Visitor fees collected in the Rocky Mountain parks will cover the $1.05 million cost of repairs to the Old Fort Point bridges.

Yellowhead MP Rob Merrifield and Jasper National Park Supt. Greg Fenton announced the funding for the project while standing next to the Athabasca River, May 14.

“Behind us there are bridges,” said Merrifield. “Eighty-year-old bridges that need some refurbishing—although, I noticed they’re not so depleted that we were too nervous to drive across them today.

“But, we’re investing. This is something that will keep the infrastructure here for another 80 years.”

The funds will pay for new concrete decks, sidewalks and railings, said Marion Lee, manager of highway services. Construction will likely begin next month.

“The first order of business for the contractor is to repair the sidewalk,” she said, noting that there will be pedestrian bridges built by Parks staff to allow access to the area during construction.

“We’ve ordered the materials and are working on building two new pedestrian, bike access bridges to allow people to come off the Red Squirrel Trail and access the bridge by foot or by bike.”

“Because it’s a popular place, of course there were lots of concerns about being able to access some of these areas,” said Fenton. “That’s why we’re working hard with the highway service centre staff and the rest of my team to get temporary access.”

There will also be new pullout spots for rafting companies that utilize the area, said Fenton, mentioning the old well site and the confluence of the Maligne and Athabasca rivers.

The Old Fort Point bridges were built in the 1930s. The one spanning the Athabasca River “replaced a wooden structure that provided the main access and entry point into, first of all, tent city and then what became Jasper Park Lodge after that,” said Fenton.

The repairs, paid for by the “Fees at Work” program, are necessary as the bridges are reaching the end of their serviceable life.

Parks Canada has approved summer use at Mount Norquay ski area, a decision that will see a via ferrata — an adventure activity that fixes the mountain with cables, ladders and bridges to the upper cliffs — installed by next summer.

On Tuesday, the federal government signed off on the resort’s long-range plan, allowing its owners to operate Mount Norquay in the summer and expand its winter offerings.

Photo credit Mt. Banff Norquay

“The approval of the Mount Norquay 2013 Long Range Plan is a watershed event for national park ski areas,” Environment Minister Peter Kent said in a news release. “This is the first new long-range plan for a national park-based ski area since 1989.”

The plan outlines the resort’s development and operation for the next five to 15 years.

Peter Sudermann, co-owner of Mount Norquay, said it’s good to finally have a long-range plan for Mount Norquay approved.

“Now the real challenge begins,” he said. “We have to build a unique Banff experience now.”

The plan allows the resort to install the via ferrata and reopen the upper mountain tea house and observation area in the summer. It also allows Mount Norquay to improve winter operations by adding ski runs, tree skiing in thinned out parts of the forest, ski run widening and modifying a terrain park.

But the approval drew immediate criticism from conservationists who are concerned about wildlife — particularly grizzly bears — in the area.

“We’ve long spoken out about the flaws in the plan and some of the issues we have with it,” said Katie Morrison, conservation campaign director for the southern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. “The first one would be grizzly bear use of the area and grizzly bear habitat.

“Increasing the number of people in the summer when grizzly bears are also using that habitat, which is a relatively good habitat for bears in that area, we just don’t know what the effects on bears will be. We do know that bears are sensitive to human disturbance.”

Wendy Francis, program director of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a joint Canada-U.S. not-for-profit organization, said increased traffic in the area is also a major concern.

“The road up Mount Norquay goes right through the Cascade wildlife corridor,” she said. “There’s a herd of sheep that live on the slope there right beside the road. I would be concerned what the ultimate impacts on that herd of sheep might be.

Environmental protection will increase habitat in wildlife corridors

“It’s also a corridor that is used by carnivores like wolves and cougars, as well.”

The superintendent of Banff National Park, however, said there are a number of measures to protect the ecological integrity of the park.

“We’re working through the transportation plan to reduce the amount of vehicle traffic through the Cascade wildlife corridor,” said Dave McDonough, noting visitors will be encouraged to take a shuttle to the site.

He said a vegetation plan will help thin the forest, protecting against wildfires and enhancing the habitat for wildlife.

In addition, McDonough said Norquay’s summer operations will be subject to restrictions.

“There will only be one lift operating with restricted hours of operation to avoid those dawn and dusk periods,” he said, referring to the times when wildlife are most active.

Similar to Lake Louise, where summer use has been allowed for years, McDonough said activity will be concentrated around the base and top of the lift.

“Those areas will be fenced so there will be no hiking and no activity between those two base areas,” he said.

McDonough said the plan both improves the area from an ecological perspective and offers visitors a unique experience within the park.

The owners of Mount Norquay said they’ll begin work immediately, but noted the via ferrata will be delayed.

“We aren’t really looking at having a full summer operation going for this summer,” said Sudermann, noting the timelines won’t work out. “The via ferrata itself is a two-month process to build, so that’s not going to happen this summer.”

He added that they’ll also start work this summer on the changes to Mount Norquay’s winter operations.

Cascade Gardens – 3:00pm
Parks Canada Administration Grounds, Banff

Photo courtesy of Banff Lake Louise Tourism

Celebrate the arrival of summer in the beautiful natural outdoor setting of Banff National Park.

Serena Ryder the soulful Canadian songstress and Juno Award-winning artist known for her powerful vocal range and hits like Stompa and Calling To Say, will headline Banff’s fourth annual Performance in the Park.

 With special guests:

Coeur de Pirate, one of Montreal’s biggest new musical export and Juno Award winners Said The Whale.

Good to Know:    

• Gates open at 2 p.m.
• Event is presented outdoors on the lawn so bring a blanket, cushion or festival chair (see below) to sit on.
• Lawn chairs are permitted but will be restricted to certain seating sections.
• Goes rain or shine, so dress appropriately.
• No parking on-site, public parking is available in town and on the surrounding streets.
• Small bags and packs are permitted but may be subject to search.
• No alcohol will be permitted on the grounds.
• No pets allowed on site.

TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

Banff Centre Box Office: banffcentre.ca or 1-800-413-8368 or 403-762-6301 or Ticketmaster.ca

Banff’s Cave and Basin National Historic Site reopened Friday after undergoing a three-year renovation.

The sulphurous hot springs was discovered in the late 1800s and soon became a major draw for visitors to the area.

Click the link to watch full news cast on CBC of the Cave and Basin Grand Opening – http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2013/05/17/calgary-cave-basin-reopens.html

Inside the newly renovated Cave and Basin. Photo courtesy of Alana Baker CBC

The $13.8-million renovations to the Cave and Basin, announced in 2009, were to include restoration of its historic buildings, a new plaza and interpretive displays and restoration of habitat for the endangered Banff Springs snail.

From 1914 until the early 1990s the site had a naturally heated swimming pool but they have been removed.

The project leader Steve Malins said that was a difficult decision.

“We really laboured over that, but it frankly would have taken most of our budget to get the pool up and going and then there’s just the sustainability of the pool after that.”

Interpreter Amar Athwal said great care was taken during construction to not disturb the endangered Banff Springs Snail, which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

“The snails tell us how far we have come. In the early days in a national park we had hunting, we had trapping going on, and here today we’re looking after this wonderful little creature, the snails.”

Historical site

Prime Minister John A. Macdonald created the Banff Hot Springs Reserve in 1885, marking the beginning of Canada’s national parks system.

Susan Kennard, the manager of heritage programs in Banff, said she wants visitors to recognize the site for its history.

“People know it as the Cave and Basin, but we really want them to know it as the birthplace of Canada’s national parks,” she said.

A rink-size slab of limestone gently slopes into the waves of Sluice Box Rapids, atop Virginia Falls in the Northwest Territories. If you scramble down nearby gravel cliffs, following a faint trail through scrappy stands of black spruce and soapberry, you can tiptoe out to its slippery edge and trail your fingers in the surging froth. At your feet, the entire Nahanni River plunges into the abyss of Fourth Canyon. Quickly drenched by monsoon-like mists, it is not the chill that leaves one trembling. It is the proximity to nature, raw and elemental.

Kluane National Park in the Yukon. Photo Credit The Globe and Mail.

Thousands of kilometres away, off British Columbia’s west coast, on the craggy southern tip of the Haida Gwaii archipelago, cedar mortuary poles stand in silence. Slowly but steadily decaying, they are returning to the soil of their birth, where the San Christoval Mountains sink beneath the Pacific. Here, in the stillness of SGaang Gwaay village ruins, one only has to listen carefully to hear the sounds of children playing by the water’s edge, or the triumphant return of the whaler’s canoe.

This weekend, great waves of migrant birds will descend onto the sandy shores of Point Pelee in southern Ontario; flocks of grebes and gulls, canvasbacks and pintail. Many will continue north toward the magnificent but little-known arctic lands of Auyuittuq, Tuktut Nogait and Sirmilik, which are creaking to life with the approach of equinox. Honeymooners and March-breakers will wander driftwood-littered Long Beach on the exposed outer shores of Vancouver Island, while across the country Nordic skiers will float through Gros Morne’s wind-stunted tuckamore forests in Newfoundland.

