

Hopeful miners continued to arrive, and as Antler Creek became claimed out, many fanned out to other creeks. New discoveries occurred along Williams, Lightning, Lowhee, and Grouse Creeks.

Antlertown became the service centre for these new sites. During the winter of 1860-61, there was a party of six miners sharing a single camp. They included Murtz j. Collins, Michael Costin Brown, John "Kansas" Metz, Wilhelm Dietz (a Prussian ex-sailor), James Costello, and Michael Burns.

Costello, Burns and Dietz had wandered off to prospect and suddenly returned wide-eyed to report a new discovery in a creek not too far distant. Brown, Dietz and Costello headed back to the creek. Here is Brown's accounting of the discovery:

"We crossed the divide, eventually making the headwaters of the creek and after some time we travelled to a place near a little gulch or canyon, where we camped for the night, building a little shelter.

On the following morning we separated to prospect the stream, agreeing to meet again at night to report progress. The story of that day's prospecting, which we recalled over the campfire, has become a matter of mining history in British Columbia. "Dutch Bill" made the best prospect, striking pay dirt at $125 a pan. Costello and I had done pretty well, finding dirt worth a dollar or so a pan. You can well imagine we were well pleased with the day's exertions and each man in his heart felt that we had discovered very rich ground. I shall not forget the discussion that took place as to the name to be given to the creek. Dutch Bill was for having it called "Billy Creek" because he had found the best prospects of the three. I was quite agreeable, but I stipulated that Mr. William [sic] Dietz should buy the first basket of champagne that reached the creek. This appealed to Costello and so the creek was then and there named - not Billy Creek, but William's Creek. "

In a story reminiscent of so many before them, as they tried to secretly record their claims, and purchase supplies, the news leaked out and the tracks in the snow once again led a pilgrimage of panners to their diggings.

As the fickle finger of fate would have it, the original six discoverers didn't pick the best claims and one by one, they sold out and moved on, six more disappointed souls amidst a bonanza lottery. Thousands came to the Cariboo with the hope of easy wealth, most left broken and broke…and some never left at all, but were buried in lonely graves in places long forgotten.

Around this time, another American party led by Richard Willoughby accompanied by Asa and Thomas Patterson and Hanson Tilton arrived. As they explored upstream of Williams Creek and descended into a valley where they came across a lake that they named Jack of Clubs Lake.

From Jack of Clubs Lake, they found a stream that flowed through a narrow canyon and almost immediately they came across promising gravels. They had it all to themselves - for the moment, and so they didn't rush the process of staking out their claims. They decided to take as much time as it required to find the very best gravels.

This was a canny plan for, as had happened so often in the past, when they did finally head back to civilization for supplies, the multitudes followed them back to the Lowhee.

Lowhee was not only incredibly gold rich, but it was an easy creek to work. It represented the start of hard rock mining as the gravels, rather than being panned, were removed to expose the bedrock little more than a metre below. In the bedrock were embedded huge nuggets of gold.

Willoughby's group mined for just five weeks and left the area with four thousand ounces worth of nuggets. George Weaver and William Keithley also joined the miners at this site and had to build a 6 km long flume in order to carry water to their site, but the gold was far richer than any expense.

Ranald MacDonald also walked away with a fortune before selling his claim to John Rose for a 320-ounce poke of gold. As the stories began to spread, miners that had been working played out creeks further downstream on the Fraser and Thompson Rivers abandoned them and headed to the Cariboo.

Of all the creeks thought, Williams Creek was the richest. Towns began to spring up along its length with names like Richfield, Barkerville and, dear to my heart, Camerontown.

As the miners began to look deeper into the gravels of Williams Creek, they began to find the real paydirt. Above the Williams Creek Canyon, the gravels were shallow, usually less than 2-3 metres before the miners would reach a layer of hard blue clay. This was where the gold nuggets lay.

On one claim, owned by two men named Abbot and Jourdan, Abbot managed to find 48 ounces in just 36 hours.

Further downstream, deep shafts of up to 24 metres along with dense cribwork were required. Isaiah Diller, an American found vast wealth in his claim after reaching bedrock. His crew sook somewhere in the neighbourhood of 11.3 and 45.3 kg of gold in the first few days.

Diller claimed that he wouldn't leave the mine until he had mined his weight of 109 kg as well as the weight of his rather weighty dog at 45.3 kg. Unlike most of the miners, Diller didn't squander his riches and some of his original gold is still in the Diller family.

Perhaps the most well-known name in the Cariboo is that of William or Billy Barker. Hailing from Norfolk, England, Barker had abandoned his wife and daughter in order to follow the siren song of easy riches in the California gold fields.

While he was in the States, his wife passed away and so he followed the news of new discoveries in the Cariboo. His first claim provided enough gold to allow him to buy several others by selling shares in his mine.

As winter arrived, he left the frigid shores of Williams Creek for the more gentle climates of Victoria B.C.

In the spring of 1862, the Puget Sound Herald reported:

The excitement respecting the Cariboo mines is fast reaching fever heat in this vicinity. People will not think of or talk about anything else, even the battles of the Rebellion are forgotten or cease to interest them, so engrossing is the subject of the new mines. Everybody talks of going to the Cariboo diggings in the spring. We may, therefore, confidently look for a rush to these mines next season, equaled only by the Fraser River excitement of '58. So far as we can learn every miner from this new gold field has brought with him from $5,000 to $20,000, all of which has been obtained in the short space of two or three months."

By the end of May, some 6,000 miners had arrived at the Cariboo, many hoping to be able to claim workings abandoned by miners that had hadn't returned to their claims.

Barker partnered with 6 other miners and headed back to the Cariboo to found the Barker Company. They staked 7 claims further downriver, despite ridicule from other miners who thought their decision folly, thinking he would have to go impossibly deep before finding paydirt.

Barker did have to go deep - almost 16 metres before hitting bedrock. He was getting $5 for each pan of dirt. Working close to Barker was John "Cariboo" Cameron, but he moved even further down the creek where he found rich diggings.

By the end of the season, Barker had found clays that gave them an ounce for every three pans. As they went even deeper, they found a small crevice that gave them 60 oz of gold. By the end of the season, his 7-claims had produced $600,000 of gold. He headed back to Victoria and married Elizabeth Collyer. She would be his undoing.

Over the course of 1862, the colonies produced $2,656,903 worth of gold, but that was just a prelude to 1863 which really showed the riches of the Cariboo.

The wealth of the area led to a townsite rising from the muds that was known as Barkerville. Before long, it claimed to be the largest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco. Elizabeth was in her element and enjoyed the attentions of all the men much younger than Billy.

Elizabeth was allowed to spend freely and became a regular at the saloons. His gold production couldn't keep pace with her spending habits and bit by bit, he sold off shares of his company. It wasn't long before the mine was played out and the party was over for Billy and Elizabeth.

He left the Cariboo as he had arrived - pennyless.

Cariboo Cameron was staked by Bob Stevenson, after meeting him in the Royal Hotel in Victoria. Stevenson was taken by Cameron and they headed to the gold fields along Williams Creek. Along the way, Stevenson bought supplies and hired packers to ferry them to the gold fields where they could be sold for a tidy profit.

Stevenson, along with Cameron and 6 other partners claimed an area below Billy Barkers claim. Next to this claim, Henry Beatty and John Wilson staked a claim that brought them a fortune. Beatty invested in shipbuilding. Wilson became known as the 'Cattle King' of Kamloops.

Cameron's party had a difficult time at the beginning, but after sinking a new shaft. Stevenson later related:

"On 22 December we struck it very rich at 22 feet. It was 30 feet below and Dick Rivers called up from the shaft: 'the place is yellow with gold. Look here boys,' at the same time holding up a flat rock the size of a dinner plate. I laid down on the platform and peered into the shaft. I could see the gold standing out on the rock as he held it. He sent a piece up and I got one ounce of gold.

Then Cameron started down the shaft, and while he was down, I took my pick and went through some of the frozen stuff that had been sent up that morning and got another ounce before he came up again. Out of three 12-gallon kegs of gravel I got $155 worth of gold.

Sinking, we found bedrock at 38 feet. It was good all the way down to here, but the richest was at 22 feet strange to say".

By this time, winter was upon them and further mining was going to have to wait for warmer temperatures. They returned in April of 1863 and between July and August, they employed 75 miners as yet another townsite arose from the mud to be christened Camerontown.

On October 22, 1863, Doc. Walter Cheadle and Viscount William Milton passed through the area. Dr. Cheadle wrote:

"We met a small bullwork wagon escorted by about 20 men on foot. This proved to contain 630 pounds of gold, the profits of Mr. Cameron, and the principal shareholder of the noted Cameron claim. The gold, worth about 30,000 pounds, had been amassed in the short space of three months and represents less than one-half of the actual production of the mine during that time. "

The mine made a fortune and Cameron left at the end of the season. During the summer of 1863, the mine produced between 40 to 112 ounces each of three daily shifts. Cameron personally left with $150,000 for his three months at the mine.

Unfortunately, his later investments outside of the gold fields never panned out and by 1886 he was broke. He was buried in Barkerville in 1888.

1863 was the biggest year for gold production in the Cariboo. This summer the mines produced far more gold than California's gold fields at their peak. In total, 1863 officially yielded up $3,913,563 worth of gold although some estimates were as high as 6 million dollars.

1863 also brought continuing improvements to the road access into the interior. As the government began to widen the main Cariboo Wagon Road. The government planned a much wider, 5.5 m wide road that would allow wagons to easily pass.

The project ended up being much more difficult than originally planned and the contractors, men like Walter Moberly, Thomas Spence and Gustafus Wright took the narrow mule trails and created a permanent link into the wild interior of the future province of British Columbia.

The gold rush, along with Governor James Douglas really helped to create the conditions that would bring a new province into the fledgling country of Canada. In less than a decade, on July 20, 1871 it joined Canada as a full province. The promise of a railroad would link this new nation from coast to coast and become the tie that binds Canada together.

James Douglas really does deserve the moniker of the "Father of British Columbia" due to his tireless efforts to manage the gold fields, the filing of claims and the reporting of each mines takings. The roads he spearheaded changed the nature of the province forever.

Today, you can still visit many the old sites that were important during the heyday of the Cariboo including Barkerville, Williams Lake, Horsefly, and Quesnel. I'll leave a link in the show notes to a good driving tour brochure to help guide your explorations (http://cariboord.ca/uploads/heritage/drivingFINALweb.pdf). For more detailed travel and exploration information, visit www.goldrustrail.ca

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. If you're looking for a guide to help you experience the stories behind the mountain scenery, our expert guides are ready to help you explore. To book your tour, guided hike, wildlife biology safari or speaker, drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com. You can visit us at www.WardCameron.com or hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron. And with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go hiking. I'll talk to you next week.

Wolves are a grizzlies best friend - at least in Yellowstone

Yellowstone has become a world renowned laboratory for what can happen when long absent carnivores are returned to the landscape.

For decades across North America, predators were seen as the enemy, and targeted for extermination. Bounties were paid for the pelts of wolves, coyotes and other carnivores in order to make the wilderness a more human friendly place.

The program resulted in a natural system that ran amok. Food chains evolved over millions and in some cases 10s of millions of years. Every hoofed animal was partially designed by its need to escape predators that were in turn designed to eat them.

In some cases, as in the case of snowshoe hare and lynx, both predator and prey evolved the same strategies. Snowshoe hares gradually developed huge back feet to enable them to stay atop deep snows and escape the lynx. In time, the lynx evolved to also have huge feet, negating the hare's advantage.

As biologists, we call that co-evolution - two species evolving in concert with each other in the age-old chess match of hunter and hunted.

Over time, the predator control programs were very effective over much of their range and wolves were long ago extirpated from places like the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

In their absence, nature didn't rest on its laurels. It continued to evolve based on the now more limited numbers of actors on the stage.

In a 2013 study, a research study looked into what impacts removing wolves from Yellowstone may have had on other species, in particular grizzly bears.

Normally, we think of animals like wolves and bears as adversaries, both competing for similar prey. Hop onto Youtube and you can find countless examples of wolves and grizzlies battling over carcasses.

However when you remove the wolf, might the entire equation change? This study tried to look at what how the Yellowstone ecosystem was impacted by the removal of wolves and how it was further impacted with their return.

Looking at mountain landscapes is not all about the pretty pictures that we as visitors take home. Less wolves meant, more elk. Tourists love to take photos of elk. They are one of the main large, charismatic animals that bring tour bus after tour bus into the mountain west.

However we also need to remember one important fact. Elk are…what's that word again…oh yah…food! Elk are here not because they are cute and charismatic. They are here because they are made of meat.

Ecosystems are a combination of predator and prey. Pressure from predation stimulates adaptation and evolution in their prey animals. This in turn forces the predators to also adapt. Take away the predator and the prey population simply explodes.

This is what happened in Yellowstone. With an absence of wolves for more than 70 years, elk and deer numbers had exploded. Everything that was edible was, well, eaten.

During this same time, the population of Yellowstone grizzlies also suffered. Could there be some relationship between wolves, elk and grizzly population?

This study looked to quantify this relationship. We like to think of bears as carnivores, but in reality, they are omnivores. Most of their diet is made up of plants rather than meat.

Uncontrolled elk numbers may have impacted the bears by simply grazing on the plants that produced berries important to those bears.

This study examined the idea that taking wolves off the landscape simply changed the landscape to make it less suitable to bears.

Grizzlies thrive in forests of aspen, poplar and willow because they tend to have a diverse understory of berry-producing plants like buffaloberry, Saskatoon or Serviceberry and chokecherry.

Too many elk, meant that these shrubs, and even the new shoots of aspen, poplar and willow trees were mere fodder for the endless appetite of the ever growing elk population.

In the early days of the absence of wolves, the park did some elk reductions but they stopped those in 1968 with a population of some 3,000 elk. With the programs cancellation, by 1994 the population had grown to a high of approximately 19,000 elk.

New growth of trees and shrubs essentially stopped during this period as every edible shoot, leaf and berry was consumed by the elkopolypse.

In a further hit to bear populations, the park closed all of its garbage dumps in 1971. Anyone visiting parks like Yellowstone, or even Banff in those days knew that if you want to see the bears, go to the dump.

For bears already stressed by a loss of berry crops, the loss of the easy calories offered by landfills represented another loss in food opportunities for grizzlies.

Coincidentally, in 1975 the grizzly bear was designated as a threatened species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Could reintroducing wolves reverse this trend? In 1995 wolves from Jasper National Park in Canada were captured and reintroduced to Yellowstone.

The results have exceeded any expectations although this report was looking at just the impact on grizzlies. With the return of the wolf, populations of both bison and beaver increased, likely due to the increase availability of food.

Did the increase in forage improve bear habitat as well? This study looked into the situation before and after wolves were re-introduced.

When looking at the amount of fruit composing the diet of Yellowstone grizzlies prior to the reintroduction, they found it was just 2 to 4% as opposed to 28% in British Columbia and 18% in Alberta.

In normal ecosystems, fruit composes a critical part of the grizzly bear's diet. The contain huge amounts of carbohydrates that are easily converted to fat. In fact, in episode 42, I spoke about the amazing realization that grizzlies in Alaska will choose Elderberries over salmon when given the opportunity. It seems that berries are the way to go. You can check out that episode at: www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep042.

So, we brought the wolves back. Did it make a difference? Well, OK, it exceeded anyone's expectations.

Returning wolves to the Yellowstone released something biologists call a trophic cascade. This means that by reintroducing wolves, biologists returned the balance to the landscape and the benefits trickled down through the entire ecosystem.

More wolves meant less elk. Even today, the wolves take very few bison simply because they are very formidable prey. Elk, on the other hand are manageable, even in cases where bison are more plentiful.

Removing elk allowed forage to grow. Poplar, aspen, and willow, in turn allowed bison and beaver populations to increase. More importantly they also allowed plants to grow. Aspen, poplar, and willow trees thrived. Beneath their canopy berry bushes also began to regenerate.

Looking into the effects on the diet of bears, the study showed that fruit consumption more than doubled with the reduction in elk numbers. In some years, fruit consumption could account for up to 29% of the diet of male bears and as high as 39% for females once the wolves were returned to the landscape.

Wolves reduced the elk population by an order of magnitude; from an average of 12.1/km2 in the absence of wolves to just 1-2/km2.

If we look at the real benefits of the reintroduction of the wolf and the downward cascade of benefits we would see many things.

Wolves preyed on elk, but more importantly changed their behaviour in order to avoid the wolves. They moved out of the valleys allowing those areas to regrow. The height of trees skyrocketed with the freedom to simply grow.

Long absent forests of aspen, poplar, and willow thrived. This brought in songbirds that used the trees for nesting sites. Less competition for trees allowed beaver populations to grow as well. The beavers helped the ducks, the fish, the muskrat and even the otters.

Wolves are a big predator of coyotes, and as they did this, rabbits, hares and mice numbers exploded, helping to spur populations of weasels, hawks, fox and badgers.

Many scavengers rely upon animals like wolves to open up carcasses to allow them to feed. As a result, raven and bald eagle populations increased.

We've already mentioned that the bears benefited with more available berries. Remember thought that bears will take a significant amount of newborn elk and moose calves. This meant that the bears worked in concert with the wolves to reduce elk populations, while at the same time benefiting with more available berries.

Ok, now are you ready for this. The wolves impacted the landscape, and with that the rivers. The regrowth of plant life helped to stabilize the riverbanks and in turn helped to change the course of the rivers.

Scientists call this a trophic cascade. It refers to situations like this, where a predator can create a series of benefits that trickle down the entire food chain. I'll include a link in the show notes to a great video that highlights some of the incredible changes that wolves have brought to the Yellowstone ecosystem.

Most importantly for this story though, the wolves have helped the bears to thrive in this renewed landscape.

This study also helped to reveal a historically negative aspect of this story. Grizzlies once roamed the mountain west all the way south to Mexico. Looking at the history of the mountains, people moved onto the landscape and culled predators, allowing herbivores to reproduce unchecked, while in many cases introducing cattle to the landscape.

All of this would have reduced the forage necessary for bears to survive. Think of this as a grizzly bear famine. 20 to 30% of their normal annual food budget had been removed by overgrazing.

Perhaps associated with this, grizzly populations began to drop. This means that the removal of wolves may have played an important role in the disappearance of grizzlies from much of the southwest.

Could programs like wolf reintroductions allow bears to also be reintroduced to new landscapes? While bears are much more difficult to reintroduce, I'd love to see the scientists make a concerted effort and investigating the possibilities. It all starts with wolves.

Trails - the good and the bad

Let's talk about a few trail projects in and adjacent to the Rockies. First I want to talk about the grand-daddy of them all - the Great Trail, formerly known as the Trans Canada Trail.

This month, the world's longest recreational trail opened - and it's in Canada. Formerly known as the Trans Canada Trail, Canada's "Great Trail" has officially opened. In total, it covers some 24,000 km, traverses all 10 provinces and 2 territories, and travels from ocean to ocean to ocean.

The announcement means that you can now hike across the country from coast to coast, with an option to head all the way to the Arctic Ocean at Inuvik (although you'd need to follow the East Channel of the Mackenzie River a bit to truly meet the ocean.

It is not a true trail, but a collaboration of hundreds of trails, each operated by differing jurisdictions, and then joined together by stretches of road or river where necessary. All-in-all, there are more than 400 trails winding their way across all 10 provinces with a potential detour to the far north.

Like any network of its kind, it's a work in progress. Over time, sections involving walking on the shoulder of roads will be replaced by bonafide trails, but after 25 years, it's now a reality.

Can you hike it all? Not yet. Think of this as a multi-disciplinary trail. The best way to take in the magic will be to combine hiking, cycling and paddling. Like the earliest days of Canada, for some stretches, the waters show the way. Some 26% of the trail follows waterways, so best to practice your J-stroke if you want to conquer this trail network. Other stretches that are dominated by connecting roadways are better covered on two-wheels. If you want, you can even strap on cross-country skis (or if need be fire up a snowmobile) for some sections.

The great trail is a reflection of Canada. It crosses diverse landscapes with varying amounts of development and urbanization. Each section will offer its own unique challenges along with its own vistas.

Traveling west across the country, when the trail reaches Edmonton, you'll have to decide whether you want to head south towards Calgary to continue the westward section of the trail, or north towards Inuvik and the Arctic Ocean. Along this northern route, you can select a land-based or aquatic route depending on your preferred mode of exploration.

As Canadians, most of us have never traveled from coast to coast to coast. It was less than 10 years ago that I finally traveled west to east but I have yet to explore the north. Perhaps the magic of the Great Trail is in its possibilities. It offers each of us the ability to explore Canada in our own way.

Lovers of history can follow the footsteps, or paddleways of those that traveled long before we did. Urban explorers can look for trails that connect in ways that allow them to cycle or perhaps hike from hotel to hotel.

Nowhere else is there a network like this one. In some ways, it's not ready for the prime time, but in others, it's prime time to begin to imagine the possibilities that await you on the existing pathways, as well as where new additions of the trail may beckon.

As you can imagine, this didn't emerge out of the ether. It took 25 years of volunteer hours and thousands of individuals to bring the trail to the point that we are today. If you'd like to learn more, check out their website at: www.tctrail.ca. If you can contribute to the effort, the Federal Government will contribute 50 cents for every dollar you can spare.

There is also an app available on both Android and iPhone to help you navigate along the way. I'll see you on the trail.

Now onto another trail. Over the past year, I've spoken at length about a proposed bike trail planned to run between the town of Jasper all the way to the Columbia Icefields, and eventually to Lake Louise and Banff.

This trail was poorly conceived and rammed through with little or no public input, and against the best advice of Parks Canada's own scientists.

You can read more about the trail plans by checking out episodes 3, 23, and 26. Episode 26 especially, brings out the backroom dealings that occurred in order to force the trail through the approval process. You can listen to it at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep026.

The public opinion on the trail has been overwhelmingly negative and it seems that, for the moment at least, the trail has been put on hold.

The trail was tied to dollars that had a deadline of 2-years to be spent and that time is running out. Jasper currently has hundreds of kilometres of trails that are virtually impassable due to a decade of neglect during the Harper years.

During that time, all the focus was on getting more and more cars through the park gates so they could claim the $8 bucks a head per day. The backcountry was largely forgotten.

I first came to the mountains in 1980 to walk the South Boundary Trail in Jasper. At the time, this 176 km trail was the longest in the mountain parks. Today, parts of the original route are impassable.

$86 million dollars could go a long way towards repairing overgrown trails, replacing bridges and upgrading long neglected backcountry campgrounds, hanging racks and outhouses.

It now seems that there is hope that this trail will be cancelled. The time limit on the money is running out. The park is now, after being pilloried in the media, doing more extensive public consultations, but the trail is no longer connected to any definite timeline. According to a recent article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Parks spokesperson Audrey Champagne stated:

“After the consultation periods, if the decision is to move forward with the concept, new project timelines would be established”

If the decision is eventually made to move forward, they'll try to get a continuation on the original $70 million that was earmarked in the 2016 budget.

As the author of two books on mountain biking, I'm not opposed to mountain biking as a valid use of the backcountry. However ill-conceived trails will always be ill-conceived.

New trails need to take into account new realities, like wildlife movement corridors and habitat patches for endangered or threatened animals like caribou and grizzly bears.

This trail not only traveled through critical habitat for the endangered mountain caribou, but also that of grizzly bears, a threatened species in Alberta. At the same time, creating a trail would also create openings in the canopy which would promote the growth of buffaloberries.

Bikes and buffaloberries don't mix. The trail would increase the likelihood of bear bike conflicts along its route.

The public consultation ended in April of 2017, but the Indigenous consultation is just in the process of ending.

There should be an opportunity for further public and indigenous consultation once the draft of the detailed impact analysis is competed so stay tuned. I'll leave a link in the show notes so that you can stay on top of current updates on the trail's status (https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/ab/jasper/info/plan/sentierdesglaciers-icefieldstrail)

Hopefully, we'll see this project quietly slip into the dustbin of history and see the dollars dedicated to iconic trails that have been neglected in favour of the frontcountry. Parks are for all Canadians, and not just for those visiting the paved corridors. Let's all fight to make sure that the backcountry trails are refurbished to make sure that tomorrows wilderness wanderers will have an opportunity to explore the further reaches of the park.

Thars Gold in British Columbia

Many years ago, I wrote a magazine article on the legend of the Lost Lemon Mine in Alberta. I interviewed a long time prospector, Mike Czech who had prospected in the Yukon and southern Alberta in search of the famed Lost Lemon Mine.

I was writing an article on this legendary bonanza when suddenly, his wife looked at me and said…"don't get the gold fever!"

Her message was that once you get the fever, there is no inoculation. She had been married to a prospector for more than 50 years and had moved from place to place and the hope for the big strike had always been a part of her life as well.

Gold Fever is real…once you catch it, it stays with you, and the genesis of British Columbia can be, to a great extent, connected to gold fever.

Now if you're not familiar with the symptoms, they often began/begin accidentally. Wilderness wandering was often a pre-requisite. Gold doesn't just pop up anywhere but, like finding a unicorn, it suddenly appears to that individual that not both wandered and observed.

In British Columbia, like most places where gold is discovered, discoveries began with a rumour, which evolved into a story which excited the imaginations of adventure seekers, leading to a sudden migration into a wilderness area lacking utilities, support systems, or any of the things people took for granted in civilization.

In 1851, a 27 oz nugget from the Queen Charlottes, known as the Haida Gwaii today, was traded in at Fort Victoria. Now you can't just walk into a trading post, drop of an almost two pound chunk of gold and then just wander back to your pickup like nothing unusual has happened.

A nugget means people take notice and after this nugget was traded for 1,500 Hudson's Bay Company Blankets, it was brought to the attention of Governor Richard Blandshard. He sent a message to the British Secretary of War and the Colonies (Yup, we were part of the department of war). In it he stated:

"I have heard that fresh specimens of gold have been obtained from the Queen Charlotte Islanders. I have not seen them myself, but they are reported to be very rich. The Hudson's Bay Company servants intend to send an expedition in the course of the summer to make proper investigations. The brigantine Huron was dispatched accordingly, ostensibly to trade, but really to search for gold. Failing in which, the men broke up part of a quartz ledge, and carrying pieces on board their vessel, returned in triumph to Victoria"

In the end though, this first goldrush didn't produce much gold, but it did see enough people flooding into the territory that the region was designated as the unified Colony of British Columbia.

Prior to this, there was a colony on Vancouver Island, with James Douglas as the governor. Douglas was also an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company and so was also in charge of the lands on the mainland although they were not part of the original colony.

In a way, the crown colony of British Columbia owes its genesis to the search for gold. While the first taste of gold in the Haida Gwaii had not panned out, in 1857 rumours surfaced of a new gold strike on the Thompson River, downstream of Fort Kamloops.

The gold was acquired by the Hudson's Bay Company and in Feb of 1858, Douglas dispatched the steamship Otter to San Francisco with 800 ounces of gold for minting.

Within weeks, miners began to arrive on the Fraser River. The first gold strikes were around just a few kilometres above the city of Hope. The new governor of the Colony of British Columbia, James Douglas, hired gold commissioners to intercept American prospectors and make them buy licenses, stake claims and record their progress.

This was needed to help maintain sovereignty over the new colony as much as it was to make sure that the gold didn't disappear into the U.S. without helping to enrich British Columbia first.

In the spring of 1858, shiploads of miners from San Francisco began to arrive at Fort Victoria. Now keep in mind that Fort Victoria was home to a mere 400 people, but between May and July, some 23,000 gold seekers departed San Francisco to arrive at a Fort completely overwhelmed.

When they arrived at the growing tent city, only then did they learn that Fort Kamloops was still 600 km distant, and on the mainland, across the Strait.

Many built their own boats to try to beat the crowds across the 32 km crossing and up the Fraser towards Fort Yale. Many miners simply began to pan there, pocketing 4-5 ounces per person per day.

The more adventurous though, headed upriver on foot. If there was gold in the gravels, then the motherlode must be upstream. Some miners brought with them both experience and instinct. Some, it seemed, could smell the gold.

One of these included a group of five Americans led by Peter Curran Dunlevy from Pittsburgh. Like their contemporaries, they began staking claims upstream from Fort Yale, but soon ventured upstream, far upstream.

By May, they were panning near the confluence of the Chilcotin and Fraser Rivers, near to present-day Junction Sheep Range Provincial Park. While there, they met a native named Tomaah, the son of Chief Lolo St. Paul. When he asked what they were doing, they showed him a few flakes of gold. Tomaah then claimed that he could "show them a river where gold lay like beans in a pan."

The miners would need to stock up on supplies though, and Tomaah promised to meet them at Lac La Hache, some 65 km east as the crow flies. The party purchased a tonne of provisions and 12 packhorses in Fort Kamloops and headed to Lac La Hache.

Tomaah, asked his friend Baptiste to show them the river of gold and after several days of travel, they came to a river that they named the "Little Horsefly" because of the hordes of biting flies that plagued them.

One of the party, Ira Crow panned the very first gold from the area of British Columbia that would soon be known as the Cariboo. Dunlevy's party had swelled to some 12 men but they struck it rich.

They left the area with gold rumoured to have been worth more than a million dollars - that's a million dollars in 1859 dollars. It's the equivalent to winning the lottery.

They took their money and moved on. Some, like Dunlevy, continued to invest in the goldrush, opening roadhouses and freighting operations to help other miners along the Cariboo Road as it the area was opened up to easier access.

The route to the Cariboo was long, hard and dangerous. James Douglas, the acting Governor of the Crown Colony, informed London:

"Another important object I have in view is the improvement of the internal communications of the country, which at present are, for all practical purposes, nearly inaccessible beyond Fort Yale."

A road to the Cariboo would not only assist the miners in traveling safer, but would also assist in making sure that the 49th parallel remain as the border between Canada and the U.S.

Long before getting permission to build the road, Douglas met with miners and promised that his government would trade them transportation, equipment and food in exchange for a 1.2 metre-wide mule trail through the wilderness as far as Lillooet.

To make sure they didn't desert, the miners were required to place a $25 deposit which would later be redeemed in supplies from Lillooet. It also helped to add a few dollars to the road building fund.

This road wouldn't follow Fraser past Yale though, but would rather follow the route of the Lillooet River across Harrison, Lillooet, Anderson and Seton Lakes.

Alexander Caulfield Anderson had traversed the route in 1847 and was put in charge of the construction. Workers were organized into groups of 25 and dispersed along the route. There were 500 workers on the road by mid-August.

In the meantime, the British Government replied to Douglas' original dispatch:

"Her Majesty's Government propose sending to British Columbia at the earliest possible opportunity an Officer of Royal Engineers and a Company of Sappers and Miners made up of 150 non-Commissioned Officers and men."

By December, 1858 it was reported by the Victoria Gazette that:

"Good boats are running on all the lakes, while numerous houses for public entertainment are opening up all along the line. "

In one of the strangest stories of the Cariboo Goldrush, Gustavus Blin Wright imported 23 camels at the cost of $7,000. He believed that they could carry twice the weight and cover more distance than mules and horse.

What he didn't count on was that their feet were far too soft for the coarse terrain and the fact that horses and mules would stampede when they smelled the strong smells that the camel radiated.

In the end, the idea was a total bust. Miners petitioned to have the "Dromedary Express" banned from the road and, in the end, they were simply turned loose. The last one died in 1905 south of Kamloops near present-day Westwold, B.C.

Douglas then shifted his attention to the Fraser Valley route to the Cariboo. In 1860, he sent out construction parties to improve the road between Yale and Lytton.

There was already an established route from Lytton up to the gold fields. In the end, this Cariboo Road turned out to be a much faster route than Douglas' original route to Lillooet and it quickly took on the majority of the traffic.

In just over a year, Douglas has built two major roads towards the gold fields of the Cariboo. He has developed a system of gold commissioners to monitor the miners, the claims and the findings. For many, he is considered the father of British Columbia.

Next week we'll follow the story as the Cariboo really begins to get the gold fever.

And with that it's time to wrap this episode up. I want to thank you for sharing your time with me and be sure to check out the show notes for links and additional information. You can find them at www.MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep045. Don't forget to click the subscribe button - cmon…do it now! To make sure that you don't miss any episodes.

And as always, if you'd like to reach out to me personally you can drop me a line at ward@wardcameron.com or hit me up on twitter @wardcameron. You can also visit our FaceBook page at www.Facebook.com/wardcameronenterprises. And with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go hiking. I'll talk to you next week.

Flying Dinosaurs as Tall as Giraffes

If you're a regular listener of this podcast, then you know that I love dinosaurs. Living in Alberta is the perfect mix because we have one of the best landscapes for finding dino remains and there are new discoveries happening all the time. The Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller is one of the leading research centres in the world and for many visitors to Alberta, it is there first real opportunity to look at some of the most unique fossils that have been placed on display. One of their most recent exhibits shows the most well preserved dinosaur ever found, a Nodosaur, essentially an armoured dinosaur similar to the more well known Ankylosaurs. You can learn more about it in episode 30 at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep030. Now comes an even stranger story from the Royal Tyrell Museum that has to do with those strange flying dinosaurs known as pterosaurs. These were formidable creatures, in some cases being as tall as a modern giraffe but potentially soaring on wingspans similar to airplanes. No creature, before or since has ever been a more fearsome presence soaring overhead. Donald Henderson is the curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrell, and he came across an artist's rendering of the largest of pterosaurs, Arambourgiania philadelphiae, placed next to, and as tall as, a giraffe. The giraffe weighs in at 1,500 kg but a similarly sized pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, was thought to weigh far far less, perhaps as little as 70 kg. For Henderson, he felt that a pterosaur that tall had to weigh far more than 70 kg, and he did his own math and came up with an estimate of some 550 kg. This immense weight also meant that it was highly unlikely that the Arambourgiania could fly at all. He concluded that, like penguins, it had likely evolved to be flightless. A bird of this mass would have needed incredible muscle strength in order to take to the air. Based on his research, he was clipping its wings and grounding it. Well his paper got little response from fellow researchers…oh wait, it was like he'd said something crazy like pterosaurs can't fly. Well the opposition to his research was not long in coming. Mark Witton is one of the most recognized authorities on pterosaurs, and it was his rendering that Henderson had encountered that started this whole process. As he was quoted in a recent interview in the publication Inverse: “There’s a handful of people who sort of dip in and out of pterosaurs, who have suggested that they can’t fly, but most people who work on pterosaurs have never really questioned this. And that’s not in the sense of, they’ve not ever wondered it, but they’ve never seen any reason to think it’s a good hypothesis.” When Witton looked at the fossil physiology, his estimate showed these pterosaurs to be less than half of Henderson's estimate, closer to 250 kg. Pterosaurs had many of the same adaptations that modern-day birds have to help them fly. They had small torsos, hollow bones, and interior air sacs. All of these things combined to dramatically reduce their weight specifically to enable the ability to fly. As Witton put it: “All the ducks line up in a row, and it’s actually far more complicated for us to think of a reason why they’re not flying,” Working with Witton to refute Henderson's estimate was paleontologist Michael Habib. He is a recognized expert on the biomechanics of pterosaur flight but has now partnered with Henderson to take a renewed look at the Quetzalcoatlus based on new skeletal reconstructions. Their work has led Habib to the conclusion that they may have weighed far more than he previously thought, although not as big as Henderson's original estimate. Despite this, he's still two thumbs up on flight. I love science. The proper scientific method forces researchers to constantly challenge established research in order to test, verify and update previous peer-reviewed papers. Good research should be repeatable if it is to be proven correct. Good scientists embrace dissent and Habib and Henderson's recent work proves this. The thought of these massive predatory birds flying around, seeing small tyrannosaurs as a light snack is a visual that even the producers of Jurassic Park couldn't have conceived. As these two scientists continue their research it seems that a middle ground may be appearing. Habib believes that these pterosaurs did still fly, but that some of the largest ones may have been mostly ground dwelling but that the young would have flown immediately since the eggs were not tended by their parents. Young pterosaurs that lingered were essentially dinner for larger dinosaurs. The model that's emerging has these giant pterosaurs flying when they were young, and spending more time on terra firma as their large size made it harder to fly but also made them large enough that they didn't have to worry about becoming a meal for tyrannosaurs. They may have still been capable of short flights, perhaps to move between prime hunting grounds. Conversely, they may have become completely terrestrial as they aged. Comparing the bones of these giants to smaller pterosaurs, the bones show all the same adaptations to flight that their smaller relatives display. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…well you get the idea. Really, what is needed is an complete fossil. Pterosaur fossils are rare simply because the bones are so delicate that they rarely are preserved in the fossil record. Thinking of such huge creatures soaring overhead would have been a truly magical thing to see - all from the safety of a pterosaur proof bunker of course. Next up…loving the mountains to death. Loving the Mountains to Death As the 2017 tourism season begins to wane, This is a good time to take stock of what we have learned from the growing influx of tourists and how we can better manage the parks that we all love so that our grandchildren's grandchildren will be able to experience the same wonders that we do. Ideally, we could create a world in which the landscape they visit is even better than it is today, with more ecological integrity and less personal self-interest. Seeing the huge crowds at many mountain viewpoints these days makes me sad. When you can't take a photo without people crawling over railings and swarming over the very scene that has brought you soooo far to photograph. If you've gotten to the point where you really believe, in the pit of your stomach, that something's gotta give, then you're in good company. Many, many local people, people like me that earn their entire income from tourism, have come to the same conclusion. And we're not alone. Parks across Canada and the US are collapsing under their popularity and run the risk of being loved to death. Parks like Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Yosemite, and Great Smokey Mountains in the US are feeling the same pressures that parks like Banff, Jasper, Yoho, and Kootenay are. Visit Peyto Lake in Banff or the Natural Bridge in Yoho, and you can't even take a photo without clowns going out of the designated viewing areas to do selfies in areas that are either sensitive to disturbance or downright dangerous. If we look at Banff and Jasper National Parks, we can see time and time again where the Harper Government allowed developments that have no place in a national park to move forward. These include developments like the Glacier Skywalk at the Columbia Icefields, new 'roofed accommodation' at Maligne Lake in Jasper, glamping (glamorous camping) sites in Two Jack Lake in Banff, and even a paved bike path from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields through critical habitat for endangered caribou. Thankfully, this last development is currently on hold due to the strong negative public reaction. The Harper years were characterized by budget cuts for classic backcountry trail networks and over-emphasis on getting more cars through the park gates. $8/person, kaching, thank you very much…next! This creates a situation where 95% of the visitors see the same 2% of the park, the paved corridors. As locations like Moraine Lake and Lake Louise collapse under sheer numbers and parking lots and feeder roads clog up due to traffic, what kind of experience are visitors to the area getting? What kind of image is it giving the mountain national parks? What do we do when people flood to sites like TripAdvisor to say: "don't go to Banff, it's overrun, why not go to…?" In a Globe and Mail article, former Banff Park Superintendent Kevin Van Tighem stated that Canada's National Parks are being used merely as: "raw material to be commodified into a bundle of Disneyesque visitor attractions and marketing packages." It is as if "nature was no longer enough" Parks Canada's mandate, and I've harped on this time and again on this podcast, is that parks: "shall be maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." More importantly, the role of the federal minister of parks shall be the: "maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity, through the protection of natural resources and natural processes." I don't know anyone, either within parks or within the communities that serve to provide the services to park visitors that feels that this goal is even being attempted. Even the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has made some huge blunders. Seriously…free park passes! I can guarantee that nobody working in the mountain national parks thought this was a good idea. While the numbers aren't in yet, I'm betting that we added another half a million visitors to an already overburdened landscape. They could have said: "here are 10 parks that are underutilized and so we're going to offer free access to them to celebrate Canada's 150th birthday", but alas no, the gates were tossed wide open. I'll give Justin this one giant oops. He did send out an intergovernmental panel to the mountain parks last year to see how people living and working in the parks felt about the current park management. They got an earful. If you'd like to learn more about the panel, check out episode 26 at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep026. Parks Canada received failing marks for its lack of transparency in its decision making process. Projects like the Glacier Skywalk in Jasper were approved despite overwhelming negative feedback. The panel couldn't find any logic in the way decisions within the organization were being made at the highest levels. Again, I stand with the parks employees working locally, because they are merely the receiver of directives from on high and to a man (or woman), most would agree that developments like this should never have been approved. Has Justin done better than Harper? Somewhat. He allowed all government scientists across the nation to publish their research, whether or not it was supportive of current government goals. He also immediately removed the muzzle that the Harper government had put on park wardens from speaking to the media. As a guide, I can't do my job without the amazing work being done by park wardens and scientists. The wardens of the mountain national parks are responsible for incredible research into the wildlife and ecosystems that are critical to these mountain landscapes. If I'm critical of something that Parks Canada approves, it is often because of the good science their rank and file perform on a daily basis has helped to contradict the justification for those approvals. When discussing another national park development, Van Tighem stated: "Rules? We don't actually have those anymore, so what did you have in mind as a money-making idea for our park? We'll dress it up in heritage language and funky marketing-speak to persuade ourselves it's good for national parks, and then you can have at 'er." I'll leave a link to the Globe and Mail article in the show notes a mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep044. (https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-disneyfication-of-canadas-national-parks/article28359840/?ref=https://www.theglobeandmail.com&service=mobile) Tourism doesn't have to mean sacrificing the very thing that you're trying to showcase. There has to be another way. Thankfully, we don't have to muddle our way through the challenges of excess alone. We can look to other jurisdictions that are also doing some muddling of their own. One of those is Yellowstone. Like the mountain national parks, they are drowning in visitors and seeing their most iconic locations swamped with an ocean of tourists. One of the things that is hampering any discussion into limiting visitors has to do with the simple fact that nobody wants to be the guy (or girl) that says: "No, you can't visit Lake Louise" Most of the focus over the past decade has been to bring more and more and more and more visitors. I think anyone visiting these sites would agree that this hasn't worked. There is an inverse relationship between the number of visitors and the visitor's experience. The busier a site becomes, there will be a threshold where the visitor experience begins to suffer. Someone has to say the word! NO! I will say that things have been much better this year. Because of the Canada 150th, Parks put out an army of people working for an amazing company, ATS Traffic, that have done an impressive job reducing the amount of vehicles in places like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake this summer. In past years, I have had days where it's taken me two and a half hours to drive the 3 or 4 km between the village of Lake Louise and the actual lake. That has not happened this year at all, mainly because of the amazing work being done by ATS Traffic. The traffic control has been supplemented by the shuttle service that the park has sponsored this summer. There are free shuttles everywhere, and they have been working. I've spoken numerous times to the staff organizing the shuttles to Lake Louise from the Overflow Campground to the east of the village along the Trans Canada Highway. They have been doing impressive numbers, in the range of 2,000 plus people on busy days. That's some 1,000 cars or so that are NOT trying to drive to Lake Louise. Moraine Lake has been even more dramatic. In past years, there would be cars parked for kilometres along the all too narrow road. It made the road almost impossible for buses or wide vehicles to navigate. This year, the road has essentially been closed to cars by 9 am. The road and associated parking area can only accommodate so many cars. When the lots are full, the road is closed. Has that had any impacts on the shoreline of Lake Louise and Moraine Lake? It's been impressive. Closing the roads and parking areas when they reach a capacity, and preventing miles and miles of roadside parking means that there are fewer people at the actual sites. This means that the people that did arrive early enough presumably are having a much better experience. What about those that didn't? Those are the visitors that will leave the park with a negative experience. I've met them. I've walked past traffic jams and had people ask why they can't get to Lake Louise. The fact that it was simply too busy did not compute when they had traveled all the way from Toronto to see it. The traffic management is a key first step to creating a balance between expectation and experience. As a guide, I've been pushing my groups ever earlier in the morning to try to manage the experience they will have when they arrive. Unfortunately, hotels, will only make breakfasts available at certain times, so you can't always be 'early enough'. One thing that is an unknown at this point is whether ATS traffic will be hired to do the same job next year. So many things were tied to the funding for Canada 150, that the funds that are paying for their critical work may only be a one-time deal. If that is the case, then we go back to endless traffic jams again next year. If you applaud the work done by these mountain heroes this year, then be sure to let your elected officials know that we need this to be the new norm. There is no going back. In addition to traffic management, we also saw extensive parking restrictions implemented in 2017. Long sections of road approaching places like Johnston Canyon and Moraine Lake are now tow away zones with parking barriers. Managing traffic and parking are two of the critical pillars towards capacity management, but how do we manage the visitor experience? What we need to do for the long-term is to sit down, and create a comprehensive visitor experience plan. What do we, as tourism professionals, park managers, and stakeholders want people to say about our destinations when they leave? How do we create that experience? The only way that can happen is if we place a finite limit on the number of people that can visit certain locations. It's not too late to decide the kind of destination that we want to be when we grow up. I like to think that we're in the adolescence of our role as keepers of the ecological jewels of the mountain landscape. We started slowly some 130 years ago. We marketed our butts off to try to carve our little piece of the world tourism market. We coerced, cajoled and click baited until the dreams of many hoteliers, restaurants, gift shops and tour companies were given the taste of success. Like a drug addict, that first taste is always free. Twenty years ago, I believed it was time to stop building hotels. The number of hotel rooms provide a natural limit to the number of visitors to a destination. We are still building hotels like a drunken sailor. Destination Marketing organizations like Banff Lake Louise Tourism and Travel Alberta are still singing the siren song of more, more, more. However we're now at a tipping point. Can we learn anything from this summer that can help us to start to navigate towards a better, more sustainable future? I think we can. I know we can! This year we managed traffic. Now we need to envision a future where the experience is managed in such a way that the traffic is pre-managed for us. There is only one way - quotas. Fabulous destinations around the world have had to deal with these questions decades ago. We need to look at their examples. Did people stop going when they created quotas? Or did they plan their trips in such a way to make sure they had the experiences they saw in their Lonely Planet guide? In Banff National Park, we have four places that jump to the top of the list, in order of priority 1. Moraine Lake 2. Johnston Canyon 3. Lake Louise 4. Sulphur Mountain Gondola Three of the four are a challenge because they are at the end of one-way-in and one-way-out roads that back up very quickly. Johnston Canyon is simply a victim of its incredible popularity. The list contains four of the most popular destinations in Banff. We can add Emerald Lake In Yoho to this list, along with Mount Edith Cavell in Jasper Are limits bad? Hockey games have them. There are only so many seats at the stadium. We are surrounded by limits, but when it comes to a natural feature, the prevailing wisdom is to squeeze as many people and cars as possible. More, more, more! Well Lake Louise, is not a dairy cow. We can't keep squeezing the unique landscape. The environment around Lake Louise also contains the highest concentration of breeding female grizzlies in the central Rockies. There is something in that landscape that is just a good place to raise a family if you're a grizzly bear. OK. Here's my pitch. How do we create finite limits? For many sites, we create parking lots designed to collect visitors that are NOT at the destination. We make sure that shuttle buses can take them to the site with minimal inconvenience. Do you want to visit Lake Louise? Click this link to book your shuttle bus. The shuttle system this year has been awesome in showing that this works. Here's how I would supercharge it. Take away all public parking at Lake Louise, or Sulphur Mountain, or Moraine Lake. Those lots are for tour and shuttle buses only, and the tour buses would also be limited. If shutting parking down is too hard a sell, than create a financial disincentive to park at the destination. The option of a free shuttle versus a $20 parking fee will likely help to shift the trend towards free, scheduled shuttles and away from driving directly to the destination. If a parking rate can be found that provides a sufficient disincentive to driving but still helps to fund the resource, I'm all for that. One scenario might be that there are 200 parking spots for Lake Louise and they cost $10 or $40. What will the market bear? Ideally though, most of the visitors should arrive on shuttle or tour buses. One of the final things I would like to see the mountain parks do is to try to implement more active restrictions to people moving beyond the designated visitor corridors and start climbing over barriers to get ever closer to the view. . We can't stop determined visitors from forcing their way beyond barriers to do their worst, but we can create better discouragement barriers. As Canadians, we have perhaps been too polite. In places like Peyto Lake, it would not be too hard to create a pretty convincible barrier to prevent tourists from swarming the cliff below the public viewpoint. The viewpoint is there because it's designed to reduce the impact on this lower cliff. Alternatively, the park could extend the viewpoint to include this lower outcrop. The most important thing is to manage the visitor experience while also managing the visitor. A recent article on Yellowstone National Park in the publication Mountain Journal, really has had me thinking more about this issue. So far in this story, I focused on simple human use management to address the issue of ecological integrity. If the mountain national parks have to look anywhere for an example, the first national park in the world might be a great place to start. This article, penned by long-time Yellowstone advocate Todd Wilkinson really ties into my philosophy of how we might combine a better visitor experience with better ecological integrity within the mountain park landscape. One of Wilkinson's key concepts requires "saying yes to saying no". We have a finite limit on the number of people that can visit Old Faithful on a given day. Get your permit here! His article contains some pretty inflammatory statements, but I agree with them all. One of the most challenging for a community like Banff is: "The irony, of course, is that some of the biggest financial beneficiaries of the dividends of conservation are people who, for their own ideological reasons and motivations of rational self-interest, are today opposed to limits. It’s probably fair to say that most possess no malicious intent, but the needs of wildlife, the underpinnings of what enables biological diversity to thrive, do not register with them." Wilkinson also states: "There is no example on Earth where conservation of nature, over time, has not generated huge ecological, economic, social, cultural, and spiritual benefits." Did you say economic benefits? Yellowstone and its surrounding landscapes are a billion dollar a year industry. Like our mountain parks, Yellowstone has one word that it has yet to utter: NO. According to Wilkinson: "We live in times, which some commentators describe as America’s newregression back to adolescence, where it is not fashionable to ever say no. It is an age when some claim that natural landscapes have no limits for the amount and intensity of human activity that can occur on them without serious ecological harm being done. We live in a time of climate change and population growth in which users of landscapes (for profit, recreation or lifestyle) conclude that unless they can actually see impacts being caused by their own actions or by the larger acumulating wave of human presence, such impacts, therefore, do not exist. He sees three big challenges that parks like Yellowstone, and by extension, Banff face: • The deepening impacts of climate change and what they predict, especially where water in the arid west is concerned. • The deepening inexorable impacts of human growth (both an unprecedented rise in people migrating to live in the Greater Yellowstone from other nature deprived areas, and accompanied by a somewhat related surge in unprecedented numbers of visitors and recreationists to public lands. • The inability or reluctance of land management agencies to see the writing on the wall. Yellowstone, unlike Banff, still hosts every major mammal and bird species that was there before the arrival of the Europeans. Banff gets points for the 2017 reintroduction of wild bison back to the park, but loses points because it was not able to keep its northern mountain caribou herd. Now Jasper's remaining caribou are also at serious risk of vanishing. Wilkonsin states: "The 22.5-million-acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is actually pretty small. Functionally, it will be made ever smaller, squeezed by climate change altering its ecological carrying capacity because of less winter snowpack, hotter and drier conditions, and further fragmented by a doubling or tripling of the human population likely to occur in just two human generations." I know that for me, this could just as easily be said about the Bow River Valley. Combine growth without proper cumulative impact assessments, with vast increases in visitation, and we can see real challenges in our future. According to Wilkinson: "If we don’t get the “growth” component of Greater Yellowstone addressed, experts have told me, it won’t matter how fond we are of thinking about ecological processes playing out at the landscape level, like terrestrial migrations of ungulates, protecting wide-ranging species like grizzly bears, wolverines and elk that need escape cover free of intensive human intrusion." These are problems that are apparent throughout the entire Mountain National Park and surrounding areas. Canmore is in the middle of the battle to protect continentally significant wildlife corridors. If we don't get this right, nothing else matters. We, as a community, need to continue to fight to make sure that big development does not get to compromise critical connecting routes that are a key component of the much larger Rocky Mountain ecosystem. Even now, the town of Canmore is not only negotiating wildlife corridors, but developing within metres of them. The new bike trail being designed adjacent to Quarry Lake is a folly that the town cannot afford. Already, bears like 148 are being removed from the landscape for spending time on corridors dedicated to their movement. Having more and more and more development encroaching on these corridors will lead to a continued eroding of the ecological viability of the town of Canmore corridors - and maybe that's exactly what development focused mayors like John Borrowman want. Once the corridor is gone, he can promote the valley to his heart's content. Canmore has an election coming up. Make a better decision this time Canmore! You may not have many more chances. One advantage that Canada has over Yellowstone at the moment is that we are no longer afraid of science. We can look to great research being done within our parks that shows that the current trends are simply unsustainable. Wilkinson quotes Thomas Roffe, the former National Chief of wildlife health for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: “Science doesn’t define what the proper thing to do is. Science helps to define what the conditions will be if you choose one vision or another. Science will help you understand what the advantages or disadvantages are to your perspective. But it doesn’t tell you what’s right or what’s wrong.” We have the science. We can all see the changes. What are we going to do? Will we make the right choice? And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. If you'd like to hit me up personally, you can email me at info@wardcameron.com or send me a message on Twitter @wardcameron. Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for step-on and hiking guides as well as wildlife biology safaris, snowshoe animal tracking and corporate speaking programs. We've been sharing the stories behind the scenery for more than 30 years and we can help to make sure your visit to the Rockies is one that you'll be talking about for years. You can visit our website at www.WardCameron.com for more details. And with that said, the rain has thankfully come and now stopped so it's time to go hiking. I'll talk to you next week.

