Passby Creek 1

I gave the Passby Creek Trail a try yesterday. This trail is pretty weak on references: all I had was a recommendation from S---, who had snowshoed it, and a verbal description from the bcnorth.ca website dated was pre-2005. There was no entry in the original Trails To Timberline, and no entry on followyourpath.ca. I set out to follow the verbal description and see if I could just find the roadhead. I took snowshoes because on north-facing sloes the snowline seems to be still down around 2000'

I've been thinking about mapping trails without a GPS—a sort of variant on “Games Climbers Play” that I'm calling “Games Map-makers Play.” It's about going back to the technology of 1990: no computer, no Google Earth, no GPS. Just map and compass. So I took a compass, and the 1971 topo map.

Here was the verbal description:

Drive north from Smithers on Highway 16 for 24.4 kms and turn left on the Kitseguecla Lake Road. Turn left again after .7 km and cross the railway tracks on the 6000 Forest Service Road. About 1/2 km past the 6008 sign, turn left on the small Forestry Road. After driving 2.3 km past some fields, bear right at the "Y" onto the 608 Road, drive across a small bridge and turn left at the 4 km sign on a small road behind a corral to an overgrown landing in the cut block. The trail starts from the southwest corner of the landing and follows the creek bank south to the edge of the timber. After about an 1-1/2 hours hike, turn left on the beaten track. The old main trail goes straight ahead down the hill to Passby Lake.

You'll notice it sounds like you somehow get from the Kitseguecla Lake Road to the 6000 Forest Service Road, but in fact they're the same thing. It's marked with the little yellow kilometre signs: “6001,” “6002,” etc. Four tenths of a km past the 6008 signs (yes, this road seems to have been posted twice, and there are two signs in slightly different places for many of the kilometres) was the left turn described, but it turned out also to be the turn posted “Hankin-Evelyn Backcountry Trails Parking, 9km.” I'd noticed this last fall and wanted to check it out: it's the gladed, skins-only, backcountry ski area developed over the past few years by the Bulkley Backcountry Ski Society.

45 minutes from the house at this point.

This turn-off was already signed from here as the 608 Road, and right off it had one of those scary yellow signs giving a radio frequency: “608 Road; Call Empty; 159.42”. At if that wasn't going to give me enough of a pause--picturing a head-on collision with a a logging truck because I have no such radio--there was also another sign close to the ground on the same post, red one, saying “Road Temporarily Closed To Recreation Traffic.” Oh, Geez.

I went down there anyway, slowly, watching and listening for logging trucks. (Some doubt if this actually works.) Partly it was me being indignant that recreation sites should not be limited to people with forestry radios; partly it was me impatient to know what was down there. I met no one. I crossed Trout Creek, passed through some fields, and ascended through snowy forest. Snowline is at something like 2000' on these north-facing slopes. It was unclear where the “Y” was, but I did pass a turn-off to the left for a “602 Road” and that might have been it.

At 4 km there was the mentioned bridge and small corral. Leading up behind the corral, which was mired in snow, was what was probably an old road between young (maybe 20 year old) pine and spruce. It was unplowed and certainly undrivable. (The snow was about two feet deep here.) I decided that, for today, this was the roadhead, and parked on the road margin, leaving plenty of room for the hurtling logging trucks of my imagination. I donned snowshoes, shouldered pack, and set out to explore “a small road behind a corral to an overgrown landing in the cut block.”

There was an old track of snowshoes going up there, perhaps from a week before, and I followed these. I passed a yellow “deactivated road” sign, and after about ½ km I came to what might have been, seven years ago, a “overgrown landing:” it was full of aspen rather than coniferous trees. Here I shot a bearing to the Nipples and to the highest point on the ridge across the valley, so I could figure out later where the “landing” was.

From here, “the trail starts from the southwest corner of the landing and follows the creek bank south to the edge of the timber.” I poked around in the far southwest corner, but the place was only about the size of a small parking lot, and the snowshoe tracks continued confidently up a narrower corridor between trees a bit more at what I would call the “mid-point” in the south side of the landing. Oh well. I followed the tracks, and found myself in a distinct corridor between trees, narrower than a road but about the right size for what would have been a pack trail 70 years ago. I looked for blazes but found none. The trees were still “recently” planted, but a little bigger now, maybe 30 years old. There was no creek in evidence, but I thought I could hear one off to my left.

One piece of evidence that would help in figuring this all out would be a map showing cut blocks and the years they were cut.