This is the stuff of our national parks.

“Canada! We have more square feet of awesomeness per person than any other nation on Earth,” the beer commercial shouted over and over during last year’s Vancouver Olympics, to a steady backdrop of national park scenes. And we all raised our glasses, for Canadians love their national parks. A 2010 Environics survey placed national parks alongside health care, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and our flag as the top four symbols of Canadian identity. Parks came in ahead of hockey, the RCMP and even the anthem. But, as much as we love our wilderness, it’s possible we don’t grasp – from a global perspective – just how great it is. “Parks Canada oversees one of the most extensive, best managed, and highly respected park systems in the world,” explains Harvey Locke, former president of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and co-founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon conservation project. “It should be a fantastic source of pride for all Canadians.”

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Banff Hot Springs

In 1885, when John A. Macdonald set aside 26 square kilometres near Banff Hot Springs to protect the area from “sale, settlement or squatting,” no one had a clear idea of what a national park was, or how one should be managed.

To the south, the U.S. Army had been called in to run Yellowstone. In Australia’s newly created Royal National Park, native trees were being logged at a dizzying rate, mangrove swamps bulldozed over, amusement villages built, and invasive animal species introduced to enhance sport hunting.

Twenty-six years later, as the number of visitors to Banff (and four other nearby “scenic reserves”) began to soar, the government established the Dominion Parks Branch to manage and protect these infant parklands. The man in charge – J.B. Harkin – was a visionary. His deeply held faith that wilderness could rejuvenate the human spirit changed the face of parks worldwide.

“Use without abuse” was the ideal he sought, a delicate balance between public access and protected environment. In the years ahead, he established preservation standards and helped draft the National Parks Act.

Words from that 1930 act still steer Parks Canada today: “The national parks of Canada are hereby dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment, subject to this Act and the regulations, and the national parks shall be maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Foreign emissaries began arriving on Canadian shores to study Harkin’s methods. By the time he retired in 1936, Harkin had built a system of 13 protected areas that touched nearly every province. Recognized internationally as the Father of National Parks, he remains little-known in his homeland. A 16-page booklet, containing excerpts from Harkin’s notes, was posthumously published in 1957. The Origin and Meaning of the National Parks of Canada, a seminal and lyrical gem, closes with this: “Man is a restless animal. He is constantly changing the face of nature. Even the face of Canada has seen many changes in the last 50 years. What will it look like a hundred years from now?”

WHAT’S NEXT

Photo courtesy of Parks Canada

Today, Parks Canada protects 167 national historic sites, 42 national parks and four national marine conservation areas. It is one of the most extensive networks of protected sites in the world.

Canada is also taking its first steps toward marine ecosystem preservation with the creation of the first four National Marine Conservation Areas (notably Lake Superior and Gwaii Haanas). But for the country with the longest coastline in the world, we still have a long way to go: Less than one per cent of Canada’s ocean area is protected.

There is a new understanding of protected areas as well. Parks were originally envisaged as islands of protection, a breakwater against the sweeping wave of development. However, such “islands” have limited gene pools. Animals leak out, and invasive species seep in. Over the past 20 years, the importance of connecting these isolated preserves with unbroken wildlife corridors has grown clear.

In the decades ahead, Parks Canada needs to work in conjunction with provincial parks, conservation areas and land trusts if Canada hopes to achieve landscape-scale conservation goals.

Most importantly, the battle to keep parks inviolate is ongoing. “Claims for the violations of their sanctity are constantly being put forward,” Harkin warned almost 100 years ago. “Passive goodwill does nothing. We need fierce loyalties to back action.”

So with our inheritance comes a responsibility: To speak up, to protect and strengthen our shared legacy. Eight out of 10 Canadians live in urban centres, and a growing number have never visited a national park. The responsibility is more urgent than ever.

It can be easy, in our rush to experience the exotic, to miss the beauty that lies right before our nose. Travel anywhere on this planet, from the Himalayas to Antarctica, and you’ll see postcards of Banff stuck to bulletin boards. Our national parks are the envy of the world. May they stay that way for another hundred years, and beyond.

Special to The Globe and Mail.

May 20 2013 ­– Brue Kirkby. Special to The Globe and Mail.

DAY ONE

Bruce Kirkby marked the Canada-U.S. border. Photo courtesy of Dave Quinn for The Globe and Mail

Ralph Gravelle’s pickup grinds to a halt on the Phillips Creek logging road. We have travelled only a few kilometres, but already deep snow and ice make it impossible to continue.

The Ktunaxa (pronounced “k-too-nah-ha”) elder from Tobacco Plains stands silently at the roadside as we haul heavy backpacks from his truck and adjust our headlamps. Heavy white flakes pour down from the dark night sky.

Ahead, tucked in the quiet southeastern corner of British Columbia, lies a historic hunting route through the Flathead Basin and across the Rocky Mountains. Known as the Buffalo Cow Trail, it was abandoned more than 150 years ago, following the decimation of the great herds.

“They’d go in January,” Ralph tells us. “Wait till a warm spell that was followed by a cold snap, hoping to get a good strong crust on the snow.”

While most mountain-dwelling first nations travelled to the Prairies each spring and fall to hunt buffalo, only the Ktunaxa mounted a gruelling winter hunt as well. Without the aid of horses, returning warriors struggled under loads of meat and skins weighing more than 100 kilograms. Staggering a kilometre or less at a time, they would pass their burden to another before collapsing, and leapfrog the entire 10-day journey home.

We are about to retrace these steps, although fat skis, synthetic jackets and mere 30-kilogram packs will make our journey over the mountains a world easier.

At the height of its use, the Buffalo Cow Trail was literally carved into the land. Generations of passing feet and hooves created a trench 50 centimetres deep or more in places. Today, time and nature have obliterated the last remains of such trails, which once crisscrossed the mountains like highways. Only the knowledge of elders and journals of early travellers keep the route alive, but we are following a fading memory.

The three of us shake hands with Ralph, and prepare to ski into the night. He becomes grave. “Take good care of each other out there. Real good care.”

Suddenly Ralph digs behind the pickup’s seat, retrieving a handful of black garbage bags.

“Been a warm winter. The Flathead [River] will be open, so you’ll be wanting these. Official issue. Ktunaxa gaiters.”

Photo courtesy of The Globe and Mail

Grizzlies, prospectors and a gritty American Senator

Take a peek at the Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, on a map, and you’ll notice it looks like a pie – with a large slice cut out. That slice is the Flathead. Hidden on three sides by towering mountain ranges, and to the south by the impassable U.S. border, this remote river basin is a land that guards its secrets well.

In recent years, a real western-style dust-up has been erupting over the fate of the Flathead. The only unsettled, low-elevation valley of its size in southern Canada, and home to the highest concentration of grizzlies anywhere in the North American interior, it is also rich in resources. And plenty of fingers have been reaching for that slice of pie.

For years, conservation groups have pressed for an expansion of Waterton Lakes National Park to encompass a third of the Flathead Valley.

Things began heating up in 2002, when Parks Canada denoted the region an “area of interest.” It would move ahead only if British Columbia and the Ktunaxa First Nation agreed.

British Columbia did not agree, and instead accepted a steady stream of proposals for oil, gas, coal bed methane, mining and logging development in the basin. To the dismay of many, they also continued to permit trophy hunting and off-road vehicle use.

The brouhaha hit full stride when Max Baucus (a gritty Democratic senator from Montana who is notorious in B.C. for his stance on softwood lumber) took up the cause and began expressing concerns for Glacier National Park, which lies just downstream of the Canadian Flathead. (Note: The U.S. file would eventually reach the desk of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and later Barack Obama who, as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination, opposed a proposed open pit coal mine on the headwaters of the Flathead River.) In response, provincial cabinet minister Bill Bennett confronted Baucus on a street in Fernie, B.C., telling him he was not welcome. Later, in the legislature, Bennett wondered aloud, “What unscrupulous, traitorous twit sunk so low as to invite this guy to B.C.?”

Last summer, the United Nations waded in, sending a fact-finding team to the Flathead. The mission: Evaluate threats to the adjacent World Heritage Site. The report, due to be tabled this summer, is expected to recommend a moratorium on all mining, in the area, and the development of a comprehensive trans boundary conservation and wildlife management plan. It was in January of this year – just as a new gold strike was being enthusiastically announced in the Flathead – that our team began planning a traverse of the great basin. Our goal: to leave the hullabaloos behind and simply explore the vast wilderness during its most remote season.

Then British Columbia blindsided everybody (including us) by abruptly declaring a ban on all mining, oil and gas in the Flathead during the Feb. 9 Throne Speech. A move has many people wondering if Canada’s next national park could be far off.