A recent study conducted by researchers in British Columbia's Columbia Mountain range is raising eyebrows for its novel approach to trying to help struggling caribou populations in several endangered herds throughout several areas.

Over the past few years, programs focused on killing wolves in many areas concentrated on reducing predation of already declining herds of caribou in Alberta and British Columbia. These herds have been in decline for a long time. Much of that decline has been the result of previous interventions that created the current situation.

Caribou are animals of deep snowpacks and dense old-growth forests. Their traditional ranges were not an area where heavy wolf predation took place. The deep snows were a disadvantage to the wolves who rarely trekked into the caribou's home range.

Unfortunately for the Caribou, decades of extensive logging of old-growth forests, along with the roads that come with them, followed by snowmobile and atv adoption of these same roads, provided easy access into their home ranges.

At the same time, moose thrive on clearcuts where the new growth is just what they need to survive. Moose moved into the area in ever increasing numbers.

The moose were aided in their population boom by the simple fact that wolves had bounties on their heads from 1906-1962 throughout British Columbia.

Without a strong predator presence, the moose population exploded to many times their historic levels. With tonnes of moose, and an end to predator control, the wolf population moved in and began to prey heavily on moose.

All of these developments created a situation where logging opened an area to moose, followed by wolves being attracted by those moose, and in turn giving the wolves access to another tasty prey; caribou.

This is a story that is repeated in almost every caribou herd in the mountain west. As a result, almost every caribou herd in the mountain regions of Alberta and British Columbia is in serious decline with some on the verge of disappearing.

When a classic predator prey interaction, like moose and wolves, ensnares a third party, we refer to that as incidental competition. Essentially, if the moose weren't there, the caribou would not likely be bothered by the wolves simply because they don't occur in dense enough populations to support wolf packs. They also live in areas that are difficult for the wolves to access.

Wolf culls are a controversial practice, but are being used in Alberta and British Columbia to try to help struggling caribou herds. The mantra has been kill the wolves and the caribou can survive. This mantra has been repeated over and over by politicians convinced that it is the only way to keep caribou herds in the wild.

We have to remember, that without the developments that provided access for wolves to get to the caribou, the problem may not have occurred in the first place. Alberta in particular, is still allowing more oil and gas exploration in critical caribou habitat, putting in more roads to allow wolves into caribou territory.

Any plan that focuses only on killing predators but doesn't prioritize habitat protection and restoration is not likely to succeed.

In this particular study, scientists wanted to take a different approach to caribou conservation. Step one is to either reduce or halt logging in caribou home ranges to reduce the opportunities for white-tail deer and moose to move in and drag their canine predators with them.

Caribou do not benefit from logging. They rely on the hanging, stringy lichens that dangle from the foliage of old growth trees and these are not found in clearcuts.

At this point, just stopping logging will not help the caribou on the short-term. It will take decades for today's clearcuts to regrow into dense forests more amenable to caribou instead of moose and deer.

Biologists decided to try something else. Since moose were not traditionally present in their currently dense populations in the study areas in B.C.'s Columbia Mountains, it was proposed that increasing the availability of moose hunting licenses might be a better approach to reducing wolf populations.

Because moose are the wolves primary prey, a significant reduction in their food supply would also stimulate a drop in wolf population as a natural response.

Predator-prey relationships are always interdependent. If the prey is plentiful, the wolves will produce more young and fewer wolves will disperse to new territories.

One fear was that by reducing elk, the wolves may be forced to hunt more heavily on caribou as moose became less available.

In order to test this, they designated two study areas in the Columbia and Caribou Mountains. One area of 6,500 km2 was designated as the treatment zone, where moose hunting permits would be increased 10-fold. The second area, covering 11,500 km2 did not have any increase in moose quotas during the hunting season.

The goal was to compare moose, wolf and caribou populations in the two areas to see if reducing the numbers of moose would indeed have a positive impact on caribou populations by reducing the number of wolves in the area.

The two areas were separated by the Monashee Mountains which helped to provide a geographic boundary between the two study areas.

There were three caribou populations in the treatment area, the Columbia North, Columbia South and Frisby-Queest. Only the Columbia North population exceeded 50 animals with a population around 150.

With the increase in hunting pressure, the moose population in the treatment area was reduced by 71% or a drop from approximately 1,650 moose down to 466.

Wolf populations soon began to reflect the reduction in prey. Of 34 wolves in the treatment area, 8 wolves, or 23.5% of the population dispersed out of the study area, and 12 wolves died of a variety of causes. Four wolves were found to have starved and an additional one was killed by other wolves.

So how did the caribou fare during all of this? Well, it's a bit of a good-news bad news story. The two smaller populations continued to decline during the study, however the larger Caribou North herd showed a slight increase in population.

There may be other reasons that the smaller populations did not benefit from the reduction in wolf numbers. It may take longer for the reduction in wolf populations to have an impact on the caribou numbers.

Moose were reduced substantially, but even 466 moose is still higher than the historic abundance of around 300 moose prior to logging and predator control. In fact, prior to the 1940s, moose may not have been present at all in much of central and southern B.C.

The wolf population in the winter dropped to 13 wolves/1,000 km2 which is still higher than the desired density of just 6.5 wolves in the same area.

So where do researchers go from here? One option would be to do some limited wolf control, in addition to the increased moose harvest each year during the hunting season. Any wolf cull would not need to be nearly as extensive as the unpopular one in Alberta and would not likely need to be continuous.

In the long-term, caribou habitats need to be restored if they have any hope of surviving in a landscape of high intensity logging and outdoor recreation. Restoration and protection of old growth forests will eventually limit the habitat for moose and deer and their numbers will naturally diminish - with the wolf populations following suit.

There are no winners in this research. Humans have changed the habitat so that it now favours animals other than the native caribou. For them to survive, the first priority must be habitat based. Returning the landscape to one that favours the caribou and not the invasive moose and white-tail deer. Without these food species, the wolf population will also diminish naturally over time.

Any program of culling, must be seen as a temporary program to stem the population decline while other efforts at habitat restoration can take root. No amount of culling with replace the need for a good landscape to call home.

We can just look at Alberta's abject failures to protect their native caribou herds to see what happens when you simply slaughter animals but do nothing towards habitat restoration.

Let's hope that B.C. will continue to focus on prioritizing habitat while at the same time working to reduce the downward population trends in its caribou herds.

Lying just within Yoho National Park are several rock outcroppings collectively known as the Burgess Shales. So unique and vital were the discoveries at this site that it was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 1980.

Discovered by Charles Walcott in 1909, it's one of very few sites in the world where soft bodied animals left almost perfect fossils. This may not seem important until you realize that most of the study of early life is the study of hard parts--trying to learn something about an animal from a cast of its shell. This tells us little about what lived inside the shell.

This quarry uniquely preserved a huge variety of soft bodied creatures along with their shells. For the first time we could see the whole picture.

How did this level of preservation occur? Scientists believe that a mud slide came down into a shallow bay and then washed the animals caught in its flow down into the oxygen poor depths far below. Since oxygen is a major factor in decay, this allowed the soft bodied animals to remain for a long time before disappearing - long enough to leave their remains fossilized.

The other unique characteristic of this rock formation lies in the timing of this tragic slide. It occurred in middle Cambrian times, basically around 508 million years ago. This puts it right in the middle of the greatest explosion of life in the history of the planet. The Cambrian was the first period in which multicellular life exploded and within a geologic blink of the eye, the world was populated with a diversity never before (or since) experienced.

Few other fossil sites across the globe can match the high level of preservation of this site along with such excellent timing. There are a few other important Cambrian sites in other parts of the world, but they are much more recent and as a result don't show nearly the diversity found in this site.

As Walcott began to grapple the significance of this fossil bed, he ravenously collected tens of thousands of specimens which he brought back to the Smisthsonian. At the time, he was one of the most powerful scientists in the U.S. and this would be his greatest discovery. Over the next 18 years he published small preliminary works on the fossils but he never found the time to truly study them and unravel their real significance.

In the small amount of actual study of the fossils that he completed, he tried to force them to fit into the same groupings of animals present on the planet today, and although this may seem a natural conclusion, it would become his greatest error. Many of the animals present in the Burgess Shales, could not properly be categorized as part of any group of animals present on the planet today.

Harry Whittington, one of Walcott's successors slowly unraveled the true mysteries of the Burgess by careful and thorough examination of the multitude of fossils left behind. One of the techniques used by Whittington to rebuild the creatures of the Burgess Shales was to slowly dissect the actual fossils. Like living beings, even though crushed flat, the fossils retained most of their original structure and by carefully removing micro-thin layers, one by one, Whittington was able to make much more detailed examinations of each specimen.

Whittington began in 1971 with a creature called Marella. This animal was clearly an Arthropod (the group of animals containing all the insects, spiders and crustaceans as well as the extinct trilobites) but he found that it didn't fit into any of the major grouping of Arthropods known to exist today. His next specimen, Yohoia, led him to a similar conclusion; it was an arthropod but of no known group.

Moving onto Opabina, the biggest surprise to date would arise. Not only was this not even an arthropod, it didn't fit into any known Phylum. After Kingdom, Phylum is the next largest category of living things on the planet. Arthropods are one phylum and all living creatures fit into at least one of 25 or 30 known phyla.

Further examination of many of the other fossils led to similar conclusions – animals that could not be classified based on today’s system of phyla. Never before, at any other fossil site in the world, had fossils been found that could not be classified. This would have far reaching consequences

Most standard discussions of evolution show a single primitive ancestor giving rise to a wide variety of future species. As a result we expected there to be less diversity early in the history of life; not more. In actual fact what we have found is that there were many more basic structural plans at the beginning of life than today and this doesn't work well according to standard discussions.

Survival of the fittest may be invoked to say that these early animals were merely inferior and failed to survive. However, survival of the fittest should be predictable and scientists could not find anything that would indicate inferiority in these unclassifiable animals. This led to Stephen Jay Gould, the author of the book Wonderful Life that details much of the science of the shales to come up with a new aspect of natural selection - luck. Perhaps some extinctions were based on some environmental of otherwise unpredictable fluke and as a result, animals not inferior in any way ended up perishing.

The long term results become very interesting indeed. If chance plays a major role in the extinction of species, than perhaps if we were to turn the clock back in time an entirely different outcome could arise. This could in turn change the entire sequence of events following this particular occurrence - and could have had a dramatic impact on the evolution of humans. Found in this fossil bed is the oldest ancestor of all the animals with backbones. What if it had have been the unlucky one?

This brings a whole new view to evolution. This chance factor is known as contingency and is being widely accepted as one possible component of evolution today - all because of a tiny quarry in Yoho National Park.

There has been a lot of recent news relating to the Burgess Shales over the past few years, including several new exposures of rich fossil bearing rocks in nearby Kootenay National Park.

Most recently, a frightening new worm has been described from the Burgess Shales. It is a predatory worm called Capinatator praetermissus. It was a flat worm, some 10 cm long with a series of 25 grasping spines on either side of its mouth.

While 10 cm may seem small today, in its day it was one of the largest predators in the ocean. This Capinatator is a member of a group of worms that still exist today called Arrow Worms, but this particular species was much larger and had many more grasping spines than any species alive today.

Arrow worms are extremely efficient predators. The clasping spines quickly reach out and close around potential prey, locking them in their interlocking grasp. Today, they only grow to a few milimetres in length, but Capinatator would have been a frightening prospect to many aquatic residents of the early oceans.

To add to their frightening character, they are translucent which gives them an air of invisibility. A few quick flaps from their flat tail fin and the spines open and this near invisible creature has another meal.

Today, there are still some 120 species of arrow worms globally. The fossil record though is very sparse simply because they lack the hard body parts found in some animals and so are rarely fossilized. If anything survives, it's just the clasping spines.

Despite this rarity, the Burgess Shales have provide some 50 fossils of varying levels of condition. Even though the species has only recently been described, the first fossils were collected way back in 1983. In order to get enough information to do a formal description, scientists needed many different specimens with each helping to reveal a different component of the worms physiology.

It's just one more example of the ongoing and amazing science being done at the various exposures of the Burgess Shales.

If you'd like to visit one of the quarries, you'll need to book an official tour since they are all designated as archaeological sites and closed to the general public. Parks Canada and the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation offer guided tours to several of the sites. I'll leave a link to their booking pages in the show notes for this episode at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep043 .

You can book your Parks Canada hike to one of three Burgess Shale exposures, the classic Walcott Quarry, the Mount Stephen site or the Stanley Glacier site in Kootenay National Park at the following link: https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/bc/yoho/activ/burgess/burgess-visit/reserv.aspx. Alternatively the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation leads walks to the Walcott and Mount Stephen sites. Bookings can me made at: https://www.burgess-shale.bc.ca/guided-hikes.

Next up - local fires provide hope for endangered pines

First up, a few updates on the fire situation in western Canada. Perhaps one of the most surprising updates comes from Fort McMurray. After 15 months, the Horse River fire that devastated Fort McMurray in May of 2016 has just been officially deemed to have been extinguished.

Fires can linger for long periods underground, and this fire, christened the 'beast', burned some 6,000 km2 last year and leveled 2,400 buildings. Fire managers had to wait until advanced heat detectors from helicopters could find no more lingering hot spots before finally declaring the fire out on Aug 2, 2017.

This story comes as our skies are still full of smoke from fires burning across British Columbia.

Closer to home, Calgary is set to surpass its record for the smokiest summer on record. The current record was set in 1969 and saw 269 hours of smoke clouding the skies above Calgary. As of Sept 3, 2017 Calgary had seen 255 hours.

This record is toast. The season is far from over and the skies around Canmore are continually smoky with much of that drifting eastward towards Calgary.

Unless we see some dramatic changes in weather over the next few weeks, Calgary will likely set a record that will be difficult to top. Unfortunately though, with warming climates, all bets are off when it comes of fires in our western forests.

To put this into perspective, the average number of smoke filled hours in a year in Calgary is slightly less than 17 for the entire year.

Calgary has bettered that on single days numerous times this year. Aug 17 saw 24 hours of smoke, Aug 31 saw 23. July 12 had 19 hours.

In 1969 the last smoke measurement was on Dec 22. We still have 4 months of potentially smoke-filled skies before we bid this record breaking year good bye for hopefully clearer skies in 2018.

[caption id="attachment_609" align="alignleft" width="501"] Wilderness closure in the Rocky Mountain Forest District in British Columbia[/caption]

This week also saw the complete closure of all wilderness in southeastern British Columbia due to the extreme fire situation. The closure affects the entire Rocky Mountain Forest District following the Continental Divide from Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park and areas south of Glacier National Park, all the way south to the U.S. Border. I'll include a map of the closure area in the show notes to this episode at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep043.

As fire hazards continue to escalate and wildfires appear with little warning, the provincial government wants to make sure that nobody gets stranded in the wilderness should another fire break out.

At the same time, provincial resources are already stretched to the limit dealing with currently imminent situations and simply don't have the manpower to make sure fire bans are respected and wilderness regulations followed.

According to the closure bulletin posted. The government states:

"When deciding to implement a restriction multiple factors are considered, such as current and forecasted weather conditions, anticipated fire behaviour, access routes, the number of active fires and the current extreme fire danger rating.

Given, the extreme wildfire activity within the Rocky Mountain Resource District and forecasted high temperatures and winds, it has, in the interests of public safety, become necessary to restrict access to the backcountry in the Rocky Mountain Resource District."

The closure doesn't affect anybody's home. People are free to travel to their residences, but as of noon on Sept 2, they cannot head into the wilderness to retrieve boats or camper trailers.

I'll leave a link to the government announcement in the show notes if you would like to get additional information as this story unfolds.

Looking closer to home, the Verdant Creek fire is still burning, but it is being looked at as an opportunity to help restore some of Kootenay National Park's endangered whitebark pine.

As of this week, the fire has burned 15,500 ha within Kootenay National Park and Mount Assiniboine Provincial Parks. As it burned, it also burned some of these endangered trees.

While some trees have been lost, the whitebark, like it's close relative the lodgepole pine, is a fire adapted species. It thrives in open sunlight like the landscape left behind by wildfires.

Fire suppression has been one thing that has limited the reproduction of whitebark pine trees in the recent past. Without fire, nice open habitats are not available for the pine to grow.

According to a story in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Parks Canada fire and vegetation specialist Jed Cochrane was quoted as saying:

“What fire does is it removes the competition, which is typically Engelmann spruce and sub-alpine fir,” Cochrane said. “Fire removes that competition and whitebark pine comes in and has time to grow without competition and get a foothold.

“Without fire, what we have seen is that spruce and fir species outcompete whitebark pine and there is a loss of overall regeneration and habitat for whitebark pine.”

Whitebark pine has more to contend with than just lack of habitat though. It is also very susceptible to white pine blister rust. This fungal infection has had dramatic impacts on populations of western white pine, limber pine and whitebark pine.

In a 2002 study in British Columbia (http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x02-049), a 3 year survey of more than 24,000 whitebark pine trees found that 19% were dead and an additional 31% showed signs of active infection.

Provincially, infections are more common in the eastern portion of the province and slightly lower in the west. Parks Canada biologists have been looking to breed more blister rust-resistant whitebark pine seedlings and outside Cranbrook, B.C. 2,500 seedlings have been grown.

This month, park staff will be planting 1,500 of those seedlings in the area burned by the Verdant Creek fire.

As the fire burned over areas already burned in 2001, 2003 and 2012, it will help to create a mozaic of different forest age classes.

While the seedlings can help to restore some pine lost to the fire back to the landscape, they won't begin producing seeds for 40 years or more. Once they do produce cones, the Clark's nutcracker will collect the seeds for food, and at the same time, help disperse them to new habitats.

Fire is an important ecological process in the mountain west. Unfortunately, fire suppression for the past 100 years has left us with much denser forest canopies then would have existed prior. This leaves fewer potential sites for sun-loving trees like the whitebark pine to take root.

Please remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for hiking, step-on and corporate guides across the mountain west. We work with a team of expert naturalists and guides that can help make sure that your mountain experience is one full of memories and discovery.

If you'd like to connect with me on social media, you can leave a comment on this page, or hit me up on twitter @wardcameron. You can also visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/wardcameronenterprises.

This week I look at an amazing report from Alaska that shows that given the choice, salmon may not be a grizzlies first choice for dinner. I also bring to a close, the story of the building of Canada's transcontinental railway..and with that said, let's get to it. Grizzlies Choose Berries over Salmon Every once in a while you come across a study that throws out everything that you thought you knew about a subject. As a biologist and naturalist, I often lament about how tough the bears in the Rockies have it over their counterparts on the north coast of British Columbia and Alaska. To most people, coastal bears live in the land of milk and honey. They have 5 kinds of Pacific salmon, and many kinds of edible berries. I often talk about the importance of understanding the seasonal food preferences of bears in order to stay safe in bear country. If you know what they're eating when they're eating it, it becomes safer to avoid unwanted encounters simply by avoiding the bear's food de jour. Stay clear of what is on today's menu. We often talk about the critical importance of meat in the diet of bears. Here in the Rockies, they don't have a great deal of meaty options. They'll take some 45% of newborn moose and elk calves, feed on winter killed bighorn sheep and mountain goats, and dig up some ground squirrel colonies. Since they can't have enough meat calories, they rely upon buffaloberries to build their fat layers for winter. If they can't find meat, then berries are their second choice…or so that's what we used to think. What if a bear found itself in a world with unlimited numbers of tasty salmon, but also a bumper crop of berries? What do YOU think they would choose? A recent study on Kodiak Island in Alaska tried to discover the answer to this question. They focused on a well-studied portion of the Karluk watershed on the island. Because bears have been studied here for many years, it seemed like a good place to start simply because there was some good historic data that might help them to determine the food preferences of the resident grizzlies. In this study, bears feed on a variety of berries including red elderberry, salmonberry, crowberry and blueberry. Of these four, red elderberry is by far the preferred choice for bears. If you're not familiar with elderberry bushes, look for a shrub that can be as tall as 3 or 4 metres with compound leaves and dense spikes of white flowers. Later, the flowers will be replaced by dense clumps of berries that grizzlies find very appealing. The denseness of the berry clusters is also what makes these berries popular with bears as they don't need to expend great deals of energy eating them. This experiment was prompted as a result of changes in the seasonal food patterns on Kodiak Island. Historically, while sockeye salmon run for 4 months, they are most vulnerable to bears when they enter smaller tributary streams in July and August. Year after year, decade after decade, the salmon always arrive at the same time of year. Because the bears are able to catch the salmon before they spawn, the fish contain up to 3 times more food energy than dying fish. In the past, elderberries ripened later in the season, usually mid-August as the salmon run was beginning to wane. For bears, this was ideal. As one food disappeared, another food was ready for feeding. Things have been changing rapidly in the north as a result of changing climates and increasingly warm spring temperatures. In warm years, the berries are beginning to ripen earlier and earlier, with ripe berries as early as mid-July on some years. For the first time the bears found themselves in a situation where there were two key foods that were available in the same area at the same time. What surprised University of California scientists though was that they did not make the obvious choice - salmon. Instead the majority of bears abandoned the streams and moved upland to feast on elderberries. I know what you're saying - "fake science". After all, no self-respecting carnivore would choose berries over salmon, but despite all logic indicating that they would stick with salmon, they didn't. Biologists used a number of methods to track the bears behaviour in years where the elderberries ripened at the same time as the sockeye runs. When they studied images from 8 years of aerial surveys of the rivers during the salmon run, in every case, years with early berry crops coincided with fewer bears fishing for salmon. This was backed up by looking at areas outside the Karluk River and when 31 years of aerial photographs were compared to ripening dates, the same results were shown. In particular, during the exceedingly warm summers of 2014 and 2015, studies of scat showed the same results. Of 151 scat samples identified, 125 were composed primarily of red elderberries. 2010 formed a good control years as there was a failure of the elderberry crop and, when they looked at the location of GPS collared bears, they remained at the river to feed on the available salmon. Their conclusions showed that if elderberries were available at the same time as sockeye salmon, the bears would largely ignore the salmon and turn into a furry frugivore. As you can imagine, this put the biologists into a tizzy. Why would grizzlies purposely choose foods with lower nutritional value and a lower percentage of protein. When they looked into the nutritional content of the foods, they discovered that the berries offered only around 50% as much food energy as salmon. This number can be reduced even further when you consider that with a seemingly endless number of salmon, the bears are able to select just the most nutritious parts like the skin, the brains and the eggs. This still seemed to confound common sense. They had to look deeper. What they discovered is that it's not just about calories. In order for the bears to maximize weight gain, they may need to look beyond simple calories. The choice may be impacted by the relative percentages of macronutrients like protein. They turned to food studies of bears in captivity. In one case, the bears were given the choice of foods of varying protein levels. The bears selected foods with protein levels in the 11-21% range, much lower than the 83% found in salmon, but right in the range of elderberry with 12.8%. In the end, it looks like all calories are not created equal. When given the choice, bears looked for a more moderate amount of protein. Elderberries may be the berry of choice, despite there being other available berries to choose from, simply because they occur in dense clumps which allows bears to eat vast numbers while expending minimal energy. As temperatures continue to warm, the trend looks like elderberries will continue to ripen earlier and earlier. Currently, they are ripening at a rate of 2-1/2 days earlier each decade. This would put the average ripening date at the same time as the peak salmon run by the year 2070. It's unknown how this will affect bears in the long run. Currently, the two foods normally occur sequentially, extending their feeding season. It will also depend on what other food options are available to bears once the salmon and elderberry harvest ends. I love it when science gets turned on its head. Sometimes the obvious conclusion just isn't the right one. This study helps to really show the importance of fruit to black and grizzly bears. It also has a local connections as we look to the end of buffaloberry season. This study helps to show why berries are critical to bears and it also means that it is even more important for us to protect the supply of berries for our local bear populations. Simply chopping down every buffaloberry bush in town is NOT the solution. Bears are creatures of habit. Once a location is a part of their regular foraging routine, they'll continue to return. If they don't find buffaloberries, then they may find…crabapples. Wildlife corridors should be for wildlife. Clear berry bushes from places like the Peaks, but the wildlife corridor berries should be left for the bears. If the berries are concentrated there, so will the bears be. If, as a community, we can get people to respect closures, than maybe we can help to keep the bears healthy and the wildlife corridors viable. Next up…the last spike The Last Spike Over the past few weeks, I've introduced you to the main players in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This week, I want to talk about the completion of the line through the Kicking Horse and Roger's Passes. While the stories of adventure and exploration were taking place, the financiers and managers were doing everything they could to keep the flow of money coming…and many times, they were failing. In 1880, the government of Canada gave the contract to finish the CPR to a group of financiers led by George Stephen and Donald Smith. The contract required the line to be finished within 10 years and offered the "syndicate" a monopoly of the line along with $25 million in cash and 25 million acres of land grants in stages as they completed sections of the track. When the job was done, they would be given an additional 1,100 km of track already completed. The value of those lines was some $75 million. During the battles to pass the C.P.R. contract in the house, the conservatives had to defeat 23 different amendments during an excess of 30 sessions that extended past midnight. The ordeal took its toll on Macdonald who was confined to bed with severe bowel cramps when the contract was passed in parliament. When he left for England to recuperate, many believed they would never see him again. Stephen knew that it would be next to impossible to raise money in England due to the fiasco surrounding another Canadian railroad, the Grand Trunk. It had earned the nickname “The Big Suitcase” for the immense amounts of money it had managed to walk away with, without ever paying a penny in dividends. The Grand Trunk also did all it could to discredit the C.P.R., whom it saw as a competitor. When Stephen arrived in London, he was shocked to find that the newspapers were more interested in the fact that Jumbo the elephant had been sold to P.T. Barnum. This was a few years before John, Paul, George and Ringo, and Jumbo was the closest thing England had to a Rock Star…he was one famous elephant. Revenge can be sweet though, and Stephen had his chuckle when, just three weeks before the hammering of the last spike, a Grand Trunk locomotive ran over Jumbo and killed him. Financial difficulties were not long in arriving, and repeatedly, the syndicate had to ask the government for assistance. Each hand out made it more difficult to approve the next, and to cut costs, Sandford Fleming’s Yellowhead Pass route was abandoned for the shorter route through the Kicking Horse Pass. In the two years between 1880 and 1882, the company spent almost $59 million dollars, but barely collected $21 million. The remaining $37 million was not covered by the fact that they had less than $20 million in investor money. That left them with a whopping $17 million in debt. Thomas Shaughnessy, the C.P.R.’s purchasing agent managed to keep the line afloat through some interesting financial dealings. In one case, an American firm accused him of taking bribes to secure work, while not delivering. When he was hauled into Stephen’s office, he pulled out a collection of deposit slips, all to the C.P.R. account, which totaled exactly what the American firm had claimed. When asked if they had been bribes, he answered: “Of Course, but by God we needed the money didn’t we!” In the end it became clear that they needed at least another $27 million dollars in order to get the line through. The only way to get the funding would be for the government to, once again, bail the railway out. By Dec of 1883 Stephen was desperate, and he wired Prime Minister John A. Macdonald: "Things have now reached a point when we must either stop or find the means of going on. Our enemies here and elsewhere think they can now break us down and finish the CPR forever." While Macdonald had no interest in bailing out the railroad yet again, his Minister of Railways, John Henry Pope pointed out: "the day the Canadian Pacific busts the Conservative party busts the day after" Once again, the railroad was bailed out. In October, Stephen set out for one last fund raising trip to England. Along with him was Macdonald who was trying to escape the stress that pushing through the railroad aid bills had put on him. Finally, through a feat of financial finagling, Stephen managed to borrow $250,000 from a Scottish bank. He then sent off the most famous telegram in Canadian history to Smith—all it read was “Stand Fast Craigellachie” Smith and Stephen had grown up in Banffshire, Scotland, and a giant rock nearby had become a symbol of the clan Grant’s defiance during the clan wars—it was known as Craigellachie. This telegram was Stephen’s way of informing Smith that the funds were on the way. A final saving grace occurred when a Metis named Louis Riel, led a revolt against the government beginning in March of 1885. The Metis were of mixed blood French/Indian origin and had begun to attack settlements in the west and the troops were being sent in. Van Horne dedicated all the resources of the railroad to get 3,000 troops to the front in just 7 days. With this quick response, the uprising was quelled more quickly than expected. An earlier uprising had required 3 months to get troops to the front. Suddenly the railroad had shown it had more value, and the government bailed them out at the eleventh hour. Workers had not been paid for several months and were refusing to work. The banks had turned them down for any temporary loans, and when the government agreed to back their loan, Van Horne Stated that when they received the news: “We tossed up chairs to the ceiling; we tramped on desks; I believe we danced on tables. I do not fancy that any of us knows what occurred, and no one who was there can ever remember anything except loud yells of joy and the sound of things breaking.” Van Horne then sent out a hasty telegraph to Shaughnessy. All it said was: “Pay creditors now. Van Horne.” Stephen had lost all pleasure in the enterprise. The government sent appraisers to his vast Montreal mansion for security for his loan. They evaluated everything from his silverware to his underwear, and with a stroke of a pen, he signed it all away. In fact, he did not even go to the hammering of the last spike, but returned to Scotland to recover from the strain. The Last Spike Ceremony Finally, on Nov. 7, 1885 the day had arrived. The last spike would finally be hammered. The location was named Craigellachie in honour of the three word telegram that had saved the railway. But before I tell the story of our last spike, I like to share the story of the American last spike ceremony that occurred in 1869 in Promontory, Utah because no two events could be so wonderfully different. In Promontory Utah, there were two gold, and two silver spikes. The main spike had been forged at a cost of $400. Attached to the spikes were telegraph wires, so the whole country could hear it driven home. The Governor of California was on hand for the occasion and he had a specially designed silver maul, silver hammer with which to drive the stake. When everyone was in position and the cameras were ready, he raised that hammer and he brought it down…and he missed. He missed the last spike. That's okay because the telegraph operator sent the word "done" and simultaneous celebrations broke out from New York to San Francisco. They even rang the long silent liberty bell. When Van Horne was asked about what kind of ceremony he would like, he declared that '“...the only ceremony I fancy may occur will be the damning of the foreman for not driving it sooner...” He also declared that there would be no golden spike, that the last spike would be a plain iron spike, as good as all the rest. There were no heads of state or government at the hammering of our last spike, just some of the financiers and surveyors who would not have missed this moment, along with the workers that just happened to be there at the time. In the photograph, hammering the spike is Donald Smith, one of the main financiers. Behind him, with a stove pipe hat and patriarchal style beard is Sandford Fleming. To Fleming’s right, with his hands in his pockets, is William Cornelius Van Horne. Out of sight is Major A.B. Rogers, and way in the back, with a Stetson hat, peaking over the crowd, is a young Tom Wilson who would not have missed this day for the world. Now Donald Smith had heard the story of the Governor of California missing the spike, and we would have no such shenanigans here. And so when everything was ready, and the cameras were in position, he raised his hammer, took careful aim, and he brought it down…and he didn't miss!… …he bent it. He bent the last spike! It obviously had to be taken out, so we actually had two last spikes in Canada. It was later cut up into pieces to make souvenir pins for the many dignitaries that were not present. A new spike was put into place, and this time Smith drove the spike home. It was also immediately pulled out. The last thing we wanted was souvenir hunters tearing up the track as soon as we got it built. After the spike, there was silence, as the men pondered the friends they had made, the friends they had lost, and in more cases than not, just what the heck they were going to do next because with that simple act they were now unemployed. The silence was followed by a cheer and cries for a speech. We needed some words by which to mark the occasion…after all, what would the historians say? Finally Van Horne reluctantly agreed. He climbed on the platform, cleared his throat and stated: “All I can say is that the work has been done well in every way!” That was it. That was the entire text of the speech at our last spike ceremony. After that, Major A.B. Rogers, so taken by the moment, forgot about hiding his emotions, grabbed a piece of railroad tie and tried to thrust it into the ground to mark the spot. After a few minutes of private celebration, the sound of a train whistle and a call of “all aboard for the pacific” broke the silence. And for the first time, the train was able to continue over what had once been a gap in the tracks, and that little train chugged its way into history. The last spike had been removed shortly after the dignitaries left by Frank Brothers. In the famous photograph of the event, he's the bearded man on the left of the image looking directly at the camera. He later presented it to Edward Beatty who became the first Canadian born president of the CPR. It was reportedly stolen from his desk and at that point it was largely lost in history. In 2012, the mystery of the missing spike may have finally been solved. Rumour has it that the spike somehow made its way to railroad surveyor Henry Cambie, who in turn gave it to the chief of the patent office in Ottawa, W.J. Lynch. It was to be a gift for his son, Arthur who was a railroad buff. From Arthur it made its way to his daughter, Margo Remnant. The spike was silver plated and fashioned into the handle of a knife blade. Metallurgical studies showed it was consistent with the metal used in spikes at the time. In 2012, Remnant's widow presented it to the Museum of Civilization where hopefully it will find a permanent home. And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. I want to thank you for sharing your time with me and I appreciate you hitting the subscribe button so that you don't miss any future episodes. Ward Cameron Enterprises is your specialist on guided hikes, tours and photography outings across the mountain west. If you'd like to make the most of your mountain experience drop us a line at info@wardcameron.com or hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron. Don't forget you can always comment and find links to additional information in the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep042. And with that said, the sun's out and it's time to go hiking. I'll see you next week.

This week I take a look at one of our most secretive animals, the northern flying squirrel. It also looks like B.C. has broken a record this summer for the worst fire season on record. Finally, I'll share the story of the Greatest Canadian Railroader, that wasn't well Canadian, William Cornelius Van Horne. And with that said, let's get to it.