Varied thrushes and some kind of warbler were calling. I saw a hare ahead, already gone brown. After a while the snowshoe prints left the corridor between trees and forked through denser pine right up a little ridge nose. I followed them for a hundred metres or so and got a view out over the basin I was walking through. I could see I had indeed been following a stream, and that I was in a big area of light green (a warm green) trees, but on the edges there were taller, dark green trees: “the edge of timber.” I'm pretty sure that in the local lingo of forestry, “timber” specifically means the uncut, mature trees, rather than trees period.

It looked like a long way to the edge of timber. I'd accomplished what I came for, and I'd forgot my gaiters, ski poles, and dark glasses, so I turned around. But first I went a bit further up what appeared to be the trail corridor and found I did come out on the creek itself. It was melted open and made a lovely, inspiring Spring sound.

Descending, I was struck by how much the place was like the canyonlands at that moment. Across from me to the north, the ridge seemed sere, bare and melted out, like something you might see above White Canyon, or the Escalante Road. The whole area was unnaturally quiet, as if I was a long way from civilization. I was standing on two feet of snow, but life was surging up all around. My hands smelled of pine and cottonwood where they'd brushed branches, and it was just about enough to make me feel good about having survived Winter.

At home I called the BC Rec guys, Kevin and Ben, and found out the 608 road is temporarily closed for the melt (they call it “break-up” ), so vehicles don't tear up the steep section near the Hankin-Evelyn Parking lot, which was 5 km beyond where I went. They don't know of any logging planned on the 608 Road in the next few years, so that's good news.

The triangulation proved totally inaccurate to locate the “landing.” I was off by kilometres. Instead I located it using (embarrassed!) a GPS track of this trail I found on my server, perhaps donated originally by a colleague at BC Parks. Do I need a better compass? A plane table? A sextant? Must work on this.
Here's what I knew at the end of this first day: 

Winter River

Although it's covered in snow, you can see that no trees or bushes grow in that strange, long, thin, wandering field that goes down the centre of the valley. After your car has warmed up and the heat is working, you can relax as you drive from Smithers to Quick, and notice that no fences cross that field. If you have lived in Winter all your life you might wonder about it. And by March it sometimes feels like we have lived in Winter all our lives.

Rivers get closed down in winter. Like an amusement park where the rides are boarded up, silent and still, the river goes under its white tarp for the whole season. The employees are gone, the children are gone, there's no noise or light. We drive past put-ins or over bridges and pay no attention, as if there were a sign saying “Closed until Spring.”

You won't learn that the river is there in the winter by listening to people tell stories about it. You hear that flow went up quite fast one week on May, that a certain rapid got washed out, that it took four hours one September to go from Walcott to Telkwa by canoe. Someone talks about coho making it past Moricetown, or which hole always contains a steelhead; another tells a story about going from Morice Lake to the Skeena in a kayak. There are guides to paddling, books about fishing... Perhaps the river is just a summer phenomenon.

Come examine the winter river. It's quite silent here. The ice is lumpy and jumbled along the river edge. It piles up in strange shapes which, like snowflakes, never repeat and don't last long. The air is cold and a slight breeze blows from the south. Snow is moving in. Like the curving back of a big beast, water surfaces briefly in the centre of the channel, grey and muscly. It rides along in the air for a few metres, then dives again beneath the ice.

You shouldn't go down there in the dark water, but someone has; and we know that down in the gravels, steelhead are waiting out the winter silently, holding their territories. Salmon eggs are hatching. The nearby Lake Kathlyn elementary school sets up a tank to hatch salmon eggs, and it is completely covered from light, a refrigeration tube inserted into it to keep the water frigidly cold. Quietly bubbling outside a classroom for months, it reminds us what it's like on the bottom of the river.

Up on the surface people are skiing on the ice, or perhaps just meandering down the edge of the river, cautiously avoiding the uncertain centre when ice can be thin. In Telkwa a snowmobile trail gets set up on the ice of the Telkwa River, and the village has a new trail for a few months. When it's solidly frozen, the river could be the ideal highway for dog sleds or foot travellers because, as I said before, there are no fences.

You might think that the size of the river is the same in winter, but don't be fooled. In winter, the river is a much different size. It's not smaller. It's bigger. Because what is a river? It's the contiguous waterbody as far as it stretches. In summer it stretches merely from bank to bank; but in winter, water, in some form or another, frozen or liquid, continues contiguously far beyond the bank. Sure, there's liquid water in the riverbed, and then ice on top; but there's snow above that, and the unbroken blanket of snow continues, climbing the banks and setting off across the fields and through the forest. It's all river now, all river water, getting ready to flow downhill, sagging downhill already. There's nowhere you can draw a line and say, “This is river and that is not.” We are inundated: the snow and ice in turn stretch up the hill, around your house, over your car, across the road, up the mountains, over the pass, down to other rivers. It's all river now. And the summer river is a mere remnant of the real river, the Winter river.