Photo courtesy of The Globe and Mail

DAY TWO

I awake with ice and cold nylon pressed against my face. A night of heavy snow has crushed the teepee, only the centre pole keeping it up. We dig our way out to find it looks like a handkerchief being pulled through a small ring.

Our spirits are high. Despite an abysmally thin snowpack across British Columbia – the last persistent patches of snow disappeared around my home in the nearby Columbia Trench more than a month ago – any worries we harboured about completing the journey on skis have suddenly been erased.

Dawn turns to day, and we crest the Galton Range. Descending toward the headwaters of the Wigwam River, we drag our packs behind us atop plastic children’s toboggans. Heavy wet flakes continue to plaster the forest, and the storm shows no sign of abating.

Plowing down the trail beside me are good friends Dave Quinn, a local wildlife biologist, and the bull-strong, silver-haired John Bergenske, who came to these mountains 40 years ago as a young homesteader. Both are well-seasoned backcountry travellers.

By late afternoon, cloud and blowing snow have obscured all visibility. Crashing through dense forest, we are unsure of where we are. Lost, I suppose, is the correct word.

“Did you bring a GPS?” Dave turns to ask, and I shake my head. We both look to John, who has just pulled up behind. “Nope.”

The route looked so simple from the comfort of home, yet now, less than 24 hours after Ralph dropped us off, we are already lost and exhausted.

Increasing the navigational challenge is the fact we are within kilometres of the U.S. border, and our topographic map ends at the 49th parallel: Meaning the ridgelines and summits to the south that occasionally peek from the swirling storm offer no help in determining our position.

Convinced that the U.S. border must be within a few hundred metres of where we stand, the three of us crash southward, scratched and clawed by a sea of undergrowth and dead branches.

Suddenly the dark woods open up, and we find ourselves standing on an arrow-straight slash. Cleaved through hillside and mountain peaks, it continues due west and east for as far as the eye can see: the border.

A wave of euphoria passes through our team; I don’t think I have ever been so happy to see a clear-cut.

Moving quickly now, we head west, past steel obelisks that protrude from the snow every few kilometres, marked “Canada” on one side and “United States” on the other, in black engraved letters.

Photo courtesy of The Globe and Mail

Home on the ranges

Between the Ktunaxa homeland and the buffalo hunting grounds of the Great Plains rises a formidable series of mountain ranges. Crossing these peaks would normally present a serious challenge, but a string of (miraculously) low passes made it possible for elders, children and even thousands of horses at a time to follow the well-trampled Buffalo Cow Trail. Meandering back and forth across the 49th parallel, the route followed the path of least resistance.

Then, in 1861 the international border was carved across the wilderness.

“The border didn’t mean anything to my people at first,” Ralph told us. “My great grandparents and even my grandparents used to cross back and forth into the United States anytime, anywhere they liked.”

By the 1930s authorities began cracking down and today, anyone who wanders across the line faces a real chance of jail time. Which is about to make things more difficult for us.

As the Buffalo Cow Trail approached the high ramparts of Couldrey Ridge, it veered southward and easily bypassed the obstacle by following the Weasel Creek. However, today the border blocks that way. So instead, we must hoist our packs to our shoulders, strap the toboggans on top, attach climbing skins on our skis, and start grinding upwards into the clouds.

As dusk nears, we discover a helicopter-landing pad hewn from the thick forest and decide to camp there. The next morning, we continue upward.

DAY THREE

It is noon on our third day of travel when we finally stagger atop Couldrey Ridge. A sea of snowy peaks stretches at our feet. To the east lies the grand Flathead Basin, with the stark, white borderline draped over every rise and undulation. Beyond rise the bunched summits of the Clarke Range and Waterton Lakes National Park.

Our immediate concern is finding a way down. It doesn’t look easy. The east side of Couldrey Ridge drops into a mess of dark cliff bands. There are a few gullies breaking the face, but with avalanche conditions near extreme, these are not options. Ominous “whoomphs” emanate from the snowpack every time we shuffle forward, and cracks spread from our ski tips.

A lone spur to the north offers the only glimmer of hope. We carefully traverse to the top. Below, the narrow ridge falls away steeply and most the majority of the route is blocked from view.

Sidestepping gingerly downward, we each remain silent, hoping that this will not be a dead end: No one wants to struggle back up the heavy, loose snow.

After an hour, we reach the final drop, and thankfully, by taking our skis off, are able to down climb past it.

Below, the mountainside mellows. Entering a mature forest of whitebark pine, we float between the broad trunks, raising billows of soft snow, swooshing downward. Skiing faster and faster, it is thousands of feet below that we skitter to a stop at the head of a logging road.

After waxing the skis, we follow the recent tracks of a large lynx down the road, at last entering the great Flathead Basin, which we have travelled so far to see.

Special to The Globe and Mail

5 Race Stages. 4 days. A $21,000 prize purse. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more spectacular setting than Banff National Park. 500 cyclists from Western Canada and the US will participate in five competitive events and two family friendly events from June 13th to 16th, 2013.

Bike Fest registration is now open. Come test your mettle in Canada’s finest bike race. As an ABA sanctioned event you must hold a valid UCI license to race.

Everyone can take part in our Festival Fun activities as part of Bike Fest. On Saturday, the Banff Farmers Market comes to Banff Ave for one day only; enjoy the entertainment and fresh local produce. Kids take part in the Balkan Restaurant Little Crits fun ride followed by Cruise for a Cause which features adults in costumes and wacky bikes, entry by donation.

For those looking for a longer ride head down the Bow Valley Parkway to Castle Mountain Chalets on Saturday for a fundraising BBQ in support of the Bow Valley Mountain Bike Alliance, or cycle to the Cave and Basin on Sunday for Father’s Day and relax in the new picnic area.

“Making the Tour”

At this year’s Banff National Park Bike Fest, The Tour of Alberta organizers, the Alberta Peloton Association (APA) and Banff Lake Louise Tourism, are offering a unique opportunity to the overall Alberta winner, under 22 years of age, to join the U.S. Continental cycling team Smart Stop presented by Mountain Khakis in the Tour of Alberta this fall.

Race at a higher level!

Two original artworks now adorn the outside of the Parks Canada Banff Visitor Centre. Once a well-known auditorium in the 1930s for the Banff School of Fine Arts and today a heritage building, it will once again contribute to the promotion of art education in the park. With its perfect location in the Welcome Kiosk, it is expected to be viewed by over 135,000 annual visitors who seek information services while in the park. In fact, it is likely to be appreciated by a whole lot more visitors exploring Banff Avenue as the brilliant colours and exposed wood inlay technique is highly noticeable and unique.

Photo courtesy of Parks Canada

Parks Canada’s intent was to create two distinct pieces that would interpret the natural and cultural heritage of Banff National Park to visitors from around the world. The goal was to create a special place on Banff Avenue where visitors would be naturally drawn and inspired to take a memorable photo of their visit to Canada’s first national park. The only guidance provided for the design was that it was to portray the stories of wildlife, exploration, Canadian Pacific Railway, and mountain landscape. Sketches were hand drawn by pencil to create the initial composition. Then, the two-month long meticulous work of designing and carving each individual piece began. The two panels combined include over 500 individually shaped pieces. The artist, Fraser McGurk says he was thrilled to work on this project because usually his inspiration comes directly from his surroundings. What made this project exciting and rewarding to him was the research element.  Spending hours mulling over old black and white photographs in the Archives of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies was inspiring and the direction for the art.

About the Artist
McGurk arrived in Lake Louise at 18 years old being drawn to the excitement of mountain living and outdoor adventure. Full of passion for discovery and expression, and the love of mountain biking, McGurk began a journey of exploration leading him to a unique artistic style combining new wood materials with traditional wood-working techniques. Influenced by the works of Canadian artists Lawren Harris, Ted Harrison and Bill Weber, Fraser uses intense colours and bold simple lines. The end result is an expression of strength, majesty and the haunting beauty of rocky mountain landscapes. For a preview of his work, visit www.frasermcgurk.com.

 In addition to the new artwork, the Banff Visitor Centre will see new visitor orientation panels and improved outdoor lighting and signage installed.

For more information:

Lori Bayne

Promotion Officer, Parks Canada

Telephone 403-760-1350 

Fax 403-762-1592

Lori.Bayne@pc.gc.ca

Yoga practitioners in Ichih Wang's Yin/Yang session restore their balance – Photo courtesy of The Jasper Local

The first conference of its kind in Jasper brought more than 100 yoga practioners to get Grounded in the Rockies.
The event, which took place at various Mountain Park Lodges properties as well as various outdoor locations in the community, was for beginners and advanced yogis alike.
“I was so thrilled with the number of people who were doing yoga for the first time,” said Stephanie Sophocleous-Lewis, who, along with Terry Olsen, represented Jasper’s Riverstone Yoga Studio as instructors during the conference.
“It was amazing to see so many yoga mats being carried around Jasper.”
Participant Beth Dauk came from Grande Cache to get into her flow. She was surprised by the caliber of instructors the conference attracted. “I had an awesome weekend. I learned so much,” she said.
Organizer Andrea Quick of Jasper’s Ever After Events said the weekend couldn’t have happened without key sponsors, the support of MPL staff and the Jasper instructors.