Flying Squirrels

We're all familiar with the red squirrel, that ubiquitous little scavenger that invades bird feeders and constantly chatters at us whenever we enter its forested domain. However were you aware that the red squirrel is NOT the only squirrely resident of our western forests? The northern flying squirrel shares the forest with its more gregarious neighbour but for most residents of the mountain west, these squirrels remain virtually invisible.

They range from 25 to 37 cm in length and they have a light underside and dark backs. They give birth to just a single litter each year and may live communally in the winter in order to huddle together to share warmth.

They are far more secretive than the red squirrel and are usually only active at night. Like red squirrels, their diet is very flexible, including seeds, cones, tree sap, fungi and even eggs, and nestlings.

They are characterized by a skin membrane that runs from their front feet to their back which, when stretched out, gives them a large leathery sail that allows them to fly like a furry kite from tree to tree to tree.

The proper name for these membranes are patagia. If this doesn't give them enough of a wing, they have cartilage spurs on each wrist that can help to extend the patagia even further. As they leap from their perch, they stretch out their arms and legs and soar away.

When they approach their landing site, they'll rapidly raise their flat tail which, in turn, shifts their body upwards. This positions all four legs forward for landing and the patagia also forms a breaking parachute to slow them down for landing.

Globally, there are 43 species of flying squirrels and in some cases, flights of up to 300 feet can be made. The northern flying squirrel averages around 20 metres, but flights of up to 90 metres have also been recorded.

If you've ever seen a youtube video of humans wearing squirrel suits, you will noticed that they don't just fly in a single direction, they can execute sharp turns by changing the orientation of their arms and legs. Squirrles are the real master at this. They can make incredibly sudden corrections and turns mid-flight, even completely reversing direction if needed.

While they're foraging on the ground though, they're clumsy as they collect seeds and cones to store in their caches.

Large eyes help them to see in the dark and they quietly scurry about looking for tasty morsels.

The range of the northern flying squirrel covers almost all of Canada. With the exception of southeastern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan.

Just because you haven't seen one doesn't mean they're uncommon. In fact in many areas, they are very common, and like red squirrels, they're not above invading an attic or two.

If you're out at night and see two big eyes staring at you from the treetops, you may just be seeing one of our most secretive residents. Take a few minutes and watch, you may just get lucky and see it make a quick aerial exit.

In the winter, you will sometimes come across a set of squirrel tracks that mysteriously just begins in the middle of a field. That's a sure sign that a flying squirrel has been passing through.

Next up…a record breaking season - for all the wrong reasons

Worst Fire Season Ever

It's now official. 2017 already has become the worst fire season in British Columbia history - and the season isn't even over yet.

As of Aug 16, fires had blazed across an estimated 894,941 hectares in the province since April 1 according to a CBC story. To battle these fires, the federal and provincial governments have spent in excess of $315 million dollars. That number doesn't yet surpass the $382 million dollars spent in 2009, but again, the season isn't over yet.

Perhaps even more important than financial costs to fight the fires, has been the loss of homes and lengthy evacuations of some 45,000 people over the course of the summer. As of August 22, there were still 3,800 people unable to return to their communities due to evacuation orders.

Currently firefighters are fighting a single fire that covers some 4,674 square kilometres making it the largest single fire in B.C. history. It was created when 19 individual fires converged to create one single monster blaze near Quesnel. From end to end it stretches 130 kilometres.

This is more than double the previous record held by a 1958 fire that charred 2,250 sq km. Province wide, there are still 135 fires burning.

This season is far from over. Many of the fires currently burning will continue until the snows of winter douse them. Let's hope for some good solid rains for B.C. this fall.

Next up…a rainmaker saves the CPR

Van Horne’s Line

The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway was an epic adventure for a small nation. There are many stories related to this line but I wanted to introduce you to one of the key characters responsible for helping us to get the job done. His name is Sir William Cornelius Van Horne.

As Canada struggled to build its railroad, the epic struggle against an unforgiving landscape and diminishing coffers made for a very difficult undertaking for a small population. We had little experience with such an immense railroad project and the politics around the construction managed to topple two governments.

As time passed, and funds diminished, the disorganization around the construction began to become overwhelming. The final straw occurred during the 1881 season where the company only managed to lay just over 200 km of track and in the process squandered $10 million. We still had some 3,000 left to finish.

It became clear that we needed to bring in a rainmaker. As it turns out there was just a man south of the border: William Cornilius Van Horne.

Van Horne had begun his career as a telegraph operator during the civil war. While working one day, a train rolled into the station and he saw the grand private car of the railroad superintendent…and he was impressed. He immediately declared that someday, he would also have his own private car. In order to accomplish this, he knew that he would need to learn everything there was about railroading; and so, he set out to learn. He began staying after work to copy the drawings of the railroad engineers…until he was caught. Fortunately for him, he was pretty good. They hired him to do their lettering from that point on, and for the rest of his life he was an amateur engineer.

He was only 29 when he got his private car, and was named the superintendent of the St. Louis, Kansas City, and Northern Railroad, making him the youngest Railroad Superintendent in the world.

Van Horne was a gambler and he never hesitated to gamble on his own abilities. He gained a reputation for taking bankrupt railways and making them pay. Since broke railroads didn’t have a lot of money, but had a lot of useless stock lying around, he would negotiate as much of his pay in stocks as possible. He could later sell them for a fortune; once he turned the fortunes of the railway around that is.

One of his contemporaries, Colonel Allan Magee stated: "You always knew when Sir William Van Horne was approaching his office, even when he had just got off the elevator, was still coming down the corridor, but had not yet turned the corner. The sounds were unmistakable--the heavy tread, the wheeze, the shuffle, the snort, all warnings that a portentous figure was about to loom into view"

He had a reputation of being everywhere at once, and he took great pains to cultivate that reputation. At one point he learned that some of his workers were taking pillows from passenger compartments to make beds in the luggage compartment. He arranged for a telegram to meet them in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and all that telegram said was: “put those pillows back! Van Horne”

Even though he had his private car, he would often travel 2nd class as that was the best way to see the operation of your line the way your customers saw it. On one trip, some roughians were taunting a young African American woman with a child that wouldn’t stop crying. He sat quietly until one of the youths got up and slapped the child. Van Horne, who was a man of rather generous proportions launched to his feet, grabbed the youth by the scruff of the collar and said: “Leave that child alone!” When the youth responded with: “Who the hell are you?” Van Horned replied: “Never mind! Be careful how your conduct yourself or I shall throw your off the train”

By this time the tempers were flaring, and the testosterone was pumping, but the angry stare of Van Horne caused the youth to back down. Things were very tense until they got into the next station when the youth’s sidekicks hustled him off the train. Van Horne watched as they unloaded on the platform, all the while wondering where his conductors had been during this entire time.

Suddenly one of them appeared and ordered Van Horne to duck down: "Do you know who those men are?" he whispered..."That's Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers. Lie as you are or they may take it in their heads to shoot you as the train leaves."

The story of how the ‘super’ had bested the most notorious train robbers of all time helped to cement his reputation. It was stories like these that eventually brought him to the attention of the builders of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

When Van Horne was hired to take over the Canadian Pacific he was paid $15,000/year, making him the highest paid general manager in North America. As one author put it: -"Van Horne...took the CPR in his hands like a giant whip, cracked it once to announce his presence, cracked it again to loose the sloth and corruption and cracked it a third time simply because the 1st two had felt so good"

On Jan. 1 of 1882, Van Horne officially took over and appeared at the end of track in Winnipeg.

R.K. Kernighan wrote about Van Horne's first visit to end of track at Flat Creek, Manitoba--the headline: "Massacre at Flat Creek"

"...when manager Van Horne strikes the town there is a shaking of bones. He cometh like a blizzard and he goeth out like a lantern. He is the terror of Flat Krik. He shakes them up like an earthquake and they are as frightened of him as if he were old Nick himself.

Yet Van Horne is calm and harmless looking. So is a she mule, and so is a buzz saw. you didn't know their inwardness till you go up and get the feel of them. To see Van Horne get out of the car and go softly up the platform, you might think he was an evangelist on his way west to preach temperance to the Mounted Police.

But you are soon undeceived. If you are within hearing distance you will have more fun than you ever had in your life before. He calls the first official he comes to just to get his hand in and leads the next one by the car, and pointing eastward informs him that the walking is good as far as St. Paul. To see the rest hunt for their hides and commence scribbling for dear life is a terror.

Van Horne wants to know. He is that kind of man. He wants to know why this was not done and why this was done. If the answers are not satisfactory, there is a dark and bloody tragedy enacted right there. During each act, all the characters are killed off and in the last scene the heavy villain is filled with dynamite, struck with a hammer and by the time he has knocked a hole plumb through the sky, and the smoke has cleared away, Van Horne has discharged all the officials and hired them over again at lower figures."

Van Horne met with railroad officials in Winnipeg and boasted that he would lay 500 miles of track during the 1882 season. The room was filled with echoes of laughter, but nobody was laughing at the end of the year when he had bettered that claim by some 48 miles.

J.H.E. Secretan, the man in charge of the railroad surveys on the prairies complained that: “construction was moving so quickly that grating crews passed him during the night, grading ground that hadn't yet been surveyed”

With the efficiency with which Van Horne was laying track the railroad coffers were also quickly being drained.

As the railroad struggled to keep up with financing this breakneck pace of track laying, the 1883 season led off with a bang. They began grading in March and were laying track only a few weeks later. My the end the season they had reached the Kicking Horse Pass. During one 42 day period, they laid an average of 5.6 km of track per day. July 28 was a particularly good day with 10.3 km of track laid.

Van Horne was just the man the railroad needed, but as he pushed the crews, the finances of the railway were quickly falling into ruin. Eventually the railway would push through those financial challenges and complete the route.

William Cornelius Van Horne was the right man at the right time. We are just beginning to tell his story in this episode and I promise he will be an important part of future episodes. Suffice it to say that without his unrelenting leadership the CPR, the tie that binds this nation together coast to coast might never have been completed. Today you can see his likeness in front of the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. His statue stands in front of one of the railroad hotels that he had built in order to provide high class accommodation to passengers traveling his line, but that is a story for another day.

Next week I'll look at the completion of the line as there were still major challenges ahead of the railroaders before the last spike could be hammered.

And with that, it's time to wrap this episode up. I want to thank you for sharing your time with me and remember, if you're looking for a hiking or step-on guide, speaker or workshop facilitator, Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source when it comes to the mountain west. We will make sure that your western Canada memories last a lifetime.

If you'd like to connect with me directly, you can contact me through the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep041 or hit me up on twitter @wardcameron.

Welcome to episode 40 of the Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast. I'm your host, Ward Cameron, and I record this on August 16, 2017, we've finally received a bit of rain in the Canadian Rockies. Every drop is a gift at this point and hopefully it will reduce our explosive fire hazard and let us stop worrying about unplanned fires. This week, I take a look at the fire fears in Jasper as an increase in pine beetle killed pines has added vast amounts of fuel to an already tinder dry forest. I also continue the story of Major A.B. Rogers, the surveyor responsible for designing the route that the Canadian Pacific Railway follows as it traverses the Rocky and Selkirk Mountains of western Canada. Pine Beetles Wreak Havoc on Jasper's Forests I just returned from 4-days of hiking in Jasper National Park, and I was horrified by the damage being done by mountain pine beetle in the park. In a summer plagued by an almost endless drought, thousands of dead pine trees simply adds fuel to the potential for a huge fire in the park. Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) is a natural pest of the mountain forests of western Canada and the U.S. but historically they were only found in very low numbers in the park. The beetles create tunnels behind the bark in the layer of cells called the phloem, the thin layer of cells that transmit sugars within the plant. As they mine this layer, they may end up killing the tree, but they also carry with them a blue stain fungus. This fungus finishes the job by interrupting the ability of nutrients to move up and down the tree trunk. It also stains the wood blue, destroying any potential commercial value that it might have. If you have any doubt about the impact of a warming climate, just take a drive towards the town of Jasper. Warmer temperatures have allowed the beetles to explode in numbers and infest enormous numbers of lodgepole pine as well as western white pine. The lack of sufficiently cold winters is coupled with decades of fire suppression to provide plenty of food for them to take advantage of. The beetle is now expanding its range eastward out of the Rockies while also affecting trees at higher and higher elevation. As populations grow, the beetles disperse in one of two ways. In the first, dispersal within stands, they usually just travel a short distance, up to 30 metres or so, but when they move above the canopy into a long-distance dispersal, they can travel hundreds of kilometres. Long-distance dispersals are difficult to stop, so many of the management decisions are based on stopping dispersal within stands as the infestation spreads from tree to tree. Prior to fire suppression, many of the valleys in the mountains would have had far fewer trees as the flames would kiss the forests every 15 years or so. Today, we've created a massive monoculture of huge stands of lodgepole pine and the beetles are loving them. The simplest solution to this problem is to bring more fire, much more fire to the landscape to try to restore some of that balance. Back in episode 35, I talked about how fire is an integral part of the mountain landscape. The wildlife benefit from fire, the plant communities are refreshed and the mosaic of forest stands of different ages also helps to challenge insect pests. These regular fires, also help to protect communities like Jasper from the potential for large conflagrations like the one that the town is currently afraid could occur. Because of the huge amount of fuel that has built up over time, these fires may need to be tempered by some selective logging in areas that are too sensitive to burn. In some areas, the beetles have killed 70% of the lodgepole pine trees and the infection is spreading quickly. Experts believe that the number of infected trees could increase exponentially over the next few years, continually increasing the fire risk to communities like Jasper. Surprisingly, at a meeting in Jasper recently CAO Mark Fercho talked about his experience fighting the pine beetle when he worked in Prince George, B.C. He was quoted in the Fitzhugh newspaper as saying: “It’s the green trees that are full of beetles, not the red ones,” Each one of those live trees can infect a dozen or more additional trees. The area of infected trees has tripled since 2014 to some 21,500 ha. Back in the day, when we had proper winters, it was the cold that helped keep the beetles at bay. On average, mid-winter temperatures in the range of -37 C are sufficient to kill 50% of the beetle larvae. Earlier in the season, temperatures as low as -20 C can also be effective. Communities like Prince George were forced to cut down thousands of trees in order to reduce the fire hazard in and around the community. They followed that by a replanting program to help replace the lost trees. Standing dead trees, like those left behind by pine beetles are capable of sending sparks high into the sky allowing fires to spread. Natural fires are not quite as explosive simply because they lack the tinder dry, standing, dead wood. Jasper has a lot of work ahead of it, and the character of the place will also change. If Parks is able to combine increased prescribed burns along with selective clearing of standing dead trees, the future may not be as bleak as it seems at the moment. Across North America, fire experts are beginning to realize that the biggest challenges faced by most forests is NOT forest fires, but the lack of them. More and more fire ecologists are suggesting that fires be simply left to burn themselves out - at least those that don't threaten human lives or property. These same scientists suggest that if some of the money being spent on suppression were actually devoted to fireproofing homes in communities then these towns may actually be much safer than they currently are. With changing climates and increased beetle expansion, fires are coming. I applaud the work Parks Canada is doing in recognizing the growing challenges that our western forests are experiencing and, for Jasper, I hope that they have received some of the rainfall that finally soaked my hiking group over the past few days. I'm happy to walk in the rain, and even the snow that we had yesterday, if it helps to reduce the fire hazard that we have all been worried about in the mountain west. A.B. Roger's Line Last week I talked about Major A.B. Rogers and his quest to find a route through the Bow Valley and the Selkirk Mountains in B.C. Well, by the end of the 1882 season he'd found a route…or had he? Unfortunately for the Major, his unlikeable personality meant that he had a long line of rivals that considered him to be all bluster and no substance…and then there was the fact that he was…oh, what's that word? Oh, yah…American! Even back then, there was that inherent rivalry, although we would see more American involvement in this line before the last spike would be driven home. By the start of the 1883 season, nobody BUT Rogers had actually traversed his route through the Selkirks, the Kicking Horse Pass route was far from finished, and finally, there was the matter of some inconvenient tunnels to be corrected. All in all, it was just another frantic year of exploring, confirming, and changing the slowly coalescing line on a map that would, just a few years down the road, become the tie that binds this nation together. In addition, Rogers was acting as a pathfinder as opposed to a proper surveyor. The fact that he forced his way through some mad wilderness, that didn't mean a train could follow his trail of tobacco stains. Any potential route still needed axe men, transit men, and the levelers before a real route could be confirmed. It really needed more than that. It needed a sober investigation to prove that the route down the Bow River, through the Kicking Horse Pass, and across the Selkirks was indeed possible. Too much money and time were being invested in this commitment to risk any chance of error. Rogers had his detractors. Perhaps it was his gruff nature, or his penny-pinching way of economizing on supplies, leading many of his expeditions to retreat on the verge of starvation. One of those was Jon Egan, the western Superintendent of the railway. He was unwavering in his assessment of the route through the Selkirks: "I want to tell you positively that there is no pass in the Selkirk Range...It has to be crossed in the same manner as any other mountain. The track must go up one side and down the other." At the same time, the Governor General of Canada, the Marquis of Lorne, the husband of Princess Louise (after whom Lake Louise is named), also was concerned about the potentially steep gradients that might be involved, but he was more concerned with the time constraints. As he put it: "It would be better to have them than further delay, with the N. Pacific gaining Traffic." Any fan of TV shows like Hell on Wheels, coincidentally filmed along the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway, can understand the focus on time and money. This was the biggest investment this young nation had embarked upon and, quite frankly, we couldn't afford it. Time was money and every dollar spent was not easily replaced down the road. While some may have underestimated Rogers because of his American birth, there was one American that nobody dared underestimate, the General Manager of the line, William Cornelius Van Horne. Van Horne is the star of the show, and I'll devote an entire episode to sharing his story but at this point, he pondered: "we must take no chances on this season's work because any failure to reach the desired results and have the line ready to put under contract will be serious if not disastrous. I think it important that you should take an extra engineer, who is fully competent, to take charge of a party in case of sickness or failure of any of your regular men." Van Horne was also concerned about the fact that Rogers often pushed his workers in difficult conditions with few rations. He added: "It is also exceedingly important that an ample supply of food be provided and that the quantity be beyond a possibility of a doubt. "Very serious reports have been made to the Government and in other quarters about the inadequacy of the supplies provided last year and a good many other reports have been made tending to discredit our work. The officials in Ottawa, as a consequence look upon our reports with a good deal of suspicion... "We cannot expect to get good men for that work at as low or lower rates than are paid further East and we must feed the men properly in order to get good service. It will be cheaper for the Company to pay for twice the amount of supplies actually necessary than to lose a day's work for lack of any." To understand his caution, we need to remember that the ribbon of steel that was the Canadian Pacific was winding westward day after day after day, mile after mile, creeping ever closer to this question mark on the map. Every rail cost money. Every railroad tie cost money. The further west the line progressed, the more committed they were to a route for which some still harbored doubt. Despite this dispatch, Van Horne fully trusted Rogers, he just came from a very different point of view. He defended Rogers to a businessman in New York: "There has been a good deal of feeling among some of the Canadian Engineers particularly those who have been accustomed to the Government Service against Major Rogers, partly from natural jealousy of one who is looked upon as an outsider, partly from his lively treatment of those whom he looks upon as shirkers or 'tender feet' and partly from his somewhat peculiar methods of securing economy, but more that all perhaps from his having succeeded, as is supposed, in doing what was unsuccessfully attempted by the Gov't Engineers, namely, in getting through the Rocky and Selkirk Mountains by a direct line. "I believe him to be capable and I know him to be thoroughly honest. He is something of an enthusiast and is disposed to undertake himself and put upon his men more severe duties than most engineers are accustomed to and I have reason to believe that in his anxiety to economize in every possible way he has gone too far in some cases and that a good deal of unnecessary discomfort, although no suffering, has resulted from it." The route was to be scrutinized from east to west, beginning with the area closest to the westward moving rails, the Bow Valley, beginning at Fort Calgary and extending westward. Charles Shaw was asked by James Ross, the western division manager to look at Rogers line covering the first 60 miles to the west of Calgary. He was unimpressed. He stated: "It's a nightmare to me and I'm afraid it will hold us back a year." Shaw felt he could improve on the line when Roger's who was present at the time leaped to his feet and blurted: "That's the best line that can be got through the country. Who in hell are you, anyway?" Undeterred, Shaw claimed that if he could not only find a better line, but: "If I don't save at least half a million dollars over the estimated cost of construction, I won't ask for pay for my season's work." There was another tunnel to the west, around a mountain in Banff. Van Horne knew it would delay work so Van Horne demanded: "Look at that," the general manager exclaimed. "Some infernal idiot has put a tunnel in there. I want you to go up and take it out." He was talking to his locating engineer J.H.A. Secretan, never a fan of Rogers, yet Secretan responded: "Mr. Van Horne, those mountains are in the way, and the rivers don't all run right for us. While we are at it we might as well fix them, too" In the end, Roger's nemesis Shaw, found a way to just go around the mountain which still bears the name 'Tunnel Mountain" in Banff although the tunnel was never actually built. Shaw was very critical for Rogers because he missed this option. He stated: "Roger's location here was the most extraordinary blunder I have ever known in the way of engineering" To make matters worse, Shaw was now sent to examine Rogers route through the Selkirks. This was easier said than done. To get to the Selkirks, you first needed to cross the Kicking Horse…and it held its own special brand of challenges. One did not just stroll, down the Kicking Horse, no more than Albert Rogers strolled, er crawled up. To traverse the Kicking Horse, you had to survive the Golden Staircase. Essentially, you had to survive a two-foot wide trail carved into the cliffs several hundred feet above the raging waters of the Kicking Horse River. The surveyors that plied these mountains were some of the toughest men these mountains have ever seen, but some were so terrified by the Golden Staircase that they would literally shut their eyes and hold on to the tail of their horse for guidance. As Shaw descended, he encountered a packer with a single horse ascending the staircase while he had an entire packtrain. As they mentally went through the arithmetic, one horse, several horses, one horse, several horses. In the end, they had no other option than to push the one horse off the cliff to its death. You simply can't turn a horse around on a 24 inch ledge. To attempt it risked spooking the entire pack train and risking much more dire consequences. So Shaw gets to the bottom and he bumps into the old man. I know, what are the odds. An entire mountain range and…oops, what brings you here. Rogers, in his usual congenial manner offered up a pleasant greeting that went something like: "Who the hell are you, and where the hell do you think you're going?" Thankfully, Shaw was a more reasonable man…or maybe not. The exchange continued. "It's none of your damned business to either question. Who the hell are you, anyway?" "I am Major Rogers." "My name is Shaw. I've been sent by Van Horne to examine and report on the pass through the Selkirks." That was a name that Rogers knew. Rogers was not a man to forgive a slight and he virtually exploded: "You're the…Prairie Gopher that has come into the mountains and ruined my reputation as an Engineer" Shaw was a big man, a much bigger man than Rogers and so he wasted no time jumping off his horse and grabbed Rogers by the throat, shaking him and threatening? "Another word out of you and I'll throw you in the river and drown you" Rogers, not a big fan of water since his incident in Bath Creek in last week's episode, decided to back down. He claimed that he had been let down by an engineer and agreed to show him the route through the Selkirks. Rogers dragged Shaw up the Beaver River to the divide and then down to the Illecillewaet River. Shaw constantly criticized the route. At every turn, Shaw was there to dismiss Rogers and demean his progress. Simple things could add fuel to the fire…even former fires. As the story goes, Rogers gestured to the great Illecillewaet Glacier and exclaimed: "Shaw, I was the first white man to ever set eyes on this pass and this panorama." Shortly after this happened, Shaw found the remains of a campfire along with some rotted tent poles and asked Rogers where they had come from. The hatred continued in the exchange. Rogers replied: "How strange! I never noticed those things before. I wonder who could have camped here." To which Shaw countered: "These things were left here years ago by Moberly when he found this pass!" This was a world of egos and it usually seemed that one surveyor could never praise commend or support the work of another. Rogers was an easy man to hate and it brought him great grief. Stories like this sowed doubt in the Canadian Pacific and this pass had to be carefully scrutinized before the line could continue. After Shaw departed Rogers, heading eastward towards the Kicking Horse Pass, they encountered a second party dispatched to check up on Roger's route, led by none other than Sandford Fleming himself. Fleming had been dispatched by George Stephen, one of the two main financiers of the railroad; and if Stephen suggested an outing, you kitted up and headed for the hills. Shaw enjoyed telling Fleming that the route was impassable and that Rogers was a charlatan. As it turned out, Fleming ignored most of Shaw's stories because he had just descended the Kicking Horse and it had been the most horrifying experience of his many years in the wilderness. Nothing could possibly be worse…or could it? Descending the 'golden staircase, he later stated that he could not look down. If you did: "gives one an uncontrollable dizziness, to make the head swim and the view unsteady, even with men of tried nerve. I do not think that I can ever forget that terrible walk; it was the greatest trial I ever experienced." It was also a scorching hot summer, much like this one, and he added: "I, myself, felt as if I had been dragged through a brook, for I was without a dry shred on me," Now let's back this up a little. All this happened before they met Rogers. As they continued on, Shaw's allegations faded and they began to recover from the terror of the Kicking Horse Pass. After connecting with Rogers, he dragged them up to the pass and Fleming, happy to see a way over the ramparts pulled out a box of cigars and toasted Rogers accomplishments and proposed that a Canadian Alpine Club be formed. Fleming was immediately voted in as president. The concept did not really take shape though until 1906 when former railroad surveyor A.O. Wheeler and reporter Elizabeth Parker took this spark and created the Alpine Club of Canada on March 27, 1906. Of course, this is a story for another episode. Things took a turn for the worse when they began the descent down the western side, into the dense interior rainforest of the Columbia Mountains. Along with Fleming was his former Minister George Grant and the experience was so harrowing that Grant would never return to such a wilderness again. As he described it: "It rained almost every day. Every night the thunder rattled over the hills with terrific reverberations, and fierce flashes lit up weirdly [sic] tall trees covered with wreaths of moss, and the forms of tired men sleeping by smoldering camp fires." In the following 5 days, they travelled only 27 km. How bad could it be? According to Grant, they pushed their way: "through acres of densest underbrush where you cannot see a yard ahead, wading through swamps and beaver dams, getting scratched from eyes to ankles with prickly thorns, scaling precipices, falling over moss- covered rocks into pitfalls, your packs almost strangling you, losing the rest of the party while you halt to feel all over whether any bones are broken, and then experiencing in your inmost soul the unutterable loneliness of savage mountains." Essentially, a good time was had by all. In this time of catered tourism with 5 million visitors a year swarming over routes that caused terror, hardship, privation, and death. It's important at times to stop, step back and wonder…if these forbearers could see what we have done with their legacy what would they think? As they see the landscape trampled and the wildlife sequestered, what would people like Rogers and Fleming say? They saw the landscape in its rawest form when even the idea of a national railway was simply a fanciful idea. Today, we don't have room for a single grizzly. We think it's more important for our dog to pee than it is for black and grizzly bears to be able to feed on the single food that allows them to exist on the landscape. Rogers was a miserable curmudgeon. He loved neither man nor beast, but he loved one thing…wilderness. As a guide, I spend a great deal of time relating the stories of those that came before. At the same time, I've written three books on the trails of western Canada and designed a 7-day mountain bike race that both Bike Magazine and Mountain Bike Magazine called 'North America's Toughest Race'. This meant that I had to explore thousands of kilometres alone in the wilderness. During this time, I often reflected on the experiences of these explorers and pioneers…the men that came before. To them, the wilderness was not something to be appreciated, it was something to be conquered…or was it? People often ask me about these men. I reply that" "Lots of people want to know what these men thought when they tore through that last tangle of wilderness and encountered an emerald green lake that had a glacier capped peak at the far end. To the left was a sheer vertical wall, and to the right was a matching vertical wall. What did they really think? Damn, another dead end!" These mountains were not something to be appreciated, they were something to be survived. Yet today, we see them with an eye of entitlement. The journals of these explorers describe a landscape of hardship and terror, but also one full of wonder and opportunity. As I look at the decisions being made just on local levels when it comes to preserving these landscapes and the ecosystems and animals that call them home. I fear that I may be one of the storytellers writing the last chapter… chroniclers of the end of our local wilderness and the animals that define it. And with that said, it's time to wrap this episode up. I want to thank you for sharing your time with me and if you like the stories, please share the episodes with your friends. Stories are always best when shared. At Ward Cameron Enterprises, we sell wow! As a tour operator for the last 30 years, we can make sure your visit to the mountain west is one that you'll never forget. We specialize in hiking and step-on guides as well as speaking programs, nature and culture workshops and guide training. Drop us a line at info@wardcameron.com if you'd like to book your mountain experience. Today I took clients up to Mirror Lake and along the Highline Trail in Lake Louise. It's a classic trail that offers the option to crest the Big Beehive and offer panoramic views for miles. I'll post a picture in the show notes at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep040.

The Bears Bite Back I hate it when the inevitable happens! We've been talking for weeks about people entering closed areas during the most critical time of the year for black and grizzly bears to put on fat for the winter months. I've witnessed numerous people violating the closures and have called for a wildlife ambassador program for Canmore, similar in some ways to the Wildlife Guardians program that has been pioneered by Banff National Park. If you might be interested in getting involved in such a program, drop me a line at info@wardcameron.com or leave a comment in the show notes for this episode. This week, this all came to a head. This week an 18 year old Canmore woman decided to violate the closure in order to take her dog for a walk. Keep in mind that any time there is a close encounter with a bear and you have a dog, there is a chance that the encounter will escalate simply because a snarling dog can be perceived as a threat by a bear. She was walking the trail that runs beside the Rundle Forebay when the attack occurred. She met what is believed to have been a black bear, and the bear made contact resulting in some superficial injuries. She was treated at hospital and released…for now! For the sake of a walk to let her dog pee, she now faces both enormous fines and jail time. Her family and friends dispute the contention that she was in a closed area, stating that it was an open area connecting the Highline far connector along the reservoir. Alberta Environment and Parks insist however she was indeed in a closed area. The entire Rundle Forebay area is closed and it is well publicized within the local area. According to a story in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Sherene Kaw, assistant director of communications for Alberta Justice and the Solicitor General indicated that the woman did NOT have bear spray and that, while the dog was on leash, she released the leash when the attack occurred. While it can't be definitively determined if the bear was a black or grizzly, no grizzlies were known to be feeding in the area, at least based upon trail camera evidence. This incident really showcases the need for a Wildlife Ambassador program in Canmore. In most years, it may only last for 6-8 weeks. The buffaloberries only last until the first frost, and then they all fall from the bush. Programs like this must operate in conjunction with programs focused on reducing attractants within the townsite. In 2015, when the buffaloberry crop failed, the town saw a huge influx of bears attracted to our flowering fruit trees. Since then, Banff, Jasper and Canmore have developed various programs designed to help reduce the problem. Buffaloberries are no different than any other crop. They need the right conditions at the right time, and if we don't get them, we get a failure in the crop. This year and last were bumper crops, but 2015 was an utter failure. This young woman is being publicly vilified. Her identity is currently being protected and I support that. The tendency of internet vigilantism has no role in this story. Her life is changing by the moment. It is NOT confirmed at this point, whether she is guilty, but let's set that aside for the moment. I truly believe that her point of view has shifted dramatically in the last 48 hours. Instead of vilifiying her, why not bring her into the conversation? It's easy to pour on hate but let's put this into perspective. She's a kid who, as the story currently stands, did a dumb thing. I personally would like to spend some time simply talking with her to understand her point of view at the time, and how it may have changed since that encounter. Protecting corridors is not going well. Social media is composed of adversarial groups unable to see any other viewpoint. I understand that completely. I find it difficult to comprehend the decisions that many people make when their actions do not match their stated beliefs. So let's talk. If found guilty, she faces the potential for large fines and even jail time. The fact that the spokesman for the Alberta government is in the Solicitor General's office indicates that there may be plans to make an example of her in the courts. So many of us that are expelling comments on social media are, well how do I say it, more experienced. How do we reach that younger generation which is far more likely to violate closures simply from a feeling of invincibility and entitlement? Maybe we just talk to them. I would love to talk with you. Please reach out. If you know her, please have her contact me. I will protect your privacy 100% because I think you have something to add to the conversation. Let's put away the pitchforks and look at this as another chance to build a bridge to a community that is an important part of the conversation. Just sayin' And if we're keeping score, this is not a new story. A colleague of mine that is interested in helping coordinate the wildlife guardian program pointed me to a Calgary Sun article from 2014 that looked into the same issue in Canmore. In this story, there was an aggressive bear was known to be in the area. It had, in a similar situation, had a minor infraction where it bit the finger of a Danish tourist. It was a minor encounter, but bears sell newspapers and the story was all over the media and airwaves. Just like this year, yellow flagging tape and signs indicated that the same areas were closed to access. And in case you're wondering, the same closures will happen next year, and the next, and the next. However in this case, Fish and Wildlife officers placed automated cameras at the main access points to the closed area. What did they find? In just 8 days they photographed some 60 people completely ignoring the closure and entering the restricted area. In one case, an entire family with Mom, Dad, one kid on a bike and a burley in tow went under the flagging tape closing a trail and continued on their merry way. This is the world we live in. it's time we embrace the conversation, create a visible wildlife guardian program, provide eyes and provide ears for Conservation Officers. We can help remove the potential for people to 'anonymously' enter closed areas. Guardians would be there for education and outreach. The goal would be to help Parks keep both people AND bears safe. We may find other areas where we can assist in keeping people and wildlife safe down the road. I'm a believer in dialogue and collaboration. I don't know how this will eventually manifest itself, but I'm willing to do what I can do help reduce the challenges we are experiencing this year in the future. Maybe Bear 148 will be one of the last to be removed from the landscape on our watch. Please remember, any time that Parks has to make a decision like the one they did with 148, it's a gut wrenching one. Nothing moves forward without their help and support. Let's build bridges towards viable corridors. Next up…Hells Bells Rogers. Hells Bells Rogers Last week I talked about railroad surveyor Walter Moberly. He was a pivotal figure in the early days of the Canadian Pacific construction. Another surveyor of note was American Major A.B. Rogers. Railroad surveyors were an independently minded lot. Each would select one route for the railroad - their route - and they would defend that to the death. "Nobody could possibly have a better route than the one I selected" However there were a few things that the surveyors agreed upon. One was that the Selkirk Mountains in the interior of British Columbia were impossible to put a train through. Even Walter Moberly planned to go around the Selkirks rather than through them. Well clearly we needed to find someone with an open mind - and we found that in Major A.B. Rogers. Rogers had earned his reputation as an Indian fighter during a Sioux uprising in 1862 during which he rose to the rank of Major. Later, while working as a surveyor for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, he earned a reputation as a man that could find the best route for a new rail line. He was not a well-loved man. He was described by the CPR's locating engineer, J.H.E. Secretan as: "A short, sharp, snappy little chap with long Dundreary whiskers. He was a master of picturesque profanity, who continually chewed tobacco and was an artist of expectoration. He wore overalls with pockets behind, and had a plug of tobacco in one pocket and a sea biscuit in the other, which was his idea of a season's provisions for an engineer." He also had a reputation for heading out a little short on supplies, if not faculties, and many of his expeditions returned on the verge of starvation. At one point, the general manager of the railroad, William Cornelius Van Horne tried to urge him to bring more supplies. The exchange apparently went as follows: Van Horne stated: "Look here, Major, I hear your men won't stay with you, they say you starve them." The Major replied with: "Tain't so, Van." Van Horne continued: "Well, I'm told you feed 'em on soup made out of hot water flavoured with old ham canvas covers." To this, Rogers replied: "Tain't so, Van. I didn't never have no hams!" James Jerome Hill, more well known as the builder of the Great Northern Railroad in the U.S. was also a part of the Canadian Pacific project and he hired Rogers to find a shorter route between Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and Savona's Ferry in British Columbia. The only way to do that would be to go straight through the impenetrable Selkirks as well as through the southern Rockies. While the Rockies had seen more exploration both as part of the Railroad project, but also earlier as part of the fur trade, Rogers would need to link one of these passes with a route through the Selkirks. Jim Hill offered Rogers a bonus of $5,000 and his name on the pass if he could find a route through the Selkirks. Rogers scoured the journals of explorers and surveyors like Walter Moberly to look for some hint of where he might begin to explore for a potential pass. In Moberly's journal, it looked like there might be a possibility by following the Illecillewaet River. Rogers took note of a particular passage in Moberly's journal from 1865: "Friday, July 13th--Rained hard most of the day. Perry returned from his trip up the east fork of the Ille-cille-waut River. He did not reach the divide, but reported a low, wide valley as far as he went. His exploration has not settled the point whether it would be possible to get through the mountains by this valley but I fear not. He ought to have got on the divide, and his failure is a great disappointment to me. He reports a most difficult country to travel through, owing to fallen timber and underbrush of very thick growth..." In the spring of 1881, the Major, along with his favourite nephew Albert Rogers, and 10 Indians headed out towards the Selkirks. While Albert was his given name, the Major generally just referred to him as that Damn Little Cuss. It took them 22 days to reach Kamloops, and from there, the 'Gold Ranges', today known as the Monashees also had to be crossed before they even arrived at the start of the Selkirks. That ate up another 14 days. After spending another 22 days on a raft on the Columbia River, they finally reached the mouth of the Illecillewaet River where the real work began. Each man hoisted a 45-kg pack and they slowly tried to make their way upwards. They went through mile after mile of the most horrific plant to ever grace the planet Earth - Devil's club. If you've never had the pleasure of Devil's club, imagine a six to seven foot woody shrub with huge maple-style leaves and everything from the leaves to the trunk is armed with razor sharp thorns that can easily tear through a pair of canvas pants. So terrible was Devil's club that entire stretches of the railroad were rerouted to go around the worst patches. You couldn't even hack through with a machete. As they made their way through swamp and up vertical rock faces. Albert Rogers later stated that: "many a time I wished myself dead," and added that "the Indians were sicker then we, a good deal." The going never got easier. On numerous occassions, they had to cross bridges of snow suspeded 50 metres above the foaming water of the Illecillewaet River. By this time, their supplies were also beginning to run low, and the cold nights sent a chill right through their thin blankets. They clung to the lower slopes of a mountain that would later be named Mount Sir Donald after Donald Smith, one of the two chief financiers of the railway. "Being gaunt as greyhounds, with lungs and muscles of the best, we soon reached the timber-line, where the climbing became very difficult. We crawled along the ledges, getting toe-hold here and a finger hold there, keeping in the shade as much as possible and kicking toe-holes in the snow crust. When several hundred feet above the timber line, we followed a narrow ledge around a point that was exposed to the sun. (Here four Indians fell over the ledge.) It was in the evening when we reached the summit, very much exhausted. Crawling along this ridge, we came to a small ledge protected from the wind by a great perpendicular rock. Here we decided to wait until the crust again formed on the snow and the morning light enabled us to travel. At ten o'clock, it was still twilight, on the peaks, but the valleys below were filled with the deepest gloom. We wrapped ourselves in our blankets and nibbled at our dry meat and bannock, stamping our feet in the snow to keep them from freezing, and taking turns whipping each other with our pack straps to keep up circulation." Now doesn't that sound like a good time? In the end, they found a stream which split into two channels, with one branch heading west and the other east. It looked like they might have found a pass through the Selkirks, but a shortage of supplies once again forced them to retreat without exploring the western side of the divide. Rogers also realized that the survey crews were rapidly approaching the Bow River valley and he had still not explored the Kicking Horse Pass yet. One of the other things that most of the surveyors agreed upon was that the Bow River valley was the worst possible route to put a train. Not only did it force the line to traverse the Selkirks, but it also meant that they had to go through a horrible pass to the west of present-day Lake Louise, Alberta called the Kicking Horse. Despite these difficulties, this was the route finally chosen and that's a decision we've dissected for more than a century. The long and short of it was that this was the shortest route surveyed and the promoters hoped it would be the cheapest, but that turned out to be completely wrong. We also have to remember that this was a sovereign tool and this route was also the most southerly. They hoped that it would be far enough south to discourage American spur lines from moving into what was Canadian territory. At least in this case it proved true. With the rush towards the Kicking Horse Pass, Rogers party rerouted towards the Bow River valley. Now Rogers, was more of a pathfinder at this point and most of the proper surveyors, the men with the actual instruments necessary to lay out the line, were waiting at about the point visitors to the Rockies would enter the mountains as they drove west from Calgary. The Major came from the south and west and met up with them, and he sent that Damn Little Cuss to come up the Kicking Horse River from the west. He didn't think twice about sending Albert, a 21-year old greenhorn that had never before even been to the Rockies to attempt a task that had never before been accomplished by a non-native. Even the local natives avoided the dreary valley of the Kicking Horse because there was very little in the way of game to hunt - and therefore no real reason to hang about. Needless to say, Albert never showed. The Major paced like a caged animal. He said: "If anything happens to that Damn Little Cuss, I'll never show my face in St. Paul again." He sent out search parties in all directions with orders to fire a volley of shots in the air when they found him. One of those search parties descended the Kicking Horse Pass from the west and finally, they stumbled upon Albert Rogers…literally. Barely moving, and on the verge of starvation, his progress had slowed to a crawl. The only thing he had eaten in the previous 2 days was a porcupine that he had clubbed to death and picked clean right down to the quills. They picked up this pitiful sight, put him on a horse, made their way to the summit of the pass and fired a volley of shots in the air. Apparently the Major road in on his big white horse and as Wilson later recalled: "He plainly choked with emotion, then, as his face hardened again he took an extra-vicious tobacco juice shot at the nearest tree and almost snarled...'Well, you did get here did you, you damn little cuss?' There followed a second juice eruption and then, as he swung on his heel, the Major shot back over his shoulder; 'You're alright, are you, you damn little cuss?'" And with that Albert's face apparently exploded into a grin. He knew the old man better than anyone else and knew that he could never let his real emotions be seen. But the say the double-speed eruptions of tobacco juice from between his big sideburns said more about his emotional state than any words ever could have and nothing more was ever said about the matter. One of the men waiting for the Major was a young punk named Tom Wilson. Wilson was one of those characters that seemed to have the incredible knack of timing. He had the ability to be in the right places at the right time in history. He had begun his career as a Northwest Mounted Policeman and had joined the great march west of the mounties in 1875. He then resigned to join the first survey crews through the Rockies. He described Rogers as he arrived to meet the survey party: "His condition--dirty doesn't begin to describe it. His voluminous sideburns waved like flags in a breeze; his piercing eyes seemed to look and see through everything at once...Every few moments a stream of tobacco juice erupted from between the side-burns. I'll bet there were not many trees alongside the trail that had escaped that deadly tobacco juice aim." Rogers was a typical workaholic, and always had to accomplish more in a day then was practical. The season was getting late and so he pushed the survey crews to move faster. He then declared that he was going to ride out ahead to explore the route and asked for a volunteer. As Wilson again put it: "every man present had learned, in three days, to hate the Major with real hatred. He had no mercy on horses or men--he had none on himself. The labourers hated him for the way he drove them and the packers for that and the way he abused the horses--never gave their needs a thought." Wilson, in the end, agreed to accompany him. Eventually, they came to a river which was swollen and muddy with the spring runoff. Generally, during the summer season, river levels can rise dramatically during the daytime due to the increased pace of snowmelt during the sunny days. At night the water levels usually dropped as the cooler evening reduced the rate of melt. Tom suggested they wait for morning to cross and the old man laughed at him: "Afraid of it are you? Want the old man to show you how to ford it?" The Major spurred his horse into the river at which point the horse was pulled out from under him and he disappeared beneath the raging water. All Tom could do was grab a branch, stick it in the water where the old man had disappeared, go fishing and hope for the best. He was rewarded with a welcome tug and when the Major pulled himself onto the shoreline, all he could say was: "Blue Jesus! Light a fire and then get that damned horse. Blue Jesus, it's cold!" From that point on, when the river would be dirty and muddy with the spring runoff, the surveyors would joke that it was dirty because the old man must be having another bath. In fact to this day it's still known as Bath Creek on maps. Wilson left the survey early this year, swearing never to come back to these God forsaken hills. Rogers laughed at him saying: "You may think you're not coming back but you'll be here next year and I'll be looking for you," All that winter, Tom tried to fight something that just seemed to be tugging at him. Have you ever noticed how sometimes you choose life, and sometimes life chooses you. Before Tom knew what had happened, he found himself back in Fort Benton signing up for one more year on the survey. Tom was hired to pack supplies from present-day Canmore, to the summit of the Kicking Horse Pass. In August of that year, Tom was camped near to present-day village of Lake Louise. He had been hearing the sound of thunder under a clear blue sky. When he met some Stoney Natives he asked them what the sound was: On individual by the name of Gold-seeker told him that it was avalanches off of Snow Mountain high above the Lake of Little Fishes. The next day Tom had the native take him up to the lake and as he became the first non-native to lay eyes on what we now call Lake Louise, he wrote in his journal: "As God is my judge, I never in all my explorations saw such a matchless scene." Tom called the lake Emerald Lake because of its beautiful colour, but the railroad promptly changed the name to Lake Louise after Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria. This also gives you an idea of where Alberta takes its name as well. She was married to the Governor General of Canada. The very next day, Tom bumped into the Major for the very first time that year and the old man let out a guffaw: "Blue Jesus! I knew you'd be back. I knew you'd be back. You'll never leave these mountains again as long as you live. They've got you now." He was right. Tom was on hand for the hammering of the last spike. You can see his stetson and mustache peering above the crowd from the back in the most iconic photograph of the event. He then went on to start the first guiding operation in the Canadian Rockies and gave many of the areas other enduring guides their start. He lived into the 1930s and is buried in the little cemetery in the town of Banff. Also this summer, Rogers route through the Selkirks was confirmed, and for breaching the final barrier for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he received his bonus of $5,000. He never cashed the cheque. When the general manager of the railroad, William Cornelius Van Horne cornered him to find out why he hadn't cashed it, he blurted out: "What! Cash the cheque? I wouldn't take a hundred thousand dollars for it. It is framed and hangs in my brother's house in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it. I'm not in this for the money." Rogers more than most, really embodied what drove these surveyors. It was not money, it was immortality, and he got that in the naming of Rogers Pass. Next week, I'll look at the challenges in confirming his route as well as the difficulties that the Kicking Horse Pass would present to the railroad.