Finding A Map

I’m intrigued by this problem: you find a book about someone travelling in Nepal, or about a certain forest in Poland, or about the highlands of Costa Rica, and you want a good map of the area.

You want, it turns out, a topographic map, usually at 1:50,000 or 1:100,000, a map you could use to follow a route. It has all the landmarks local people and travellers use: the rivers are labelled, the peaks are labelled, and towns and hamlets are labelled.

So where do you turn? Specifically, I’m interested in where you turn on-line, and this is for two reasons which more or less define this particular game I’m playing. First, it should be free. Second, it should be automatically generated.

In a sense, I’m posing a challenge here: who can make an automatic map-generator that works at any scale and is map-based, rather than imagery-based.

Within certain countries, excellent local solutions exist. For example, if your area of interest in in the US, WorldWind and the USGS topo-map server give you an awesome abilty to pan around on topo maps of various scales draped over a digital elevation model. In Canada you can use toporama, or EarthDetails, or you can download the CanMatrix images of scanned topo maps. In Norway you can visit a lovely site whose name I forget where you are panning over topo maps at many scales.

Note that I’m not looking for free data; images of maps is fine.

To the extent that the solutions are going to be provided on a country-by-country basis, what’s missing is a central clearinghouse of links to topo maps for various countries.

My speech at the HBMN forum, October 1st, 2008

Address to the Hudson Bay Mountain Neighbourhood fundraiser and forum, by Morgan Hite. October 1^st, 2008, the Old Church

I’d just like to start by reviewing the basic parameters of what Blue Pearl is proposing here:

• We’re looking at an 11 hectare industrial facility on the road to Twin Falls, visible from all over the valley in what is otherwise a forested, undeveloped area
• We’re looking at 50 trucks a day to Endako and back, with all the noise, dust, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that that implies
• We’re looking at a new road being pushed north along the base of the mountain from the Twin Falls area to Evelyn
• We’re looking at—or listening to—noise that will always be audible to Glacier Gulch residents, sometimes audible in town, and certainly sometimes audible across the valley
• We’re looking at wastewater being discharged into the Bulkey carrying enough heavy metals, and organic compounds to require a provincial permit
• 125 jobs

Now the place I’d like to start talking about this is that these are nice people. I’ve been involved with Hudson Bay Mountain Neighbourhoods for about three and a half years, and I’ve been to countless PLC meetings with Blue Pearl and Rescan.

They are friendly and civil, and, incredibly, they seem glad to see me when we meet. So we don’t have a problem with the proposed mine from that point of view.

I imagine you’ve all had the experience, though, that sometimes groups of good people can bring forward bad plans. So I want to talk a little bit about the process that appears to have generated this Application.

If you were at the Open House last Wednesday, the most telling moment was when Randy MacGillavry, the senior Blue Pearl representative, put up a map of the 11-hectare loadout facility, and someone asked him to point out the road to Twin Falls on the map. The road to Twin Falls runs right by their facility, but he didn’t know where it was. It took him a minute to find it.

It spoke volumes about the level of awareness that Blue Pearl has about what goes on here in the Bulkley Valley.

They did not ask themselves, “What are the daily uses people already have for these areas we want to appropriate?” These parts of the landscape and the soundscape, and the aquatic environment, let alone whether we’re attached to what the identity of the town is like at present.

They asked themselves, “How can we put a mine in here?”

• Their plans were not shaped by how we take visitors to Twin Falls.
• Their plans were not shaped by the 40 households in the Glacier Gulch neighbourhood that draw water from a surface well.
• Their plans were not shaped by a desire to fish the Bulkley
• Their plans were not shaped by driving highway 16 every day.
• Their plans were not shaped by the pleasure we take in that clean and pretty mountain.

A few moments later Randy said he also hadn’t actually read the Application, that they had hired Rescan to write it.

Which is the way their business is. But I know a bit more about that story. I spoke to the president of Rescan, Clem Pelletier, in 2005. He called me because he was upset about some things we said about Rescan on our website, and he explained to me, “We want to do the best job possible, but we can only do what the proponent hires us to do.” In other words he was saying to me, Don’t be tough on me—it’s not my fault.