Monica Andreeff – AMPPE Executive Director

Innovative events such as this help connect visitors to Jasper, said Monica Andreeff, Executive Director of the Association for Mountain Parks Protection and Enjoyment (AMPPE).
“It’s not only great to diversify the product offering but it’s a boost to the local economy, which is especially critical in the shoulder seasons,” Andreeff said.

Quick said the event is already being planned for next year.
“We got so many amazing comments and stories. Mark your calendars for 2014,” she said.

http://www.thejasperlocal.com/features.html

Banff Lake Louise will host its very first Housekeeping Olympics on Thursday, May 30, 2013, 5:00 pm at the Fenland Recreation Centre in Banff. The Housekeeping Olympics is a fun way to recognize the professionals that create a positive customer experience and are key players in our industry’s success. Housekeeping teams from Banff and Lake Louise properties will come together to showcase their housekeeping skills in an evening of events that incorporate the tools of their trade. The bed sheets, vacuum cleaners, mops and towels are an apparatus in the competition as teams’ race through obstacles, make beds, create towel art and toss buffer pads in a series of timed games. The Olympics kick-off with a BBQ welcome and opening ceremony before participants take on the ultimate housekeeping challenge. The winners of these events will be presented with awards including cash prizes at the closing ceremony.

Spring is a critical time for wildlife in the Bow Valley – hungry bears are starting to emerge from their dens in search of food and wolves are looking after a new litter of pups.

The season is, in fact, so important to wildlife that Parks Canada has put two mandatory closures in place, one near the Hillsdale area by the Bow Valley Parkway and one on the Fairholme benchlands east of Banff.

photo credit: Rocky Mountain Outlook

“This is a critical time of year when many animals require security from human disturbance – most have babies at this time of year,” said Jesse Whittington, a wildlife biologist for Banff National Park.

“The highest quality habitat occurs in the valley bottom, and so to give our wildlife the best chance of success, we’ve closed some areas near Hillsdale and along the Fairholme that are especially productive for animals.”

The closures in both locations run from May 7 to July 15. People caught in the off-limits areas will be charged under national park regulations and could face a maximum fine of $25,000 if convicted.

The Hillsdale closure applies to an area between Ranger Creek and the west end of the Hillsdale split, including areas surrounding the Hillsdale split. The Bow Valley Parkway remains open to vehicles.

The Fairholme benchlands east of Banff, which are considered the last remaining critical undeveloped montane area in the park, has been subject to a year-round voluntary closure since the late 1990s.

That closure is now mandatory until July 15 – and will return to a voluntary closure after that date. The closure covers an area south of Johnson Lake and northeast of the Trans-Canada Highway.

Whittington said the Bow Valley wolf pack has five members and the Fairholme pack is believed to have six members. That’s not including the number of pups in any new litter, likely born in mid-April.

“Wolves den around the middle of April, and stay at or near the den until late June, mid-July,” he said. “It’s an important time for the pack.”

Whittington said grizzly bears are emerging from dens and seeking early season food to try to regain some of the weight they lost over winter. In some cases, females will emerge with cubs.

In the case of the Fairholme benchlands, he said tracking data from GPS collars fitted on 11 grizzly bears in the region showed at least three female grizzlies, all with young ones in tow, hung out on the benchlands last year.

Last year the three sows had a combined total of five cubs, aged from yearlings to two-year-olds, he said.

Whittington said the combined effects of a long-term voluntary closure and the environmental benefits of a prescribed fire on the benchlands in 2003 make this area very productive and secure habitat for bears.

“There’s three female grizzly bears that are regularly using that area, especially in the spring. It’s highly productive habitat and very safe from disturbance,” he said.

“When we look at how GPS-collared bears travel through that area, they spent lots and lots of time throughout the Fairholme bench, whereas females with cubs in busier parts of the Bow Valley didn’t tend to spend as much time in higher quality habitat.”

Whittington said there have not yet been any signs of females with cubs in tow.

“Especially with this warmer weather, I wouldn’t be surprised to see bears in the valley bottom very soon,” he said.

Whittington said wardens will keep a close eye on the areas to make sure people are respecting the closures.

“These closures are seasonal and will affect very, very few people,” he said.

It was all hands on deck last week as Parks Canada, provincial and municipal firefighters gathered to manage a pair of prescribed burns in the Carrot Creek area of Banff National Park.

On Monday (May 6), about 40 firefighters from all departments took part in the burns, which completed a four-year project, “to complete a valley-wide fuel break for community protection for the downwind communities of Harvie Heights and Canmore,” said Jane Park, a fire and vegetation specialist with Parks Canada.

“It will basically help us mitigate the effects of catastrophic wildfire that comes from inside the park toward the neighbouring communities.”

The Carrot Creek burns, one of six hectares which was ignited on Monday and one of 49 hectares which was ignited Tuesday (May 7), took place at the eastern boundary of Banff National Park (BNP). Both were in close proximity to an area of forest thinning work done at the Canmore Nordic Centre to reduce wildfire hazard.

Both the six- and 49-hectare areas had been selectively logged previously and prepared over the past two weeks for the burn to take place.

The Carrot Creek area, said Park, is a montane area, “that has some of the highest biodiversity in the area. It’s important to maintain fire for ungulates, wolves and grizzlies.”

To manage the burns, Parks Canada fire managers and firefighters (including Banff, Jasper, Wateron and Lake Louise, Yoho, Kootenay and Mount Revelstoke/Glacier) teamed up with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development crews, as well as Town of Banff and Town of Canmore firefighters to ensure the burns remained under control.

Fire crews were on the ground and on the Trans-Canada Highway to ensure the fires were contained to an area between the highway and the Bow River. As well, helicopter crews were on standby in case water needed to be dropped with aerial buckets on problem areas.

Ignition of the burns couldn’t happen, said Park, until conditions were right. Ideal conditions, she said, included a combination of “weather, fuel and moisture conditions, temperature and the humidity of fuel (trees, grasses).”

The right conditions, along with prior logging, would ensure a moderate intensity fire that stayed low in the forested area without burning deep into the ground and destroying roots.

Managing a prescribed burn requires much more than simply tossing a match into a pile of dry kindling, of course.

Along with prior logging and fuel (trees) removal, burn areas were prepared by using an excavator to remove top growth to a level where there is ground moisture – in a ring around the outer area to be burned.

Once the excavator was finished, crews set up sprinklers or used hoses, with water pumped from the nearby Bow River, to further wet down the containment area. Hoses and sprinklers, said Park, not only wetted down vegetation and the soil, if run long enough, they actually raised the humidity in an area.

Once the outer containment area was prepared, fires were ignited in the easterly portions of each block of forest, downwind of the area to be burned.

Starting the fires opposite the prevailing winds (west to east in the valley), said Park, helped ensure a burn remained under control. By burning slowly into the wind, she said, sudden strong gusts or increasing wind speed could then only push fire back over an area already burned, with fuel already diminished.

During the prescribed burns air monitoring equipment was in place at Canmore General Hospital, the eastern portion of the Legacy Trail was closed during the burn and fire departments were station on the Trans-Canada to ensure the roadway wasn’t threatened.

“In a week,” said Jasper fire specialist Dave Smith, “this area will all be green. The top dead growth will be burned off and the ash will act as fertilizer. And by keeping the fire low and not letting it burn deep, no plant roots are destroyed.”

Families, bikers, hikers, and rollerbladers will have eight more kilometers to enjoy along the Rocky Mountain Legacy Trail between Canmore and Banff.

Tourism Parks and Recreation Minister Dr. Richard Starke

The extension of one of the most scenic routes in the world is the result of a $4.35 million investment by the Alberta government, the towns of Canmore and Banff, and the Municipal District.

Over the next year, the popular trail will wind its way from the Banff National Park East Gate to the Travel Alberta Visitor Information Centre in Canmore. Additional work will begin in 2014 to extend the trail from the visitor centre, through the town of Canmore and to the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park.

“There are more than 45,000 visits to the Rocky Mountain Legacy Trail each year and the new paved trails will provide an unforgettable experience for everyone to enjoy,” said Tourism Parks and Recreation Minister Dr. Richard Starke. “The partnership approach on this project was the key to it moving forward. We support collaborative efforts that expand the experiences we offer to Albertans while growing our tourism industry.”

“This new stretch of the scenic Rocky Mountain Legacy Trail will offer safe, continuous access to cycle, hike or bike or blade along the majestic Rockies,” added Transportation Minister Ric McLver. “Moving cyclists off Highway 1 improves the safety for everyone, including tourist and commercial vehicles. With our partner municipalities, we continue to build Alberta for our residents and visitors alike.”