Ode to Grizzly 148 This has been a heartbreaking week as bear 148, the beloved daughter of Banff's most famous bear 66, was translocated far away from her home territory of Banff and Canmore all the way north to Kakwa Provincial Park, located to the west of Grand Cache. It was a difficult decision for officials with Alberta Environment and Parks, but 148 was getting increasingly closer to people and in the end they felt that the risk of an escalation in behaviour left them with few options other than to move her out of the area. This is the second time she has been moved. Earlier in July she was captured and returned to an area west of the Town of Banff but she returned to Canmore to feed on buffaloberries. In past episodes, I've talked at length about the importance of buffaloberries to bears and how they will always be attracted to low elevation valleys in order to take advantage of these critical calories. One message that doesn't seem to be getting out is that the bears have little choice but to be in communities like Canmore and Banff at this time of year. Buffaloberries need sunlight to grow. Sunlight requires openings in the forest canopy, and this is provided by developers cutting down trees, urban parks, trails and roads…all things that are prevalent in townsites. Essentially, townsites create great conditions for buffaloberry to thrive, even more so than the undeveloped areas between Canmore and Banff where openings are created more sparingly by falling trees or old fires. When you put it all together, there will likely be more berries in Canmore than there will be in an undeveloped forest area. Powerline right of ways become habitat patches for a few months of the year. Every new trail we build allows sunlight to percolate down to the forest floor and creates good conditions for buffaloberries to grow. The story of buffaloberries is about much more than corridors. Wildlife movement corridors are about allowing animals connectivity with adjacent patches of good habitat. Animals will often use the corridors to simply traverse between places like Banff and Kananaskis, through Canmore. However at this time of year, corridors become habitat patches as the openings create buffaloberry buffets. Bears are attracted from many miles to take advantage of these critical foods. It's for this reason that the story of 148 is particularly poignant. She was the canary in the coal mine. If we couldn't create a situation where she could take advantage of the berry crop, then what is the hope for the other 7 or 8 bears currently feeding in the valley? Closures are an important strategy at this time of year, but a closure that is ignored is no closure. If people violating closures get injured by bears, it's always the bears that pay the ultimate price. We need to think beyond 148. Her chances of survival are very slim, but how many other bears do we need to lose in a similar fashion. If we don't create a workable solution then so much of our current battles for corridors will be for nothing. Alberta Parks simply doesn't have the resources to constantly patrol the many entrance and exit points on some of these closures - and neither does Parks Canada. I was impressed to hear about Canmore Bylaw Officers charging people trying to shortcut between the Peaks of Grassi and Quarry Lake over the weekend as well. Maybe it's time for a new approach. I know from my posts on the Bow Valley Community Connection Facebook page that we have a very engaged local population. Maybe we need to set up volunteer systems where people are trained in bear safety and ecology who simply wait at key entry points to try to encourage people to obey the closures. This could NOT be a vigilante force. It would a group of educators, helping people to understand the importance of the closures and how important it is that the bears are allowed to feed unimpeded during the brief berry season. This would help keep both people and bears safe. The volunteers could coordinate with the various enforcement agencies, but their role would simply be one of awareness. Recent studies on wildlife corridors showed astounding use by people and dogs, both on and off leash. The study showed that in the designated wildlife corridors around Canmore, people accounted for 94% of traffic. Of that, 56% of the incidents included people with dogs - and 60% of the dogs were off leash! We need to have a visible presence during closures and maybe a Friends of Wildlife patrol could work similarly to the Wildlife Guardians in the national park that patrol bear jams and try to educate visitors on safe ways to view wildlife responsibly. They also set up stations at popular viewpoints with the sole purpose of providing education and outreach. Our wildlife patrol could fulfil a similar role, educating and informing, while also adding additional sets of eyes to help enforcement officials when the need arises. Next up. Walter Moberly's western surveys The Canadian Pacific Railway Part 2 - Walter Moberly I can't tell the story of the building of the Railway without mentioning Walter Moberly. He was a pivotal personality in the history of British Columbia and a huge proponent of a transcontinental railway. Born in Oxfordshire, England in 1832, his family moved to Upper Canada when he was just 2 years old. As he grew into a man, he became a logger and worked several timber holdings in the Muskoka area before he headed west to British Columbia. He began to do some survey work for the community of New Westminster, and between 1961 and 64 he worked on a number of road building projects. He helped Edgar Dewdney build the Dewdney trail from Hope to the Okanagan. He also built a section of the road to the Caribou gold fields. This experience led him to be named the Assistant Surveyor General of British Columbia in 1865, and he was assigned to search for new travel routes through the mountains landscape of the province. It was this year that Moberly made his most important discovery - Eagle Pass which enabled him to travel through the Gold Range from Shuswap Lake in the Okanagan to join the Columbia River at Revelstoke. As Moberly told the story of the discovery, he shot an arrow at an eagle nest and watched the eagle as it flew up the valley. Since the birds were unlikely to fly up a valley blocked by mountains, he decided to follow them and discovered Eagle Pass. At this time, there was NO talk about a transcontinental railway, but Moberly always believed that it as an unavoidable eventuality. He claimed to have blazed a tree and carved "This is the Pass of the Overland Railway". Eventually, some 20 years later, the railroad would follow this portion of his imagined route. It didn't take Moberly long to hear about the agreement to build the railway in 1972 and so he set about to position himself as just the man to get the job done. By coincidence, as a child, he had gone to school with a girl named Susan Agnes Bernard. She was now the wife of Prime Minister John A Macdonald, and so he managed to talk his way into a dinner invitation with them at their home in Ottawa. Never a shy man, Moberly told Macdonald that he knew exactly where the train should go and that he was the man to do it. In fact he could begin construction within 6 weeks of his return to British Columbia. The boast came with a caveat: "I don't know how many millions you have, but it is going to cost you money to get through those canyons" Moberly had an ego bigger than the mountains and there was only one possible route - his route! He returned to B.C. as District Engineer in charge of the region between Shuswap Lake and the foothills of the Rockies. Moberly was as tough as nails and one of the best axemen in the country, but it would take more than muscles and axes to crack the mountain barrier. Between Shuswap Lake and the foothills sat the impenetrable Selkirk Mountains. Even the Columbia River couldn't penetrate these ramparts. It's forced to flow north for 200 hundred kilometres to go around the northern extent of the Selkirks before turning south towards the U.S. If the mightiest river on the Pacific couldn't crack the mountain rampart, than how could the railway? In fact, Moberly had this all figured out as well. He planned on going around the Selkirks by crossing an old fur trader route over Howse Pass. This would take it through Eagle Pass, around the Selkirks to the north and enter Alberta to the west of the current day Saskatchewan River Crossing and David Thompson Highway. Moberly spent the next 8 months exploring the territory of his proposed line. He also explored the Selkirks to see if there was any possible pass through. After being almost buried by an avalanche, he spent New Year's day of 1872 all alone in a trappers cabin. He wrote in his diary: "I think it...one of the most wretched and dreary places I ever saw...this was the most wretched New Year's Day I ever spent." but as for the Selkirks he continued "I found there was not any practicable pass through the Selkirk Range." He reported his finding to the Chief Surveyor Sandford Fleming. Now did I mention that he had an ego? The thought that Fleming would not agree with his routing never crossed his mind and so he decided to start the work of surveying the Howse Pass right away. After all, better to apologize than ask permission…right? Fleming did agree to a quick trial line through the pass, but Moberly planned for a detailed location survey. He instantly took Fleming's approval to mean that his route was confirmed. As he put it, he read the telegram: "which led me to infer that the line I had taken so many years to explore and discover, and which I was quite confident would be the best to adopt for the proposed transcontinental railroad, would be adopted" After hiring men, hiring pack trains and buying thousands of dollars on supplies, much of which had already been dispatched to places like Eagle Pass, he received a telegram from Fleming telling him that the Yellowhead Pass to the west of Jasper had been chosen instead of Howse Pass. The telegram arrived just 4 hours before his party headed into the wilderness. He was ordered to head north through the Athabasca Pass and to conduct a survey of the Yellowhead Pass, which is the route the Canadian National Railway takes today. Moberly was crushed and actually tried to buy his way out of his contracts, but alas, it was too late. Moberly met with Fleming in the Yellowhead and Fleming was extremely displeased with his excessive spending. Moberly thought Fleming unpatriotic for not using his route. Clearly these two men were not going to get along. Before long, Fleming sent a message taking control of the survey away from Moberly and giving it to someone else. Moberly simply ignored the message and continued working. As he put it: "the instructions conveyed in the letter were too childish to be followed" He would obey orders: "when I could see they were sensible but not otherwise...I went on the survey for business, not to be made a fool of" When Marcus Smith was officially placed in charge of the British Columbia surveys, Moberly left the service. Ironically, some 20 years later, the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway would be hammered in Eagle Pass, right where he predicted so many years ago. One of the great things about much of our western history is that the first-hand journals of many explorers have survived to help keep their stories alive. But we also have to keep in mind that many of these journals were written for their boss. They weren't going to enter: "I saw a grizzly bear and wet my pants". Instead they'll say: "I saw a grizzly and I dropped it from 200 yards with one shot from my Henry rifle". However occasionally we find a journal that was written for more personal reasons. Such is the case of Robert M. Rylatt. Rylatt was one of the surveyors that Moberly had dispatched to Howse Pass. He had a sickly wife and felt that the money from the survey work would help get her the level of care that she needed. His journal was written for his mother and he constantly states that if he ever thought it would be published, he would drop his pen immediately. Rylatt was in charge of the pack trains on the expedition. He signed up for a one year contract, but there was an option to extend it to 2 years - at the railroad's discretion. When he left home in July of 1871, little did he know that he would not return home until June of 1873. Once dispatched, there really was no way to quit. The wilderness was too remote for a lone individual to walk out without the support of the pack trains. Along with Rylatt, Engineer E.C. Gillette was in charge and the party also included 4 surveyors, sixteen axemen, 8 native and Mexican packers and a hunter. Every day Rylatt had to supervise the loading and unloading of 45 pack animals carrying almost 7 tonnes of supplies. About the pack animals Rylatt wrote: "How worried would be any member of the Humane society, could he see the treatment animals in a Pack Train receive, where the animals themselves are only a secondary consideration, the open sores on their backs, from hard and incessant packing, angry and running with humour, over which the Packer, too often, if not closely watched, without washing throws the heavy apparajos, or Pack Saddle, and as the sinch [sic] is tightened the poor beast groans, rears and plunges and not unfrequently sinks down under the pain, only to be whipped again into position." The work was backbreaking. The axemen led the way, hacking through endless numbers of both standing and prostrate trees. Only then would the pack trains continue on. When they met the junction of the Columbia and Blaeberry Rivers, the real work began to cut their way towards Howse Pass. It was about this time that Rylatt first began to feel lonely: "Your sense of being alone in the heart of a city, or even in a village, or within easy distance of fellow beings...gives you no claim to use the term 'alone'. You may have the feeling peculiar to being alone--that is all. Listen sometime when you think you are alone...Can you hear a footfall; a door slam in the distance; a carriage go by? Or the rumble of one...? Can you hear a dog bark? Hare you a cricket on the hearth or even the ticking of a clock...? They reached the pass on October 26, 1871 and the snows of winter quickly signaled that they would need to settle in and wait for spring. Once the snows landed, there would be no mail, pay or new supplies until the next spring. By New Year's Day, tempers were flaring and Rylatt found himself in a standoff with several of the crew that were trying to raid the supplies, and accused Rylatt of hiding the sugar that had ago run out. As they rushed the pantry, he took an axe and cut off three of the fingers of the ring leader. When they returned an hour later, all armed with axes, Rylatt held them off with his Henry rifle. As he wrote: "the roughs of the party are in open mutiny. Growling at their food, cursing me for being out of sugar, all this I care little for...but my pent up feelings have found vent today, and the leader of the roughs will carry my mark to his grave. I have passed through a somewhat exciting scene and don't care to have it repeated" As spring arrived, so did mail, but nothing for Rylatt who was distraught at not knowing if his wife was alive or dead. "We were informed that the white man who undertook to carry down the mail from Wild Horse Creek to Hope last fall, did not reach; and that this spring his body was found somewhere on the lonely route, the mailbag beside him" The mosquitoes were unrelenting as well: "I have smothered my face with mosquito muslin, smeared my hands with bacon grease, but bah! nothing keeps them off, and the heat only melts the grease and sends it beneath my clothing" On May 15, they received word that the Howse Pass route was to be abandoned and that they were to head north. Rylatt also received a long awaited letter when Moberly arrived in camp. In the letter, his bedridden wife begged for him to return but Moberly would not release him from his contract. By August of 1872, the mosquitoes were unrelenting and Rylatt was also beginning to suffer from the effects of scurvy. "My teeth have a feeling of looseness, and my gums are so sore, to touch them with my tongue gives me acute pain; am wondering if it is a touch of Scurvy; it is not very comforting to be sick in the mountains, but to be sick and all alone makes the chills creep down my back. These mountains are inhospitable enough for a man in full vigor." In September, he received three more letters, the last saying: "Oh! Bob, come home, I can't bear it". He was overcome with grief as there was no way he could make his way home to his beloved wife. By October, they were camped at the base of Mounts Hooker and Brown near to Athabasca Pass in present day Jasper National Park. It was here on Oct 19 that Rylatt received a message that simply stated: "Dear Rylatt--The papers state your wife has passed beyond the stream of time. Don't be too cut up, dear old fellow" Three days later, his dog Nip broke through the ice and Rylatt was unable to help as the dog vainly struggled to get out of his icy trap. As he disappeared beneath the ice, Rylatt dropped to his knees and screamed: "Oh God! Must everything be taken from me?" By April, Scurvy was taking its toll on Rylatt: "My mouth is in a dreadful state, the gums being black, the teeth loose, and when pressed against any substance they prick at the roots like needles. At times the gums swell, almost covering the teeth. To chew food is out of the question and so have to bolt it without mastication. My legs also becoming black below the knee...My breath is somewhat offensive and I am troubled with a dry cough. In fact I feel like an old man" With his poor health, he was finally allowed to leave the surveys and return home to an empty house. He left on May 13, 1873. Rylatt's ordeal showed us the things we don't often see in the journals of surveyors and explorers…the hardship, the horror, the loneliness and, in Rylatt's case, the heartbreak. Rylatt's journals are still available for purchase on Amazon.ca. I'll leave a link in the show notes for those that may like to buy a copy. Of all the books I've read on the survey, this one is my favourite because of its brutal honesty. Next week, we'll begin to look at the surveyor that ended up cracking the barrier of the Selkirk Mountains, Major A.B. Rogers. Next up - bird eating deer…say what? Bird-eating Deer While this is a story that comes out of states like South Dakota and Pennsylvania, it's just so unexpected that I thought it might be of interest to listeners of this podcast. It may also be happening right under our noses, but simply not been observed. So often we categorize our wildlife as either carnivore or herbivore depending on what they eat. Deer eat plants and Cougars eat deer. Some animals, like bears and humans get the special title of omnivore or eater of everything. Well it looks like those labels may have been too limiting as scientists have recently discovered that deer are a major predator of songbirds…yes you heard that right, white-tail deer eat birds, in particular ground nesting birds like eastern meadowlarks, sparrows, red-winged blackbirds and others. You can go onto Youtube and find some a number of videos of deer munching on a bird or two but researcher Les Murray placed cameras on 25 different nests in Valley Forge National Historic Park in Pennsylvania. Eight of the 25 nests was beset upon by predators and, as it turned out, the number-one predator was white-tailed deer. White-tails ate all 5 eggs from an eastern meadowlark nest, all but one egg from a field sparrow nest and four 5-day old nestlings from another field sparrow nest. Ok, so deer at a few eggs and nestlings - well they accounted for 38% of the recorded predation events as compared to 25% for fox, and 13% for both raccoons and weasels. Studies had shown that deer do occasionally eat an egg or nestling, but nobody expected that they were such an avid fan of birds. It may have something to do with sheer numbers of deer as opposed to the numbers of fox or raccoons. As songbird populations are shrinking in many areas, this is the first study to indicate that deer may actually play a role in the drop in population. States like Delaware have population densities of 45 deer/square km. That's potentially a lot of deer to hoover up eggs. The first time a bird was discovered in the gut of a deer was in 1970. It was later discovered that birds netted for population studies in Michigan were also being gobbled down by white-tails. Maybe it's time to redefine the word herbivore? Next up solar eclipse time Solar Eclipse coming next month On August 21, parts of North America will get the chance to experience a total solar eclipse. For many sky watchers, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Few people ever get to see a total solar eclipse simply because they are very rare. They take place when the moon lines up perfectly between the Earth and the sun and blocks out all of its light, casting the moons shadow on the Earth. For those of us in the mountain west, we won't get the full-meal-deal, but we should be able to see about an 85% coverage of the sun by the shadow of the moon. This eclipse is unique in that it will travel right across the U.S. from coast to coast - and that hasn't happened since 1918. Globally, partial solar eclipses happen between 2 and 5 times each year, but total eclipses only happen every 12-18 months. While we won't get to see the total eclipse, it will still be a special event. Want to see the TOTAL eclipse, well then it's time for a road show…'shotgun'. Head south to Oregon, Idaho or Montana. The total eclipse will last for just a few minutes and within a 110 kilometre wide band stretching from Oregon to South Carolina. You'll also need to be ready at between 10 am and 12:30 pm Mountain Daylights Savings Time. For those of us that can't do a road trip, it will begin at 10:18 am, hit its maximum at 11:31 am and be finished at 12:48 pm. If you want to learn about the timing where you are, I'll leave a link in the show notes at mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep038 to make sure you don't miss the show (https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2017-august-21) Now don't you be looking directly at it though as you can quickly damage your eyesight. You can buy special eclipse glasses for a few dollars or build a pinhole projector to help you watch it without risking vision damage. I'll have a link to this as well (https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/box-pinhole-projector.html) While we haven't had a many cloudy days this summer, should you just not have luck, you can watch it live on NASA's site by clicking the following link: https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/eclipse-live-stream And with that it's time to wrap this episode up. For links mentioned in this story simply visit www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep038 for show notes and links to additional stories.

Ancient archaeological Site found on the Coast For as long as I can remember, archaeologists have been talking about the ice free corridor that ran from Alaska, across the Bering Strait to Russia and all the way past Calgary. We were told that this was the route that the ancestors of all the first nations on the continent would have taken as they migrated from Asia to the new world. Back in episode 6 (www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep006 I talked about some chinks in the armour of that tried and true theory. Two studies cast some serious doubt on the ice free corridor migration. In one study, researchers looked into a large glacial lake called Lake Peace that sat smack dab in the middle of the corridor. It would have completely blocked the route of any traveler looking to make their way through the corridor. As they examined the sediments below this lake, they learned that food animals like bison and jack rabbits didn't show up in the sediments until around 12,500 years ago. They theorize that the landscape did not support enough food for anyone migrating through the area before that time. The lack of food resources would have stopped any large scale migration. By the time this route would have opened up, archaeological sites farther south would have made these travelers followers rather than leaders. Other studies have shown possible human sites in Monte Verde South America at least 15,000 years ago and in Florida 14,500 years ago. It seems there must have been another way to get south. A second study looked at bison populations through the ice free corridor. Researchers investigate 78 skulls from now-extinct steppe bison and examined the mitochondrial DNA. They also carbon dated the fossils. Prior to the opening of the corridor, both populations had been separated for a long enough period to be considered different genetic populations. It wasn't until 13,000 years ago that the two groups of bison began to intermingle. The fossil dates also imply that the corridor opened up from south to north as opposed to the other way around. Based on the dates of some of these other sites, like Monte Verde, people had already made it south of the corridor by that time. Scientists have long speculated about a possible coastal migration route, but for years, there was not a speck of evidence of an actual coastal migration. Part of the reason is likely that some areas would have been submerged by rising ocean levels as the glaciers melted. Finally, recent discoveries off the coast of British Columbia have found a 14,000-year-old site on Triquet Island, a lonely island some 133 km north of Port Moody which is located on the north end of Vancouver Island. 14,000 years makes this site one of the earliest cultural sites on the continent, with the exception of a few already mentioned in this story. It also shows there may have been a viable coastal route long before any ice-free corridor opened up. The first nations that call Triquet Island home are the Heitsuk Nation. For generations, their oral traditions have talked about an area of land that never froze during the ice age. The Hietsuk stayed there as a refuge during those years. For the Heitsuk, it is an affirmation of their long-held oral history. It is also yet another example of first nations oral histories proving to be more factual than some of the western histories. After all, it was first nations stories that led to the discovery of both of the lost Franklin ships over the past several years after remaining hidden to history for more than 170 years. The site revealed fish hooks, spears and fire making materials. All it took was a small amount of charcoal from one of the fire pits to carbon date the site. One of the most puzzling parts of the story is that in the area of Triquet Island, the ocean levels remained fairly consistent over the millennia. This allowed for the island to remain inhabited throughout many thousands of years. As archaeologists excavated through the layers of dirt, with each representing a layer of time, they could see an evolution of hunting and fishing techniques. The research was led by Alisha Gaubreau, a Ph.D. student at the University of Victoria, along with a scholar from the Hakai Institute. This research organization focuses on long-term studies of remote areas of coastal British Columbia. This is an amazing discovery and may help to spur a flurry of new studies across a variety of scientific disciplines as researchers try to ferret out additional clues to potential coastal migration routes. Does this mean that nobody walked through the ice-free corridor - absolutely not. They may not have been the first to see the lands south of the corridor, but I still like to think of them as the first Calgary Stampede. A Ribbon of Steel was just a National Dream When we look at the opening up of western Canada, two great events stand out. The fur trade which opened a vast land to exploration, and the Canadian Pacific Railway. This ribbon of steel really is the tie that binds this nation together and without it Canada might not exist...at least not in the way it does today. Prior to our building an all Canadian railway, a lot of talk drifted north from the U. S. about annexation of the Canadian west. One American politician was elected with the rallying cry of 54-40 or fight! Forget the 49th parallel, they wanted everything up to the 54th. That would have put a real dent in western Canada especially when you realize that communities like Banff are just on the 51st parallel. When we hear about the ‘Oregon’ territory, it was NOT the state of Oregon, it was a much larger area. It included present day Oregon, Washington and the lower half of British Columbia. It was much later that the various states were delineated. Well lucky for us, but unlucky for Americans, American intentions were diverted south by the Civil War. What that horrible conflict did for Canada was it bought us time, time to cement our sovereignty over our western lands. Prior to B.C. joining confederation, it had already experienced a gold rush in 1858 that saw some 30,000 prospectors flood into the territory. As a result, the British government created the colony of B.C. that same year. Just 6 years later, in 1964, they instituted a kind of representative government. Simultaneously the colonies in the eastern part of British North America were talking about Confederation. A legislative assembly with a regional governor was established in 1866 which placed Victoria as the capital. Some debate occurred in British Columbia about joining the fledgling nation of Canada in order to provide some security against American aspirations in the western portions of North America, especially after the U.S. purchased Alaska in March of 1867. While there was support in B.C. towards joining Canada, there was also some staunch opposition. However in 1869, when Canada purchased Rupert’s Land and the Northwest Territories from the Hudson’s Bay Company, suddenly the new nation was right up to the eastern boundary of the colony. A three person delegation was sent to Ottawa and after some heated debate, politicians in Ottawa did what politicians do, they sat down with their counterparts from British Columbia and they began to make promises. They said: “if you join Canada we’ll build you a railway” and British Columbia said ‘sold’. In fact, they joined Canada so fast that they joined as a full province on July 20, 1871, when this country was just 4 years old. That may not sound impressive, until you realize that Alberta and Saskatchewan did not become provinces until 1905, more than 30 years later. Nobody knew better than British Columbians how important this link with the rest of the country would be, but also how impossible it would be to build. The government dispatched an army of surveyors across the western wilderness in order to find a route for the transcontinental railway. Pierre Burton in his book The National Dream stated: “no life was harsher than that suffered by members of the Canadian Pacific Survey crews and none was less rewarding, underpaid, overworked, exiled from their families, deprived of their mail, sleeping in slime and snowdrifts, suffering from sunstroke, frostbite, scurvy, fatigue and the tensions that always rise to the surface when weary dispirited men are thrown together for long periods of isolation, the surveyors kept on, year after year Pierre Burton in his book The National Dream stated: “no life was harsher than that suffered by members of the Canadian Pacific Survey crews and none was less rewarding, underpaid, overworked, exiled from their families, deprived of their mail, sleeping in slime and snowdrifts, suffering from sunstroke, frostbite, scurvy, fatigue and the tensions that always rise to the surface when weary dispirited men are thrown together for long periods of isolation, the surveyors kept on, year after year “No life was harsher than that suffered by members of the Canadian Pacific Survey crews and none was less rewarding, underpaid, overworked, exiled from their families, deprived of their mail, sleeping in slime and snowdrifts, suffering from sunstroke, frostbite, scurvy, fatigue and the tensions that always rise to the surface when weary dispirited men are thrown together for long periods of isolation, the surveyors kept on, year after year They explored great sections of Canada--the first engineers scaled mountains that had never before been climbed, crossed lakes that had never known a white man's paddle and forded rivers that were not on any map. They walked with a uniform stride developed through years of habit, measuring the distances as they went, checking altitudes with an aneroid barometer slung around the neck and examining the land with a practiced gaze, always seeing in the mind's eye the finished line of steel--curves, grades, valley crossings, bridges and trestles, tunnels, cuts and fills” Seventy-four thousand kilometres of Canadian wilderness were surveyed during the first 6 years of the survey. Of that, 12,000 was properly charted. Many of the people we refer to as ‘surveyors’ were really just the first step of the process. Men like A.B. Rogers really should be referred to as the pathfinders. A long line of others would need to follow their footsteps once a route was determined. First came the axemen who cleared the route of brush, making way for the chainmen. They would break the line into 30m or 100-foot sections and place a stake at the end of each section and labeled with how many chain lengths it was from the start of the division. Behind them came the transit men. They’re the mathletes of the crew. They’ll look at each bend in the route and estimate the angles of the turns. They note river crossings, changes in landscape and obstacles the route may encounter. And finally, come the levelers who placed elevation benchmarks every 1,500 feet or 457 metres. By 1877, 25,000 bench marks had been placed and more than 600,000 stakes had been pounded in by the Chainmen. It wasn’t long before the chief surveyor, Sandford Fleming found it difficult to find men that were tough enough to endure the challenges of survey life. By mid-summer 1871, he had already dispatched some 800 men on 21 survey parties but many of them were unfit to the task. As he wrote: "Many of those we were obliged to take, subsequent events proved, were unequal to the very arduous labour they had to undergo, causing a very considerable delay and difficulty in pushing the work." He also had to deal with political meddling and nepotism. He was constantly pressured to hire family members or friends of eastern politicians. With unfit and incompetent men in the wilderness, entire crews simply abandoned their posts when the going got tough. In the season of 1871-2, two parties simply quit and wandered home when the temperatures started to get cold. The surveyors traveled through areas where the local first nations had never before seen a white man. On surveyor, Henry Cambie came across a group of natives that would simply not believe that hair actually grew on his face. Another surveyor accepted a seat on a bear skin rug next to a young native woman, not realizing that that was the equivalent of a marriage proposal. After a few tense negotiations, he managed to trade her back to her father for a nice ring that he had been wearing. In the winter of 1875-6, the expedition of E.W. Jarvis in the Smoky River Pass in the Rockies really highlighted the hardships these surveyors endured. In January, Jarvis, along with his assistant C.F. Hannington and dogmaster Alec Macdonald headed out from Fort George with 6 natives and 20 dogs. The weather dropped to -47C. One evening Macdonald knocked on the door of their winter shack completely encased in ice from head to toe. Another day, as they got the dogsleds ready to go in the morning, the lead dog stood up, gave a feeble tail wag and then fell over dead with his legs frozen solid right up to the shoulder. They carried few supplies and just two blankets each and a thin cotton sheet for a tent. After a time, they began to suffer from ‘mal de raquette’ or snowshoe sickness which left them lame simply from walking hundreds of kilometres in large snowshoes. As can often do in the mountains, they experienced a brief chinook wind on one occasion with the temperature increasing from -42C to +4C in a single day. The sudden change left them exhausted. Another morning, they were mushing along the frozen surface of a river when they had to stop suddenly when they found the entire dog team on the thinly frozen overhang of a waterfall. Beneath their feet, the river plunged 65m. Another evening, they made camp beneath the beautiful blue of a glacier. In the middle of the night, huge blocks of ice broke off of the glacier and came crashing through their camp. They described: "masses of ice and rock chasing one another and leaping from point to point as if playing some weird, gigantic game" Surprisingly, even though a chunk of limestone more than 3 metres thick bounced past them, they were left somewhat dazed but even more surprisingly, unharmed. By March, their dogs were dying on a daily basis and the men began to believe that they would never see their families again. At one point Hannington wrote in his journal: "I have been thinking of 'the dearest spot on earth to me' - of our Mother and Father and all my brothers and sisters and friends--of the happy days at home--of all the good deeds I have left undone and all the bad ones committed. If ever our bones will be discovered, when and by whom. If our friends will mourn long for us or do as is often done, forget us as soon as possible. In short, I have been looking death in the face..." In the end, though they did survive. Hannington had lost 15 kg and when they finally reached Fort Edmonton and received fresh food and water it brought on spasms of dysentery and vomiting as it had been so long since they had eaten proper food. In the end, they covered 3036 km over 162 days on the trail. Fifteen hundred of those kilometres were done on snowshoes with the final 530 carrying all of their supplies on their backs because, by this time, all their dogs were dead. Usually, about this point, people come up with a pretty good question...why? Clearly, the work left a little to be desired and the pay, well the pay was even worse. The answer to that question can also be summed up in one word – immortality. They hoped that somewhere along the way their name would linger on a map or, hope beyond hope, that they would go down as the man who had found the route through which the transcontinental railway would pass. We’ll continue this story in future episodes. Golden Eagles People often have a vision of the mountains with eagles soaring overhead and wolves howling in the distance. These idealized pictures often hide the harsh realities of mountain life. It's a tough place to earn a living. In 35 years of guiding, I have yet to hear a wolf howl, lots and lots of coyotes, but nary a wolf. Never has a cougar crossed my path, wolverines, yes, but no cougars. The mountain landscape is a place of secrets with animals and birds constantly striving to survive in a landscape that constantly conspires against them. Travel to the north coast of British Columbia and you've entered the land of milk and honey for many animals and birds. You'll find yourself tripping over bald eagles and great-blue herons. The density of black and grizzly populations can be an order of magnitude higher than it is here simply because there is more food. Golden eagles are a northern specialist. They thrive in high latitude landscapes hunting many of the small game animals that share their environment. They are also the most popular avian national animal. Golden eagles are the emblem of Albania, Germany, Austria, Mexico, and Kazakhstan. They are an exciting siting in the Canadian Rockies, but in 1992, biologist Peter Sherrington stumbled upon something truly unique on an outing in Kananaskis Country in March of that year. As he looked up from the top of a small summit, he noticed a tiny speck high above him. As he studied it, he realized it was a golden eagle. Cool, I've just won the wildlife lottery for the day. Before long though, there was another speck, and then another. Any time you see a single golden eagle is exciting, but to see more than one, astounding. By the end of the day, he had counted more than 100. It didn't take Sherrington long to realize that something was out of the ordinary. As he put it in a recent story in the Calgary Herald: "Every time we looked up, there were more golden eagles,” he said. “Everybody thought of the mountains as barriers, but we established they were very serious avian highways.” Sherrington has spent every spring and fall since staking out the area as the research director for the Rocky Mountain Eagle Research Foundation. Now at age 72, he has the opportunity to share the spectacle with thousands of visitors each year that flock to the area to see the spring and fall migrations of golden eagles. Just how many eagles pass through this area every spring and fall? When the foundation first began tracking eagles, there were some 4,000/season. Last year only saw 2,500. In fall of 2007, they witnessed almost 5,500 golden eagles. According to Sherington, this is "the greatest eagle migration in the world, and it's right on our doorstep. It truly is a world-class phenomenon." The drop in numbers of the years that the foundation has been counting the eagles is a reflection of the environments that they call home. They overwinter in the states where they are occasionally captured in traps meant for coyotes. However, it may be more a reflection of snowshoe hare populations in their summer homes in the far northern areas of Alaska and the Yukon. It won't be long before the eagles begin to point south at the end of the summer nesting and hunting season. If you'd like to volunteer with the foundation or learn more about their work, you can visit them on their website at www.eaglewatch.ca. Next up, British Columbia abdicates its responsibility for managing wildlife New BC Wildlife Agency Announced Conservation organizations in British Columbia are reeling after the provincial government announced the creation of a new Wildlife Management Agency to be funded by hunting revenues. In late March 2017 the B.C. Government announced that all the revenue from hunting licenses would be reinvested into wildlife management in the province. B.C.'s Minister of Forests, Steve Tomson called it "a significant investment and significant initiative on the part of the provincial government". He went on to state: "This will have great benefit for wildlife populations and wildlife management in British Columbia. It will benefit rural communities throughout the province," Along with a proposed budget of $5million in the first year and revenues of 9-10 million on subsequent years, $200,000 was budgeted as part of a consultation process to determine the structure and priorities of the new agency. British Columbia organizations related to hunting are applauding the move, including the B.C. Wildlife Federation, Guide Outfitters Association of B.C., Wild Sheep Society of B.C., Wildlife Stewardship Council and the B.C. Trappers Association. All five agencies signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate in supporting the new agency. Not a single, not consumptive conservation organization has stepped up to support this new agency. As a biologist, this seems like the hunting groups are lining up to manage the organization and that seems a little like the fox guarding the chicken coop to me. Time and again, hunting organizations focus only on huntable species. How do we protect the remainder of the 136 species of mammals, 488 species of birds, 20 amphibians and 16 reptiles? On June 27, twenty-three organizations focusing on protecting wildlife in British Columbia sent an open letter to the province. The organizations include the B.C. SPCA, Bear Matters, Get Bear Smart Society, Humane Society, Raincoast Conservation Foundation, the Wildlife Defense League, Wolf Awareness Inc and Zoocheck Canada, amongst numerous other stakeholders. In the letter, they state: "The wildlife of the province belongs to all British Columbians and has by law been held by the government in trust, to conserve the wildlife itself, and to ensure the rights of all members of the public. The British Columbia Wildlife Act states that “Ownership in all wildlife in British Columbia is vested in the government.” That means that elected representatives can be held accountable for their wildlife decisions through general elections and in courts. Indeed, a groundswell of public unhappiness with the way our wildlife has been mismanaged (grizzly bear trophy hunt) was a significant issue in the recent election." It continues "In announcing the proposed new agency, Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett stated in the media that “The government is afraid to manage wolves, or afraid to manage grizzly bears in some cases because of the politics of that. Hopefully, an agency that is separate from government can make decisions that are in the best long-term interest of wildlife and just forget about the politics and do what is best for the animals.” The letter continues: "We are sorry to learn that Minister Bennett believes our government representatives cannot apply the wildlife laws and science in an unbiased manner, since we believed that’s what they were elected to do. However, they are accountable to voters, whereas an independent agency would not be. It would have no duty to represent all British Columbians, and would be far more susceptible to influence by special interest groups." Finally, the letter calls for the government to: Cancel the plan for an “independent” agency. Increase the wildlife management staff and funding of government ministries. Recognize that BC has a biodiversity crisis; it requires a shift in focus from juggling numbers of game animals for hunters, to applying the science of ecology. Recognize that all British Columbians are stakeholders in our wildlife. All interest groups should be equally empowered. Only about 2% of the total BC population are registered hunters, whereas a huge majority of British Columbians care about the welfare of our wildlife and ecosystems. A wildlife agency that is not tied to the government for accountability would mean that there was no requirement for the province to intervene in wildlife matters. It creates a situation where special interest groups can move in and manage based on their own agenda. In addition, if the funding is based upon hunting revenue, there is an inherent motivation to increase that revenue by granting more hunting permits. It's a negative spiral that could easily result in priorities being shifted away from things like wildlife viewing and towards consumptive uses like hunting and trapping which fund the program. Numerous studies have shown that wildlife viewing brings in much more money to the provincial coffers than does hunting. This is particularly true for iconic species like whales and grizzly bears. Birding as well is a huge economic driver. And generates 10s of millions of dollars annually to the B.C. economy. Under the species at risk at, the B.C. Government is required by law to develop recovery plans for designated species. They cannot simply sidestep federal law by saying that we aren't in charge of wildlife anymore. I stand with these organizations against a government that is abdicating its responsibility to manage wildlife in a sustainable way. If you want to get involved, send a letter to your MLA if you live in British Columbia. Every voice counts.

