Youds — Stepping out in Wells Gray this summer

EDITOR’S NOTE — The Armchair Mayor News is pleased to introduce a new column by long-time Kamloops journalist Mike Youds, who will write about the outdoors.

COLUMN — Roland Neave has his summer completely mapped out. Between now and October, he’ll be all over the place in, of all places, Wells Gray park.

The guidebook author and tour company owner is revisiting about 60 trails in the provincial park this summer, re-hiking each one in preparation for a sixth edition, his first update in 10 years of the inch-thick Exploring Wells Gray Park.

By virtue of its size, diversity and vast stretches of wilderness, this is a park that demands a guide book if you want to get off the beaten path to Helmcken Falls. Even if you just want to visit the famous cataract, it’s a good idea to take a map or some kind of reference because you’ll find no book stores or natural history centres in the park. Beyond the info centre in Clearwater, unless it’s a guided tour, you’re on your own. An outdated or thinly researched guidebook (some authors don’t even hike the routes, I suspect) can ruin a whole weekend, maybe even send you over a cliff, as I once found in New Zealand.

Guides have to be living documents, obviously, because landscape, river and forest constantly change, an elemental dance that tells the story of Wells Gray in countless ways, with occasional reminders that take out bridges. Spahats, for example, once a campground, is now an oversized parking lot, a preventive measure to reduce the risk of falling trees. Then there’s the general decline in provincial park maintenance across the province, a gradual wearing down through lack of funding and vision for what could be truly world-class.

With his fifth edition sold out, the author has another excuse to get back on the trails, as though he ever had to hunt for one. Neave wrote his first edition 40 years ago as a 22-year-old SFU geography student. It began as an essay, grew into an ambitious enterprise and hasn’t stopped growing since. Now 62, he’s back for more.

He has a little help from his friends back home. Kamloops Outdoor Club members have been taking him up on an invitation to join the day hikes, some short, some, well, “significant trails.” It’s a great way to shed some pounds, he says, understating the overall task.

“I haven’t backpacked for a long time,” he said, leaving more arduous routes such as Garnet Peak to his son, Fraser.

Wells Gray runs in the family. Garnet was first climbed by Roland’s dad, the late Hugh Neave, also 40 years ago this summer. It was Hugh’s dream after first setting eyes on the peak in 1966. He made it on the fourth attempt after weather repeatedly turned him back.

It’s more than a sentimental journey for Roland this summer; it’s an uneasy one. He was on hand for a recent tour led by the Wells Gray Action Committee to see sections of the Upper Clearwater Valley where Canfor may begin logging any day. About 60 people, including MLA Terry Lake, joined the tour.

“It’s all about listening,” Lake told a reporter from the Clearwater Times. “The message is that this is part of a process. There has been lots of good input and I appreciate that.”

Lake chose not to address the gathering and left early to attend a Canfor picnic, an unfortunate coincidence that left the community a little rattled. They’re not convinced, at least in the Upper Clearwater Valley, that anyone is listening.

“That’s a huge concern right now,”Neave said. “Canfor doesn’t seem to care. They’re just desperate to keep their mills running.”

Reasoning that the park is a magnet for international tourists (a German phrasebook would come in handy on Murtle Lake), tourism is vital to the Clearwater economy and therefore it’s counter-productive to log, opponents have been dreading this day for years.

A declining herd of the endangered mountain caribou depends on the older growth trees, feeding on hanging lichen for winter sustenance. Logging, critics predict with past experience on their side, would increase deer and moose populations at the expense of the caribou.

Neave points to another essential cost factor —canyon bridges prone to washout through the years. The cost of replacing bridges in streams swollen by runoff from logging far outweighs the value of stumpage the province will obtain from logging, he figures.

“But we’ve got to act fast. Canfor could bring in equipment any day and start cutting and could be gone, finished, before we get an injunction.”

At issue are what’s known as the guiding principles for management of land and resources in the Upper Clearwater Valley, a 15-year-old document that some say is not legally binding for Canfor. Neave’s Kamloops lawyer says it is.

You’re left to wonder why the company and the province are playing this so close to the vest, why there could not at least be some public discussion about ecological and tourism values, or at least about protecting views through the same landscape logging practiced in other parts of B.C. that rely on tourism.

Mike Youds is a Kamloops journalist who writes for A.M. News.