The Government of Alberta is providing nearly $3.3 million of the total $4.35 million investment. This contribution will extend the trail 8.4 kilometers from the Banff National Park Gates to the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park as well as create a world-class trailhead at the Travel Alberta Visitor Centre parking lot in Canmore.

The towns of Canmore and Banff, and the Municipal District of Bighorn are providing more than $1 million toward the trail extension.

“The Legacy Trail has proved to be a tremendous asset to the Bow Valley, and an economic and tourism benefit, as well as facilitating the use of alternative modes of transportation. A vital recreation connection between the east gate and the Town of Canmore has been missing,” said Canmore Mayor John Borrowman, speaking on behalf of the Bow Corridor Regional Mobility Partnership. “I am thrilled by the announcement that this gap will be closed. The Legacy Trail will become a safe place for drivers on the nearby TransCanda Highway.

The new trail will connect to 26 kilometers of existing pathways in Banff National Park and offer three-season access to cyclists, hikers and other non-motorized vehicles.

“It is my hope and expectation that one day soon, the completed Rocky Mountain Legacy Trail will be one of the most celebrated and sought after experiences along the Trans Canada Trail, a nationwide recreational pathway winding its way across our country from coast to coast,” said Ross Haynes, Alberta TrailNet Society President. “We are pleased to see all levels of government working together to create an amazing trail for all Albertans and visitors to enjoy.”

The Redford government was elected to keep building Alberta, to live within its means and to fight to open new markets for Alberta’s resources. The province will continue to deliver the responsible change Albertan’s voted for.

New Brunswick’s Kouchibouguac National Park is proposing to charge visitors $4.25 for a day of soft-shell clam fishing. Newfoundland and Labrador’s Gros Morne National Park hopes to charge swimmers $2.50, with packages of lessons costing up $247.50. Ontario’s Fort George National Historic Site wants to host outings for companies that would range in price from $35.50 to a whopping $15,815.

At Canada’s national historic sites, proposals for visitor experiences include the opportunity to fire weapons and play soldier.

In an effort to boost visitor numbers and revenue streams, cash-strapped Parks Canada is offering a number of new initiatives just in time for its huge summer season, while Ottawa considers a slew of other money-making ventures. Already 800 Canadians have offered their input during the public-consultation period, which is now closed. Most of the proposals are new user fees – only 30 per cent of services are covered by these fees – but parks and sites in the system have also pitched a wide range of user experiences.

Parks Canada, which maintains 167 national historic sites, 44 national parks and four marine conservation areas, saw its funding cut in last year’s federal budget by $29.2-million over three years. In 2013-14, Parks has an overall planned spending estimate of about $693.7-million.

The cuts have meant job losses – so far, there have been 617 anticipated or actual departures among workers, including scientists, engineers, technicians, mechanics, carpenters and program managers, according to the Public Service Alliance of Canada – as well has reduced hours for seasonal workers, with a number of historic sites now self-guided. Over the winter, there were protests urging the return of services, such as maintenance of cross-country ski trails that were shuttered.

At the same time, attendance has decreased. In 2007-08, more than 13.1 million people visited the parks and historic sites nationwide, compared to 12.5 million in 2011-12.

Cape Breton Highlands National Park: photo courtesy of Parks Canada

In an attempt to share or unload costs, Ottawa has already opened the door to privatization. It approved a controversial glass-floored elevated walkway in Jasper National Park, unsuccessfully tried to contract out operations at the Highlands Links Golf Course in Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and is still considering accepting bids to run the hot springs in the Rocky Mountain parks.

Ottawa is hoping to reach out to a new generation of park lovers among urbanites who have lost touch with the wilderness or those who hail from immigrant communities not familiar with Canada’s great outdoors.

Here are some ways Parks is hoping to turn things around.

Merchandising: Visit Banff, buy a hat

Until this year, visitors couldn’t really buy Parks Canada merchandise. Ottawa hopes that everything from toques to T-shirts to water bottles emblazoned with the iconic beaver-on-a-log logo will stir enthusiasm, and in turn, attract visitors.

Photo courtesy of Parks Canada

The official product line is available online (parkscanadashop.ca, with items prices from $2.95 to $95) and at most national parks and historic sites, after a successful pilot project with a few items in a few places was trotted out last year.

“We want to raise awareness of Parks Canada and the places and programs that we’re responsible for, and to inspire people to visit,” says Halifax-based Greg Danchuk, Parks Canada’s brand manager.

The question he most often gets when people see the earth-toned, mostly made-in-Canada items, which will also be available adorned with the name of each local site: “How come this hasn’t been here before?”

“There’s not a lot of this that’s been done in government agencies,” he explains.

But Parks wanted to respond to visitor comments requesting authentic items, not just goods available in tacky tourist shops. Mr. Danchuk says Parks can’t even “ballpark” the amount of cash it hopes the merchandise will bring in, but Ottawa aims to turn a profit – in more ways than one.

“We want it to be a positive revenue flow,” Mr. Danchuk says. “But its primary role is to raise that awareness and hopefully generate increased visitation, which turns into operating revenue at the locations.”

Experience war: What did you do in the park, Daddy?

National historic sites could soon be a boon for history buffs looking for hands-on wartime experiences. Ottawa is considering charging visitors to watch new military displays, but also step back in time by sounding a horn or firing guns.

One proposal would allow guests aboard the Second World War battleship HMCS Haida, which is docked in Hamilton Harbour, to pull the horn or fire a four-inch turret forward gun ($500 each). The national historic site, so designated because of the ship’s role in naval combat and also because it’s the last Tribal-class destroyer in the world, already allows a private shooting lesson with the $1,000 purchase of a lifetime membership to Friends of HMCS Haida.

Second World War battleship HMCS Haida: photo courtesy of Parks Canada

As part of an initiative to open sites nationwide to facility rentals for weddings, conferences and other events, Parks also envisions charging visitors to HMCS Haida for everything from trivia nights to boot camps ($38.50 to $2,500).

At Fort George, which served as the headquarters for the centre division of the British Army during the War of 1812 in what is now Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., visitors may be also be able to pay for a variety of similar military-themed activities. There could be the opportunity for artillery firing – $1,000 per cannon and $600 per mortar – but also performances ranging from fife and drum corps performances to war-era trials known as Bloody Assizes to “petticoats, boots and muskets” programming ($5 to $15,815).

Fort Malden in Amherstburg, Ont., which was the main military station for the defence of the western frontier in the late 1700s and early 1800s, is considering offering various military displays with soldiers ($75 to $250). Fort Wellington in Prescott, Ont., a former safe haven for British troops and Canadian militia during the War of 1812, could also offer a cannon-firing experience ($150). Across the country at Fort Rodd Hill, the 19th- and 20th-century coastal defence site located on Esquimalt Harbour near Victoria, visitors may one day be able to play soldier for a day ($150) or enjoy a campout in an army bell tent ($125).

Camping: Programs for newbies

Ottawa is launching some major expansions this year to help ease neophyte campers into the outdoors.

There’s a program that teaches would-be campers everything from how to start a campfire to how to remain safe in bear country, as well as another to add more fancy tent-like accommodations for discerning vacationers who may be less keen on roughing it.

At one time, Parks offered its two-day learn-to-camp program at no charge in conjunction with some local immigration societies as a way to connect with new Canadians. But as the program is expanding, it’s coming with a cost to cover gear, food and workshops ($88 per family of four, plus $22 for each additional member).

“Now it’s shifted to a program with user fees to make it more sustainable, but also to broaden its appeal,” says Omar McDadi, a spokesperson with Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks.

Parks Canada still hopes new Canadians will participate (and, in some places there may be partnerships intact for discounted rates), but it’s also reaching out to anyone who has forgotten how to camp or never really got around to trying it.

For those feeling confident in the bush, Parks is also offering its oTENTik – a play on the word ‘authentic’ – which Ottawa describes as a “cross between a tent and a rustic cabin.” Mostly, it’s for those (up to six in each three-bed hut) who want to enjoy camping without the nuisance of hiking gear in, stamping down tent pegs and the general “muss and fuss” related to sleeping outdoors.

oTENTiks: photo courtesy of Parks Canada

Units are already in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park and Quebec’s La Mauricie National Park, but another 100 oTENTiks are being added in parks nationwide with costs varying from $100 in Quebec’s Forillon to $150 in Alberta’s Banff.

EDMONTON – The inaugural commercial in Travel Alberta’s Remember to Breathe campaign has garnered 1.8 million YouTube views in two years and has won more than 25 marketing awards, but the Crown Corporation isn’t resting on those laurels.

It’s launching Remember to Breathe 3.0, with a heavy emphasis on promoting social media for travellers to share their Alberta experiences.

“The No. 1 trusted source of destination information is friends and family,” said Royce Chwin, Travel Alberta vice-president of marketing and communications.

“It’s really leveraging user content — people on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — and really engaging those people in two-way conversations to help sell the destination from their point of view.”

The corporation’s website now makes it easier to share content with other users. Travel Alberta also shares photos and other posted content through its own channels and surprising social-media users with weekly gifts.