Forest Fires Spreading across British Columbia and now threaten parts of Alberta When I wrote last week's fire focused episode, little did I know that my own community of Canmore would be smelly and smoky this week as fires continue to spread and the number of evacuees in British Columbia climbs. The hot dry weather is showing no signs of abating and over the past week, the number of people forced out of their homes and communities in British Columbia has swelled from 14,000 to more than 45,000 as of July 18, 2017. This makes it one of the largest mass evacuations in the history of the province. The previous record was an evacuation of 50,000 due to fires near Kelowna in 2003. Heat waves that year also caused massive fires across both Alberta and British Columbia. Over this past weekend, high winds caused a number of fires to rapidly expand in size and has subsequently resulted in more evacuations. In other areas, the fires around Williams Lake and 100 Mile House have stayed fairly stable over the past few days allowing firefighters to make some headway. Some people are being allowed to return to their communities, although many may return to find their homes have been destroyed. Members of the Ashcroft Indian Reserve and the community of Cache Creek are returning home after an 11-day absence. Residents of 100-Mile House may also be returning home soon. Province-wide, there are still 155 active fires burning and there is still no sign of significant rain on the horizon. Closer to the Alberta border, a fire in the Verdant Creek area of Kootenay National Park ignited last week. This fire puts flames within just 2.5 kilometres of Sunshine Village in Banff National Park. In just 24 hours it swelled in size by a factor of 10, growing from a few hundred hectares on Sunday to some 2,000 ha by Monday. The fire is considered to be out of control and crews are working in the Sunshine area to try to prevent the loss of any structures should the fire continue to spread eastward. Huge water pumps are also at the ready in order to keep buildings wet if the fire encroaches the resort area. As you can imagine, there is now a total fire ban throughout the mountain national parks. Kootenay National Park has also closed the Verdant Creek area all the way to the Simpson River in the south and Banff has closed Sunshine Meadows and Village, as well as access to the Egypt Lake area, Healy Pass, Citadel Pass, Whistling Valley and Pharaoh Pass. I would expect additional closures to occur as the conditions continue to evolve. Even in towns like Canmore and Banff, the mountains are barely visible and the air quality is dropping fast. Currently, the Verdant Creek fire is approximately 24 km from Banff and 31 km from Canmore. Environment Canada has issued an air quality warning for Banff, Canmore and Kananaskis warning that: "Due to the smoke, the AQHI (Air Quality Health Index) will likely reach 10, or high risk, in parts of Central and southern Alberta on Wednesday. There is some uncertainty as to where the thickest smoke will set up, but current indications are that the corridor of thickest smoke and poorest air quality will be between Hinton, Red Deer, and Edmonton." "Individuals may experience symptoms such as increased coughing, throat irritation, headaches or shortness of breath. Children, seniors, and those with cardiovascular or lung disease, such as asthma, are especially at risk." "In general, wearing a mask is not the best way to protect your health during a smoke event. In fact, masks may lead to a false sense of security, which may encourage increased physical activity and time spent outdoors, meaning increased exposure to smoke. They can also make breathing more difficult." The smoke is not only affecting communities in the Rockies, but it has spread as far west as Vancouver and as far east as Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. These smoke plumes can carry for hundreds of kilometres and as the fires continue to spread, we can expect air quality to suffer along with it. In the interior of B.C., near Williams Lake, the Air Quality Index was reportedly as high as 23, and that is on a scale of 1 to 10 with a 10+ reserved for very high-risk air quality. Today should see some of the winds shifting to send more wind westward to the coast, but the eastern slopes are still completely smoked in. Also in last week's episode, I talked about the need to ramp up our use of prescribed burns as we see summer weather regimes shift with the shifting of climate norms. As summers see more and more prolonged droughts, separated by severe storms, lightning caused fires may become far more prevalent. To complicate matters, we have had years of fire suppression leaving many of our western forests susceptible to large fires. Even places like British Columbia's Interior Rainforest, some of which may not have burned for a millennium or more, are susceptible to large fires if their normal weather regiments continue to change. The interior rainforest is unique on the planet as more than 97% of all rainforests occur in coastal areas. However, while it is considered a rainforest, it doesn't get enough rain to truly qualify. What it does get is huge accumulations of snow. The slow melting of this snow releases vast amounts of moisture and essentially allows it to simulate a true rainforest. Should that change, these forests could also burn. With changing climates we need to look at fire in a very different way. After my comments last week, I came across a CBC News article that interviews a fire ecologist by the name of Robert Gray, of R.W. Gray Consulting. Gray consults with communities to help them reduce their overall fire risk and he echoes my previous comments. He recommends a minimum of doubling the current number of prescribed burns - especially if we see a continuation of the hot summer drought conditions that are becoming more common in the mountain west. The extreme heat this summer created tinder that was ignited by thousands of dry lightning strikes. According to David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, the number of lightning strikes increases by 15% for every additional degree of warming. To complicate things further, years of mountain pine beetle infestations have left tens of thousands of standing dead trees which are extremely flammable. While the potential for large, catastrophic fires has been building over the past decade, the incidence of prescribed burns has dropped in British Columbia from 150-200,000 hectares in the 1980s to just 5,000 in the past few years. Prescribed burns are a hassle. They're smoky and smelly, and tourists hate them, but they are still a way better option than ignoring the problem and waiting for conflagrations to ignite. For generations, first nations used prescribed fires in order to improve wildlife habitat. We need to recognize that these forests are going to burn, there is nothing we can do to prevent it. Robert Gray is very clear that there is no way to avoid smoke in a prescribed burn, but as he puts it: "There is no 'no smoke' option…How do you want your smoke — wild or controlled?" Recent studies have also shown that by having smaller, more controlled burns, the amount of smoke is reduced as are the amount of unhealthy particulates that are floating through the air at the moment. Let's use this as a wake-up call to begin looking at our forests and our climate as a pair. As the climate warms, the fires burn. Let's ramp our prescribed burn schedules up to help keep the mountain west a little safer. For some areas of B.C., fire breaks are being created the hard way at the moment. Let's try to make the next decade one of adaptation to new fire realities. Bear 148 Gets a Reprieve In episode 34, I talked about the challenges that the Provincial conservations officers seem to be having when dealing with Grizzly 148, the daughter of Banff's beloved Bear 64. If you'd like to listen to the story, check it out at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep034. After an incident in the Peaks of Grassi area where 148 bluff charged a man with a stroller and two dogs, conservation officers live-trapped her and relocated her back to her home turf in Banff. They also made it clear that they planned to euthanize her should a similar incident occur in the future. This was despite the fact that a bluff charge is simply a way of telling an intruder that she is in charge. Bluff charges are especially common when people bring dogs into bear country as dogs are easily perceived as a threat by bears. She was in a designated primary wildlife corridor doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. The people were in her turf, not the other way around. As we encroach more and more on wilderness corridors, we can only expect to see more and more incidents like this one. After the relocation, a petition was started that attracted more than 4,000 signatures from people that did not want to see 148 killed for no good management reason. Even the individual that was involved in the bluff charge encounter supports the right of 148 to use that particular corridor. She is just at the age where she may have mated for the first time and female bears are critical to the stability of the local bear population. After this huge public outcry, conservation officers have softened their stance on 148. Alberta officials are now talking about a partnership with Banff Park Wardens when dealing with bears like 148 when she leaves the boundaries of the park and wanders into Provincial lands. Despite this, Conservation Officer Jay Honeyman did reiterate that "bears cannot be within the developed footprint of the Town of Canmore", despite the fact that the designated corridors force them to be within this supposed no-go zone. In a recent article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook Honeyman was quoted: “When that bear comes out we’re trying to do what we can to enable her to live on the landscape without causing public safety concerns,” Honeyman said. “Nobody is taking this lightly. Nobody, more so people who work with wildlife, want to harm or euthanize wildlife … but we can’t and won’t ignore public safety.” This is particularly important as the area she was spending time is an area where buffaloberries are now ripening. Many more bears will be attracted to the lower Bow Valley over the next several weeks as these berries ripen. If you don't know how to recognize this plant, then stop right now and watch this safety video that I've put together to help you understand the critical importance of buffaloberries. Buffaloberries mean bears and so over the next 6-8 weeks, or until the first frost of the season, bears will descend to the valley bottom to feast on these critical berries. Don't walk along the town trails without bear spray on your belt - especially in the areas around Quarry Lake and the Peaks of Grassi primary wildlife corridors. Things are only going to get tougher for bears in the Canmore/Quarry Lake area as the Town of Canmore pushes forward with its proposed mountain bike park in the Quarry Lake area. Mayor John Borrowman supports this ecological madness, continually claiming that the area is NOT a habitat patch and therefore not of importance to wildlife. This is something that I have a lot of background in. I wrote two books on mountain biking, including Mountain Bike! The Canadian Rockies and Mountain Bike! Southwestern British Columbia. I also designed the original route for the famous Trans Rockies Challenge that ran from Fernie British Columbia to Canmore. It was called the "Toughest Race in the World" by both Mountain Bike and Bike magazines. I've spent the past 30 years out on foot and pedal and, as a biologist, I'm always working to educate people on bear safety. I understand the Mayor saying that there are already too many pirate trails that go through wildlife corridors and they should be dismantled. Wildlife corridors should be signed and marked off limits. This would have to be tempered by the reality that the corridors west of the Peaks of Grassi are already mostly useless - especially if we punish bears for using them. Areas adjacent to the corridors are NOT places to put intensive development. If a bear is using the corridor and feels crowded, it will move into adjacent habitats. New trails will be used by bears if they are perceived to be quieter than the wildlife corridor due to less human use. Building trails does NOT mean that bears will not use them, just ask the Nordic Centre. I would also argue that the off-leash park should also be moved to an area not adjacent to critical habitat - especially since the town does NOT enforce illegal off-leash use outside of the dog park. It's time for this community to make a choice. Do we stand with wildlife, or do we stand with development? Do we want a vibrant community surrounded by intact ecosystems or do we want Disney? If you want the latter, hang out in Silver Tip as they are planning a wildlife apocalypse. Please join with me in opposing this bike park, regardless of the faulty reasoning that the mayor presents to share its ecological basis. His logic is false and his support of this development indicates that maybe it's time for a change at the helm. Next up…no national bird for Canada No National Bird for Canada Way back in Episode 14, recorded in November of last year, I talked about an effort to get the government of Canada to designate a national bird. If you'd like to hear more about the story, check out the full episode at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep014. When I first began writing this story, I was unaware that Canada DIDN'T already have a national bird. After all, we had a national animal, a national tree and even a national horse - but alas, no bird. In 2016, the Royal Canadian Geographic Society sought to put an end to this obvious oversight by doing a national poll to see what bird should win the right to be Canada's feathered flagbearer. There were many contenders. People were invited to submit their suggestions for the best avian representatives and these were compiled to create a feathered list of frontrunners for a national vote. The ballot contained a list of birds that would make an Canuck proud. They included the black-capped chickadee, the Canada goose, the snowy owl, the loon and the Gray (or Canada) Jay. There were ardent avian allies of all the birds submitted. Any Canadian that has set up a winter bird feeder knows the black-capped chickadee with its habit of chirping its name as it collects sunflower seeds. It is a steadfast Canadian and refuses to leave in even the harshest of winters. They are friendly, and faithful to feeders from coast to coast. The Canada goose is another bird known to all. However it has, a dark side as one of very few waterfowl that do most of their feeding on land. This leads them to gather on golf courses and public parks where they have become a nuisance, so their votes suffered accordingly. The snowy owl seemed like a good options, but it is only known to a few dedicated birders and as a result, never garnered the numbers needed for a win. Now the loon. That was one that I thought would be a shoe in. Most of its worldly breeding range is in Canada and its call has become symbolic with the northern wilderness. Few Canadians don't recognize the haunting call of the loon and it has made many a camping trip memorable as campers try to imitate the call with their hands cupped tightly. The Gray (or Canada) Jay has been selected as Canada's candidate for a National Bird The rightful winner was the Gray jay. It's a bird with many names, gray jay, Canada jay, camp robber, whiskey jack, Perisorius canadensis…take your pick. It's an ever present companion to most outings in the wilds of Canada. Gray jays will quietly stalk your forays and appear just when the sandwiches are ready to be eaten. Turn your back on them and you may catch your corned beef flying off into the spruce and pine forest. I was an early advocate of the loon, but I la ter sang the praises of the gray jay and it ended up taking the title of the bird most likely to become Canada's National Bird. Alas, this hope all came crashing down earlier this month when the federal government sent a terse message that they were not considering any additional national symbols at this time. Is that the end of it? I hope not. Perhaps a flock of crafty camp robbers will roost on Parliament Hill and carry off politicians lunches until they cry "uncle" and demand the liberals move forward with this feathered designation. And with that said, it's time to wrap this episode up. If you would like to explore the Canadian Rockies, Ward Cameron Enterprises is your one-stop shop for step-on and hiking guides, nature workshops and keynote presentations. We will make sure that your next mountain experience is one to remember. And with that said, the valley is smoky, so I'm hanging out with the ashes. Talk to you next week.

Forest Fires in B.C. Recent forest fires in British Columbia have once again raised the horror of forest fires to the top of the news feeds. The hot dry weather that has been a constant companion for the past few weeks has allowed the number of fires to escalate in the interior of British Columbia and has sky watchers in Alberta thankful for the good soaking we finally received after some record hot temps. B.C. has issued a state of Emergency due to the hundreds of forest fires and thousands of homes evacuated. This gives the province additional authority in times of emergency. The last time a province wide state of emergency was issued was in 2,003 which was another extreme year for fires. As of July 8, there were still 9 major fires burning out of control in the province. They were located throughout the dry interior and Caribou regions. Thousands had been evacuated with little time to grab personal belongings, or deal with animals and livestock. Numerous fires forced evacuations of the airport near Williams Lake. Firefighters are also arriving from numerous other provinces, police are moving inland from Vancouver and the military has been placed on standby to assist where possible. The Canadian Red Cross has also begun to accept donations to provide assistance to those affected by the fires and evacuations. They are also helping to supply bedding and cots to people displaced by the flames. In one day, on July 7, 142 new fires broke out across B.C. bringing the total to 182. By Monday, the number of fires had grown to 225. Some of the largest fires are burning near Princeton and Ashcroft. The Princeton fire swelled by a factor of 7 in just a few days. As of Saturday, July 8, it was engulfing some 1,500 hectares. The Ashcroft fire is more than 4,000 hectares in size. Cache Creek was also evacuated as a result of this fire. As the fire moved through Cache Creek, it burned two airport hangers and 30 homes in a Boston Flats trailer park. It also burned through the Ashcroft Indian Reserve. A 3,200 ha fire near 100 Mile House forced evacuation of the entire town on Sunday, July 10. To complicate matters, they had to drive through the night to make their way to Prince George as Kamloops was already inundated with people that had been displaced by other fires. The evacuation of 100 Mile House brought the number of evacuees in British Columbia to more than 14,000. For firefighters, it seems that every tiny bit of progress on one fire is countered by new outbreaks, changes in the winds or fires closing in on new communities. Williams Lake, a town of 10,500 now has fires closing in on three sides with a total of 5 fires burning in the area. Alberta fire crews are heading to B.C. to help with the firestorm and thankfully, many areas in Alberta got a good dousing of rain today. This should help reduce our hazard level and free up more firefighters to travel west. In an outpouring of generosity, Fort McMurry has reached out to help British Columbians. After enduring devastating fires last summer, the community is sending trailers full of bottled water, toiletries, medical supplies, food and fuel to Kamloops and Prince George. This time last summer, they were the people in desperate need of assistance. Fort Mac lost thousands of homes and resulted in one of the largest evacuations in Canadian history. The fire was so massive and unpredictable that it was dubbed "the beast". No matter what fire crews did, the fire seemed to thwart their efforts. Youtube videos showing the evacuation are absolutely terrifying as some 60,000 people tried to head out of town on Highway 63, only single highway leading into and out of fort McMurray. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieTQvIdG-Vo Canadians take care of each other. The Red Cross is now taking donations to provide relief to displaced families in British Columbia. To donate you can simply text 'FIRES' to 45678 and you'll make a $10 donation to the Red Cross BC Fires Appeal. Cash is always the best way to donate. Goods are much more difficult to manage and involve larger logistic challenges. If you want to do more, hold a fundraiser and donate the proceeds to the Red Cross or another organization assisting in the locally affected areas. Please focus on cash as local agencies are already overwhelmed and unable to accept donations of clothing and toys. If you need to donate goods, contact local agencies and find out what they need before collecting materials and assuming there will be facilities and personnel to store and distribute it. Also, like Fort McMurray, the residents of affected areas will need help long after the flames have subsided. With changing climates, large fires are likely to become more explosive AND more prevalent. Even here in Alberta, while we are seeing more total moisture over the course of the year, we are seeing it in fewer, more extreme storms. Just today we ended a dry heatwave with a huge thunderstorm that produced prodigious amounts of precipitation. For days, we have been in a similar situation to our neighbours in B.C. but we dodged the bullet with the large downpouring of rain. As we look to the future, we also have to look at the changing climate realities. Longer droughts mean larger fires. Prescribed burns reduce the fuel available to potential fires, but they also provide natural fire breaks in the case of major fire seasons like this year, and 2003 which saw fires burning extensively through the Rockies. That summer huge fires burned around the Blairmore area in the Crowsnest Pass as well as a huge area of Kootenay National Park. At its peak, three fires converged near Vermillion Pass in Kootenay National Park and made a run for the Alberta border and the adjacent Bow Valley. It took heroic efforts by fire fighters to keep that fire from sweeping towards communities like Banff. It's time to look at stepping up our programs of prescribed burns to keep up with the changing realities of climate change. This summer, the mountain parks are planning a number of burns. There are numerous reasons for planning prescribed fires. They include improvement of wildlife or plant habitat, reduction of disease or invasive species, and most importantly at this time, they provide firebreaks and fuel reduction. Ecologically fire is essential to most mountain landscapes. If we look beyond the immediate danger, the role of forest fires on ecosystems is a key process that helps drive the ecology of the mountain west. While fire near communities is both inevitable and destructive, that's where fuel reduction and prescribed burns can help provide effective barriers to conflagrations like the current ones being experienced. Outside of communities, fire is a critical part of mountain ecological processes. In nature, any time there is a regular and inevitable disturbance, nature will learn to take advantage of it. That's why the two landscapes in the Rockies that we, as humans, see devastation…forest fire sites and avalanche slopes, nature sees opportunity. They are too of the most productive habitats in the mountain west. If we look at our local trees, many are particular fire adapted. Douglas-fir trees sport thick cork layers that allow them to survive all but the largest fires. Core samples from large Douglas-firs help fire ecologists to determine local fire histories often spanning centuries. Trembling aspen trees are a truly unique plant. One tree will grow from a seed. It will then send out roots horizontally just below the surface. Periodically they will emerge as new shoots or suckers. That's why if you have an aspen in your yard, every time you cut the lawn, you're cutting down newly sprouted suckers that will quickly take over your property if you don't stay on top of them. Clonal groves of aspen can be enormous, spanning hundreds of hectares, all representing a single organism, joined by a common root system. They are also some of the oldest living things. Although individual stems are not particularly long lived, the root systems can live for tens of thousands of years. One particular grove in Utah, in the Fishlake National Forest, is estimated to be some 80,000 years old…yowza. A single organism has been alive since long before humans made their way to the new world. Aspen groves living today could have witnessed the extinctions of the woolly mammoth. They could have witnessed the disappearance of the Neanderthal in Europe where their relatives also exhibit the same longevity. When a fire comes through, the shoots are killed, but the roots survive. Before long, they begin to send up new shoots to greet the new firescape. This brings us to the lodgepole pine. This common low elevation pine tree can't even reproduce on a large scale without the help of fire. Its cones are sealed with a hard wax that will only melt when the temperature reaches approximately 45 C. In this area, that means fire. It just doesn't get that hot…at least not yet. They've actually taken this adaptation to fire one step further. They have perfected something that most gardeners would kill for, they're a self-pruner. Any branch that doesn't get enough sunlight, they shut off the power and let that branch die. That does two things. It lets them operate more efficiently in a harsh climate, much like a lot of corporations these days…killing off the unprofitable branches. But it does one other thing; how much do you think it will take to light those dry, dead branches on fire? Not much. In a way, they've found a way to attract fire, and through death comes life, comes a new generation of lodgepole pines. This is a good strategy for lodgepole pines, and in the east, jack pines, because they can't live in any shade at all. Not even the shade of another lodgepole pine. If a fire doesn't shake things up every 90 to 130 years, eventually the shade tolerant white spruce will shade them out and they'll disappear. About this time, people say, "but what about the animals…we've all seen Bambi". In reality, Bambi was not very realistic. Very few animals die in forest fires. A natural fire is not like a tsunami of death. It moves more like a tornado. It leaves almost as much unburnt as it burns. To fly over a natural fire, you will see something that looks like a patchwork quilt of burned and unburned areas. It moves much more like a tornado than a wave of destruction. It is a very chaotic movement. If you watch coverage from the Fort McMuray fires of 2016, you're constantly struck by the fact that while communities were devastated, individual homes somehow survived in the middle of the conflagration. Animals take advantage of this pathwork character and pick their way between the burned and unburned areas to stay away from the flames. However, imagine life as a common animal, a red squirrel. Now imagine spending your life chewing open the rock hard cones of the lodgepole pine, trying to get at the few seeds that are inside; it's a whole lot of work for a few seeds. But suddenly, as those flames flicker out, for as far as the eye can see, the ground is covered with millions upon millions of juicy, tasty, succulent, chewy seeds. They'll move back into that fire site as fast as their little legs can carry them, and hot on their tails will be every other seed eating bird and animal, and they'll have the biggest feeding frenzy they'll ever have in their lives…but even at their best, they can't eat all those seeds. At the same time, before the trees even stop smoldering, hundreds of large black beetles will descend on the scene. These are the white-spotted sawyer beetle. They're several centimetres in length and then they have antennae that are as long as their body. I don't care how tough you are, if you look at your shoulder and see one of these beetles, you scream like a school girl. These are wood boring beetles and they lay their eggs in the newly burned wood. Well beetles don't arrive in a vacuum. Hot on their trail will be an in migration of woodpeckers. The woodpecker population can increase by 500% following a forest fire as the woodpeckers are attracted to the insects that are attracted to the dead wood. Well, what do woodpeckers do to trees? They bore holes in them. Those holes are what many of our native songbirds need to nest and so the songbird population also increases after a forest fire. On the ground, for the first time in perhaps a hundred years, sunlight bakes the forest floor. This will spur an explosion of wildflowers, followed by a larger explosion of new shrubs and trees. This new growth is the food the animals most people visiting the mountains are here to see. The word moose, is an Algonkian native term that literally translates to 'twig eater'. They need the new twigs, the new growth that comes in after a forest fire. In Montana, they did a study of grizzly bears and they found that of the foods important to grizzlies, almost all were more common in areas that regularly had fire, which simply means more bears in areas that regularly burn. This includes buffaloberries which represent the single most important food to black and grizzly bears in the Rockies. They have just ripened locally and they line most low elevation trails and roads. Expect closures as bears are attracted to these critical foods. An adult grizzly can eat the equivalent of 75 Big Macs a day for the next 6 weeks. Fire makes fat bears. Fire is as much a part of our mountain landscape as bears, berries, glaciers and global warming. As communities, they are our greatest fear and our hearts go out to our British Columbia brothers and sisters. However in the larger ecosystem they are critical. As we look towards a future of changing climatic norms, we need to carefully consider the role fire will play in this changing landscape. Prescribed burns can allow fuel to burn on our schedule rather than that of the fickle finger of fate. For the past 30 years the mountain west has been slowly ramping up the use of prescribed fires in order to improve habitat, reduce the rate that invasive species can move and in this story, most importantly, reduce the likelihood of large fires sweeping through our communities. We really need to support our B.C. neighbours as fire terrorizes their communities at the moment. They will need our help for some time to come. At the same time, we need to also realize that fire is an integral part of our landscape. We can't stop it without compromising the ecology that has evolved over millions of years around fire created ecosystems.

Last week I spoke with Lyndsay Kearns about a canister of bear spray that exploded in her car. It was a horrible situation and the damage to her car was significant. If you'd like to hear her interview, check out www.mountainnaturepodcast.com/ep033. During the podcast I mentioned bear spray safety containers sold by Kodiak Wildlife Products. I've since received one and decided to give it a test. Yesterday I placed it in a car parked in the hot sun with a thermometer inside the canister. I also placed an oven thermometer in the windshield to see how hot the interior of the car became after a few hours in the hot sun. The outside temperature was a scorching 28C, but the interior of the car, it reached 70C or a whopping 158F. When I picked up the bear safety container it was extremely hot to the touch. When I opened it to check the thermometer, it had exceeded its maximum temperature of 50C. The website says that it protects against "accidental impact and heat that could damage or discharge your bear spray canister". It's clear from testing that it does not keep the bear spray below the maximum storage temperature of 50C as shown on the label of the Sabre Max bear spray canister. Will it still protect your car in the case of a canister explosion? I contacted the manufacturer and they said that they had not specifically tested whether it would stop an exploding canister from piercing the container. They are considering using more 'cooler' style materials thought to try to reduce the chance that the temperatures keep climbing beyond dangerous levels. I'll keep you posted as this story evolves. Next up - wildlife crossings Wildlife Crossing structures are expanding and changing The wildlife crossing structures in Banff National Park are an amazing success story of protecting wildlife and people from high speed collisions along park highways. Studies have shown that a properly designed and implemented combination of highway fencing along with under and overpasses for wildlife can reduce animal vehicle collisions by up to 95%. Banff National Park led the way in terms of building the first series of under and overpasses along a major highway. Their studies have documented more than 200,000 individual animal crossings so there can be absolutely no doubt as to their effectiveness. The average cost of hitting wildlife can be very high, if not fatal. Deer impacts typically exceed $6,000 while moose average out at around $30,000 or more. Banff has shown that investing in wildlife is effective for wildlife and dramatically reduces loss of life along highways - both for people and wildlife. I remember in the early 1990s, we used to call the Trans Canada Highway between Banff and Lake Louise the meat grinder because of the number of people and animals that were being killed. Thankfully, we can now look at that same stretch of highway as an inspiration for other destinations to aspire to…and that's what I want to talk about today. The work that Banff has done has shown that not only do the structures reduce mortality but they dramatically increase connectivity as well. A large highway can have the effect of completely dividing a landscape into two. In the past 20 years, more and more research has shown that good habitat for wildlife is not good enough. We need corridors that allow for a steady stream of fresh genetic material to move through landscapes. In many cases, a stretch of road with as few as 3.2 deer-vehicle collisions per kilometre per year would actually see a net benefit by building structures. Studies have shown that in cases like this, the cost benefits of building the structures can quickly exceed any costs involved in their construction. In 2015, Banff saw a total of 19 moderate to large animals killed along the Trans Canada Highway. This was less than half of the 41 animals killed in 2006. The stats in Banff show an 80% reduction in wildlife collisions. Carnivores are seeing a huge reduction in deaths but the real winner seems to be elk. Virtually no elk die in fenced sections of highway in Banff as opposed to 100 or more prior to the fences being constructed. Today in Banff, there are a total of 44 different crossing structures of which six are overpasses and 38 underpasses. While Banff got the ball rolling, by 2010 the research had finally led to interest from other jurisdictions. That’s why in 2010, an organization known as Animal Road Crossings or ARC, sponsored a design competition designed to bring fresh ideas and potentially cost savings to the design and implementation of future crossing structures. Every dollar saved in the construction can help to move the political process towards a yes decision in terms of expanding the use of crossing structures to new destinations. In fact in a 2012 survey of U.S. State Department of Transportation professionals, 84% indicated that their state considers the building of crossing structures to improve safety and connectivity. Unfortunately, those numbers don't translate into implementation. Funding was the number one reason given for not including them in the planning of highways and upgrades to road systems. Despite resistance in some areas, other areas in Canada and the U.S. are going full-steam ahead with new projects. Now that the Trans Canada is twinned and fenced all the way through Banff National Park, crews are working hard on expanding the twinning and fencing through neighbouring Yoho. They are already working on both an overpass and an underpass just west of the British Columbia Border. Perhaps the most ambitious one at the moment is taking place along Interstate 90 in Washington State which runs between Seattle and Spokane. The first overpass is being built near Snoqualmie Pass, just an hour east of Seattle. Like the overpasses in Banff, it will eventually be a forest covered crossing. When the project is finished, there will be a total of 27 over and underpasses along a 24 km stretch of highway. Programs have also taken place or been started in Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Nevada. Jackson Hole, Wyoming is also looking into creating a series of structures as well. Florida has a long history of using crossing structures particularly to protect the endangered Florida panther and California has used them to protect desert tortoises. More and more, the value of these structures are being applied to a wider diversity of wildlife - even salamanders. In Waterton Lakes National Park, specially designed underpasses were built specifically for the long-toed salamander. In a study conducted in 2009, research showed the salamanders had suffered a 60% loss in population since 1994. By building the underpasses, 130 salamanders were able to safely cross the road, dramatically reducing highway mortality. Banff should be very proud of the role it has played in helping spread the word about fencing and crossing structures and their role in helping to reduce wildlife mortality. Over the next decade, we can hope to see them spread far and wide as new jurisdictions begin to add them to their normal planning process for highway improvement projects. After all, 200,000 animal crossings in Banff has to say something about their effectiveness, not to mention an 80% reduction in animal deaths caused by vehicles. Wildlife Crossings Next up…Bear 148 gets one more chance Bear 148 in Trouble Grizzly 148, the well-known daughter of Banff most famous bear, number 64, has once again run afoul of provincial conservation officers by leaving the protection of Banff National Park and hanging around Quarry Lake and the Peaks of Grassi neighbourhood in Canmore. Despite the fact that they are built on a primary wildlife corridor and that they are right on the route that any bear would need to take were it to connect with the (hopefully) soon to be established Three Sisters Corridor, it seems provincial conservation officers have little tolerance for 148. She has never made contact with people, but she does not do well with dogs. This past week, she bluff charged a man with a child in a stroller that also had two dogs on leash. Any time dogs are involved in bear encounters there is a chance that the encounter may escalate. In most situations, when bears encounter people, they are looking to see whether we pose a threat or not. Two barking, growling dogs can definitely be interpreted that way and so she escalated to a bluff charge just to let them know that she was in charge. Bluff charges are just that…a bluff. It's a way to let something know that she is ready for business if need be. Like most bears, she then left them alone. No injuries occurred, just some shaky nerves. She essentially just did what she was supposed to do. She warned them to stay away and then she moved on. She is collared and so officials should have known she was in the area. As a result of this encounter, officials live trapped her and moved her back to her main turf around the town of Banff. They did state though that if she comes back to Canmore and has another similar encounter that they will euthanize her. As Bill Hunt from Banff National Park stated in a recent story in the Rocky Mountain Outlook: "Female bears are the reproductive engines of the population and she's lived her entire life in Banff National Park and surrounding area without incident so far." There's also a very good chance that she has mated for the first time this spring. At 6-1/2 years old, she's right at the age when bears in the central Rockies tend to begin mating. As it is, we have one of the lowest productivity rates of any bear population and so the loss of even one breeding female can make a big impact on the population. Canmore is her territory, just as much as Banff. As a community we need to find ways to live with bears or we will see more and more of them shot simply for hanging out where people can harass them. Just after closing off the area where 148 had her incident, Conservation Officers charged two people with a dog for crawling under the closure tape and ignoring the closure. Unfortunately, all it takes is a few more morons like these two that will help ensure that bears are no longer welcome on the landscape. It makes no sense to fight for a corridor along the Three Sisters lands if bears are not allowed to move through the Canmore Nordic Centre, Power Line Trail, Quarry Lake and Peaks of Grassi in order to actually reach it. They are all connected. We already have the most developed landscape in the world where grizzlies still exist and unless we as a community vow to share the mountains with bears than the bears will simply be shot one after the other. Let's hope that 148 stays put in Banff, but the buffaloberry season is now upon us. I spotted my first ripe berries last week, right in the heart of Canmore. Even if 148 stays away, bears WILL be moving into the valley bottoms to feed on these berries. A bear like 148 can eat up to 200,000 buffaloberries every day. That's the equivalent of you eating 75 Big Macs, every day for the next 6 weeks. It's the one food that allows them to build their fat layers for winter. The safety concern is that the berries need sunlight to grow. That means they need an opening in the forest canopy…which is exactly what a trail or a road provides. This means that almost all low elevation trails in the area are lined with grizzly bear buffets. If there are buffaloberries, there will be bears nearby. If you learn to identify just one plant in the central Rockies, make it this one. This summer, instead of complaining about the closures that will be coming as bears gather to feed on berries, forget about the low elevation trails. This is a great time of year to do some of the higher ridgewalks like the Mount Allan Centennial Trail or Sunshine Meadows. You can avoid the bears simply by avoiding the berries. It doesn't mean you won't encounter a bear, but you can dramatically shift the odds in your favour by avoiding areas with large patches of buffaloberries. If you're a mountain biker, sloooooow down. The bears are so focused on feeding that if you scream down some of the nordic centre trails, you may find yourself with a very close encounter. Everyone needs to carry bear spray, even along local town trails. Make sure it is on your belt and not strapped to your pack or your bike. If you get separated from them, you will still have your spray only if it's on your person. Bears are an amazing part of the mountain landscape. They are one of the key reasons that visitors state for visiting this area. We all rely on tourism for the lifeblood of the valley and we need to do our part to make sure that the grandchildren of today's visitors will still be able to see grizzlies 50 years from now. I hope to be around to see bear 148s great grandchildren as well. New Method to Count Bears Biologists have developed a new method to estimate bear populations and densities in the mountains. By placing hundreds of remote wildlife cameras along trails throughout the mountains, and combining this with radio collar data, they can get a much more accurate estimate of grizzly populations. Historically, they would need to do extensive field work to collect dna from hair and scat samples. As biologists look at the cost of another dna study in Banff, the estimate runs at almost a half a million dollars and hundreds of man hours in the field. During the study, researchers Jesse Whittington and Mark Hebblewhite trapped and collared 22 grizzlies. This was followed up by placing 214 remote cameras they were able to track the collared grizzlies as well as unknown individuals as they were captured on the cameras. Without the help of cameras, they would have come to the conclusion that the population had dropped by as much as 51%. The use of cameras makes it much easier for researchers and land managers to estimate population densities for animals like grizzlies. Parks Canada cameras have captured more than 2,000 images of bears in just the past 3 years. They are also regularly capturing photographs of five females and their young. The important thing in this method is that the combination of collar data and cameras is what allows them to estimate density. In the central Rockies, they estimated around 13 bears per 1,000 km. These are fairly stable numbers and compare well to studies done 10 or more years ago. However, this stability relies on keeping breeding females like 148 on the landscape. If we start to lose the reproductive engines of the population, we could see a steep decline in numbers. Let's all do our part in not just staying away from bear prone areas during buffaloberry season but also reporting violations like off-leash dogs that could result in a very negative interaction with a grizzly. If a bear has to die because you thought it was your God given right to have your dog illegally off-leash, then you should not be living in a community that prides itself on being bear aware. And I would hope that everyone around you would report that violation to the appropriate authorities. Let's celebrate that our bears are doing well, but maintain our vigilance so that the trend continues. Next up…Where did Waterton get it's name. Carol Patterson has spent the last two decades traveling the world. She writes and speaks extensively about reinventing your business and your life with travel. Her writing has been featured in BBC Travel, Avenue Magazine, Roadstories.ca, Alaska magazine and more. More recently, one of her stories won second place in the Best Sustainable/Responsible Tourism Feature category at the Travel Media Association of Canada Conference. In June, Carol presented at the Waterton Wildflower Festival about the naming of Waterton Lakes National Park and about the park's namesake Charles Waterton. Recently she was nice enough to share some of her story with me in an interview. I hope you enjoy it.

Story 1 - Bulletproof Elk A recent study published in the journal PLOS One has brought some amazing insights into the behaviour of female elk in the Rocky Mountains. The study took place in southwestern Alberta and southeastern British Columbia. It looked at the behaviour of female elk when confronted by hunters and how they are able to learn to effectively avoid the hunters completely over time…and when I say avoid…They become virtually bulletproof by the age of 9 or 10. In any animal population, there will be two sets of behavioural traits, those they are born with (such as personality and temperament), and those they learn over time. This study looks to see how female elk learn to effectively evade both bow and rifle hunters over time. They satellite collared female elk and then looked into whether behavioural differences based on age were due ONLY to pressure from hunters, meaning that more timid elk were naturally more likely to survive, or whether the elk could learn new behaviours over time to increase their odds of surviving into old age. In any predator-prey relationship, predators may seek certain behaviours in their prey, while the prey also adopt behaviours designed to make them less vulnerable, such as moving to less risky locations. Many of these responses seem to be based on experience dealing with either predators, or in the case of elk, hunters. This gives older female elk an advantage over younger, less experienced individuals. The higher the pressure, the stronger will be the elks reaction. This is especially evident during the hunting season where the elk will experience intense pressure from numerous hunters over a short period of time. The study found that animals react quite rapidly to changes in their home range. These include new predators arriving or even increased disturbances by people. The changes in behaviour show that the animals are learning to adapt to new conditions over time. In this study, hunters were the main predator putting pressure on the elk. New high powered rifles allow elk to be taken at distances of 300 m or more. The study focused on female elk, because the hunting pressure on them is lower than it is for bulls. They can also live as long as 20 years or more and are highly social, living together in groups through survive successive hunting seasons. As some females in the herd are shot, the remainder have an opportunity to alter their behaviour and to learn from the experience. The fact that the hunting season is limited to a short period allows the elk to take more extreme measures, such as moving to more inaccessible areas, in order to reduce their exposure to hunters. They may also move around less which also makes them more difficult for hunters to spot. As elk gain more experience, they seem to become more and more successful in evading hunters. By the age of 9 or 10, they are essentially bulletproof. The study also looked into whether personality types made a difference in survival. For instance, were bolder individuals killed more quickly, and thus making up less of the population in older elk. During the study, female elk were fitted with satellite collars that allows biologists to track their movements over time. From their locations, they could analyze how they used forest cover and rugged landscapes to escape hunters. As female elk aged, they moved less, making them less easily spotted by hunters. They also increased their use of more rugged landscapes more during bow hunting season than during rifle season. This may be due to the fact that bow hunters need a closer approach and rugged terrain will make that more difficult. It also increases the chances that the hunter will be discovered. Rifle hunters, however, can shoot long distances into rugged terrain as they may be more visible if they are on slopes as compared to flatter ground. While female elk normally reduce their use of forest cover with age, they will increase its use if they are near roads where hunters may be present. Their strategies change when they are in areas where the likelihood of being spotted is higher. The elk actually used different methods of evading hunters depending on the type of equipment the hunters used, such as bows vs rifles. Most of the bold elk are killed at a young age, so the population gets more timid with age. As the saying goes, there are no old-bold elk. But the elk that get old, can become bullet proof. Story 2 - Exploding Bear Spray Have you ever left your bear spray in your car? OK, be honest. You know you have. I would bet that most of us do this all the time. My guides pack has been living in my car through entire seasons with my trusty bear spray in its holster. Well that all changes right now! Last weekend, Lyndsay Kearns returned to her car after a long bike ride to discover that her canister of Saber Wild Max bear spray had exploded in her car. The hot sun, heated up her car to temperatures high above the recommended storage temperatures and after cooking for a few hours…kaboom. The canister was completely destroyed and her car was seriously damaged. Everything was saturated with bear spray. Before I had an opportunity to speak with Lyndsay, I took out a magnifying glass and read the tiny notices on the side of the canisters and came across this message: "When travelling, do not store in a passenger compartment. Container may explode if heated. Do not place in hot water or near radiators, stoves or other sources of heat. Do not leave in a hot vehicle. For safety and performance do not store above 50C or below 0C" Say what? I guess this makes sense, but I'd never really thought much about it. Well I will now. Yesterday Lyndsay was nice enough to let me interview her for the podcast. She's been in Canmore since 2009 and is an avid lover of the local mountain bike scene. If you want to listen to the interview, the link to listen to the episode is at the top of this post. The interview begins at the 7:50 mark. From her experience, it's critical that we don't store bear spray in our cars when we're not in them. The bear spray should also not be stored in the passenger compartment if possible. For those of you with sedans, keep it in the trunk, away from people. I'll also be ordering a Bear Spray Safety Container from Kodiak Wildlife Products. For $20, it offers a sealable storage container that protects the canisters against heat and accidental impact that could damage the canister and lead to accidental releases. You can order one of these canisters here: Bear Spray Safety Container And don't forget that canisters should not be stored in your car in the winter either. Although they SHOULD not freeze, I did come across one video that showed a car where the canister exploded when left overnight in cold temperatures. So my advice, store it in a safety container when travelling, and keep it indoors at night. Yikes…what a mess. Story 3 - Dr. Joe Shea Presentation Dr. Joseph Shea is a climatologist focusing on high elevation landscapes using unmanned aerial vehicles. On a daily basis, he runs the new cold water research lab in Canmore, Alberta and is recognized as one of the top snow and ice scientists in the world. His presentation looks into the use of drones in high elevation climate science. I hope you enjoy Dr. Shea's presentation. The new Cold Water Research Lab in Canmore is poised to do some amazing research and I look forward to sharing some of their discoveries in upcoming episodes. Don't forget that if you're looking for a unique Rocky Mountain Experience, drop me a line a ward@wardcameron.com. I've been helping people build memories for the past 30 years and Ward Cameron Enterprises can provide you with custom guiding solutions, wildlife ecology and bear safety workshops, as well as keynote speakers. We do one thing and we do it well..we sell wow!

Microburst Mayhem

On the evening of June 8, I was getting ready to head out to the climate change presentation that I'll play during the second portion of this episode, and wouldn't you know it, minutes before I left the house, an extremely severe storm hit Canmore. It postponed the presentation slightly as traffic slowed to a halt and audience members were delayed.

Little did I know that a little further west, along the Bow Valley Parkway in Banff National Park, a massive microburst was creating mayhem near to the Johnston Canyon campground and chalets.

A microburst hits like a weather bomb. A wet microburst hits like a tornado but lacks the rotational movement. Think of it as a super intense downdraft of sinking air that hits the ground like a hammer. These downdrafts usually come with mind-boggling amounts of moisture and winds in excess of 100 km/hour.

Like a tornado, microbursts are extremely local events, usually only affecting a few 100 metres to a few kilometres in size.

Climatologists have defined them as extreme downbursts that extend no more than 4 km over the surface. It's small scale, results in much higher wind speeds.

They're caused by a huge change in air pressure and the air picks up speed as it descends. Essentially, when a large storm happens, dry air draws moisture from the wet air. This cools the wet air and it begins to sink. The bigger the difference in moisture, the bigger the difference in the air pressure. This cool, low-pressure air drops like a stone.

As the downdraft descends, it accelerates. When it hits the ground, it bursts outward and accelerateseven faster increasing the potential for damage from the high winds even more.

In this particular case, the epicentre was just east of Johnston Canyon along the Bow Valley Parkway in Banff. When I visited on Monday, I explored a little of the impact zone and it was absolutely impassable. Almost every tree was either snapped off or uprooted within an area covering almost 10 hectares.

When the storm hit around 5 pm, the debris began flying almost immediately. While the burst was focused primarily east of the campground and resort, a number of trees damaged 90-year-old cabins at Johnston Canyon Resort.

In the campground, falling trees caused the evacuation of 100 campers from the Johnston Canyon Campground to Tunnel Mountain in Banff for safety.

The storm took out power lines and dozens of trees blocked the Parkway. I do a regularnature walk that passes the site of a small microburst that happened years ago, but this scene really helped me to understand the power of a large-scale event.

Events like this have been historically rare in the mountains, but they do happen. However, with warming climates, we get more extreme storms on a more regular basis. Currently, the Rockies is receiving more moisture than it did historically, but it's getting it in fewer, more extreme events.

Globally, microbursts have resulted in numerous commercial plane crashes during takeoffs and landings.

Understanding weather and the implications of events like microbursts can help us to stay safe in the mountains. When hiking, it's becoming more and more important to keep your eyes on the sky. Look for sudden changes in weather and air pressure.

In the mountains, we often are unaware of an approaching storm until it appears over the top of the nearest mountain. This storm has illustrated just how scary severe storms can be and we all need to take extra precautions in these changing times.

In the Rockies, we often have warm air rising over the course of the day, condensing around the mountain tops. This 'orographic' or mountain weather often causes short-lived, extreme thunder storms in the late afternoon or early evening, as was the case in this storm.

Coincidentally, this is often just about the time many hikers are cresting the summit ridge on a long walk. If you can see visible changes in the cloud cover, or sudden changes in the direction of winds, it may indicate a coming change in the weather. Take the time to learn a little more about predicting the weather when you're exploring the mountains. If you hike a lot, it will definitely pay off in the long run.

High Elevation Climate Change byDr Pomeroy

Dr. Pomeroy recently received the largest water research grant in the world to start the Global Water Futures. It's focused on the impacts of climate change on water systems and will look at helping Canada predict the impacts of climate change on water availability and ways of dealing with and predicting extreme weather events.

I hope you enjoy Dr. Pomeroy's presentation. It really brings into focus the huge amount of work yet to be done on high elevation climate research. It also brings into sharp focus that the runoff from mountain rivers effects almost every corner of this country, from the Pacific Ocean to Hudson Bay.

Wheat growing on the prairies receives most of its water from melting snow and ice in the mountains. While today, we are getting a higher amount of runoff simply because we are seeing increased melting of our glaciers, that is a bill that will soon come due. As you watch the high river levels this year, remember, that is our future going down the drain.

Next week, I'll share the final of this 3-part climate series with a presentation by Dr. Joe Shea who is an expert on using drones in climate science in high mountain landscapes.

