by Joe Foy
By the end of May, if everything goes to plan, the government of BC will have enshrined the protection of 11 new provincial parks and 70 new conservancies, totaling almost a million hectares.
The new protected areas span landscapes that were the battlegrounds of the War in the Woods back in the late 1990s. Elaho Valley – Sims Valley – Great Bear Rainforest – Haida Gwaii. They are all represented in the new parks and conservancies. So too are more peaceful valleys in the Whistler area, the Okanagan and up the coast. Every valley, every mountain lake, every stream has a story of the people who laboured for its protection.
But it is the Elaho Valley that I am thinking about today. The fight for the Elaho was without a doubt the toughest, most demanding conservation campaign I have ever been involved with. By the time it was over, an amazing collection of eco-heroes had stepped up to save the valley.
Of course nobody knew how tough it would be in the early spring of 1994. That’s when Randy Stoltmann stopped by the Wilderness Committee’s office in Gastown to leave a copy of his latest report. In it, he detailed what he believed was the largest tract of wilderness remaining in the Vancouver area. He’d mapped out a vast expanse of roadless area centred on the Sims, Clendenning and Upper Elaho Valleys in the mountains north of Squamish. He’d scaled the surrounding peaks and looked down at the great green valleys. “It was really something,” he told me with a twinkle in his eye. “The Upper Elaho is a huge wide valley carpeted in old growth forest – the logging companies are going to flip out when they see my report calling for its protection,” he said with a little smile.
That was the last time I ever spoke with Randy. Less than a month later he had lost his life in a mountaineering accident while ski touring the vast wilderness of glaciers and peaks that surround BC’s Kitlope Valley – midway between Kitimat and Bella Coola.
Randy had been the pathfinder for many of us in the wilderness preservation movement. Though barely 30 when the mountains took him, Randy had already mapped out many of the biggest trees in Canada, all of them in BC’s coastal rainforest. He’d authored several books on big trees and wilderness. It was Randy Stoltmann who had pointed the way to Carmanah Valley as home to the tallest trees in Canada. The valley eventually was protected with the designation of the Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park. And it was Randy who had shown us the Elaho.
Accompanying Randy on his fateful traverse of the Kitlope peaks was John Clarke – a wilderness legend in his own right. John had more first assents of peaks in the rugged Coast Mountains than just about anyone. Many of his epic journeys he’d done alone – mostly, he said, because he couldn’t find anyone else able to complete the weeks long treks required.
For nine years after Randy’s death John worked tirelessly to protect the wilderness that Randy had mapped. John recreated himself as a wilderness educator giving countless presentations in campgrounds, schools and even the Provincial Legislature in Victoria. He was a passionate voice for the preservation of Coast Mountain wilderness in general and Randy’s wilderness around the Elaho in particular.
Then, when a brain tumor took John’s life in 2003 the Elaho had lost another of its heroes.
Great Grandma Betty didn’t like it one bit when she saw that young people who had been protesting logging in the Elaho Valley had been beaten up by a mob of angry loggers in 2000.
A lot of people didn’t like to see that – but Betty Krawczyk chose to protest the beatings by standing on the mainline logging road leading to the Elaho and refusing to move to let the logging trucks pass. For this she received a year in prison – serving four months before her harsh sentence was overturned and she was freed.
Chief Bill Williams is both a hereditary and elected chief of the Squamish Nation. Through all the turmoil, Bill worked quietly and with great determination to map out a series of Squamish Nation Wild Spirit Places, including the Elaho Valley. He worked day in and day out to educate people both within and without the Squamish Nation on the importance of protecting these areas for future generations. It was through government-to-government negotiations that the Squamish Nation finally achieved protection for the Elaho and many other areas in their territory.
Time and space do not allow me to list all of the heroes involved in the preservation of the Elaho. There were so many. So many heroic acts.
All I can say is that if you are involved in a fight to save a little piece of wild BC, may I suggest taking a bit of a break. Go take a hike on the Elaho trail. Walk in the footsteps of heroes. Then go back to your neck of the woods – and win.
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Joe Foy is Campaign Director for the Wilderness Committee, Canada’s largest citizen-funded membership-based wilderness preservation organization, which has 28,000 members from coast to coast.