BCJ_WINTER18 Digital Edition

OUR GROUP OF EIGHT KIDS AND TWO ADULTS, knees
locked and shoulders bowed under the unfamiliar weight of packs
full of gear and food for a week in the wilderness, stood staring at
the muddy trail before us. Our boot tracks would soon join the
fresh moose, grizzly, black bear, deer and wolf tracks heading off
the end of the road into the Hornaday Wilderness Area near Elkford,
British Columbia. We were here to explore some of the last,
best, unprotected wilderness in the Southern Canadian Rockies,
an area first documented by big game hunter and conservationist
William T. Hornaday more than a century before.
The East Kootenay region is well-known as a wildlife and wilderness
lovers’ paradise. It has been called the “Serengeti of the
North” and is home to an exceptional diversity and abundance of
large mammals. Although modern industry’s removal of the region’s
original forests has pushed the old growth-reliant mountain
caribou to local extinction in these parts, elk, moose, whitetail
and mule deer all thrive in the sea of young forests. These support
abundant cougar, bobcat, lynx, wolf, coyote, black bear and
grizzly populations, the latter bolstered by rich huckleberry fields
found in the mosaic of forest types. Ten weasel species, from least
weasel to badgers and wolverine, fill the varied ecosystems, and
Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and mountain goats claim the
skylines.
The region has always drawn big game hunters and wilderness
connoisseurs. One of the most famous adventures in the region
was documented in the iconic Camp-Fires in the Canadian Rockies,
written by conservation legend William T. Hornaday, about a
month-long hunt in the vicinity of the Elk and Bull rivers in the
fall of 1905. Along with photographer, Pennsylvania State Game
Commissioner and founder of the Lewis and Clark Club John M.
Phillips, Hornaday explored the upper Elk and Bull watersheds
with the support of guides Charlie Smith and John and Mack
Norboe, brothers who trapped and hunted the region.
Hornaday fell in love with the Canadian Rockies, and his introduction
to the 1906 classic included the prescient comment:
“We dread the day of the ranch, the road, the railway, and the
coal-mine, anywhere near the Elk and Bull Rivers.”
He’d roll over in his grave to know of today’s entire lower Elk
River Valley carved into sprawling ranchlands, roads reaching to
the back of nearly every drainage, a major highway and rail line
bisecting the valley, and five of the world’s largest open-pit coal
mines slowly moving the mountains of the Elk River to China
by rail.
In addition to the extensive mining activity, the region is also
suffering from motorized abuse. Incredibly lax land use protection
laws, contrasted by neighbouring jurisdictions (Alberta and
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