Last year, for “Brand 2.0,” the tourism campaign added Alberta Stories, a new series of video travelogues highlighting experiences such as Edmonton’s culinary scene and Elk Island National Park.

Also this year, Travel Alberta will launch a new round of videos in the summer, including a 30-second commercial starring Edmonton and more Alberta Stories travelogues.

The Remember to Breathe brand, promoting “goosebump moments” instead of a hodge-podge of destinations, is part of Travel Alberta’s overall strategy to drive tourism revenue to $10.3 billion by 2020, from its current $7.9 billion.

“It’s not possible to show the millions of things to do in the province in 30 seconds or a minute,” Chwin said. “We’re going to look like everyone else, so we focused on the emotion of a travel experience. If we got people hooked emotionally, that’s how we all make purchasing decisions.”

The province’s tourism industry, which employs 139,000 people and contributes $4 billion in tax revenue, had a strong 2012, Chwin said Monday in a meeting with Edmonton-region tourism operators. Edmonton International Airport posted visitor growth of 6.4 per cent. Domestic traveller counts at the airport were up 6.1 per cent, trans-border travel was up 8.1 per cent and international increased by 4.1 per cent. Visits to Jasper National Park rose by 2.9 per cent.

Chwin is cautious, but expects another good year in 2013, he said.

“We talked to our operators and the travel trade and received some great news — bookings are up for summer which is a fantastic sign that the interest to come to Alberta remains very strong.”

But he said factors that could potentially dampen tourism include a troubled European economy, the Boston Marathon bombings and past cuts by the federal government to the Canadian Tourism Commission, an agency that markets travel to Canada.

The CTC’s budget is now $58 million, compared to $110 million nearly a decade ago, Chwin said. The tourism marketing budget for the city of Las Vegas alone totals $114 million, by comparison, he said.

To help it reach the target of a $10-billion travel industry by 2020, the Alberta government is exploring new market niches such as culinary, agricultural, aboriginal, trail-based, event and sport tourism, said Alyssa Watson, tourism development officer at Alberta Tourism, Parks and Recreation.

She said September’s Tour of Alberta cycling race and its accompanying community arts and food festivals is an example of an event that promotes several niche sectors. The elite 850-kilometre stage race will be hosted by 11 communities

“With Tour of Alberta, we’re bringing together the culinary tourism industry, the agricultural tourism industry because we’re going to be working with Alberta beef and pork producers to provide the dishes for the food elements,” Watson said. “It’s bringing together arts and culture and sport tourism.”

To check out the original “Remember to Breath” video click the link below.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Travel+Alberta+breathing+life+into+winning+campaign/8312228/story.html#ooid=F3YW9wMzpgmKdy7X-xDYHvGC12iBE6XX

Google has mapped our streets, but now they’re about to map our trails. In partnership with Parks Canada, the search engine giant will be mapping iconic Canadian landscapes and landmarks. Banff is one of the first places on their list, and they’ll be mapping everything from the inside of buildings to popular hikes.

“One of the keys they have is they try and go into different areas where there are iconic type experiences,” said Andrew Campbell, vice-president of external relations and visitor experience at Parks Canada, noting national historic sites like the Banff Park Museum and Cave and Basin could be on the list.

Banff Park Museum: Photo credit to Paul Zizka/Banff Lake Louise Tourism

“Those types of places and even into the Admin building potentially, people can go into the building and do a virtual tour.”

And on local trails, local experts will take Google staffers to some top spots so they can be documented and then available to the world.

Once they are complete, the idea is the virtual tours will help people better understand Banff and what they can expect when they visit.

“You get a good idea for that three dimensional feel of what it’s going to be like when you get there,” Campbell said. And if the virtual tour helps encourage people to make a trip to Banff, that’s all the better for Parks Canada.

“If you visited Banff, you’re four times more likely to believe that Banff should be protected from generation to generation.”

The full virtual tours of Banff should be available online by this fall or winter.

A Mix of comfort and convenience in the rustic outdoors

Are you a boomer interested in connecting with the outdoors in comfort? Is your young family looking for camping convenience? Are you thinking of camping for the first time? This summer, Parks Canada is making your camping experience in Banff National Park easier!

Exclusive to Canada’s national parks, oTENTiks are coming to Banff National Park in July. A cross between an A-frame cabin and a prospector tent mounted on a raised wooden floor, this new visitor experience seeks to attract and connect with key target markets including urbanites, youth and new Canadians. oTENTiks is designed to modernize and diversify the traditional camping experience in the park.

The ten oTENTiks will be clustered together and embraced by douglas fir, white spruce and pine trees along one of the most intimate shorelines in the park – Two Jack Lake. Set within Two Jack Lakeside Campground for easy access to site and town amenities, and as one of best locations for stunning views of the majestic mountain ranges.

A few oTENTik features:

• An outdoor deck overlooking Two Jack Lake presents an ideal location for relaxation
• 19 x 24 ft. wide tent provides plenty of room for families or groups up to six
• Sleeping area accommodates two-queen sized and one double-sized bunk bed with high-density foam mattresses for a restful night’s sleep – $145/night (includes GST).
• A spacious living room, with a table for six, offers a great activity area for inclement weather
• A replica cast iron fireplace ensures extra warmth for cool mountain nights and mornings
• Lighting and electrical outlets offers the convenience of night time reading or charging electronics
• An outdoor fire pit and a Weber BBQ guarantees the tradition of camp-style cooking
• Windows that unzip and mosquito screens allows fresh air movement and fibreglass doors that lock

For more information:

Photograph taken by Paul Zizka

One morning, the mountains that surround Banff disappeared. A bank of cloud had invaded and obscured them. Suddenly, the town was a floating island, a nowhere. It lasted a few days, on and off, and was more unsettling than you’d think. I like having mountains in the backyard. I’ve come to rely on their strict edges, their implacable, hard-to-impress presence around the human circle of the town. They remind me of a snooty condo board in an exclusive building that will never truly approve of anyone.

Then the bombs went off in Boston, and terrorists were thwarted from derailing a Via Rail train. The Tsarnaev brothers’ next stop, we are told, was Manhattan – no less than Times Square. Mountainous events that captured the obsessive attention of the world.

Details are everything. Then the news eats us alive – instead of controlling the furious pace of the present with our screens and our tweets and our multiple technologies, it controls us. We wolf down all the information we can see, and end up stuffed with exhausted despair.

As the news flooded in, I kept stepping outside and looking up at the peaks. Every time I did, I felt better.

Human beings have always been drawn to mountains – to climb them, name them, frame them, mine them, “conquer” them. In addition, I’m not the only one who spends a lot of time looking up at them: Five million tourists come to Banff every year, and they all take the same pictures.

I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Cascade Mountain: Photo taken by Paul Zizka

From the balcony of my northeast-facing room at the Banff Centre, I can see four mountains: Norquay (home to the first rope ski tow in the Rockies, in 1938), Brewster, Cascade and Rundle.

Cascade is the queen, named for the skinny waterfall that hypnotizes drivers as they flow into Banff on the Trans-Canada Highway from the east. Cascade is the blowsy turret that anchors the end of Banff Avenue, the town’s main street.

A wide band of snow around its midsection funnels down into four gullies, and looks very much like a garter belt. At 2,998 meters, she’s a big girl, Cascade, and sexy.

I prefer Rundle, 50 meters lower but more brooding and dramatic, more like a teenager. The southern face of Rundle is a continuous plate that tilts up out of the earth, and then drops away on the other side – a 12.5-kilometre wedge between Banff and the town of Canmore, a thrust smeared across the sky. It embodies the contradiction of the mountains: their welcoming intimacy (the gradual slope you can walk up) versus their danger (aiieeeeeeeee!).

Over all, Rundle looks like a massive shoulder leaning into whatever is coming. The cliffs of its peak, however, appear so private and intimate that they can take your breath away. It seems impossible something so close is nine hours distant on foot.

Rundle Mountain: Photograph taken by Paul Zizka

You’ve probably seen it. Rundle is the most photographed and painted peak in the Rockies. “Mount Rundle is my bread-and-butter mountain,” artist Walter Phillips once acknowledged. He was an Englishman who came to teach at the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1940 and stayed for 20 years before he went blind and died three years later. “I never tire of painting it, for it is never the same.”

There are entire sub-genres of writing and painting dedicated to describing the permanent changeability of mountains, and why we long to look at them. But no one has ever nailed the experience once and for all.

Some writers don’t even try. Farley Mowat grew up on the Prairies and hated the shadowy, enclosing Rockies from the moment he first saw them as a teenager. He preferred an open landscape, the way others seek the ocean or a beach. A.Y. Jackson never got the hang of painting mountains, and admitted as much (he blamed the mountains). Writer Marni Jackson, on the other hand, once described the sight of the Rockies as “a strong signature across the bottom of the sky,” and has been using the mountains for inspiration, on and off, for 40 years. Onlookers project on to the Rockies what they need to see.