So there’s the complete picture: neither party really has to take responsibility for the quality of what’s proposed in the Application. And of course that’s a great way to get a good end result.

So we have an Application where:

• the loadout site and haul road are cited as having a potential visual impact, and mitigation is proposed; but the so-called development rock storage pile, far higher on the mountain and lying in a saddle at 1000 meters easily visible from all over the valley is not.
• You have the haul route options being evaluated with a somewhat progressive formula, where they quantify the costs and then weigh the socio-community and environmental costs each 45%, and economic costs only 10%. But when we come to evaluating the alternative loadout locations for this side of the mountain, they use a very different method, ranking them in categories, and then summing the rankings. When we get to evaluating the alternative of putting the loadout on the west side of the mountain, first they sequester it away in its own special section, and then provide no kind of quantitative analysis save the mention of a cost of some $18 million.
• You have a situation where although the loadout is carefully designed so that all surface water is trapped and treated, the sewage treatment plant itself is located outside the capture and treatment area, on it own in the Glacier Gulch watershed.
• You have the number of stream crossings of the proposed haul road being 9 in the Application, 6 in Appendix C11, the “Haul Option Report,” and 7 in Appendix Q2, the Davidson Project Stream Crossings Memo.
• You have an application where it’s unclear whether the risk management procedures were designed for 10 years or 30 years.

It’s tempting to conclude that when this Application was put together, the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, and sadly it indicates exactly the kind of deal we’re being offered—a deal where even Blue Pearl isn’t sure of all the details.

If you give us money—and this is a fund raiser—this is what we will spend it on: hiring experts at CSP2—Center for Science and Public Participation—in conjunction with GGWG to examine the Application and analyze what aspects of it are unacceptable.

We’ve got three things every citizen can do.

1. We would really like you to write a letter to the EAO—the Environmental Assessment Office. Talk about the issues that matter to you. Do this by November 12^th. The address to send it to is on our website at hbmn.ca
2. Ask for a ‘panel review.’ A panel review will cause the details of this Application to come far more out into the public eye. Hearings would be held here. Independent experts would be summoned. Blue Pearl would come under far more scrutiny, and not just by regulators who might be under pressure to find a way for this mine to work.
3. Copy your letter to us at HBMN. We’re collecting all the issues people have raised.

Lastly, let me say a few words about the game we’re in. The EA process is a bit of a rigged game, and I don’t want to encourage unrealistic expectations of what may happen.

In the EA process mines almost always get approved. Only a mass popular uprising here in Smithers could stop it—and of course that could happen. It’s still our first choice.

But barring that, the next best thing we can hope for is that public criticism of the plan is so overwhelming that the company is sent back to the drawing board to make significant changes.

I don’t mean window-dressing changes like changing the haul route: I mean revising the mine completely. Throwing out this current proposal that Mayor Davidson has aptly termed ‘old school’, and turning Rescan loose to design the state-of-the-art-mine, the 21^st century mine, the mine the valley deserves—the no carbon footprint, silent operation, no need for a permit to pollute the Bulkley, not in somebody’s watershed, not next to a neighbourhood, no trucking, no airshed concerns way to get the Davidson molybdenum out. Remember, this deposit is worth hundreds of millions in profit. It’s just a matter of money.

But, we may not even get that. With moderate public input about unacceptable elements of the plan, we’re probably looking at the Application being approved, but with some conditions imposed on it by the EAO to safeguard the local environment and quality of life. There would be improvements to the plan, and some of those would matter. They are worth asking for. The mine would probably go right where they want to put it now, but it’ll be somewhat less of an ill-thought-out mine.

The worst thing that can happen—and I want to spend a minute on the real disaster scenario—is that we let the negativity of all this get to us. We take it all so seriously that we become depressed, stop smiling, become resentful. We become the not-fun people. Then it won’t matter if this project gets sent back to the drawing board or not—because the damage, the real damage will have been done.

So if I can put in a word for the dark side, make sure you Don’t Have Fun. Whatever you do, however you get involved in trying to change the course of this big cruise ship entering our valley, writing letters, or talking to your neighbours, or phoning your political representatives, whatever you do don’t let yourself smile, don’t giggle occasionally, don’t make jokes, don’t stop for a break and don’t go out and take a walk.

That’s why we’ve invited these musicians here tonight, to remind us of the big picture.

We’re going to be dealing with this deposit and the miners it attracts for a long time, and we’d better start getting good at doing it in a way we can keep up our spirit for years.

Thank you.