Story 1 - What will 2050 be like in western Canada Recently the CBC website posted an article by Tara Carman about the potential changes that will take place in British Columbia in the next 30 years with just a 2.5C increase in temperature. The story paints a troubling picture for Canada's westernmost province. It's no secret that our weather has been changing. Here in the Rockies, we are getting more overall moisture during the summer months, but it is coming in fewer, more extreme weather events. Many of these events are separated by droughts that set the scene for huge fires. The 2016 fire, known as the 'Beast' which devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta is a classic example. Even in British Columbia's rainforests, there have been significant fires over the past few years. If Canada were to halve our greenhouse emissions by 2050, that would still result in a 2.5C increase in the annual average temperature for British Columbia. Most scientists agree that an increase of just 2C over pre-industrial levels is the point at which the impacts of climate change become far more difficult for humans to deal with. Globally, it will cause longer droughts, intense heatwaves and disruptions to global food supplies. It will also result in sea level increases of more than half a metre resulting in the flooding of many coastal communities like Vancouver and Victoria. Currently, we're already half way to this 2C threshold. We're already experiencing a warmer planet than we have experienced in the past 10,000 years. Despite this, British Columbia could easily exceed that 2C point and experience 2.5C. So, what might this mean for the province? Here are a few bullet points: • Sea level could rise by 30 cm • 25% of the provinces glaciers will have disappeared completely • Flooding in the lower mainland can exceed $32.7 billion • The wettest day of the year will be 10% wetter than it is today • Days above 25C will increase from the current 18/year to a whopping 30 If you like sandy beaches, like Jericho Beach, higher sea levels could erode away the sand during storms. The seawall in Stanley Park will take a pummeling. You can also forget flying into Vancouver during severe storms as the airport, along with other low lying areas like the ferry terminal at Tsawwassen may be under water. The world class salmon runs on the west coast are dependent upon cold water runoff from the mountains. The ideal temperature range for trout and salmon is between 13 and 18C. As ocean temperatures rise with the reduction in cold water melt due to glacier loss, the temperatures can quickly exceed 20C. The Fraser River is Canada's most productive salmon river, but according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the average summer temperature rose by 1.1C between 1953 and 1998. As winters become milder, smaller snowpacks also melt quicker - and may disappear long before the summer salmon runs begin. If the cold meltwater is finished before the run, than the water temperature has more opportunity to increase to the point of being harmful to salmon runs. Now while increases in growing seasons may seem super cool, we forget that there are certain advantages to being a cold climate. Cold temperatures are very efficient at keeping many problematic insect pests and diseases at bay. While many people accuse the mountain pine beetle of being an invasive threat, it is a naturally occurring insect of the western mountains. At its peak, it resulted in a loss of over half of British Columbians pine by 2012, and likely 58% by the end of this year. Historically, it was climate that kept it under control. All we needed to keep it at bay was proper winters. A few weeks of -40C was very handy but since we're not getting that any more, the beetles have been able to spread much further north than ever before. In several cases in the 2000s, beetles that were part of huge epidemics were able to hitch a ride on atmospheric winds and Dorothy their way to a new and wondrous land…no, not Oz, but worse…far into northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta. The significance of this long-distance transport means that they have now migrated far enough north to make their way into the Canadian Shield. They've also made the jump from lodgepole pine to jack pine meaning they now have a straight run across northern Canada, all the way to the eastern pine forests of Ontario and south all the way to Texas and Florida Other pests moving north into the mountain west include the spotted-wing drosophila which attacks cherries before they have a chance to ripen. The females lay their eggs in the unripe fruit which allows them to destroy the fruit before harvest. Little Cherry Disease is another challenge that is hitting British Columbia orchards. It causes cherries to be smaller and more bitter and, as a result, unsalable. Globally, insect pests are moving north at a rate of almost 3km/year, increasing the already high rate of global crop loss of 10-16% annually. Some fungi, are moving north at a rate in excess of 10km/year (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crop-pests-on-the-move-due-to-climate-change/). Around the world, there is no crop more important than wheat, and Canada produces almost 30 million tonnes of wheat every year. We are the worlds 6th largest exporter and climate change could challenge that supremacy. Recent studies show that an global increase in temperature of just 1 degree Celsius could reduce wheat production by between 4.1 and 6.4 percent. Globally, that would be a loss in excess of Canada's entire annual production and reach as high as 32 million tonnes. British Columbia's inland rain forest is also under threat of increased wildfires. While it's difficult to think of rain forests burning, we need to remember one important fact about the interior rain forest - it doesn't get enough rain to really be considered a rain forest. What it does get is some 10 metres of winter snowfall, at least it does today. While this doesn't make it truly qualify as a rain forest, it does release vast amounts of moisture through snow melt during the summer, and this helps keep the soils saturated. In essence, it simulates a rain forest. Should the summer rains, and winter snows diminish, these ancient forests could find themselves susceptible to increased fire hazard. Changing climates are changing the rules. Everything we grew up considering normal is now up for renegotiation. Climate is changing. Water regimens are shifting. While we may see more warm weather, the weather brings with it a constantly shifting collection of complications and implications. One thing that is critical in these changing times, is that we can trust the science that our economies are built upon. Everything we know about climate change is the result of climate models that help us to anticipate how we may be effected as the various elements of change are established. Next up…Climate in the age of Trump Story 2 - Climate Science in the Trumpocene Last week, I was lucky to be able to record a presentation by three of Canada's top experts on water and climate change, Bob Sandford, Dr. John Pomeroy and Dr. Joe Shea. Bob is the EPCOR Chair for Water and Climate Security and the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health. He is the author of dozens of books including the United Nation's Water in the World We Want as well as Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Snow and Ice. He has long been a friend and mentor. His message on the challenges facing climate scientists today is important for anyone who believes in the scientific process and the role of peer reviewed science. I hope you enjoy his presentation entitled: The Hard work of Hope. Scientific Fact vs Politicized Fantasy in the Post-Truth Trumpocene.

Story 1 - Grizzlies Meet Bison This is one of the most amazing stories to hit the parks in decades, and the first large-scale reintroduction of a large hoofed animal in this area. In February of 2017, 10 pregnant females and 6 young bulls were reintroduced to a remote area of Banff National Park. Just yesterday, on June 7, 2017, Parks announced that the 10th calve had been born. That makes it 10 for 10 which is a great success for bison reintroduction Well it seems like someone else has also taken notice…master bruin. Park officials have reported that the fence around the paddock had grizzly tracks all around it on one particular morning. As a biologist and naturalist, I'm always trying to teach visitors to the mountains about the importance of understanding the seasonal foods of bears. Bears have to know when and where to find a variety of foods throughout the course of the season and every bear's habitat will have a slightly different seasonal palate. For this particular grizzly, as Marie-Eve Marchand of Bison Belong told the Calgary Eye Opener: "so the bear went to bed in the fall and there were no bison and he woke up with them right in the middle of his valley. It must have been pretty exciting to see them looking at each other." This new herd in Banff will be only one of 5 herds of wild bison in all of North America. Story 2 - Dino Discoveries Dinosaur discoveries can happen in the most unexpected ways. Take for example the recent announcement of the most well preserved dinosaur ever found. March 21, 2011, began as just another day for Alberta Suncor worker Shawn Funk as he worked an excavator at the Millennium Mine located 27 km outside of Fort McMurray, Alberta. Just like he did every day for the previous 12 years, his shovel bit into gravels saturated with bitumen. This combination of thick oil and sand is known as Alberta's oil sands. The oil itself is made up of the remains of long dead organisms. Most of them are thought to have been tiny marine creatures called zooplankton, although larger creatures may have also been a part of the organic soup as well. As this material was buried under deeper and deeper overlying deposits, heat and pressure transformed the organic material into petroleum. The oil sands in northern Alberta represent the world's third largest reserve of oil. Funk had been excavating oil sands bitumen for years and, in all that time, had previously only turned up the odd petrified tree stump or other pieces of fossilized wood. On this particular day, that would all change. At around 1:30 pm, his bucket hit something that seemed harder than the surrounding material. As he emptied his shovel, he noticed a larch chunk of rock with a diamond pattern and a texture that struck him as unusual. After calling in his supervisor, Mike Gratton, they realized tht this was no ordinary rock. Both realized that experts needed to examine the find. When Donald Henderson, a paleontologist with the Royal Tyrell Museum arrived, he couldn't believe what he was seeing. He was quoted in Alberta Oil Magazine as saying: "I couldn't believe my eyes - it was a dinosaur. When we first saw the pictures we were convinced we were going to see another plesiosaur. The fossil instead turned out to be one of the best preserved ankylosaurs in the world. All the armor is in place; we've got skin and other soft tissues, and probably stomach contents as well." This wasn't the first dinosaur to be discovered in the oil sands, but it was the first to be found in the Millennium Mine. Every company operating in the oil sands needs a permit under the provincial Historical Resources Act. Before any work is done, a paleontologist is hired to do a baseline study of the area to get an idea of where any current fossil deposits may be located. Once the permit to begin excavation is granted, they're still required to report all fossil discoveries. It's up to operators like Funk to keep a close look on what his shovels are unearthing. If a fossil is found, the rules are very strict. The area has to be cordoned off and equipment has to be moved at least 20 metres away. Once a geologist verifies that a fossil has been found, the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology gets a call and head right out to the site. The vast majority of Alberta's oil sands are found in a deposit known as the McMurray Formation, which dates from 145 to 66 million years ago. These dates encompass the entirely of the Cretaceous Period - or the age of the dinosaurs, so the area is perfect for their discovery. Sooooo…what exactly did they find? It is a dinosaur known as a nodosaur…a whatasaur? Well depending on how well you know your dinosaurs, this is a low, plant eating dinosaur which is part a group known as ankylosaurs. The ankylosaurs are kind of like a huge armadillo (without the ability to curl up into a ball), but they had a huge bony club at the end of their tail. They are like a tank, low to the ground with heavy armor plate and body spikes to protect them. Nodosaurs represent a family within the ankylosaurs and are imilar except that they lack the tail club and have a somewhat narrower head. They were very formidable. If you've visitied the Royal Tyrell Museum, you may have seen a display of an Edmontonia which was closely related to this currently un-named nodosaur. I'll leave a link in the shownotes to a great article on the National Geographic site that will give you a great look at this amazing new dinosaur

Story 1 - New Stampede Foods Every year, the Calgary Stampede introduces new menu items for the midway…and this year is no different. As usual, some are tasty, and others nasty. Last week they announced 40 new foods to their usual fare of corn dogs, French fries and pizza. Wait…did someone say pizza? How about the world's hottest pizza…yup you heard that right, this year the Stampede offers pizza infused with ghost peppers. If that doesn't make you want to head on down to the grounds, how about some crispy chicken feet on a stick…oh yah, that's a thing this year. Like always, there are a million ways to have your fries, starting with the Tropical Bobster. Think poutine topped with lobster and garnished with mango salsa and fresh coriander. Or how about clam chowder poutine. On top of a bed of fries, you'll find "creamy clammy goodness" garnished with crispy crab meat and parsley. This list only scratches the surface as to the entire list of new food offerings. If you'd like to check out the complete list, check out this link: 2017 Stampede Foods Story 2 - Johnson Lake Johnson Lake has been a fixture in the news ever since whirling disease was discovered in the lake last August, and subsequently throughout the entire Bow and Oldman River systems. While Bow River downstream of Johnson Lake has been impacted by the parasite, rivers upstream still seem to be free of the disease. Johnson Lake has the potential to form as a buffer between the lower Bow and the Upper Cascade River system. The Upper Cascade is important as it is home to 4 of the most important populations of the endangered westslope cutthroat trout. These include Sawback Lake, Sawback Creek, Cuthead Creek and Elk Lake. Johnson Lake is separated from these upper rivers by the dam on Lake Minnewanka, but with the ease with which whirling disease can be transferred from one lake to another, the lake can form an important buffer helping to make the transfer a little more unlikely. How does it spread? It can carried by fishermen on their gear or in the tread of their boots - especially felt-tipped waders. The myxospores can also be carried on the feathers of birds from one lake to another. Park managers are currently using electro-fishing and gill nets to remove as many fish from the lake as possible. The lake will reopen to public use for the summer, but after Labour Day weekend, they'll resume their electro-fishing and gill netting to try to kill more fish. They'll also bring in a contractor to help lower the water level to force the fish into a smaller area to enable their capture. The hope is that by removing all of the fish from Johnson Lake, that the disease will naturally die out over time. Story 3 - Living with Wildlife There's a new film that everyone living and traveling to the Canadian Rockies should definitely watch. It's called Living with Wildlife and has been produced in cooperation with Necessary Journeys, Bear Conflict Solutions and Front Range Films. Check out the show notes for this episode for a link to watch the actual film. Story 4 - McDougall Church On May 22nd, 2017, Alberta lost an important piece of its history when the McDougall Memorial United Church was lost to fire. The church, first built in 1875, the same year the Northwest Mounted Police marched westward, has been an important place of worship for more than 140 years. The fire is currently believed to have been accidental and arson is not suspected. Cochrane RCMP reported that they could find no signs of arson at the scene. In a CBC story, they quote an investigator who felt that the cause will likely be listed as "inappropriate use of, or disposal of, an unknown ignition source". Story 5 - The Crowds Cometh For months I've been talking about the crowds that will be heading to Banff and Jasper National Parks this summer. Well this year's Victoria Day weekend shows that the pilgrimage has begun. Throughout the park, the campgrounds and hotels were full, the highways choked and the townsite was incredibly busy. Traffic counters showed that a record 31,600 vehicles arrived at the townsite - and this doesn't count vehicles that were already there. The congestion limit for Banff is 24,000 vehicles so we were way above that on just the first long weekend of summer. I ended up calling the Warden's office when I arrived in Banff to find the highway exits were backed up beyond the exit and were stretching into the driving lane. It was a scary situation as cars were suddenly braking when they noticed that traffic in the right lane had stopped. With Canada's 150th birthday, park passes are free this year and so we may see numbers exceeding all previous records. If you are planning on visiting, it is worthwhile to look at some of the public transit options that will allow you to visit without having to fight traffic or try to find elusive parking spots.

Story 1 - Banff Officials Launch New Campaign

This summer, Parks Canada is launching a new public education campaign to try to educate visitors about the dangers of feeding animals in the park. Large images of a wolf with a plastic bottle in its mouth with the caption 'human food kills wildlife' are beginning to appear in and around Banff. The other key message that will appear on posters is 'Give Wildlife Space'.

Fines for feeding or harassing wildlife can be as high as $25,000 but the cost to wildlife can be even higher.

Over the past few decades, front-line staff has been gradually reduced in the parks and it has really begun to hurt the ability of parks to keep tabs on visitor behaviour. For a number of years, we have had the wildlife guardian programs with staff driving park roads looking for wildlife jams and educating visitors on safe behaviour around animals. It is a very successful program and it would be a great program to keep expanding.

Recently I had the opportunity to teach several this year's new guardians a course in park interpretation and from what I could see, we've got some great new guardians ready to hit the roads this summer.

Story 2 - Who owns the Franklin Artifacts

After years of searching, Parks Canada solved the second part of a 160-year mystery last summer with the discovery of the final ship of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition which disappeared without a trace in 1845 while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage.

They discovered the HMS Terror in, of all places, Terror Bay, off the coast of King William Island. This lonely outpost sits in a narrow channel to the west of Baffin Bay in Canada's Nunavut Territory.

Two years earlier, they discovered the HMS Erebus, believed to be the ship that Franklin died on.

Before Parks Canada discovered the Erebus in 2014, while the ships were the property of England, the U.K. agreed to transfer ownership of all the artifacts except for those significant to the royal navy…oh yah and gold. They want the gold (PS, so far, no gold).

Despite this agreement, so far talks to determine ownership keep stalling out. Obviously, Canada would like to have this settled before we continue to sink more money into additional archaeological work on the two sites.

According to a recent article in the Calgary Herald, Parks Canada Spokeswoman Meaghan Bradley said: "Discussions with the government of the United Kingdom on the transfer of the Franklin artifacts are ongoing".

Story 3 - Bear 148 gets Cranky

There have been several stories about bear 148 recently in the press. They have been blown out of proportion in many ways and now is the time to bring in some calmness to the discussion.

Bear 148 took over her mother's turf, which includes the town of Banff when her mother passed away a few years ago. If a bear can take advantage of a territory close to people, but still walk the tightrope of wildness, it can be a pretty good place to live.

We're just heading into the calving season and so she'll be hanging around the townsite looking to find an unattended calf. Grizzlies normally take around 45% of newborn elk and moose calves. She won't be alone; cougars and wolves will also patrol the periphery looking for an opportunity for some elk veal.

In April, she trotted behind a Canmore woman that was kick-sledding along the Spray River Fireroad in Banff. Kick-sledding is a type of dog sledding and while dogs are not allowed on this trail in the winter, they are allowed after mid-April.

In a second incident bear 148 followed a hiking party, also with a dog, for 20 minutes. They were hiking on Mount Norquay when they encountered the bear. They were not carrying bear spray at the time.

And just this past week, 148 made headlines by walking through Banff's high school girl's rugby match on the playing fields in Banff. Needless to say, it was an exciting few minutes for the girls whose team is coincidentally called the bears.

Story 4 - Interior Rainforest

The Columbia Mountains represent a landscape often referred to as the Interior Wet Belt. In most cases, when we talk about rainforests, we're talking about a coastal landscape. In fact, this is true for 98% of the world’s rainforests. What makes Canada's rainforest unique is that we also have continental rainforests. What the heck is a continental rainforest you ask?

While rainforests are ALMOST exclusively a coastal phenomenon, in rare situations, rainforest-like conditions can occur far inland from the coast. We refer to these as continental rainforests.

Summers in the Columbia Mountains are similar in temperature to the coastal rainforest, yet winters are quite a bit colder. While summer rains drop 320 to 452 mm of rain on the Columbia Mountains, it represents only a fraction of the rainfall soaking the coastal rainforests every year.

You might wonder then, why is this considered a rainforest if it doesn't get enough, well, rain? The simplest reason is that precipitation has two forms…rain and snow. Winter snowfall in the Columbia's can be dramatic, with higher elevations buried under 10 or more metres of snow.

This massive accumulation of snow means a long and prolonged summer melt, helping to ensure that soils never dry out. So, while it doesn't technically get enough overall moisture to really be considered a rainforest, the seemingly endless summer melt allows it to essentially simulate one. Soils that would dry out in other landscapes are constantly soaked by a seemingly endless runoff from melting winter snowfalls.

These interior temperate rainforests are not only fascinating, but they are significant on a global scale. Only 2% of rainforests worldwide occur far enough away from coastal areas to be considered continental rainforests. In future episodes, we'll take a deeper look into some of the incredible natural and human history of these forests

Story 1 - First Bison Born in Banff Well, today, I'm able to share several good news stories that makes all the work worth it. While we are constantly being bombarded with bad news, it's always exciting when the hard work of thousands of people has a tangible impact on decisions taking place in the places we love. So let's take a look at the great announcements filling the newswires this week. First on the list has to do with the cutest thing on earth – baby animals. Spring is the time of new life in the mountains. Over the next month we'll begin to see mule and white-tail deer fawns, elk calves, and those oh so cute black and grizzly bear cubs. So what makes this year so special? How about the first bison calf in 140 years to be born in Banff National Park? Now if that's not cool enough, not only is it the first bison in more than a century, but it was born on Earth Day, April 22, 2017. Story 2 - Icefields Trail Stalled Parks Canada has been planning a paved bike path running all the way from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields, and eventually all the way to Lake Louise and possibly Banff. This 86.4 million dollar trail has been hugely unpopular by conservationists, researchers, and as was revealed recently, Parks Canada's own scientists. Freedom of Information crusader, Ken Rubin peeled back the curtain of secrecy and has been revealing the long trail of public documents and emails that led up to the decision to build this trail. One of the most telling signs was the fact that Parks Canada actually posted a tender for engineering firms to begin the design of the actual trail. This is especially troubling since the trail is not even through the public consultation phase and has not been given any official go-ahead from the powers that be. Well it seems that the overwhelmingly negative response to this tender has finally caused Parks Canada to pay attention. This week, the tender was withdrawn. According to a story in the Fitzhugh Newspaper, Minister McKenna's press secretary, Marie-Pascale Des Rosiers said: "This was determined to be premature given that the agency is currently focused on the consultation process and the environmental assessment for the proposed project". Story 3 - Big Wins in Canmore's Wildlife Corridor Battle This has been a week of very good news in Canmore particularly in terms of the struggle to designate the last critical wildlife corridor on the south side of the Bow River valley. On April 26th, Alberta Environment and Parks announced that they will not be making a decision on the Three Sisters Mountain Village and Smith Creek Wildlife Corridors for at least another four to eight weeks. The very next day, Three Sisters withdrew from consideration, its area structure plan for its Smith Creek Development until the provincial government renders it's decision on the corridors. They did move forward with their submission for first reading of the Stewart Creek Village Centre area structure plan. But in a third blow to the developer, on May 2nd Canmore Town Council unanimously rejected Three Sisters asp for its village Centre development. Story 4 - Anglers Beware If you're one of the many anglers that love to cast a fly in the Bow River to test your luck against the prevalent trout population, you'll want to pay attention to this story. Beginning on April 1, the entire stretch of the Bow River from its headwaters at Bow Lake in Banff National Park to the Bassano Reservoir is now catch and release only. And speaking of Whirling Disease, it has now been confirmed in the entire Oldman River watershed as well. The disease now affects rivers throughout the western boundary of Alberta from Bow Lake south to the Montana Border and Waterton Lakes National Park. Despite this recent report, the Oldman River system will not see any changes to fish regulations at this time. Story 5 - Updates on Transportation and Parking for Banff In the past, it has been difficult to get to and from the mountains without a vehicle. There are a number of airport shuttle companies and a few regularly scheduled buses, but not really a proper transit system connecting Calgary with Canmore, Banff and Lake Louise. This summer, it looks like a number of players are combining to help solve this problem. One of the first stories was a new transit service between Calgary, Cochrane, Canmore and Banff. The service will run on weekends and holidays, beginning in mid-June and ending on Labour Day. The buses will be run by the Calgary Regional Partnership and will also allow valley residents to use the buses to travel to Calgary for the day. The cost of the buses will be $10 each way per person. The program would dedicate 3 buses to do approximately 13 round trips per day. The first bus will arrive in Banff around 8:30 am and the last one would leave Banff approximately 10:30 pm. The buses will pick-up and drop-off at the Crowfoot LRT Station in Calgary. A few morning and evening trips will pick-up and drop-off in Okotoks, Somerset-Bridlewood in South Calgary. There will also be additional bus service this summer between Banff and Lake Louise, as well as the Lake Minnewanka Loop. Both of these buses are also intended to encourage people to park their cars and reduce some of the strain on the busy road systems. On sunny summer days, the highway interchange at Lake Louise is completely closed as the roads become overwhelmed by the number of cars that want to visit. And finally some great news for traffic in and around Banff Townsite. On April 25th, Karen Sorensen, Mayor of Banff announce a new transportation hub and 900 stall parking area to be developed adjacent to the Banff train station.

If you're a follower of this podcast, you'll know I'm a great champion of the job that Parks Canada staff undergo on a daily basis. Every day, they're on the front lines trying to keep our wildlife both wild and safe, keeping resources protected and plucking injured wilderness wanderers off of mountain tops by helicopter. Without these champions of our wilderness Canada's National Park system would not be the world class system of protected areas that it is today. On the other hand, over the past 10-15 years, decisions have been taken from the scientists and experts that know the resource, know the priorities, and know where to best invest limited park dollars. Decisions are increasingly being made by distant bureaucrats with little connection to a local sense of place. It happened gradually. During the Harper years, the backcountry began to be de-emphasized and more and more focus was placed on getting more cars through the gates. As backcountry trails began to erode, bridges to collapse and boardwalks to rot, Parks Canada allowed skywalks, via ferratas, summer ski hill operations, and gondola expansions - all in the name of bringing more and more and more people through the gates. During the 2017 Canadian Parks Conference held in Banff National park this past March, Canada's Environment Minister, Catherine McKenna indicated that ecological integrity was again, job 1 within Parks Canada. There were three things that were her priority: "The importance of ecological integrity, science, conservation and traditional knowledge and my renewed focus on it, " She went on to state "The integral role of indigenous people will continue to play with Parks Canada as we move towards reconciliation and three, the future. What will our legacy be for the next 150 years and how can we work together?" Internal Parks Canada reports have been uncovered by Ottawa Freedom of Information Warrior Ken Rubin that shows that even Parks Canada staff had serious doubts about this project from the very beginning. According to a 2016 background document, they said: "Trail use is likely to be high and will induce further development…or at least demands for further development," They go on to indicate that any trail of this magnitude will surely need pullouts and rest stops every 5-10 km, not to mention connected campgrounds and additional asphalt based infrastructure. Recently, Rubin released another bombshell. In additional documents, he unveiled one of the real reasons this bike trail seems like it is being forced upon us despite almost universal opposition - time and money! While Parks Canada recently held 'public consultations', reports from those present said that it felt like it was less of a consultation and more of a "this is happening but let's hear, but not listen, to what you think" event. Way back in Episode 9, I reported that an intergovernmental panel was visiting Banff to hear from stakeholders regarding the increase in numbers in the park and the changes in the character of tourism in the mountain parks. After a decade of decisions made to increase tourism, despite science-based arguments showing that they were poorly conceived, many of us had little confidence in this process. However, on March 24, 2017, the report was published under the title: Taking Action Today: Establishing Protected Areas for Canada's Future. It's a big read, stretching some 120 pages and includes some great information, some re-focused stress on ecological integrity - and even a heavy dose of crow. Under the section on ecological integrity, for the first time it acknowledged the competing goals of protecting biodiversity and "sharing these great areas with Canadians as a way to maintain support for ongoing work to meet protected areas objectives. The report recognized that trying to combine these two goals can be at cross purposes. It states: "These two roles are important; however, their interpretation and implementation are varied. Many perceive a conflict between the two. Through testimony and its site visits to Banff National Park and Jasper National Park, the Committee became acutely aware of the differing points of view. Essentially, one person’s use and enjoyment of a park can be another person’s impairment." While Parks Canada sees increased numbers as a great way to foster understanding, there is a point at which too much fostering can lead to negative perceptions. As the report indicates: "In fact, some witnesses felt that planned increases in visitation will impair not just ecological integrity, but also the role of parks in connecting Canadians with nature as overcrowding at attractions diminishes visitor experience. " In terms of some of these contentious developments, the report acknowledges: "Public consultations on development proposals have become limited to a few weeks of geographically restricted consultations, often after years of behind-closed-door discussions with private developers, and often after decisions have already been made internally. In many cases, like the Lake Louise Ski Resort expansion and the Glacier Skywalk, proposals have been approved in spite of strong public opposition. Public accountability measures like the Minister’s Round Table, which is legally required every two years under the Parks Canada Agency Act, have become tightly scripted events, focused almost entirely on how to increase park visitation, with no attention paid to nature conservation in recent years." Give the episode a listen to get the full story.

This week we're looking at some important changes to the tourism infrastructure in Jasper National Park as well as some insights into the life of bats in the mountain west http://traffic.libsyn.com/mountainnature/Ep025_Mountain_Nature_and_Culture_Podcast.mp3

As the summer season approaches, there are a number of new announcements taking place within Banff and Jasper National Parks that are definitely worth taking note of this year. If you work in the guiding industry, definitely stay tuned as these stories will affect your tours in a good way this summer. One of the big announcements is a complete overhaul of the food services at the Columbia Icefields Chalet. For years, the scenery has been spectacular, but the food…well..not so much. Over the years, options for motorcoach tours and family travelers have been slim along the scenic corridor between Banff and Jasper. A few years ago, the Chateau Lake Louise closed down its famous lunch buffet in the Victoria Dining Room and this left a huge hole in the dining options outside of the major centres of Banff and Jasper - especially for larger groups. Brewster this year has hired a new company to help manage the Chalet. Forrec is a global company specializing in developing attractions all around the world. They're the people behind sites like LegoLand in the U.S. In Canada, they developed the Bat Cave at the Royal Ontario Museum and also worked on the Muskoka Boat and Heritage Centre. In a recent article in Jasper's Community Newspaper, Fitzhugh, Matt Dawson, Forrec's senior director of visitor operations stated:

“The building is crowded and underwhelming, It’s a missed opportunity – Brewster ranks high (on online travel sites and apps) but the building gets poor or non-existent reviews. People are just blanking it out of their minds. So we want to have complementary experiences inside that enhance what they have outside.”

I can certainly agree with this characterization. The building has historically been the pain before the pleasure. It has been a cram of people, all in a rush, pushing their way through a crush of equally rushed crowds. Their first order of business has been focused on cuisine. There have always been two separate restaurants in the hotel. The first, located just above the main staircase, has been a buffet restaurant largely catered to motorcoach tours. The food was adequate at best and never changing. The second restaurant was the public cafeteria style free-for-all. The food was passable but really uninspiring. It was simply…necessary. The day is long, ya gotta eat, so eat. Nobody ever remarked about remarkable food. To be fair, these two restaurants feed some 600,000 hungry visitors every year. The buffet restaurant is now known as "Altitude". According to Dawson:

“Altitude is a 450-square-metre buffet style servery,” Dawson explained. “It takes inspiration from the natural environment. So the colour palette is inspired by glaciers, lots of icy blues and whites, harder surfaces – it’s cool and contemporary, and would not be out of place in downtown Vancouver.”

When it comes to the food, in an article in this week's Crag and Canyon, menu items will include "rack of lamb with mint sauce, fish, steaks, burgers, flatbreads, and pizzas." Well- hay…I can work with that. An upgrade to the Icefields Chalet has been a very long time coming and this is welcome news. One thing I would like to see is a way to better design the human traffic flow. I'm stoked about the improved food because, as a guide, I eat a lot of meals there every summer. The newly designed restaurants look great as well. If you want to see some images, Check out this story in the Crag and Conyon Newspaper:http://www.thecragandcanyon.ca/2017/04/12/glacier-discovery-centre-completes-interior-renovations-to-restaurants Can Forrec improve this iconic destination? If they can, I'll be impressed. Let me know if you visit. I'd love to hear some first-hand impressions. Mount Edith-Cavell is one of Jasper National Park's premier destinations. The interpretive walk to the Angel Glacier overlook is one that inspires awe and, a few years ago, terror.

In 2012, the Ghost Glacier came loose from the steep slopes of Mount Edith-Cavell and into the tiny tarn known as Cavell Pond. The resulting tsunami-style wave erupted from the tiny lake and swept down the valley taking out an interpretive trail as well as much of the public parking area. This event really brought to the fore, the dangers of a rapid glacial melt. It also led to the closing of the Mount Edith Cavell road for the remainder of the 2012 season. While it reopened in 2013, it was clear the combination of increased visitation as well as increased risk due to rapid glacial retreat meant that Parks Canada needed to do some redevelopment in order to move the parking lot out of the danger zone while also increasing the capacity. As of this summer, there is now a limit on the number of cars that can travel the Mount Edith Cavell Road. If you want to visit the area…and you really really DO want to visit this site. Limited access is a really really good idea. It makes sure that the people that do get an opportunity to visit the site will get a great experience. Starting this summer, in order to visit Mount Edith Cavell, you'll need a permit issued by Parks Canada. The free permits will be available outside of the Jasper Information Centre in the heart of Jasper between 08:00 and 10:00 every day. Only one permit per vehicle is required. It is being put in place primarily to ensure that each vehicle should have a place to park in the main lot. It will also help to reduce the overcrowding challenges at the site as well as the long line of vehicles parking along the really narrow access road as it approaches the parking area. For those of us that are part of an organized group tour, we won't need vehicle permits, nor will backcountry users, cyclists, or hostel guests. Parks Canada staff will be on location at the start of the road to check permits for vehicles as well as tour operator licenses, reservations for the Tonquin Trail, Tonquin Valley Backcountry Lodge, Amethyst Lake Lodge and the Edith Cavell Hostel. This is a great development for Mount Edith Cavell. We need to make sure that the access to the location is both safe and sustainable. If you are a repeat visitor, I truly believe that this will improve the access to the location. While fewer visitors will be able to snap photos of the glacier, it will help to reduce the impact and the crowds. Story 2 - Going Batty As days slowly warm up, it won't be long until, if you're lucky and very watchful, you may be able to see dark objects flitting across the night sky in search of flying insects. Bats are still largely a mystery in the mountain west with scientists in the dark on most aspects of these furry mammals. Researchers don't know very much about their population, distribution, or even where non-migratory bats overwinter in the Rockies. In most instances, the bats we see locally are likely to be big brown or little brown bats (also called the little brown myotis). The remaining 7 species are more solitary and less likely to be spotted by the average viewer. If you're lucky enough to a rarity, you'll likely not know, for as the saying goes, they all look mostly alike when flitting across the night sky. Alberta is home to the Big and Little brown bat, Eastern Red Bat, Hoary Bat, Long-eared Myotis, Long-legged Myotis, Northern Myotis, Silver Haired Bat and the Western Small-footed Bat. All bats are members of the order Chiroptera which loosely translates to 'hand wing' in Greek. Essentially, the bones that form the structure of the wing, are the bat's finger bones, which are connected by a thin skin membrane called the patagium. Because the wing is essentially, well, a hand, bats can move it like a hand while flying, which allows them to literally swim through the air. Only the thumb remains exposed, extending from the wing as a small claw used for climbing. Bats represent one of, at least, four times in history that self-propelled flight has evolved. In addition to bats, birds, and insects, my personal favourite, the pterosaurs, took to the air some 228 million years ago. The first known ancestral bat dates to around 50 million years ago. Canada's bats are all a member of the family Vespertilonidae which means "evening bat". This refers to their preference for hunting at night when insects are more active. Birds, with their rigid wings are better at providing lift but the wings of bats are more flexible allowing them to bend them into different shapes which in turn almost instantly varies the direction and degree of lift. Their flight is also more efficient than that of both insects and birds. As an example, a hovering bat uses 40% less energy than hawkmoths and 60% less than hummingbirds. Unlike the rigid wings of birds, they have almost two dozen wing bones that can each be controlled independently to some extent. Add to this the pliable nature of the wing membrane, and you have an aerial predator of unmatched flying abilities. If you ever have the chance to watch the beautiful flights of bats as they fly, tumble, barrel roll, and almost instantly change direction to hone in on a their dinner, you will have marveled at their nimble aerial displays. Bats combine aeronautic agility with active sonar to hone in on flying insects using echolocation combining millisecond timing and millimetre accuracy. While not all bat species use sonar, all the bats in Canada DO. Bats emit high frequency pulses of sound at a rate of up to 200 per minute. While we can't hear these pulses, they can hear the pulses reflect off of objects in their flight path. Depending on circ*mstance, bats produce three different types of pulse. One pulse is used when searching for prey. Once located, they change to an approach pulse and at the last minute, change to a feeding pulse as they prepare to capture dinner. Sonar allows the bats to literally see with sound! It helps them find all manner of flying insects, but also to navigate around obstacles. Echolocation is an almost magical way for bats to navigate the night skies in search of dinner. As autumn approaches so does the mating season. Bats swarm together for this purpose and once impregnated, female bats carry the active sperm for several months, waiting for late-winter or early spring before fertilization takes place. This delayed implantation is often talked about when referring to black and grizzly bears, but bats and some members of the weasel family also utilize the same strategy. Once the pups are born, usually one, or rarely two, per year, they're fed milk by their mother for the first 6 weeks, beyond which they are on their own to fend for themselves. Occasionally, female bats gather in maternity colonies in frequently used locations. When we think of bat swarms and winter hibernation in bats, we think of caves. In fact, Banff National Park has just discovered the very first cave to show evidence of hibernating bats within its boundaries. The cave is in the northern reaches of Banff, close to the Columbia Icefields. Biologists believe the bats are little brown myotis, but they are sending out bone samples in order to get a more accurate identification. Outside of Banff, Canmore's Rat's Nest Cave also shows evidence of bats using the warm cavern for hibernation. I have photographs of bat skeletons that I took back in the 1990s from this cave. A 2013 study stated that:

"There are four known bat hibernacula in the Province of Alberta: Wapiabi (Chungo) Cave, southwest of Nordegg, Cadomin Cave, south of Hinton, Procrastination Pot (or NDP Cave), east of Jasper and Walkin Cave south of Fort Smith. The nearest hibernacula west of Banff in British Columbia are a couple abandoned mines near Cranbrook sheltering Townsend’s bigeared bat (Plecotus townsendii). Recent research by Lausen 2006 has determined, using radiotelemetry, that big brown bats (Eptesicus fiscus) use narrow deep rock crevices or erosion holes located in steep valley walls in Dinosaur Provincial Park. The potential possibilities of sub-human size cracks and crevices suitable for over-wintering bat use in the Canadian Rocky Mountains verges on uncountable."

Very little is known as to the winter use of bats in caves within the Canadian Rocky region. Within Banff National Park, there are at least 11 caves that have been explored by spelunkers, but the potential is there for many more caves to be hidden within the vast wilderness that is Banff. There may also be many smaller caves that would not attract the attention of people due to their inaccessibility, but that may serve bats just fine. There is another potential habitat in Banff as the same 2013 study mentioned:

"One fairly unique Banff habitat that might be used by bats is the geothermally warmedzone around its hot springs. Both caves and crevices, plus sub-human size cracks andholes may provide seasonal roosting and nursery bat habitat."

Along with caves, abandoned mines can create a perfect location for hibernating bats, Banff, Kootenay and Yoho National Parks each have abandoned mines with open entrances that could be worth closer inspection by researchers. And of course, caves are not the only places bats will hibernate. Many species, like the big brown bat, are fond of rafters, air vents and other man-made structures that may have some artificial heat. Bats also use hollows in bridge structures as well. One bridge in Waterton Lakes National Park has been very popular with little brown myotis. Bats look for warm, moist, dark places in these structures, ideally with a temperature in the 39-42 C range. They rely on existing openings in order to access buildings because, unlike rodents, they lack the gnawing teeth to excavate their own entrance. Potential hibernation and maternity sites worth investigating are the Banff Springs Hotel attic, some of the areas older churches, the Park Administration building, Banff Park Museum, Deer Lodge, Num-ti-jah Lodge and any other classic old structure that still has not been fully modernized. One trend that has had an impact on bats over the past few decades has been the move towards updating old buildings, many of which may have been home to large colonies of overwintering bats. One 1983 study indicated:

“Although the big brown bat is clearly associated with the townsite area, no nurseries have been located and only one roost has been identified. Old buildings with accessible attics are being replaced by well-insulated and generally inaccessible attics. Thus, artificialnurseries, roosts and hibernation sites are disappearing. Natural sites used by these bats may need protection if the species is to remain in the mountain national parks.”

Alberta's bats do not gather in the huge numbers that you see in movies. Many hibernate in small groups or even as individuals. The eastern red, hoary and silver-haired bats avoid hibernation altogether by migrating south. Understanding where bats spend their winter is critical in helping to mitigate the effects of white-nose disease when it eventually makes its way to western Canada. This deadly disease has been steadily migrating westward since its discovery in 2007. Last year, it made a sudden western jump and was for the first time identified in Washington State. To the east, it's approaching the Ontario-Manitoba border. It's inevitable that it'll make its way to the Rockies and researchers are hoping to be prepared. As they find locations, like the recent cave discovery in Banff, they are looking at seasonal use while also studying temperature and humidity. White-nose fungus grows best in temperatures between 5 and 14 C. It appears to disappear in areas where the temperature reaches 20 C. . As the fungus attacks a bat, it will be spread to neighbouring bats through physical contact, with each developing a white colouration on the hair around the mouth. The fungus doesn't kill the bat, instead it creates discomfort, causing the bat to wake more often. The bat then wastes energy grooming in a futile attempt to be rid of the fungus. This, in turn, uses precious energy and depletes fat stores. They slowly starve once they've drained all their fat reserves. In areas where white-nose has gained a foothold, bat mortality ranges from 75 to 99%. So far some 5 and a half to 7 million bats have been wiped out in the 10 years following its arrived in North America. It's for this reason that renewed interest in bats winter strategies is critical in the mountain west. One advantage we may have is that bats often don't gather in densely populated hibernation sites. The greatest mortalities occur where the bats are tightly grouped and can spread the fungus from one to another across an entire colony. Once infected, the fungus can remain in the cave until the next year's hibernation begins, starting the cycle anew. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121218094216.htm). This means that once a hibernation site is infected, it is likely to stay that way, infecting successive generations of hibernating bats. So how do researchers learn more about the bats found within the mountain west? Field research into potential hibernation and maternity sites is just one step. Some bats can be fitted with tiny tracking devices allowing them to share their location for a brief period before the devices naturally fall off. Since most bats are incredibly light, most can only carry a minuscule 0.35-gram transmitter. This would transmit over a 1 to 3 km range and would fall off after 8 to 10 days when the adhesive naturally breaks down. Acoustic monitoring is another up and coming technique for monitoring bats. Audio detectors can be purchased for use in stationary locations, mounted to vehicles, and even used in a hand-held manner. This allows for a variety of uses. Unfortunately, most equipment is designed for a single monitoring method. As an example, a stationary monitor can be set up near, or in suspected hibernation sites to monitor bat vocalizations. Vehicle mounted detectors would allow mobile, wide range detection along routes that can be traversed on a regular basis. Handheld detectors allow active monitoring of bats in an area with the acoustic pulses being displayed as real-time sonograms on the screen to assist in identification. All three techniques will be needed to get a handle on bat populations in the Rockies, and they'll be needed soon. The thought of white-nose disease devastating our bat populations is terrifying. Bats are an essential part of the mountain ecosystem - especially when we realize that many eat up to half their body weight in insects every night. That's a lot of mosquitoes that don't need swatting. Conclusion Please remember that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your one-stop shop for getting the most out of your visit to the Canadian Rockies. Step away from packaged tours and let us create your custom experience. You can drop me a line at ward at wardcameron.com or check out our show page at www.mountainnaturepodcast.com. There you'll find show notes, links to additional information and all of our back episodes. If you want to connect personally, hit me up on twitter @wardcameron or check out us out on facebook at: www.facebook.com/wardcameronenterprises.