Not long ago at breakfast, I ran into Kevin Drew, co-founder of the band Broken Social Scene. He had been at the Banff Centre from Toronto for 10 days, and had written and recorded 14 songs, which seemed like a lot. He was wearing glasses, a blue tuque, his usual beard and a large parka that was itself of mountainous loft.

“Do you like the mountains?” I asked.

He said he loved them. “I like being surrounded by the size of them, and I like that you have to be who you are and where you are around the mountains. You can’t be anything else. They’re demanding.”

“Demanding?”

“Because they can be like your elders. They can say, like, ‘What were you thinking those last few months? We gave you everything and you come back like this? Get your shit together.’ You know?”

Mount Rundle was named for Rev. Robert Rundle, a romantic Wesleyan Methodist missionary from Cornwall, England. In 1840, at the age of 29, he took up an open offer from Hudson’s Bay Company governor George Simpson of transportation, room, and board, an interpreter and £50 a year to any clergyman willing to tend the souls of natives in western North America.

After a 26-day boat journey from Liverpool to New York, and a further three-day trip to Montreal, Rundle set out on April 29, 1840, in a Hudson’s Bay canoe – for Edmonton. He arrived in October, eager to make his way to the Rocky Mountains, which seemed to hold a supernatural allure for him. Some historians claim that he was the first Protestant minister to make it west of Winnipeg.

Judging from sketches, he looked exactly like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments after Moses receives the tablets from Jehovah – slightly mad, but keen. Finally, in February of the following year, Rundle left Edmonton on the seven-day journey (his first) to Rocky Mountain House and the foothills. He was wearing lamb’s wool hose, woolen drawers, lined trousers, leggings, gaiters, a flannel shirt, a waistcoat, a coat, a pilot coat, a shawl, moccasins and a sealskin cap, and was further wrapped in a buffalo robe in his dogsled. Layering, it turns out, has been around a long time.

Rundle’s moods swung wildly. He missed England. He suffered from migraines and nosebleeds, and thought that the sled driver mistreated the dogs. He also found that roasted beaver tasted like pork (delicious) and that traveling at night prevented snow blindness. By the end of the month, his longed-for mountains were still disappointingly obscure. “How uncertain is everything here below,” he wrote in his journal, adding that “much depends on the state of the atmosphere.”

In the meantime, he encountered a party of much-feared Blackfoot Indians. “I felt the insignificance of my stature in comparison to these tall sons of the plain,” he wrote. However, Rundle had a way with natives: The Blackfoot invited him to their camp. He spent more time with the friendlier Stoney Indians, who believed that he had descended to earth from heaven, folded up in a piece of paper.

April had come around before Rundle recorded having a good look at the mountain peaks, albeit from a distance. “The sight seemed too grand and too glorious for reality,” he noted. He thought the view was what he sees in heaven. He finally breached the front ranges and reached what is now Banff, “quite amongst the mountains,” in 1847 – “a time never to be forgotten.” To honor the occasion, he conducted services by moonlight in Cree. I wish I’d seen that.

On his way back to Edmonton, he fell off his horse (something he did with regularity) and broke a wrist so badly that the arm was nearly useless, forcing a trip back to England at the age of 39.

He never returned. But Rundle’s good reputation with local tribes persisted, so much so that, when James Hector, the lead geologist (and surgeon) of the Palliser Expedition, which was surveying routes for the Canadian Pacific Railway, passed through the area in 1858, the Stoneys were still singing hymns and praying. Hector named Mount Rundle for the earnest reverend. The mountain proceeded to make its next mark in Canadian history by blocking the way of the oncoming railway.

The CPR had hired Major A.B. Rogers, an American, to find a route through the Rockies. (Rogers Pass, the site of some of the best skiing and worst avalanches in Canada, is named for him.) He was an impatient, irascible ass – his mustache was so long and white and thick that it looked as though two streams of smoke were billowing from his infuriated nostrils – who proposed getting around Rundle by running the railway through its much smaller neighbour, Sleeping Buffalo Mountain, via a 275-metre tunnel. CPR president William Cornelius Van Horne was outraged at the projected delay and cost, so the idea was dropped. Nevertheless, the mountain is still called Tunnel, except by the Blackfoot and other tribes, who stick with Sleeping Buffalo – what it looks like if approached from the west.

At least four geological thrusts come to a head in the area, and one of the seismic consequences is the Banff hot springs. Native tribes considered the springs sacred, given their power to heal the wounded, but also a sign that there was a lot of disruptive mojo in the Bow Valley, both good energy and bad. “They selected Buffalo Mountain as the place where the spirits gather,” a Blackfoot elder named Tom Cranebear told me one afternoon. We were sitting at a table overlooking the peaks to the west of town, Sulphur and Bourgeau and beyond.

“But why do that on a mountain at all?” I asked.

“Well,” Elder Tom said, “you believe in heaven? Everyone believes in some form of heaven. The higher you get, you won’t have a problem getting the rest of the way up.”

“Why don’t natives climb mountains, then, the way other people do?”

He looked at me. He spoke with long pauses, the way native elders sometimes do. “Well, we don’t have the equipment, No. 1 but what’s the use of climbing the mountain? There’s nothing up there. So we don’t climb the mountains.”

Others do. Mountains emit a siren call to challengers: Their steepness and remoteness, their disdain for human access, seem to offend our pipsqueak egos. This past ski season, one of the must-do tricks for skilled teenage hot-doggers was to ski an exceptionally steep run at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort in Golden, just across the B.C. border, while naked – or, failing that, to ski it non-stop while placing a cellphone call to your mom halfway down.

The climber who made the official first ascent of Rundle in 1888, J.J. McArthur, made no fewer than 160 such ascents from 1887 to 1893. The CPR’s Van Horne (who was, among other things, a painter) understood the appeal from the start: To attract paying passengers to his new railway (and later to his luxury chateaus), he touted “the challenge of the mountains” and their “1,100 unclimbed peaks.”

Austrian guide Conrad Kain. Photo credit: Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

After an American climber fell to his death attempting a first ascent of Mount Lefroy near Lake Louise, Alta., the CPR hired Swiss guides Eduard Feuz Sr. and Christian Häsler to haul wealthy tourists safely upward. From 1899 to 1954, the 25 Swiss guides employed by the CPR never suffered a casualty. Conrad Kain, the famed Austrian guide, made 60 virgin ascents (often falling back at the last moment to let his paying client take the glory), and then wrote a memoir, Where the Clouds Can Go, in which he laid out his essential rules for guides. No. 1 was /never show fear. No. 4 was Lie when necessary.

Feuz and Häsler begat the likes of Norwegian Erling Strom, North America’s first professional ski instructor, who helped to persuade the railway to build Assiniboine Lodge, the backcountry’s first (still operating); Strom begat Bruno Engler, the mountaineering filmmaker, and Hans Gmoser, inventor of heli-skiing. (The two guided Pierre Trudeau into the Bugaboo range in the early 1970s.)

Gmoser’s doctor, Smitty Gardner, asked him to take his son, Don, into the mountains. Don Gardner, in the company of Banff-based writer and explorer Chic Scott and others, made the first Great Divide ski traverse across a mass of ice fields from Jasper to Lake Louise, to cite just one of their remarkable exploits. Gardner had a thing for Rundle, too: He hiked up its Banff edge, traversed the long ridge and descended into Canmore in winter.

The history of the Rockies is knotted up like this, incestuous but interconnected, local history and local memory made bigg

er by the mountains that people from around the world cannot help but explore, traverse, climb up, ski down, hike or just adore.

Ralphine Locke: Photograph courtesy of the Crag and Canyon

The other day in a house next to the Bow River, I heard Chic Scott conduct a fireside chat with Ralphine Locke, an octogenarian who as a child knew many of the pioneers who settled Banff. She remembered the yellow cars that collected the first tourists from the train station on Victoria Day weekend. (In those days, the Banff Springs Hotel shut down for winter.) “That’s how you knew it was spring.” The house was packed with locals hanging on Ralphine’s every word – their living connection to the early history of their town.

Mountains have this macro-scoping effect. The weather can shift and turn circumstances deadly on 10 minutes’ notice, even on a mountain highway: You have to pay attention and plan for a range of eventualities. The reward for such deliberateness is both a sense of being able to handle yourself and resignation in the face of inevitable change and random chance. When Eduard Feuz was helped up to the high country for a last visit before he died in 1944, he stood and called out goodbye to each of the surrounding peaks. I can only imagine how devastated he must have been, knowing that he would never return to that clean, pure, practical place.

The outside world breaks through the protective ring of the mountains regardless. From Banff, via Twitter and cable and website, last week’s bombings in Boston were clearly horrific but somehow seemed to lack the conviction of international terrorism. (Deaths notwithstanding, the maiming they caused may be the most persistent legacy of the Tsarnaev brothers, their most potent symbol.) Everyone in Banff seemed to have watched the footage, but – as was not the case in cities in the East – no one mentioned it unless I brought up the subject. Maybe it was because Boston is a long way from Banff. On the other hand, maybe the mountains make you private.