This episode takes an in-depth look at the developments currently threatening to close off the last wildlife corridors moving through the Bow River Valley at Canmore. These developments include the Three Sisters and Smith Creek Developments, as well as the proposed development and gondola at Silvertip. http://traffic.libsyn.com/mountainnature/Ep024_Mountain_Nature_and_Culture_Podcast.mp3

Well, it's here - the moment that most Canmore locals have been dreading for decades - the day where we finally have to decide whether we want the Bow River Valley to have functional wildlife corridors or not. I first moved into Canmore in 1987 when there were only around 3,500 people that called this former coal mining town home. In 1988, Canmore hosted the Cross-country ski and Biathlon events for the Calgary Winter Olympic Games and suddenly, a billion people were introduced to this pristine mountain town. Since that time, the growth has been increasing exponentially. In 2016, the Canmore's official population was just shy of 14,000. Today, the town and province are faced with the task of deciding the future of three megadevelopments within the townsite. When these developments are completed, the population will swell to 34,000 in just a few years. Even more importantly though, these developments threaten to choke off the last few viable wildlife movement corridors in the Bow River Valley. This valley is significant on a continental level as part of the web of connecting corridors allowing wildlife to move through the entire Yellowstone to Yukon corridor. Towns like Canmore have the potential to pinch off these corridors, forcing wildlife onto steeper and steeper terrain and reducing the opportunities to safely move through the area. With developments currently planned for BOTH sides of the valley at the moment, protecting corridors becomes even more essential. Wildlife corridors only work if the animals using them feel safe and confident while they are traversing them. The longer the corridor, the wider it needs to be. Current guidelines specify a corridor of at least 450 m (1,500 feet) wide on a slope that does not exceed 25 degrees. Steep slopes make it more difficult for animals to travel and reduces the effectiveness of any corridor. However, hard and fast rules don't work in reality. Think about walking out of a shopping centre at midnight and having to walk to your car. If your car is in the middle of a well-lit parking lot with no obstacles blocking your view, you'll likely feel very confident. However, if your car is at the end of a long narrow alley obstructed by dumpsters, than you will likely have a very different feeling when it comes to walking towards your car. Wildlife corridors connect patches of habitat. The longer the corridor, the wider it needs to be. The corridor in Canmore is some 8km long. Previous studies recommended that a corridor that long should be at least 800 m wide. We also have to remember that we don't live on an island. Corridors are not just a pathway for animals to move, but routes through which vital genetic diversity also moves. When we talk about wildlife, connectivity is critical and animal movement simply doesn't happen if the corridor is too narrow, too busy or too steep. If we look at the history of grizzly bears over the past 150 years, they originally ranged from Mexico to the Yukon and Alaska, and eastward across much of Canada and the Northwest Territories. As more and more people settled the landscape, corridors got pinched off and disconnected populations became islands. In every case, those island populations eventually disappeared with one exception - Yellowstone. Today the map of grizzly bear populations also has a narrow peninsula and it runs right through the Bow River Valley. By not protecting the free movement of animals like grizzly bears, we risk helping to close another pinch point which could see many of the southern populations of grizzlies struggle to remain viable. This corridor is the very last to be negotiated through the Bow Valley. To the east and west, wildlife corridors are already protected within a variety of national and provincial parks. Much of the western portions of the valley already have established corridors. What remains to be defined are the eastern portions of the corridor through the Three Sisters and Smith Creek developments. Let's look at the challenges that wildlife must already negotiate as they approach this valley from the west. If you're grizzly 148 following the lower slopes of Mount Rundle and looking to head towards the Wind Valley or Skogan Pass, your first obstacle will be the labyrinth of trails that make up Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park. Depending on how busy the trails are, you may find yourself pushed up the slopes of Mount Rundle to bypass mountain bikers rapidly wending the twists and turns of the trail system. Riding these trails requires vigilance as bears also take advantage of these movement corridors. Mountain bikes move fast and quiet and there is always the risk of a close encounter. Once 148 bypasses the Nordic Centre, she hits her next roadblock - the Rundle Forebay. This linear canal completely blocks all movement east-west through the valley. 148's only option is to head towards Spray Lakes and eventually the wildlife bridge at the head of the valley. Originally, as part of the G8 legacy, the wildlife crossing was supposed to be much lower on the forebay but, as is often the case, the cost of bridging this wider section was considered too great. Instead, the current bridge sits less than a few metres from the bridge designed for hikers and mountain bikers. Once clear of the forebay, she passes Quarry Lake and the dog park with its huge numbers of off-leash dogs - many of which illegally venture beyond the boundaries of the off-leash area. Next up is the Peaks of Grassi subdivision. As a former resident of the Peaks, bears like 148 are constantly having to negotiate the many homes in this development. Finally, after passing that final house, 148 will enter the currently approved corridor. This should have been her final challenge on her journey towards Skogan Pass and the Wind Valley. Unfortunately, as we mentioned on episode 22, the wildlife corridor is crowded with extensive human use and high numbers of illegally off-leash dogs. Any agreements on corridors has to include increased enforcement of human use within designated corridors. These areas are already off-limits to human use but a lack of enforcement has led to more people than animals using the corridors - and unfortunately, many of those people have off leash dogs. There is also little in the way of signage to warn people that they are entering areas that are closed for wildlife usage. Any program to protect these corridors must start with extensive signage making it impossible to 'accidentally' find yourself in a closed area. Banff National Park has followed this route and it is very difficult to wander into a closed area without seeing a very clear sign indicating that entry is forbidden. Now back to bear 148…After running the gauntlet of people and dogs, she approaches the east end of the valley and her final hurdle. Bringing us to the current debate in terms of Three Sisters and Smith Creek. This is where she'll either be forced upslope to avoid even more development…or not. This is where she, along with wolves, cougars, wolverine, lynx, and bobcats will either make it through the valley…or not. Every obstacle to movement increases the likelihood of animals deciding that it is simply not worth the endless challenges to pass through. This is the point that we'll have closed the last corridor off and rendered the last 20 years of negotiations towards keeping the area viable moot. So let's take a closer look at the current proposals. The most pressing issue in terms of timeliness is the pending approval of Quantum Place Development's Stewart and Smith Creek proposals. There's only a very short time to make your voice heard on this issue. As I record this on April 10, 2016, there are less than 10 days to let your provincial and local politicians know that you stand for wildlife and that development must not come at the expense of working corridors. If you want to get a really great look at how development and wildlife corridors intersect, check out a video that I've linked to in the show notes. It's dated from 2013 and is hosted on the Yellowstone to Yukon website. It's narrated by Karsten Heuer who's one of the best-known conservationists in the valley. Most recently, he was in charge of the bison re-introduction program in Banff National Park. You can view the video below: https://vimeo.com/61105253 Because wildlife corridors have been a contentious issue in this valley for decades, there is a wealth of scientific research detailing the historic use of the valley by wildlife. Three Sisters would like you to think that wildlife use in the proposed corridor would be unaffected by their development and that their corridor would be equally effective to other proposals. By looking at the historic use of the valley by grizzly bears and wolves, it is clear that the preference of these animals is for flat, low elevation habitat. By overlaying grizzly and wolf movements from the 1990s and early 2000s on an aerial image of the valley, it's instantly evident that prior to development, wildlife definitely preferred areas that have since been made unavailable due to increased housing development. Historic studies show a great deal of use the currently unfinished golf course. While it was not built at the time, it shows a bias towards low elevation, flat portions of the valley. Currently, it is listed as a conservation easem*nt, but truly should be part of the wildlife corridor. The proposed Smith Creek corridor shows almost no historic use by wolves or bears. In fact, all of the historic use was in areas that are now scheduled to be developed as part of the Smith Creek site 7 development. What does that mean for wildlife using the proposed corridor? Up you go. This Smith Creek corridor has lots of steep terrains that simply doesn't work as a corridor. In a 2010 report on wildlife movement through the valley, it was found that cougars spend 95% of their time on slopes less than 30°, wolves on slopes less than 21.3°, lynx 23.4° and deer 3.7°. It's obvious that animals look for slopes that don't exceed an average incline of 25°. If you look at an aerial photograph of the proposed corridor, and then overlay slopes in excess of 25°, then most of the corridor to the east of Smith Creek becomes completely unusable. It's simply too steep to be considered viable. There is also a fair amount of steep terrain impinging on the unfinished golf course which forces animals downslope towards the developed areas of the valley. If we agree that a corridor that is over 8 km long should be at least 800m wide, this would take the Smith Creek corridor almost right down to the Trans Canada Highway. When the Stewart and Smith Creek developments are completed, it will almost double the population of Canmore, adding another 10,000 residents to the census. Ironically, the same company that is currently assisting Quantum Place Developments to push through this development is also the same company that reported in 2002 that:

"the original along-valley corridor design was based on a uniform width of 450m and was placed on slopes above the proposed development with little regard for potential pinch points". They also went on to say

"The design is NOT recommended given our increased knowledge of wildlife movements and proper corridor design"

In this same report, they came up with a compromise. Instead of an 800m corridor, they would settle on 635 meters plus a buffer of the unfinished golf course fairways. Ironically, this is very similar to the proposal that organizations like the Yellowstone to Yukon would like to see happen. Yellowstone to Yukon has proposed a true 450m corridor that would ensure that the corridor remains below 25°. Experts agree that it should be as wide as 850 to 1000m for a corridor of this length. The 450m corridor currently proposed by Three Sisters does not come close to a workable solution. Corridors also need to follow a fairly straight line because that's how animals travel. They may take detours and zig zag as they move, but having a straight corridor has been shown to be more effective. As it is, most of the proposed development already lies within the landscapes that wildlife prefers to be. Y2Y's proposed line would move the upper boundary of the corridor downslope to make sure there was a 450m corridor that remains in good terrain. When it comes to the south corridor, this is our last chance. There won't be any future opportunities to undo the decisions made in the valley today. Decisions we make here also affect wildlife populations both to the south and north - especially if we cut off the ability of key species to move freely. So what can you do? Visit the show notes for this episode for a list of ways you can directly engage with decision-makers before it is too late. I'll have links, email addresses and ways that you can make your voice heard at this critical time. Three sites that are very helpful include:

• http://www.bowvalleyengage.com
• www.canmorecommons.com
• as well as a petition on change.org. Change.org Corridor Petition

Most importantly, write a letter to: Roger Ramcharita, Executive Director, Environment and Parks South Saskatchewan Region. He is the final arbiter of the corridor design through the Three Sisters Development. His email address is: AEP.wildlifecorridor@gov.ab.ca cc:Cam Westhead, MLA, Banff - Cochrane:banff.cochrane@assembly.ab.ca cc:Shannon Phillips, Minister of Environment and Parks:AEP.minister@gov.ab.ca In your letter, be firm in your desire to see a corridor no less than 450m wide on slopes less than 25 degrees. This is NOT to be determined by the developer but by an independent assessment. While an 800-metre width would be better, there should be no area less than 450m and the current proposals allow too much steep terrain to be considered an effective corridor, especially in the area of the undeveloped golf course and the Smith Creek Corridor. This valley is significant on a continental scale as a key connecting corridor for the entire Yellowstone to Yukon ecosystem. We cannot afford to lose any threads in this interconnected corridor. Finally, ask for a full cumulative impact assessment that will take into consideration ALL of the proposed developments in the valley including Stewart and Smith Creek, Silvertip and Dead Man's Flats. Don't forget to share this with your social network. Urge your friends to reach out to the decision makers right away. The clock is ticking out. Next up…gondolas and gambling

Finally, let's look at the proposed development at Silvertip on the north side of the Trans-Canada Highway. This single development would add 3,000 residential units to the community along with a 300,000 square foot conference centre, 1,300 additional hotel rooms, a casino and a gondola ascending to the old teahouse site on Mount Lady Macdonald. The development would also squeeze off one of the two principal wildlife corridors in the Bow Valley. This valley is already the most highly developed landscape where grizzlies are still able to survive. By adding a gondola that traverses the wildlife corridor within Bow Valley Wildland Provincial Park, we risk adding thousands of more visitors to this critical movement corridor. The developer would like you to believe that since the gondola will quietly ascend from high above the animals that it will have little impact. However, by looking at Sulphur Mountain Gondola in Banff National park, you can get a much clearer picture of what will likely take place here. Once the gondola is built, the number of trail users walking the trail is going to increase to numbers vastly larger than today. With a trail that takes you up to a gondola, you can easily descend down at the end of the hike. Sulphur Mountain Trail in Banff is a steady stream of ill-equipped walkers wearing flip-flops and trainers. Most of them don't have any water, a backpack with extra clothing or even bear spray. Do we really want to attract this brand of hiker to wander into an active wildlife corridor without the necessary safety equipment or the knowledge of how to stay safe in bear country? Vancouver's Grouse Grind is a classic example where ill-equipped hikers head onto a challenging trail resulting in rescues, searches and in some cases deaths. The biggest component of this development is its 300,000 square foot conference centre. To put this into a simple context, it's the equivalent size of combining both the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary AND the Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton! Do we really need a facility of this size in Canmore? A few weeks ago, the developer, Guy Turcotte hosted a public open house to help locals better understand the development. During his presentation, he touted historic studies indicating that the wildlife corridors showed 'little' impact from the Silvertip development. To support his position, he quoted a study by biologist Paul Pacquette published more than 15 years ago. What he doesn't realize is that Paul Paquette, just this past summer, described the Bow Valley somewhat differently. In his words:

“It’s a wildlife ghetto. People need to understand, the Bow Valley has two townsites that are growing, two highways, a corridor for high transmission power lines, dams, golf courses, ski hills … They’ve got all that in the valley, so you can imagine the responses for the wolves and wildlife – it’s a ghetto for them and they’re trying to survive in there.”

This is not the voice of a biologist supporting development, or the developers approach to wildlife corridors. If you're going to invoke the word of a respected scientist, you might want to find out his current opinion. Turcotte also repeatedly stressed a few critical aspects of the development: First, he needs the casino and the gondola to provide a steady flow of cash to satisfy billion dollar investors. He also insisted that the entire development has to be built in a single stage in order to put an entire Whistler-style development on the market with little delay, again so he can maximize returns to investors. There are still some major flaws in his current plans. First, wildland parks prohibit developing facilities such as gondolas. He is hoping to take advantage of a small leasehold excluded from the park boundaries. This is the site of a long-abandoned helicopter teahouse, however the scale of his development would dramatically exceed its outer dimensions. He also needs permits for all of the towers and other structures within the park that would be necessary to support a gondola, and these would also violate the rules of a wildland park. We also need to take a province-wide look at this. Making an exception is this park creates a precedent that puts all the other 33 Wildland Provincial Parks at risk. Another casino in Alberta today is nothing exciting - it's just another casino. The province is crawling with them. He'll be competing with 24 other casinos in the province. It's a bit of fluff to tickle the wallets of investors From a conservation standpoint, the fact that the whole enchilada has to be developed in one step could just be his Achilles heel. If opponents to this development can delay any single aspect, then they can help derail the entire development. At the presentation, the room was full of people and not one of them seemed to be supporting the project. When you get a moment, take a drive up the Silvertip road. It's a narrow winding road not nearly built to handle the amount of traffic that would result from this scale of Rocky Mountain terraforming. I will definitely be putting pressure on Alberta Environment and Parks. If we can stop the gondola, we can help to stem the flow of cash and hopefully make a development like this far less attractive to investors. At the very least, it will dramatically reduce the human use in the existing corridor if there is not the siren song of a gondola calling tourists up the steep slopes of Mount Lady Macdonald. I hope that I never see the day that Silvertip has to rebrand itself after playing a role in forcing grizzly bears to abandon the valley. As a community, we need to join together to make sure that the valley we choose is one which we want our grandchildren to be proud to call home. It's time to draw a line and say enough is enough.

Have you ever wondered why wolves hunt in packs? After all, a single wolf is capable of taking down a 300 kg (1000 lb) moose all on its own. Theoretically, if a wolf hunted alone or in a group of one or two, they would just get more of the meat to themselves. New research from Isle Royale National Park in Michigan has focussed on another reason - ravens.

BiologistsJohn Vucetich and Rolf Peterson of Michigan Tech and Thomas Waite of Ohio State University led the study which delved into the mechanisms prompted wolves to hunt in large coordinated packs.

When wolves take down a moose, there is far more meat than they are capable of eating in a single sitting. Unfortunately for them, leftovers are not simply ignored. Within minutes of a kill, ravens begin to arrive. These aggressive scavengers can down up to 2 kg or 4 lbs of meat per bird per day. In many cases, the wolves can lose up to half a carcass to ravens.

By hunting in a larger group, the wolves are able to reduce the percentage of a kill lost to ravens, making it more efficient to hunt in larger groups. The ravens hunt in groups, and they may be forcing the wolves to follow suit.

It's official, the bears are beginning to emerge from their winter dens. At this time of year, it will invariably be the big male bears that wake up earlier, with females emerging several weeks later and new moms waiting until May to show themselves. There are a lot of challenges to these early risers. Food is scarce and the first shoots of spring are some weeks away.The Boss, also known as bear 122,

The Boss, also known as bear 122, is usually the first grizzly spotted every spring. He spends the early part of the season patrolling the CPR mainline in search of carcasses and grain spills. Other bears may look to avalanche slopes for bighorn sheep and mountain goat carcasses. This year is experiencing record avalanches so hopefully, most of the bears are going to wait a while before venturing into steep terrain.

Other spring foods include bearberries, which are the only berry that remains on the plant throughout the winter in the central Rockies. Other bears will search for squirrel caches of whitebark pine nuts. These highly nutritious foods will prompt grizzlies to excavate several metres into the snowpack in search of a squirrel's cache.

It's also a time of year where they may be attracted to human food and garbage. It's time to take down your bird feeders and make sure there aren't any attractants around your property that might draw a hungry bear in. It's also time to make sure you're carrying your bear spray as well.

Last summer, Parks Canada announced plans for a new bike path that would run from Jasper to the Columbia Icefields. I first introduced this plan way back in episode 3 and over the past few weeks, parks has held public comment sessions on the proposed trail and is in the process of compiling the results.

The trail will run 109 km or 65 miles from the town of Jasper to the Wilcox Campground. At a Public Consultation held in Jasper on March 14, Siivola indicated that the route was chosen specifically to "ensure users feel comfortable while enjoying nature, to maximize the use of existing infrastructure, to minimize the effects on natural and cultural resources, to connect day-use areas, viewpoints and campgrounds, and to minimize the number of crossings".

That's a tall order for any trail - especially given Jasper National Parks poor record in recent years for maintaining even its most iconic trail systems. On February 8, Jasper National Park finally reaffirmed its commitment to increased maintenance of its backcountry trail system. In a story published in the Fitzhugh, Jasper's Superintendent, Alan Fehr was quoted as saying: "We have a lot of assets in Parks Canada and a lot of them were built 40, 50, 60 years ago, maybe longer, and they are in need of repair or maintenance, and in some cases replacement.

This trail seems to be just another push to increase the number of people in the front country of the parks. Over the past decade, we've seen the backcountry neglected while the front country got bike races, via ferratas, summer ski hill operations and vast increases in vehicle traffic.

If you missed the recent open houses, you can still make your voice heard. Public comments are open until April 24th 2017. To learn more about the trail, visit:http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/ab/jasper/plan/sentierdesglaciers-icefieldstrail.aspx

To add your feedback check out:http://pc.sondages-surveys.ca/surveys/sondage-survey/icefields-trail-north-consultation-feedback-form/?l=en-ca

The more people that weigh in on this trail the better. If you believe that corridors like the Icefield Parkway should remain wild, then please add your voice to the opposition towards this proposal. There are so many great ways that Parks could use these dollars. This is not one of them.

Calgary is considering a bid for the 2026 winter Olympics. After the success of its first Olympics in 1988, the city was able to boast the first winter Olympics in history to actually turn a profit. It's also unique in that almost 30 years after the games ended, all of the venues are still in use.

As the exploration committee looks at possible venues, Lake Louise Ski Hil, as it did during the 88 bid process, is up for consideration for the alpine events. Currently, it hosts the season openers for both the men's and women's downhill events every year so it clearly has the terrain necessary for an Olympic event. It is controversial more for the fact that it lies in a sensitive location and there are fears that any Olympic bid will be used as leverage to increase development at the ski hill.

My support would be to use the original Olympic venue, Nakiska at Mount Allan which was built specifically for the 88 games. It would need a retrofit, but it has everything needed to host the events, and it's closer to Calgary.

This week we'll look at efforts to reintroduce grizzly bears to the north Cascades of Washington State. The plan may include some Canadian bears to help repopulate an area that has excellent habitat for bears. We'll also look way back into the earliest history of bison on the North American landscapes. With this summer looking to be the busiest ever, I'm promoting a new Rocky Mountain Pledge to help visitors enjoy the mountain landscapes in a safe and sensitive way. Finally, we'll look at the challenges of human use in designated wildlife corridors.

Story 1 - North Cascades Grizzly Reintroduction

The long history of grizzly bears has seen them removed from most of their historic range. Today they are limited to only the wildest of western landscapes. Once they ranged across most of western and northern Canada and south as far as Mexico.

As people began to migrate westward, the grizzly bear was a natural competitor for many of the resources that these early pioneers sought. For this reason, like the buffalo, they were gradually wiped from the map of most of the United States and many areas of Canada.

Like Banff is doing with bison, other landscapes are hoping to do with grizzly bears, in particular, the north Cascades ecosystem in northern Washington State. Like the south coast of British Columbia, grizzlies have been largely squeezed and hunted to the extent that there are only a few bears in this particular landscape. Today, there may be less than 10 bears wandering the north Cascades - a landscape that could easily support a few hundred bears.

There is a growing movement to reintroduce grizzlies to the north Cascades. Now while we proudly boast about reintroducing buffalo, we need to realize that grizzlies ain't no buffalo. Compared to grizzlies, bison are a piece of cake. They are incredibly adaptable ecosystem engineers. Like beaver, they change the landscape to benefit their expansion.

Grizzly bears are local specialists. You've heard me time and again talking about the importance of knowing the seasonal food preferences of bears in order to stay safe in bear country. Unfortunately, every bear population has a different list of seasonal foods. Bears in Banff have never tasted a salmon. Each bear must spend years with its mother learning how to survive in the landscape that it calls home. You can't just airlift a bear from one landscape and hope that it can survive in another - especially when it doesn't know what the locally available foods are.

To be successful, the north Cascades need to find bears with a familiar palate, bears that are familiar enough with the local flora and fauna so that they will be able to adapt to a terrain largely devoid of competing bears. If you can find the right bear and put it into the perfect landscape, then you may have a winning combination.

Wells Gray Provincial Park in southern British Columbia might be able to assist in such a reintroduction program. Its population was listed as 317 bears in 2012. The plan would involve removing just a few young bears to seed the reintroduction. Over the next five to ten years, 25 bears could be reintroduced from more than one seed population.

The plan can only move forward if the local populations can sustain the loss of some of their young bears. Populations in decline or in a precarious balance, obviously would not be able to become donors.

The north Cascades are in the midst of a huge public consultation at the moment…and even though this is taking place in the U.S., Canadian comments are also welcome - after all, Canadian bears are likely to be included in any successful reintroduction program.

The public comment period is open until April 28, 2017.You can add your voice to the discussion here: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?parkID=327&projectID=44144&documentID=77025

The history of the north Cascade grizzly has been a difficult one. During the period of 1827 to 1859, 3,788 grizzly hides were loaded onto Hudson Bay Company ships from trading posts in the area. No bear population can survive such an onslaught.

It would feel really great to help grizzly bears begin to march south again as opposed to having their range continually squeezed further to the north. What do you think?

Story 2 - Bison vs wooly Mammoths

Bison wandered the Canadian landscape for thousands of years. They helped to define the great plains as one of the chief ecological engineers helping to keep forests at bay and support huge populations of insects, and in turn, insect-eating birds.

It's easy to toss out numbers like 'thousands', but just how many thousands of years? Just when did bison first appear on the North American landscape and how did their arrival impact the plants and animals that preceded them?

New research by University of Alberta biologist Duane Froese and Professor Beth Shapiro of the US Santa Cruz Genomics institute have pushed those boundaries back by a factor of 10.

Scientists have long debated the tenure of bison on the North American Landscape. Bison fossils from across the continent have often suggested different histories. One thing scientists do agree on is that the original migration of bison to the continent was from the north. This study looked at the oldest bison fossils known in order to try to narrow down the period in which they first thundered onto the North American landscape.

It is still believed that they crossed the land bridge across the Bering Strait, but when? During ice ages, the bridge formed when ocean levels dropped due to great extents of water being locked up as ice. As glaciers shrank, so did the bridge disappear as rising ocean levels submerged its ephemeral passageway.

By looking at the very oldest fossil sites in the Yukon Territories, they looked at the mitochondrial DNA found in these fossils. This DNA is usually inherited from the female and allows scientists to trace a long maternal lineage.

This study pushes the tenure of bison back…way back to 130,000 years ago and possibly as far as 195,000 years. These were not the bison we know today but were the ancestors that would gradually become the bison that Banff is so proud to have reintroduced recently.

Bison would have taken the landscape by storm. They discovered a place already populated with wooly mammoths, camels, sabre tooth cats, and wild horses. Bison don't simply move in, they re-engineer the ecology of their adopted homes. Before long, they became one of the principal grazers of the Great Plains and were well-established thousands of years before the first humans set foot on the North American continent.

Story 3 - The Rocky Mountain Pledge

I was listening to the Roadtreking podcast recently and host Mike Wendland did a story about the Yellowstone Pledge. The story really struck a chord with me. As a naturalist and guide, I've watched and reported on, the challenges inherent in increasing numbers of visitors heading to the Canadian Rockies every year. When I heard about the Yellowstone Challenge, I thought, why not adopt a great idea and see if we could help it to adapt to a wider geographic area. So here's my pitch!

Yellowstone, like the mountain west, has become number one Americans bucket list of travel destinations. Surprisingly, the same site that introduced me to the Yellowstone Challenge has a picture of Moraine Lake on their home page today with the headline: "Why Canada needs to be on your 2017 RV Travel Bucket List". Like Yellowstone, we run the risk of becoming a victim of our own success.

2017 is Canada's 150th birthday and we are all proud as a nation, especially during some of the turbulent times that are taking place in other parts of the world. As a Canadian, I'm very proud to showcase the Rockies to visitors every year. However, like Yellowstone, we struggle to create an atmosphere that will encourage visitors to feel the same way we do about the importance of keeping the wild in wildlife, and of protecting the landscapes that will be the focus of so many selfies in the upcoming months.

Yellowstone developed the Yellowstone Pledge. It is a series of promises that it's asking visitors to take to help make sure that their visit will combine amazing experiences with minimal impact. Let's jump right into it - here's my suggestion for the Rocky Mountain Pledge

To be a steward and help protect myself and the park, I pledge to:

• Practice safe selfies by never approaching animals to take a picture.
• Park in designated areas and avoid blocking traffic.
• Make sure my actions do not add additional stress or danger to the wildlife I am lucky enough to view
• Stay with my car if I’m stuck in a wildlife jam.
• Follow speed limits and pull over to let cars pass.
• Travel safely in bear country by carrying bear spray, making noise, and hiking in groups.
• Keep my food away from animals.
• Recycle what I can and put my garbage in bear-proof containers.
• Report resource violations by calling 911 or talking to a member of the park staff.

You can read more about the Yellowstone Pledge by visiting: https://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/yellowstonepledge.htm

Like any pledge, it's critical that we ALL take the pledge and share it on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and our other social networks with the hashtag #RockyMountainPledge.

Maybe we can help to create a movement that can translate to some of the many visitors that come to the mountains every summer. This year we will see record numbers of travelers that have never experienced a landscape like the one that surrounds us. Don't judge them by the looks of wonder that will be all over their face. Rather, we need to help educate them. Everyone in the mountains needs to be a part of the message this year. We need to spread the Rocky Mountain Pledge far and wide and help visitors to understand how these 9 simple pledges will help to ensure that their grandchildren's grandchildren will be able to share the same experience when Canada celebrates its 300th birthday.

I for one will take the pledge…will you?

Story 4 - Humans in the Corridors

A recent study by Alberta Environment & Parks looked at current wildlife corridors in and around Canmore and they came up with some disturbing stats: humans represent 94% of the use of wildlife corridors. Researchers Melanie Percy and John Paczkowski collected 1.5 million images from wildlife cameras. These were broken down into 178,000 separate events and of those, wildlife accounted for barely 6%.

Even more disturbingly, 56% of the total events included humans with dogs. Of those, 60% of the dogs were off-leash. Let me say that again…60% of the people with dogs in the designated wildlife corridors had those dogs off-leash.

The town of Canmore works in conjunction with the province on wildlife corridors in and around the town and while they have developed some recommendations around wildlife corridors, clearly something has to be done. While wildlife are becoming more and more limited in their movements within the Bow Valley, these designated corridors need to be protected for their movement - and not for illegal off-leash dogs.

For too long in the Canmore area, dog owners have rarely been charged for having their dogs off-leash. Perhaps utilizing wildlife cameras in known corridors can help file more charges against flagrant violations of laws relating to dogs on leashes.

At the same time, we need to make sure these wildlife corridors are clearly marked so there can be no doubt when people begin to stray off designated trails and into wildlife corridors. Banff National Park has excellent signage where designated trails intersect with critical corridors. Great examples are along the Sulphur Mountain Road and around Johnson Lake. It is very difficult to 'accidentally' wander into closed areas and so it becomes much easier for Wardens to lay charges to violators. Banff also uses automated cameras for protecting sensitive sites like the restricted area around the middle hot spring along Sulphur Mountain Road.

As developments like Silver tip, Three Sisters, and Smith Creek move forward, every corridor in this valley will become increasingly precious to animals trying to move through the area. The corridors in and around Canmore offer critical connections between Banff National Park to the west and Kananaskis Country to the east.

Towns like Canmore become roadblocks to the movement of these animals. As humans, we tend to build towns at crossroads. At Canmore, we have the confluence of numerous valleys offering access to Spray Valley Provincial Park, Wind Valley, Cougar Creek, Slogan Pass and others. We need to make sure that connecting corridors remain viable so that animals can continue to move freely within the valley.

I was really pleased to record the presentations at the Buffalo Homecoming celebrations held on March 2, 2017 at the Cave and Basin National Historic Site. The Eleanor Luxton Foundation and Bison Belong co-sponsored the event which was a gala evening with first nations blessings, dancing and drums - and some amazing stories. The return of plains bison to Banff National Park has been a long time coming - more than 130 years.

Bison are not only a keystone species in the mountain national parks, but their absence has been reflected in the very ecosystems that the park was designed to protect.

Ecosystems began to change immediately after the loss of bison, reflecting the absence of this key ecological component of the landscape. When biologists talk about ecological integrity, they are talking about preserving all the components of that ecosystem. For thousands of years, bison were one of the defining characteristics of most western landscapes. The sound of their thundering hooves could be heard for miles and they helped to define the landscape in which they lived. In the end, they were reduced to just 64 animals.

Like a beaver can alter the landscape around it and benefit many other species, so do plains bison re-engineer the prairie and mountain landscape. Bison are aggressive grazers, helping keep trees from encroaching onto grasslands. At the same time they are also prodigious producers of, well buffalo apples. These patties feed massive numbers of insects which, in turn, support ever increasing numbers of insect eating birds.

This reintroduction is about more than just ecology. It combines cultural, historical and ecological values. To members of the first nations of the eastern slopes and prairies of Canada and the U.S., bison were an integral part of their culture and lives, long before the coming of the white man. The west was home to many different tribes, many of which have long been traditional enemies. Despite local animosities, there was always one thing that bound them together - bison. In 2015, eleven different tribes signed a historic buffalo treaty. The signatories include Canada's Blackfoot Confederacy: Blood, Piikani, Siksika, and TsuuT’ina; and in Montana, the Blackfeet Nation, the Assiniboine and GrosVentre Tribes of Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of Fort Peck Indian Reservation, the Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation. Since this original treaty, the three nations of the Stoney Nakoda, the Samson Cree and 10 additional first nations groups from Saskatchewan have also joined in the signing.

In episode 19, I shared a little information on the recent re-introduction of bison into Banff National Park. During this event, you'll hear the stories of the event from the people responsible for doing it. Harvey Locke shares some of the history of the project and of the genesis of the initiative. His passion really sets the scene for this story of reintroduction and renewal. If this project is successful, Banff's bison herd will join only three other wild herds of bison in North America

Parks Canada Employee and author Karsten Heuer was in charge of the project. His presentation details the incredible efforts that were required to pull this reintroduction off. Along with long and very inclusive public consultations and environmental impact assessments, as the project lead, it was his job to coordinate the many moving parts that would be necessary in order to get to the point we are today - a day with wild bison once again roaming their native landscapes in the mountain national parks.

The logistics were daunting. The bison had to first be selected. They were selected based on several criteria. They were disease free, a critical aspect of any reintroduction, but they were also young , giving them many opportunities to produce new offspring during their lifetime. All of the females were pregnant, and they are joined by six young bulls to help keep the herd going.

They are currently being held in an 18 hectare (45 acre) soft release pasture until they've had the chance to give birth twice - giving them time to bond to their new home range prior to being released to a much larger temporary habitat.

Imagine the logistics of this relocation! They loaded the bison into specially designed shipping containers that were attached to a long line and transported by a heavy lift helicopter. Each container held 3 or 4 bison with their horns covered by pieces of garden hose held on with duct tape. They were also tranquilized slightly to help reduce their stress while still allowing them to stand during the transport. Each shipping container also deployed a parachute to provide drag and help prevent them from spinning during their helicopter journey to their new home.

After the last crate was successfully delivered, they crates were kept closed for an additional 30 minutes to give the buffalo time to calm down. When all the conditions were right, the doors to the shipping containers were opened and the bison all emerged into their new home. They'll remain here until June of 2018 when park officials plan to release them to a much larger 1200 sq km or 463 sq mile reintroduction zone.

Along the way, there are lots of performance measures that will help them to reassess the success of the project. In 2022, they hope to be able to come to the decision as to whether long-term bison reintroduction is feasible in Banff National Park. This project is one of the largest of its kind in the mountain national parks. It involved very close consultations with many first nations, environmental and conservation groups. I hope you're as excited about this as I am. Bison have been missing from Banff for almost as long as Canada has been a nation. I can't wait for the day when I first encounter a wild bison in Banff National Park.

I want to especially thank Marie-eve Marchand with Bison Belong for collaborating with me to record the audio for this presentation. Her tireless work towards bringing these majestic animals back to Banff deserves all of our thanks. Special thanks also go out to Karsten Heuer for all the work he and his team at Parks Canada did to pull off this amazing feat of logistics and careful planning. This could be one of the most significant events to take place in the mountain parks for many years to come. Special thanks also go out to Harvey Locke with the Eleanor Luxton Foundation for the great work they do in preserving Banff's natural and human history.

Finally, I want to thank the politicians across the various political lines that cooperated with the project as well as the numerous native elders and counselors that were integral to moving this process towards completion.

Once again, we are all buffalo people.

Story 1 - Castle Parks are Expanding

Whenever we hear about new parks being established, it's great news - and this January, we got a double whammy as the Alberta Government finalized the boundaries of Castle Wildland and announced the creation of Castle Provincial Park on January 20, 2017. These two parks protect more than 1000 square kilometres or almost 400 square miles of the southern Alberta Rockies known as the crown of the continent. They provide a critical habitat that encompasses the spine of the Rockies which is one of the most diverse ecological areas in the entire Rocky Mountain chain.

Bordered on the south by communities like Missoula and Great Falls Montana, it follows the Rocky Mountain Ridge northward to Alberta's Kananaskis Country. These newly established parks will help to provide more consistent protection along the Rocky Mountain Ridge and runs all the way from Waterton Lakes National Park to the Crowsnest Highway, or Highway 3, in southern Alberta. The Wildland Park will focus more on low-impact access and will contain the most critically sensitive landscapes in terms of headwater protection, wildlife movement corridors and critical plant and animal habitat. The provincial park will have more frontcountry development and includes former Provincial Recreation Areas like Lynx Creek, Castle Falls, Castle River Bridge, Syncline, and Beaver Mines provincial Recreation Areas.

Story 2 - Whirling Disease Updates

Just this week, aquatic specialists with Parks Canada announced plans to remove all the fish from Johnson Lake. Parks is planning to use nets and electrofishing this spring to begin the removal process. They'll pack it in for the summer months between Canada Day on July 1 and the end of the Labour Day weekend in September. The lake will be open for visitation this summer, but all watercraft will remain banned. This includes stand-up paddleboards as well. The spores are just too easily spread by watercraft and all too often the boats are not cleaned well enough to make sure they are spore free.

In the fall they'll continue to collect fish and also lower the water level using pumps in order to make it easier to force the fish into a smaller area and facilitate their capture. It's also a better time to lower the water level as park biologists are worried about the local amphibian population and they're more prevalent in the lake during springtime.

Story 3 - Shocking Bears

As part of a recent study undertaken by Parks Canada in coordination with Canadian Pacific Railway, park officials are continuing to investigate the use of electrified mats or electromats along with electrified fencing in areas that have become hotspots for bear fatalities. The mats are still in the experimental phase and the heavy snowfalls that occur in the mountains still provide limitations to their effectiveness.

A number of different solutions are being investigated and many different solutions may eventually be incorporated to reduce the number of bears fatally struck by trains passing through the mountain parks.

Story 4 - Pine Beetle Updates

The past 2 decades has seen our mountain media full of stories of the mountain pine beetle. This tiny beetle has decimated pine forests through the mountain west for the past 10-20 years. Pine beetles are barely the size of a grain of rice, yet they are the most damaging insect pest in North America.

The odd thing is that they are not some introduced pest from Europe or Asia, but a natural part of the mountain forest ecosystem. Every species is a reflection of its habitat as reflected in the climate, landscape, and plant communities. The mountain pine beetle has always been a part of this larger ecosystem, but in the last 20 years, it has exploded in numbers and in many ways overwhelmed the forests that it has called home.

Story 1 - Bow Valley Wolf Pack

This has been a difficult year for wolves in Banff. The dramatic increase in visitation over the past few years has put wolves living in the Bow River Valley, right into direct conflict with tourists. While other Banff packs have managed to avoid the brunt of human disturbance, the Bow Valley pack finds itself right in the thick of things.

Every year, visitation grows as parks focusses on bringing more and more visitors into the park gates. It seems that Parks Canada has been put into a role where they need to flood the front country while neglecting the back country.

For more information on the plight of wolves in Banff, check out episodes 5 to hear a little bit about the Bow Valley pack's challenging summer in 2016. The question that is utmost in my mind right now is what will parks do in 2017 to help ensure we don't get a repeat - or even worse - an escalation on the challenges we saw in 2016.

As parks looks ahead to what, by all accounts, will likely be the busiest year in the history of the mountain parks, parks has set its sights on a number of strategies. After the carnage of 2016, only 3 members of the Bow Valley Wolf pack remain. Of those 3, 2 have now been fitted with tracking collars. This will allow park biologists to track their movement with a greater degree of accuracy than was previously possible. Knowing where the wolves are gives biologists the opportunity to try to keep them out of trouble when possible. They would know if they were being attracted to campgrounds, illegal campsites, or townsites.

The third wolf, a black sub-adult male has a non-working collar. Parks may attempt to recapture him and either remove the existing collar or re-collar him. While he has, so far, stayed out of trouble, a working collar would allow parks to track all the remaining members of the pack.

Last summer, the downfall of this pack was human food conditioning. People offered food rewards, left messy and illegal campsites that showed them that handouts were an easy way to earn a living. Unfortunately for the wolves, they didn't understand when people refused to reward them with food and they began to act more aggressively. This ended poorly as park wardens were forced to shoot 2 wolves over the course of the summer. In addition to these two wolves, 4 pups were killed by trains over the course of the summer, leaving only 3 wolves left in the pack.

If the collars allow park managers to intervene before the wolves become accustomed to handouts, they may be able to help them walk the gauntlet of ever increasing numbers of tourists.

In addition to increased tracking of the bow valley pack, parks will be stepping up enforcement of illegal campsites. This has been an increasing challenge in the past few years as random campsites pop up in areas adjacent to the townsites and they may attract wolves and bears looking for easy pickings. In addition to increased patrols, they will be using search dogs to ferret out illegal sites. Last summer, parks took a zero tolerance policy on messy campsites and charged numerous violators including two campers whose messy campsite at Two Jack Lake attracted the two wolves that had to be put down last summer.

This will also be bolstered by additional wildlife staff this summer and this will help improve their ability to quickly respond if and when there are incidents.

Story 2 - The Return of the Bison

For the first time in some 130+ years, bison have be released into Banff National Park. The last bison to walk these valleys, at least according to numbers I've been able to access, was in 1883. That was the year the Banff Hot Springs Preserve, which eventually became Banff National Park was first established. It was also the year that the westward expansion of the Canadian Pacific Railway finally chugged its way into the Bow River valley.

When archaeologists look at ancient campsites in places like Banff, bison made up 48% of the animal remains found in these sites. That compares with 37% for bighorn sheep, 7% for both deer and elk, and less than 1% for both moose and mountain goat. Bison were the single most important food, forming the majority of their diets.

Once the bison began to disappear, they were almost wiped off the landscape in just a few years. At its lowest point, the population dropped to just over 500 animals. One Metis rancher, Michel Pablo, in Montana bought a herd of 13 of these remaining animals and grew that herd to more than 600 by 1907. Unfortunately, as a Metis, the American government took away his grazing rights to the Flathead Reserve and so he sold them to the Canadian Government for $120,000.

This week, 16 wild bison were relocated to a remote area of Banff National Park as the first step in a wider re-introduction of plains buffalo to the park. The group was made up of 10 pregnant females along with 6 juvenile bulls in the hopes that the herd will rapidly increase in size.

Since this is just the beginning of a wider re-introduction, researches want to be able to monitor the newcomers to get a better idea of their reproductive rates, movement, survival and adaptation to both the environment and predation. After 16 months, the plan is to release them into a much larger 1200 square kilometre area along the Cascade and Red Deer River valleys.

Not everyone has been in favour of the reintroduction. Ranchers in Alberta have been less than welcoming to the idea of bison roaming in areas adjacent to grazing lands.

Bison are more than just big cows wandering the landscape, they are ecosystem engineers. Their impact influences everything from ecology to entomology. Their fine down is the second warmest, next only to the musk oxen, in Canada…and they shed a lot of it. Almost immediately, birds will begin to harvest the hair to line their nests. In some areas, eggs and nestlings have a 30% higher survival rates when the nests have this natural insulation.

Bison also eat a lot of vegetation and produce a lot of…waste product. In a single buffalo patty, up to 300 different species of insects may be found with up to 1000 individual insects present. The more insects that call a landscape home, the more insect eating birds that will also be present.

Natural fertilizers in the droppings also benefit the growth of grasses which in turn benefits other large hoofed animals like elk and deer.

Bison are also ravenous grazers and so they can help to maintain grasslands by inhibiting small trees from encroaching on the grasslands. Essentially, they transform the landscape to benefit themselves along with many other species of birds, insects and hoofed animals - and this in turn benefits the predators that prey on these animals.

The reintroduction of plains bison to Banff National Park has been a very long time coming. I for one, am rooting for them to increase in population and reclaim their role as one of the keystone species in the mountain parks.

Story 3 - The bears are ruling the research

Three recent studies conducted in Banff National Park have revealed some amazing insights into the day to day life of grizzlies in the area. When studying wildlife, there are a number of indicators that help biologists determine the health of a local population. Using central Rockies grizzles as an example, researchers have always focused on the survival rates of breeding females. They are the reproductive engine of the population and they are key to the health of the overall population. Unfortunately, in the Canadian Rockies, as first discovered by the Eastern Slopes Grizzly Bear Project in their 2005 report, our grizzlies have one of the lowest productivity rates of any bear population in the world.

Here in the central Rockies, female bears are often not giving birth for the first time until they reach 6-12 years of age and they are keeping the cubs with them for up to 4 years - during which time, they will not mate. When you consider the average life span of a female grizzly to be 20-25 years, this means that the average female produces only 1.7 female cubs during her lifetime.

Looking at the current picture for grizzlies in places like Banff, recent research has also found that the survival rate of young bears is exceedingly low. While the overall population is precariously stable, those tiny cubs currently nursing in the dens only have a slim chance of surviving through next summer. Looking at the overall population, current estimates for the bear population in Banff, sit around 50-70 bears which translates to around 14 bears per 1000 square kilometres or 386 square miles.

However, despite the low reproductive and survival rates, the current density of 14 bears per 1000 square kilometres is actually pretty good when compared to other areas of the province. Looking farther north in Alberta, the area around Hinton and Nordegg hosts only around 11 bears in the same area and Jasper, just 12.

One challenge for bears in the Bow valley is the attractiveness of grain spills leaking from the tens of thousands of grain cars that ply the railway tracks heading westward to the coast every year.

Grain spills have long been a challenge for biologists and wardens trying to reduce the number of bears being killed along the tracks. Recently, biologist Aditya Gangadharan conducted a study specifically looking at train tracks and how grain spills impact grizzly bears. He estimated that some 110 metric tonnes of grains were spilled along the tracks within Banff and Yoho National Parks every year, equivalent to the annual caloric needs of some 50 grizzly bears.

Unfortunately for bears, train tracks also offer other menu items as well, the most important of which is carrion. Over the course of the years, many animals, including bears, have been unlucky enough to encounter the business end of freight trains. Their carcasses attract bears from a long distance. Even in the early spring, when bears are first emerging from their long winter slumber, the tracks offer an easy corridor for foraging.

So how do we keep bears off the tracks? There is no simple answer! Parks continues to work with Canadian Pacific to improve current techniques while experimenting with potential technological innovations that may help in the future.

As they investigated the timing and location of bear fatalities along the tracks, a disturbing trend became apparent. It seems that while more bears use the tracks in the west end of Banff National Park, in particular a large siding to the west of Lake Louise, it seems that the majority of fatalities occur in the eastern end of Banff. While the research is ongoing, one hypothesis is that the eastern edge of the park is busier and that bears are often surrounded by noisy highways that may make it harder to hear the approach of trains. They are also looking into the fact that bears may need better sightlines in order to spot oncoming trains.

When a bear is confronted by a train, in particular at night when many bears along the eastern edge of the park tend to use the tracks, the headlights can make them freeze - or try to outrun the train by running in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, the fastest bear is no match for a freight train. In order to help bears to better avoid oncoming trains, researchers, in conjunction with Canadian Pacific, are experimenting with flashing lights in conjunction with alarms to give bears a warning of approaching trains. They are testing these warning signals in four different locations at the present time.

As researchers studied the statistics on bear fatalities along the CPR mainline, one unique statistic stood - no confirmed bear death has occurred through Banff since 2012. to help add some perspective to this 5 year lapse in fatalities; between 2000 and 2017, 14 grizzlies were killed between the east Banff border and the west end of Yoho National Park…but since 2012 - nada!

One of the most well-known local grizzlies is Bear 122, locally known as the Boss. He's the biggest, baddest, bruin in Banff and is particularly fond of the CP mainline through Banff and Yoho National Parks.

As biologists began to look at the drop in fatalities along the tracks, they begun to wonder whether a dominant male bear might be able to discourage other bears from wandering into the Boss's territory. Colleen Cassidy, the head researcher on this most recent study speculated that bear 122 has been effective at deterring other bears from encroaching into this food rich habitat.

It's well known that bears strongly defend territories. By bear 122 calling the tracks home, he may well be signaling to other bears that this narrow strip of landscape is out of bounds. Now that doesn't exempt 122 from the danger of trains, and if rumours are to be believed, he has already danced with the business end of a freight train and somehow survived. This is one tough bear!

Story 1 - Summer Camping Reservations Filling Up Fast

In Episode 17, I suggested that anybody thinking of camping in the mountain national parks this summer make a point of booking their sites as soon as the summer reservation system opened on January 11. As it turned out, the reservations went far quicker than anyone had anticipated. According to a story on the CBC website, some 9,300 reservations were made in the first 4 hours after the site opened up. This is a whopping 55% increase over 2016.

Outside of the mountain parks, Alberta's provincial park reservation system opens Feb 21 and it will likely also be a frenzy of activity. Think of it like you're booking concert tickets. Divide and conquer. Get multiple people trying to grab your booking on different computers and you can up your chances of grabbing key sites before the dreaded 'no availability' message. It's a race these days and if the provincial sites in Alberta and British Columbia reflect the trend set on the national level then it will be a race to the booking page.

Story 2 - 5.7 Million Investment in Radium Hotsprings

For those of us that like to bask in the hot springs for which the Canadian Rockies are famous, this story brings news of some long needed renovations to the Radium hot springs in Kootenay National Park. The hot pools, like many older facilities under the care of Parks Canada, have been showing their age in the past few years. Radium Hot Springs was the first major building project in the western parks following the end of World War II. It's an important heritage building so the renovations will focus on both protecting the building and improving the facilities for the future. While disturbances to guests will be minimized, it will be necessary to implement some temporary closures. The work began in 2016 and is scheduled to continue throughout 2017. There renos have several primary goals. One is to create a themed diner and replace all of the associated electrical and mechanical systems, along with changing the floor plan. This first phase is scheduled to finish sometime this month. However due to the age of the facility, other mechanical and electrical systems within the complex will also have to be replaced and upgraded. This will include improvements to the geothermal heating system and the water system. They’ll also be replacing all the water lines and the filtration system for the pool The pedestrian bridge and walkway are also being repaired and upgraded, including improvements the lighting and adding additional landscaping.

Story 3 – Layers in the Rock

Have you ever noticed the way a good covering of snow helps to bring out the layers in the surrounding peaks. In summer, the mountains tend to look like one large rock, however, when the snows come, the individual layers suddenly stand out starkly against the sky.

Looking up at mountains like Rundle we are struck by the steeply angled layers, and we often forget that these rocks were once submerged deeply underwater. I often find myself amazed by the discovery of a fossils like brachiopods, a small clam-like animal, at elevations exceeding 3,000 metres or 10,000 feet--especially when I realize they've been dead for hundreds of millions of years.

Story 4 - Small Town Canada

On January 11, Country Living Magazine out of the U.S. published a story titled "40 Canadian Towns you haven't heard of but should visit ASAP". The article was motivated by Canada's celebration of its 150th birthday this year. The magazine takes a very brief look at 40 towns that are worth getting to know, not just because it's our birthday, but, well just because they're awesome. As a long-time small town dweller I was curious to see some of the places they might recommend.

I was pleasantly surprised to see their number one spot - Jasper, Alberta. The article commended Jasper as having some of the best aerial views in the Rockies. Jasper is not only the focal point of Jasper National Park, but it is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site. Situated along the banks of the Athabasca River, Jasper is the most southern community along the Arctic Ocean Watershed. The Athabasca River will eventually join the great Mackenzie River system in the Arctic.

Second on the list, and dear to my heart, is Canmore, the town I've called home for the past 30 years. It describes it as a wildlife corridor where bears, cougars, wolves, and elk roam freely. Canmore is a former coal mining town that has become known as the gateway to Alberta's Banff National Park as well as Kananaskis Country, Alberta's best kept secret. Over the years, it has grown to dwarf Banff townsite as it sits outside the mountain national parks and has historically had less restrictions on development.

While it has been feeling the squeeze of development over the past few years, Canmore truly is one of the gems on the Canadian Landscape.

Cochrane, ranked third on the list. While hardly a small town, was selected for its western Canadian cowboy culture. Nearby, Glenbow Ranch and Big Hill Springs Provincial Parks are two nearby attractions.

After Cochrane, the list takes a trip west towards Bowen Island, Prince Rupert, Tofino, and Oliver, British Columbia. It then veers eastward before returning to Banff, Alberta in the number 18 spot. Banff needs no introduction. It was the site of Canada's first national park and the past and current headquarters for exploring the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

I hope that many Americans, who are the target of this U.S. publication, will read the article and take the time to visit these Canadian gems. Just remember, this is going to be a busy year and you'll want to plan your visit. Canada is a vast landscape with a myriad of amazing destinations. If you want to check out the complete list, check outhttp://bit.ly/2j941Bt

Story 1 - Park Passes are still necessary

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year you'll likely be aware that the federal government has decided to make entry into Canada's national parks completely free for 2017.

Parks still needs to be able to track the number of visitors to national parks, so passes will still be necessary. If you're planning a trip to any of Canada's National Parks this year, you can pre-order the pass for free online by visiting http://bit.ly/2iUBQVD

For the national parks, the 2017 summer reservations opened on January 11, so again, book as early as possible by visiting www.reservation.pc.gc.ca

Outside of the national parks, there are also many other camping options. You can reserve sites in Alberta Provincial Parks by visiting www.reserve.albertaparks.ca The site opens for bookings on Feb 21, 2017 so if you'd like to reserve your site, be on the site on that day. One important note, they are planning on closing Three Sisters Campground, just on the outskirts of Banff National Park, at the community of Dead Man's Flats. This will take another 60 campsites out of the already limited availability for camping during the summer months. Reservations for British Columbia's Provincial Parks can be made at www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/reserve.

The key this year is planning ahead. We expect the parks to break visitation records and I want to help you to have the kind of visit that you have in your mind's eye. The key is planning and visiting whatever destination you want to explore as early in the day as possible. Parking Lots at many of the Rockies most famous attractions, places like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, are usually full by 9am. Be there at 7am and you can have a truly magical experience…and besides, sites like these are really morning scenes. Don't forget, the sun comes up very early here so by 7 am the sun is already getting high in the sky.

Plan ahead, get a good alarm clock, and I'll see you this summer.

Story 2 - We're Number One

Canada has been getting a lot of kudos lately. We're a fabulous place to live and an awesome place to visit - and the world seems to be getting the message.

This week, the New York Times put out its list of 52 places to go in 2017 and topping the list was Canada. In the past, places like Toronto, Ontario were on the list but this year, they entire nation got the nod.

According to the story, Canada's 150th birthday is a great reason to visit Canada. There will be celebrations planned from coast to coast to coast throughout the year and, as we've already mentioned, all the national parks are free. In addition to Canada's birthday, the city of Montreal, turns 375 this year, so they'll also be celebrating both events.

Story 3 - Canmore Becomes a Hub of Water Research

There's no arguing that water is the issue of the 21st century. With changing weather and climate patterns, we're seeing more moisture in the mountains of Alberta and B.C. but we're getting it in fewer, more extreme weather events. 2013 has become a stark reminder of just how vulnerable many areas are to catastrophic floods. It also moved the scientific community to increase the amount of research being focusing on issues directly and peripherally related to water.

Canmore has become the centre point for much of the research now taking place and Dr. John Pomeroy of the University of Saskatchewan is the lead researcher. Pomeroy is the Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, and Director of the University of Saskatchewan's Centre for Hydrology. Pomeroy will serve as Associate Director of the Global Water Futures: Solutions to Water Threats in an Era of Global Change Initiative (or GWF), based in Canmore.

As part of a 900 million dollar federal funding initiative, the University of Saskatchewan was awarded $77.8 million to partner with the University of Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier University, and McMaster University. By combining grants received by those partners, total funding adds up to $143 million. This makes it the largest university led water research program in the world.

Story 4 - Climate Trends in 2016

NASA has released some updated statistics on climatic trends for 2016 and it seems that two particular climate change indicators are continuing to break records - global average temperature and Arctic sea ice extent.

For the first 6 months of 2016, each month set a record as the warmest respective month since record keeping began around 1880. The first 6 months of 2016 were also the warmest collectively on record, averaging 1.3°C or 2.4°F warmer than in the late 1800s.

Of the first 6 months of the year, 5 set a record for the lowest extent of Arctic sea ice since satellite records began in 1979. It is of particular importance that these two trends are working in unison. They are both reflections of the greenhouse effect with increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere holding more and more heat.

Story 5 – Mountain Caribou

Globally, things are not too rosy for caribou. Here in the Rockies, a 2009 avalanche along the slopes of Mount Hector killed the last 3 remaining caribou within the boundaries of Banff National Park. Jasper, bordering Banff to the north, still has caribou but they too are declining over time.

Caribou in the southern mountain population are currently listed as threatened according to the Species at Risk Act, however the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada lists the southern mountain population as endangered. They comprise some 19 herds across the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia and, at present, fully 13 of those 19 herds are in decline - with many likely to disappear.

In the mountain national parks, Parks Canada has identified 5 major threats to local populations. They include changes to predator prey interactions, human caused changes to the landscape that allow increased predator access to caribou, direct disturbances, loss of habitat and finally, stresses inherent to small populations.

Like moose, caribou are a northern specialist and have roamed the north country since the ice age. Unfortunately, without some major changes, their future is likely to be uncertain. Over the past 3 decades, populations of caribou in the mountain national parks have dropped from 800 individuals to less than 250 today.

One of the first steps in trying to build any kind of recovery program is to identify those areas that are most critical to caribou. By looking at areas that caribou currently and previously occupied, as well as looking at how caribou travel between areas of critical habitat, biologists can begin to get an idea of where to focus conservation efforts.

In the mountain parks, there are currently only 5 local herds. Four of them are in Jasper National Park and the Columbia south herd, is in Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Park. Of the 4 herds in Jasper, only the A La Peche herd is currently stable with about 100 animals. Recent aerial surveys showed the Tonquin herd had approximated 30-34, the Brazeau around 15 and the Maligne herd has dropped to just a few individuals.

Story 1 - Winter Ticks

Have you ever gone on a spring hike and returned to your car only to find that you had unwittingly picked up an eight legged hitchhiker? Maybe you didn't notice and, a few days later found a growing eight-legged grape tucked away in your navel, or worse - and let's leave it at that for now. Well suck it up princess - how would you feel if you had some 140,000 of the little suckers with their thirsty mouths embedded into your hide slowly draining your vitality?

As much as that may sound like something out of a bad horror film, it can be just another day in the life of a moose wandering the mountain landscape.

Story 2 - Insect Cold Weather Strategies

In episode 12, we introduced the idea of winter ecology. When it comes to surviving long northern winters, there are as many strategies as there are species…and the smaller you are, the more challenging these winters can be. Over millions of years, our smallest residents, the insects have had to create very specialized ways of keeping the species going every year. While winter brings, challenges, spring brings rebirth.

Now if you’re an insect, you already have one thing working against you - you're cold blooded - so you can't stoke the furnace with a good meal like warm blooded mammals and birds. When it comes to insects and spiders, there are not just a few strategies, rather and entire continuum of ways that they try to game the system, all in the hopes of surviving the theoretically unsurvivable.

Story 3 - Northward Migrations

Insects and spiders are not the only things moving north. There are hundreds of plants, animals and birds that are also altering their seasonal patterns to, in some cases survive, and in other cases, take advantage of, changing climatic norms. Climate change is a carousel filled with winners and losers. Cold dependent species like polar bears, are finding that they're habitat is simply melting away with the winter pack ice. Other species, like grizzly bears, are exploring new and exciting habitats and in some cases, even interbreeding with grizzlies to create, depending on who you talk to, either pizzlies, or grolar bears.

Unfortunately, northern migrations today, are very different than the might have been at the end of the ice age some 10,000 years ago. While these early migrations had to deal with nomadic bands of human hunters, todays species need to deal with fences, roads, overpasses, underpasses, pipelines, and habitat that has become fragmented and dissected by human occupation.

Researchers looked at some 3,000 species of birds, mammals and amphibians to see how they might respond to warming climates. Like migrating birds, there are definite routes of northward migrations depending on many factors. For each animal, bird and amphibian, scientists needed to determine their optimal habitats and then project where those conditions would be most likely to occur in a warming climate.

In the article, I refer to an interactive map. You can view the map and associated story at the following link: http://bit.ly/2eAdVIq.

Story 1 - Rutting Moose

Recently, photographs hit the web from Alaska, showing two bull moose that had their antlers locked together costing them both their lives. They were found frozen in a slough pond with just their antlers and part of their sides exposed above the frozen surface of the water. Unfortunately for most members of the deer family, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Youtube is full of videos showing deer rescued by people sawing off their antlers to free them. The ritual of the rut is a dangerous time for all of our hoofed animals, but for animals that find their antlers locked together, it is not one that many will survive. You can see the images from Alaska here: Moose Perish with Antlers Locked

Story 2 - Gravel Bed Rivers

Take a close look at any of our Rocky Mountain streams and you'll see a very distinctive gravel bottom. Personally, I never really thought much about it, but for Dr. Richard Hauer, a professor at the University of Montana, these stream beds have revealed an incredible biodiversity that may be key to much of the biological diversity of the Rocky Mountain ecosystems. Dr Hauer's work offers a glimpse into our landscape and one of the most areas most vulnerable human disturbance.

Story 3 - Mountains 101

If you're like me, and want to get a really good grounding in mountain landscapes, geomorphology and ecology then do I have a deal for you. The University of Alberta has just announced an new FREE course called Mountains 101. it is a 12 lesson course for home study and the cost to audit the course for those of us looking for the knowledge but not a certificate is well - free. The course covers the entire spectrum from the formation of the mountains, the ecosystems that have been built upon that foundation and the ecology surrounding the mountain landscapes. To learn more visit: Mountains 101

Story 1 - Canada Jay selected to be our national bird

For the past year, the Royal Canadian Geographic Society has been listening to Canadians suggestions for a national bird. While the Americans have the bald eagle, Canada has never adopted a national bird. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society listened to some 50,000 submissions from Canadians to whittle down the many suggestions into 5 finalists. After long deliberations, the Canada jay beat out the finalists which included the common loon, Canada Goose, black-capped chickadee and snowy owl.

Story 2 - World Cup Cancelled

The first men's World Cup Downhill of the season, scheduled to be at Lake Louise Ski Hill on November 26-27th has been cancelled. After a great start to the winter in October, suddenly the weather warmed to more than 10 degrees above average for this time of year. The warm temperatures made it impossible to make enough snow to safely run the event and organizers had to make the hard choice to cancel the event. The women's downhill season kicks off, also at Lake Louise on Dec 2-4th but the conditions seem to have cooled down significantly so hopefully they will be able to go ahead with these races.

Story 3 - Desperate Measures for Johnson Lake

Recently, Parks Canada has been looking at some drastic measures to see if Johnson Lake can be rehabilitated. The challenge with whirling disease is that once it infects a lake, the parasites produce spores that can last for decades in the lake sediments. Johnson Lake is an ideal home because it is shallow and warm during the summers with a nice muddy bottom.

The goal at the moment is to keep it from spreading upstream towards Two Jack Lake, Lake Minnewanka and the upper Cascade River system. In particular, the Cascade holds some critical populations of westslope cutthroat trout.

How can they clean the lake? Well it would take several steps. The first would be to remove all of the fish. That would interrupt the life cycle, but not do anything about the spores. New fish populations arriving in the lake would still be susceptible to the long lasting spores and be reinfected.

To deal with the spores in the muddy bottom, on idea is to largely drain the lake and allow the mud to freeze during the winter. This has been shown to kill the spores. Freezing, when combined with removing the fish, may allow parks to clean up this particular body of water.

Johnson Lake would then not only provide a buffer between downstream infected waters and the upper Cascade River, but it would also make it possible for Parks Canada to reopen Johnson Lake for summer recreation. It is one of the only lakes in Banff that gets warm enough to swim and so on hot summer days, it is one of the busiest places in the area. The challenge now for officials is to balance the ecological and financial consequences of the various mitigations against the option of leaving things as is.

Story 1 - Buying Your First Pair of Snowshoes

What should you look for when buying your first pair of snowshoes. First, you'll need to answer these fundamental questions:

1. Where do you want to go?
2. How steep will the terrain be?
3. How deep with the snow be? Will it be powder or packed?
4. Are you looking to walk or run?

Answering these questions will make it easier for store clerks to match you with the right snowshoe for the types of outings that you are most often going to be undertaking. Like cross-country skis, there are snowshoes designed for a wide variety of terrains and activities so finding the right match is critical. In time, you may find that you want a pair for tracked conditions, another for deep powder and maybe even a third pair for steep ascents. For now, though focus on your main goals when buying your first pair.

If this all sounds confusing, there is a pretty good way to test the waters without investing in the purchase of new equipment - you can choose to take a guided snowshoe program, or you can rent some snowshoes and try them out on your own. Most guided snowshoe tours will provide the snowshoes for the day so you can get an introduction into the sport while at the same time testing some snowshoes. Here at Ward Cameron Enterprises, we would love to take you out into Kananaskis Country or Banff and help you get a feel for this incredible sport. We have all the gear you need as long as you have good winter clothing and a sturdy pair of snow boots. Drop us a line a info@wardcameron.com if you'd like to learn more about our early season packages.

Story 2 - The Crowds...they are a Comin'

2017 represents Canada's 150th birthday. In celebration, the federal government has decided to make entry into all Canadian national parks completely free of charge for the entire year. This is a bad decision that should be reversed immediately. Banff and Jasper National Parks are already operating way beyond capacity. Adding another several hundred thousand visitors into the mix is simply poor management of our parks. Banff Mayor Karen Sorensen slammed parks for making decisions that affect the town without offering any consultation or assistance to deal with the huge influx of vehicles that the town will need to accommodate next year.

Story 3 - Super Duper Moon

This month has a number of astronomical delights for those of us that like to watch the night sky. Topping the list is tomorrow's Super Duper Moon. A supermoon is defined as a full moon that takes place during those months where the moon is at its closest approach to the Earth. We've had several of the 'super' moons this year. Last month's full moon was a super moon and so will Decembers, but no moon in the past 68 years will be as large or as bright as the one on November 14, 2016. I know this is short notice, but if you listen to this be sure to check out the sky tomorrow for a spectacular show, weather permitting. The next time you'll be able to see a similarly dramatic supermoon will be November of 2034, so don't forget to mark your calendar.

This week also marks the peak of the annual Leonid Meteor Shower so if you're up in the early hours of November 17 and have a clear view to the east and can wait for the moon to dip behind the horizon, you may have an opportunity to see between 10-20 meteors each hour.

Story 1 - Adapting to Winter

There are many ways that animals and birds can adapt to deal with the cold temperatures of winter. In most cases, we can classify animals as winter avoiders, winter tolerators and winter lovers. Right now we're seeing migratory birds like the tundra swan gathering on our local ponds on their way to warmer climes in the south. Many of our local birds, like the American Robin, also take to the wing and head south. Other birds, like harlequin ducks and bald eagles may choose to head west instead of south. They'll winter on the west coast.

Another strategy to avoid winter is to die. Some insects will die and leave it up to eggs or larvae to repopulate the landscape come spring. We even have a frog that freezes solid in the winter, yet thaws out with no negative results.

Hibernation or dormancy is another strategy to avoid winter. Ground squirrels and bears will take to their dens to sleep away the winter months. Other animals, like the red squirrel will sleep through the coldest winter weather but will remain active for the majority of the snowy months.

Some animals can't skip winter altogether, but they also don't have any real adaptations to help them thrive. These tolerators need to use behaviour adaptations to help them to make it through the winter to the next spring. Animals like mule deer have a very hard time walking in deep snow. With just a small accumulation these deer are forced into a bounding gait and the energy expended in movement can quickly outweigh the benefits of movement. By gathering in groups, they can take turns breaking trail and conserve energy.

Other animals will take advantage of the fact that it never gets cold under the snow. That's why snow shelters like igloos are such a comfortable winter shelter. Mice and voles will thrive in tunnels beneath the snow oblivious of the blizzards that may be taking place above the surface. Other animals like the pine marten will spend some time above the snow but will take shelter in the natural snow caves created beneath the many downed logs in the mountains. This helps them to stay warm, but also gives them access to all the mice and voles that are also hanging out beneath the snow surface.

Finally, there are the winter lovers. The moose is a great example. It is a remnant of the ice age and was designed specifically for winter landscapes. Their large hooves and prominent dew claws help them get traction and increases the surface area of their foot. However they are equally comfortable walking through very deep snows. They can easily lower their body temperature in the winter to reduce the amount of food energy they need to consume.

Story 2 - The History of Snowshoes

Snowshoes have been around for a long time - I mean a really long time. The oldest pair ever discovered was dated at 3,700 to 3,800 BC and found in the Italian Alps. It is also possible that snowshoes may have already been an ancient innovation at that time.

As humans made their way to the new world, they may have brought their snowshoes with them. first nations across Canada developed a wide variety of wooden frame snowshoes held together by a rawhide mesh. They allowed our first nations to explore the winter wilderness without sinking through the soft snows. As European fur traders and explorers arrived on the scene, they adopted the snowshoes as soon as they saw how effective they were for exploring the winter landscape. They were as important an innovation as the canoe and the red river cart and were instrumental in much of the early exploration of the Canadian north.

By the mid 1800s, snowshoeing was being used for fun as well as for work. Snowshoe clubs began to appear and before long snowshoe racing was all the rage. By the late 1800s though, downhill and cross-country skiing were introduced and snowshoeing lost its attractiveness for some time.

In the 1980s snowshoeing began to undergo a renaissance as the designs began to evolve and people began looking to snowshoes with renewed interest. Tubular aluminum frames with nylon decking and crampons beneath brough new interest and snowshoeing began to grow again in popularity.

Today it is the fastest growing winter sport. Next week, I'll look at how to choose your first pair of snowshoes.

Story 1 - Winter Weather Predictions

I look at some of the predictions for this year's winter weather. We've had a few very mild winters now but the change towards La Niña conditions may shake that up with higher than average snowfalls.

Story 2 - Leave Your Drones at Home

Camera drones are becoming more and more popular in the mountains and this year saw a dramatic increase in illegal use of these devices in the mountain parks. Drones are illegal in both the national and Alberta's provincial parks and can result in hefty fines. Please leave your drone's at home

Story 3 - Dr. Brian Luckman on the glacial history of the Athabasca Glacier

Dr. Brian Luckman has been studying the Athabasca Glacier for the paast 50 years. He has pioneered new ways of studying the history of mountain glaciers using tree rings and even lichen growth. This is a portion of a presentation that he gave at the Jasper Museum in September and is reproduced with permission.

Story 1 - Mountain Soundscape

I wanted to share a sound file that I recorded recently as part of a haunting morning video of elk during the annual rut in Banff National Park. If you enjoy the audio, check out the original file at: http://bit.ly/2dwQzJp .

Story 2 - Glaciers in the Mountain West

This week we are treated to a presentation by Bob Sandford. Bob is the EPCOR Chair for Water and Climate Security and the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Please enjoy Bob's presentation titled: The Snows of Yesteryear & The Future Climate of the Mountain West.

Story 1 - Whirling Disease

Last week we talked about the discovery of whirling disease in Johnson Lake in Banff National Park. This was the first discovery of this devastating parasitic disease in the country and resulted in a huge flurry of research to see if it had spread beyond this tiny mountain lake to the larger Bow River watershed. Unfortunately, it has shown that the answer is YES. That’s all we know at this point.

Story 2 - Franklin's Ship

The recent discovery of Franklin's second ship is one of the greatest Arctic discoveries in the past 50 years. At the same time, there are interesting connections between Franklin's arctic experience and the the local glaciers in Banff and Jasper National Park.

Story 3 - The Banff Experience

A parliamentary panel recently visited Banff to look at the changing Banff experience. It's not a pretty picture.

Story 4 - Swimming to new territory

Recently a conservation officer on Vancouver Island saw two grizzlies swimming from island to island just offshore. This might not be a problem, except grizzlies are not found on the Island.

Story 5 - Expired Bear Spray

Just say no...to expired bear spray. Seriously, just say no!

Story 1 - Life In a Rut

Now that September has arrived, thoughts will be turning to romance in the local elk population. The antlers that have been covered in velvet since late-April are now beginning to peel as the blood supply is cut off to the velvet. Big bulls, properly called stags will begin to rub the antlers against trees to get rid of the itchy skin as the velvet dies. At the same time, they'll get more standoffish with other males and begin to collecting the cows, or hinds, into a harem. The strategy of the elk is not one guy, one girl, its one guy and all the girls!

Story 2 - Famous Fall Hikes

This story looks at some of the great places for fall colours in the Canadian Rockies - and in particular, the autumn golds of the alpine larch. We look at several trails and the important information for getting the most out of your autumn hiking experience. In particular, we talk about the following walks:

• Larch Valley and Sentinel Pass in Banff National Park
• Sunshine Meadows as well as Healy Pass, also in Banff
• Burstall Pass and Chester Lake in Alberta's Kananaskis Country.

Story 3 - Jasper's Dark Sky Festival

In many places in the world, the opportunity to see the milky way has been thwarted by urban light pollution. Jasper is one of the largest dark sky preserves on the planet. This year, between October 14 and 23, they'll be hosting the Jasper Dark Sky Festival. Of particular note are presentations by Bill Nye the Science Guy and George Takei of Star Trek fame. For more information visit www.jasperdarksky.travel.

Story 4 - Canada's National Bird

Believe it or not, Canada does NOT have a national bird. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society is looking to change this and we'll look into their efforts to find the most Canadian of birds.

Story 1 - The End of the Buffaloberry Seaon

For the past 6 weeks or so, we have been talking about a bumper crop of buffaloberries. However, since they only last until the first frost of autumn, the berries have now disappeared and bears will be moving onto other fall foods. This means it is especially important to harvest and fruit trees you may have on your property as bears will be looking to replace the high calorie buffaloberries. This year has seen great crops of crab apples, nanking cherries, mountainash and even choke cherries and these can all attract bears that have been feeding near the townsite into the townsite. Let's try to keep our communities bear free.

Story 2 - Whirling Disease Found in Johnson Lake

This week officials confirmed the first case in Canada of whirling disease, in Johnson Lake in Banff National Park. This is devastating news on many levels. Johnson Lake is one of the few lakes in Banff that actually warms up in the summer to allow swimming and is always packed with people enjoying the water, whether swimming, paddling or picnicking. The lake is now closed until further notice until the extent of the infection within the larger Bow River watershed can be determined. Whirling disease affects the trout and whitefish in the area and can have devastating effects on fish populations.

Story 3 - Quagga Mussels

While whirling disease is here, likely to stay, quagga mussels is one of the potential invaders that has yet to find its way into Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. However, like whirling disease it is a one way introduction so both the Alberta government and Parks Canada are doing mandatory inspections of all watercraft visiting Alberta waterways. Let's keep Alberta quagga free!

Story 4 - New Fossil Discoveries from the Burgess Shale Formations

The Burgess Shales are one of the most important fossil beds on the planet. They represent perfect timing, around 550 million years ago, the time of the greatest explosion of life in the history of the planet. They also add unprecedented levels of preservation - even preserving animals that had no hard parts. This story looks way way way back into our ancestry.

Story 1 - Photographers Using Telemetry Gear to Track Wildlife

This week we heard from Parks Canada staff that unscrupulous photographers may be using telemetry antennas to track wildlife to photograph. These antennas, generally the sole property of wardens, conservation officers and biologists have been showing up in the hands of photographers. They have now banned the possession of the equipment with a potential fine of $25,000 and a mandatory court appearance.

Story 2 - Banff National Parks Canine Unit Honoured

Dogs are also a key aspect of law enforcement in Banff National Park. This month, dog handler Mike Henderson and his dog Cazz were awarded the Parks Canada CEO Award for Exemplary Service.

We often forget the important role of dogs in all kinds of criminal investigations and search and rescue. Mike and Cazz have been partnered for the past 5 years and have spent their time tracking lost and missing hikers, skiers, avalanche victims, poachers and criminals.

Story 3 - Ice Free Corridor Migration Busted

I love science, except when it suddenly changes years of accepted reality - and great stories. As a naturalist I am also a storyteller, but this story changes everything that we have long thought about the original migration of the ancestors of our first nations from Asia.

Story 4 - Book Reviews

We look at two books that are disproportionately timely at the moment, one looking at a previous Bow Valley Wolf Pack and the other looking at the floods of 2013 and how they forever changed the landscape.

Story 5 - Reflections on Researchers

This is a follow-up of our last program. In it, we played a presentation by 5 Columbian Ground Squirrel researchers. This clip offers some of their personal reflections on teir experiences in the Canadian Rockies.

Story 1 - Breaking News

There have been several news stories since our last episode. The first one deals with an unexpected challenge related to bears and buffaloberries…Calgary outdoor shops have been having a hard time keeping bear spray in stock. You may have to look around a bit to find a canister if you don't already have one. Well, at least people are beginning to stock up on bear spray.

In other news, there is a proposal for a gondola to the gondola in Banff Townsite. The road to the Sulphur Mountain Gondola has been getting busier and busier and routinely gets backed up for an hour or more during peak times. This 66 million dollar proposal would see a gondola built from the townsite to the Upper Hot Springs/Sulphur Mountain Gondola base with stops at Tunnel Mountain Trailhead, The Banff Centre, and the Fairmont Banff Springs along the way.

It will be a tough sell to parks as it would need expansion beyond the townsite boundaries in order to build the large parking lots designed to catch vehicles at both entrances to town in order to funnel them to an expanded public transit system as well as to the townsite gondola stations.

New funding is coming to Kananaskis Country and surrounding parks. The Alberta government has announced 25.6 million dollars will be spent improving and expanding camping facilities in the Kananaskis and nearby areas. The money will add more sites with power, additional trails and improvement to camping facilities. This is welcome news.

Jasper National Park is also seeing two major developments. First, there will be a major development at the Mount Edith Cavell Day-Use Area. In 2012 and 2014, large blocks of ice broke off of the Ghost Glacier high above the tiny lake at the base of Angel Glacier. The first one sent a huge tsunami-like wave that caused major destruction to the day-use and parking areas. The 2014 incident was smaller but still caused significant damage. This fall's development will require the area to close Sept 19 so they can move (and enlarge) the parking lot out of the danger zone and improve the trail systems.

South of Jasper townsite, the Valley of Five Lakes Trailhead parking area is also seeing a major upgrade. This will result in it closing as of Sept 6 for the season to allow workers access. Over the past few years, the popularity of this low elevation trail system has resulted in cars spilling out to the highway for miles as hikers jockey for a place to park. This will expand the parking lot as well as improving the washroom facilities and adding additional picnic tables to the site.

Story 2 - Another Wolf Put Down by Parks

A second female wolf from the Bow Valley Pack has had to be destroyed after getting into human food and garbage. This is yet another terrible hit for the beleaguered Bow Valley pack and leaves it with only 3 adult wolves and 2 remaining pups from an original 6 at the start of the season.

This wolf pack has had a very difficult year. Hopefully the remaining wolves can stay clear of human food and continue to wander the landscape around the town of Banff.

Story 3 - Ground Squirrel Research

I was lucky to be able to take in a presentation by 5 biologists studying ground squirrels in Kananaskis Country. Led by lead researcher Danielle Rivet provided some really good information on general ecology as well as some of the impacts of climate change on two different populations of ground squirrels. Surprisingly, climate change does not simply mean less winter snow and an earlier rise for ground squirrels, especially in high elevations like Ptarmigan Cirque. In fact research has shown an increase in late season storms which may have a very different effect on the little guys. They were kind enough to let me record the program and so I've edited it down a bit for time but I hope you enjoy it. I certainly did. Many thanks to Danielle and the rest of her team: Sophie Tuppen, Jorden Gladden, Elena Plana and Elly Hedt.

Story 1 - Buffaloberry and Bears Update

This has been another busy week for black and grizzly bears in the Rockies. With the bumper crop of buffaloberries this year, the number of close encounters has been growing steadily. This week. Kananaskis Country has issued a warning for the entirety of Kananaskis Country. In Canmore, mush of the area between the Peaks of Grassi and the town is closed to human use to give the bears room to feed. You'll want to check trail reports ahead of leaving your home at this time of year to check if there are any warnings or closures that may affect your plans. This is also a great time of year to think about leaving the valley bottoms and hiking into the high country. Trails like Ptarmigan Cirque and the Centennial Ridge Trails in Kanananaskis are great examples. Since buffaloberries grow at lower elevations, these higher trails leave the berries, and with them, most of the bears behind.

Story 2 - Tips to Beat the Crowds on Busy Holiday Weekends We also look at some ways to beat the crowds this weekend. With record numbers of visitors this year, the secret is to head out earlier than everyone else - the earlier the better. I would recommend 7 am or earlier. This allows you to beat the crowds and have the kind of experience you truly want. With destinations like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake being routinely closed due to the crush of traffic, going early is the best way to make sure that you are in control of your experience. One of the community challenges related to buffaloberries is the challenge of fruit trees attracting bears into the community on years, like 2015, when the berry crop fails. Jasper is leading the charge in this respect with a program designed in partnership with Parks Canada that partners the owners of fruit trees with volunteer pickers who will harvest their crab apples or choke cherries and make the fruit available to people that may want to use it. This is definitely a program that Canmore and Banff could benefit from modeling.

Story 3 - Wildlife Overpasses in Banff In our final story, we play some live tape from a recent coach tour where I talk about the wildlife over and underpasses in Banff National Park. These are an amazing success story and they are gradually being copied in other jurisdictions as well.

When the program began in the 1990s, Parks began by building underpasses beneath the highway in conjunction with fencing to keep wildlife off of the roadways. At first it seemed like the large carnivores were reluctant to use the noisy bridge style crossings. As a result, when they designed phase 2, they added two large overpasses at a cost of 1.8 million dollars each. The good news is that they work. The even better news is that we've learned that good science takes time. We've now had more than 20 years to study the over and underpasses and we've learned that, in time, the large carnivores have adapted to the underpasses. They prefer the more open overpasses, but parks can build 3 or 4 underpasses for the cost of one overpass. To create a good balance, they put overpasses at critical crossing locations and underpasses at secondary crossings.

From the day that the first underpasses were built, park wardens and biologists have been keeping track of every individual crossing. They know how many times every species of animal has used each of the over and underpasses and, as a result, have compiled an amazing amount of detailed information on the movements of large carnivores and hoofed animals.

They are a great testament to Parks Canada's long-term commitment to our wildlife populations.

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Story 1 - Citizen Science

If you regularly find your way high into the Alpine, why not help out scientific research taking place in the Rockies. The High Elevation Localized Species (or HELS) initiative is designed to keep real-time records of sightings of hoary marmots, mountain goats, pikas and white-tailed ptarmigan.

Each of these animals are alpine specialists and so it can be difficult to collect ongoing date simply due to the remote and often widely separated locations that these animals call home. By crowdsourcing sightings from those of us that like to play in the mountains on a regular basis they can begin to gain a much clearer understanding of their range, behaviour, movement and population.

Participating in the program is easy. Head to www.BowValleyNaturalists.org and follow the links to the HELS reporting area. You'll simply be asked to register followed by a simple reporting process. Important information includes the species, number of individuals, any details of the sighting and the location. If you don't have gps coordinates (as most of us won't), you can pinpoint your location on a digital topographic map.

Story 2 - Bear 148's Wanderings

Bear 64 was one of the greatest bears of the past several decades. She called the town of Banff home and helped scientists learn more about the use of wildlife over and underpasses as well as the bears use of important seasonal foods. She passed away in 2014 and now her female cub, bear 148 has taken over her territory with gusto. Recently she took to exploring her home and decided to take a bit of a walkabout. She travelled east along the Trans Canada Highway all the way to Canmore, and after passing the Legacy Trail on the highway (and causing a brief closure), she headed up to the Spray Valley and wandered all the way to the south end of Spray Lakes Reservoir. After turning north, she made a beeline back to the town of Banff covering the distance in just 20 hours.

Now that it's buffaloberry season, she'll be looking for good patches to spend the next month or so until the first frost of autumn brings the berry season to an end. If you're travelling the trails in and around the Bow Valley be sure to make lots of noise. When bears are feeding on these berries they are completely focused on feeding and may not hear your approach. It's up to you to be vigilant for the both of you. Leave your ear buds at home and be sure to have bear spray on your belt and know how to use it.

Over the past two days there have been two bear attacks, one near Cochrane and a second today near Canmore. The bears are on the trails and because the buffaloberries need sunlight to grow, they line our low elevation trails. If you haven't listened to episode 1, check it out as we talk in great depth about the importance of these important berries.

Story 3 - We're Off to See The Icefields…By Bike!

Jasper National Park has announced a 66 million dollar plan to build a paved bike path from the town of Jasper all the way to the Columbia Icefields. This trail would use portions of the original highway as well as paralleling the current road as it winds its way uphill toward the glaciers. The plan has received mixed reviews with cyclists applauding it and environmentalists warning of the loss of habitat as well as the potential for increased traffic along this important wildlife corridor. This is a difficult story since the environmental impact would be very high but at the same time the highway is becoming more and more dangerous for cyclists to take the risk. This is a story that we'll be watching unfold for some time and Parks has yet to reveal all of the details of the proposed trail.

Story 4 - Book Report

I love images taken from camera traps. You know the ones, where researchers have set up special cameras that are triggered by movement so that they catch wildlife unaware. They are critical for studying very wary animals and have been used in every corner of the globe. There are some awesome local videos produced by using these cameras as well. Glenn Naylor of Kananaskis Country did this amazing video in Kananaskis by monitoring a scent tree used by bears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AihvuZiDhsg. Jasper National Park has also produced a series which you can watch here: http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/ab/jasper/ne/prissurlevif-caughtintheact.aspx.

Now back to our book. Biologist Roland Kays of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has used camera traps for years in his work. Recently he realized that he was not the only biologist with a 'greatest hits' folder on his computer. He began to reach out to other biologists to see if they might be willing to share some of their best images as well. The result is a fabulous book called: Candid Creatures: How Camera Traps Reveal the Mysteries of Nature, looks at the history, the techniques and the humour related to using camera traps. The images reveal a world that is hidden to humans and in many cases reveal behaviours not previously observed.

Why not pick up a copy at Amazon.ca. You can buy it from this link: http://amzn.to/2awoLi7. By purchasing the book from this link you are helping to support the show.

Story 1 - Mountain News Items

Parks Increasing Prosecutions for Feeding Wildlife

This has been a difficult year for wildlife in the Rockies. We've had numerous bears killed along highways but we've also had a growing problem with visitors giving handouts to wildlife. It all came to a head recently when the alpha female of the Bow Valley Wolf Pack had to be euthanized after becoming aggressive as a result of being fed repeatedly. Let's help keep the wild in wildlife.

Colorado Black Bear Locks Itself In Subaru

The mountains are Subaru country and in Colorado a lady woke up to learn that a black bear had opened the door of her car and then somehow locked itself inside. Needless to say the distressed animal spent the whole night trying to get out and in the meantime trashed the interior of the car. Wildlife officials released the bear without incident.

White Water Rafters Cry Foul

Rafting companies in British Columbia have been blocked from accessing the Lower Canyon of the Kicking Horse River, one of the classic rafting trips in western Canada. The legal wrangling will continue for some time but as of this writing it is still blocked by a metal gate.

Story 2 - Eating Bugs at the Calgary Stampede

Every year the Stampede introduces a long list of new foods for the midway food booths. This year was no exception. We headed into Calgary to try a few of these delightful snacks, in particular the Sticky Toffee Bug Balls, the Golden Grasshopper Pie Pop, the Big Pickle Dog and finally the Bacon Beer Battered Corn Dog. You can see a full listing of the new foods here: http://blog.calgarystampede.com/2016/05/03/34-new-foods-hit-the-stampede-midway-in-2016/

Story 3 - Disappearing Glaciers

In this story we look at the rapid rate that glaciers are disappearing from the western mountain landscape. According to some scientists, by 2100 70-90% of all of our glaciers could disappear. We look at a few of the implications of this rapid melt.

Story 1 - The Amazing Race Canada comes to Jasper

On June 28 the 4th season of the Amazing Race Canada kicked off with a visit to Alberta's Jasper National Park. They did some crazy things but the scariest of all was climbing out of tram car at the Jasper Tramline and climb down one side, cross beneath hand over hand on a set of monkey bars, and then climb back up the opposite side. It was a great showcase for Jasper, but we need to begin looking at whether we need events like this in the mountain National Parks. Banff and Jasper are getting busier and busier and we need to begin looking at ways to reduce visitation in certain key areas like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake.

Story 2 - Buffaloberries and Bears

This year the buffaloberry crop ripened far ahead of schedule and it looks like it's a bumper crop this year. This plant is the single most important food for black and grizzly bears in the Canadian Rockies. It is the one food that helps them to build their fat layers for winter. When feeding on buffaloberries, Grizzly bears will eat between 50,000 and 200,000 berries every single day.

Learning to recognize seasonal foods for bears is a great way to improve your safety in bear country - and if you don't know this one plant then get out a book and learn to identify it. No other plant is more important to bears in the Rockies and this plant lines most of our low elevation trails. You can learn more about the seasonal foods of bears here: http://mountainnature.com/Wildlife/Bears/BearDiet.htm.

Story 3 - Banff taking down the Bill Peyto signs at both entrances to town

For years the mesmerizing stare of outfitter and guide Bill Peyto has greeted visitors as they enter Banff Townsite. The town has now decided to replace the signs with something new. In this story we look at the life of Bill Peyto and discuss the beautiful lake that now bears his name.

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