One evening while I was asking people why mountains mattered, I had dinner with Charles Noble, a well-known western poet, and Dave Eso, an emerging one. Mr. Eso is in his 30s and was taking part in a workshop for experimental spoken-word poets at the Banff Centre, he admired the work of Mr. Noble, who is in his 60s and is a part-time Banff resident, and had invited him to dinner at the centre. The poets in the seminar were lively types, working on monologues and performance pieces and songs about such subjects as fear and drunken dates and what it means to say “I love you,” especially prematurely.

Charles and Dave are intimidating conversationalists. They talked about Marx and Heidegger. They talked about forms of rhetoric, about how sometimes experimental poets want to avoid “intentionality” or any appearance that they are doing anything so dorky as actually “writing” a “poem,” because that way they might attain a less artificial authorial stance and hence deeper feeling. Poetry is a brainy pastime, especially these days.

Suddenly, I realized that experimental poets and people who like to look up at mountains are doing the same thing, just in opposite directions: The poets try to take something abstract, like an idea, and make it concrete, whereas admirers of mountains try to take something huge made of rock and ice and snow and turn it into an abstraction they can carry around in their minds, a mental key chain from a place that is hard to get to but gorgeous to think about.

I suppose what the mountains seduce us with, in the end, is the promise of solitude – the chance to get where hardly anyone gets to go, up high, to the top, alone. Among the high peaks, the promise whispers, you will finally have a chance to think for yourself, to be an individual, beholden to no one, and nothing, and no event – a ridiculous fantasy that has been criticized by Freudians and

Photo courtesy of Discovery Tours

philosophers as the irresponsible selfishness of thrill-seekers and introverts and narcissists.

In 1972, in a paper entitled Psychopathology in Alpinism in the Canadian Alpine Journal, a group of researchers concluded that the “mean personality type” of alpinists displayed “schizothymic features and a tendency to avoid contact with other persons.” As if that was a bad thing.

Mountains also make you humble. They remind us how much we need to experience beauty, and how rarely we do; of how crushing it can be not to get where you always longed to go, and how that disappointment can make you deeper. They remind us how carelessly we surrender our privacy and our solitude to the phone, the screen and the keyboard, and to others.

I know Elder Tom and the Blackfoot say there is nothing at the top of the mountain, but that presumes nothing has no value. Because this is the other thing: When I step out on my tiny balcony to see those peaks, I often remember poet Mary Oliver’s questioning of  “the empty spaces of the wilderness:” For something is there,/ Something is there when nothing is there but itself,/ that is not there when anything else is.

“Formless yet palpable,” as she put it, “Very shining, very delicate. Very rare.” Something you need to believe still exists when you return to the flat, hot, terrified city.

We pulled into the Glen Rouge parking lot, in the shadow of Highway 401 and Port Union Road, on a grey, balmy Toronto winter day.

Warm weather had turned recent snowfalls to slush, and last autumn’s leaves stained the icy puddles brown.

Two city workers, tinkering with a sanding truck, did not raise an eye as we yanked bulging backpacks from our car, donned cleated snowshoes and set off. Minutes later, we passed a young woman walking a golden retriever. She was the last person we would see until reaching Steeles Avenue, 10 kilometres away, the following afternoon.

With me was Fraser – an enthusiastic Mountain Equipment Co-op employee and, until recently, a total stranger. But he was the only person who responded (positively, anyway) to my search for a companion on an opaquely described mission: camping, during wintertime, in Metro Toronto.

Ahead lay the forests and ravines of the still-to-be-minted Rouge National Urban Park, amid Toronto’s eastern suburbs. The goal was to wander from one end to the other, and experience just how “wild” this landscape is firsthand.

Since a 2011 Conservative campaign pledge to study the viability of a  National Park in the Rouge, this municipal ravine has become a media darling – a teenage pop star, if you will, amid Parks Canada’s aging line up of dinosaur rockers.

I wanted to answer the unspoken question on many minds: Can a metropolitan park hold its own among Canada’s storied family of National Parks? More accurately – because comparing an urban oasis with profoundly wild realms isn’t fair – I wanted to gauge whether the so-called “People’s Park” offers a viable glimmer of hope for the future. Landlocked by concrete, and lying within an hour’s drive of seven-million people, is the Rouge a feel-good publicity stunt for a government with a floundering environmental reputation? Or could it begin to address the burgeoning disconnect between Canada’s suburban populations and the natural spaces that define our nation?

Less than a century ago, a series of deeply incised, heavily wooded ravines bisected Toronto’s landscape, stretching north from Lake Ontario like a tangle of green arteries. Decades of development have steadily shrunk, clogged and atrophied those natural conduits. Many streams disappeared from sight; routed underground in concrete viaducts while others paved. Today, just one significant splash of green remains: the Rouge.

Within its boundaries lie one of Canada’s last remaining stands of Carolinian forest. The region is one of extraordinary biodiversity, and while lacking charismatic megafauna, it rivals anywhere in the country for raw number of species present.

For decades, grassroots volunteers have fought to protect the Rouge. As early as 1987, the idea of a national park was floated, but at the time, Parks Canada was simply not interested. (Instead, a patchwork of protected and conservation areas was established, managed by the City of Toronto.) Today tells a different story. With visitation numbers plummeting and its budget slashed, Parks Canada is seeking innovative ways to extend its reach and renew its relevance.

“Are you packing bear spray?” my wife had asked days earlier, as I crammed a sleeping bag, stove and tent into my luggage for a Toronto business trip. “For people,” she added, when I looked at her questioningly.

At my luxury hotel in downtown Toronto, I organize tea, sugar, pasta and oatmeal into plastic baggies. It feels odd yet utterly exhilarating to pack for a wilderness trip while looking out over city lights. The next day, after a lunchtime presentation, I peel off my dress shirt and pants in a parkade, then pull on a fleece, hiking boots and tuque in place.

Then as I race along the 401, doubts surface. A tangle of concrete, traffic and buildings run as far as the eye can see. How could there be any hint of wilderness among all this? Were my hopes and expectation – for this trip and, more importantly, for the new Urban National Park itself – too high? Not until my GPS shows I am minutes from the park boundary does the first greenery appear: a sprinkling of farmers’ fields, and amid them, a solitary white pine.

After shuttling a car to the far end of the park, Fraser and I take a quick stroll down the sands of Rouge Beach and then set off. From the confluence of the Rouge and Little Rouge rivers – directly beneath 18 lanes of 401 and Kingston Road traffic – we turn north, ascending a ridge that cleaves between the two ravines and two distinct microclimates. Below us to the right, thick green forests of hemlock and pine cloak the cooler, moister northern slopes. To the warmer, drier south, leafless groves of hickory, maple and beech drop away.

Breaks in foliage reveal commanding views. Far below, the brown waters of the Rouge and Little Rouge swirl in a soupy mess, washing over shore-bound ice. But change is in the air. A cold front approaches, and the forecast calls for temperatures to plummet to -15.

As dusk descends and winds build, Fraser and I set up our tent on a high cliff. We sit, listening to the faint buzz of traffic and otherworldly howls from the nearby Toronto Zoo. I count the lights of 18 apartment buildings. Darkness never comes, and instead distant street lamps spray orange across low clouds.

Later, as snow pelts the tent, we huddle inside sleeping bags. Occasional trains rumble down the opposite side of the ravine, invoking a familiar nocturnal sound: coyotes howling. Up next is the rasping of a tiny saw-whet owl. Soon after, a barred owl asks the familiar question: “Who cooks for you?”

Rouge National Park is over 40 squared kilometers and sites on Lake Ontario

After a breakfast of oats and instant coffee we take down the frost-cloaked tent, and are hiking by 7:30. Yesterday’s slush has frozen solid overnight, turning the park into a skating rink.

The winter beauty is stark; leafless silhouettes, shoulder-high dry grass and a muted colour palette of deep red sumac, burnt orange bark and sand brown. Come spring, these dells will explode in a kaleidoscope of flowers; trilliums, wood sorrel and hundreds of other ephemeral species.

A brisk wind stings our cheeks as we begin the 50-metre climb up the former Beare Road Hill Landfill site (decommissioned in 1983).

Once at the summit – atop 5.4 million tons of garbage – the park stretches before us, from the southern waterfront to the Markham and Stouffville headwaters. On the horizon, like a ship floating above wavy ridgelines, rises the CN Tower.

A series of well-established trails wind through the Rouge, but we avoid these when possible, choosing instead to follow the main course of the river, clambering up and down the banks of creeks that feed in. No matter where we go, others have been there before: deer, squirrel, even opossum. On the banks of a restored wetland we find the palm-sized prints of trumpeter swans. Most plentiful of all are tracks of the human variety. Skis, snowshoes and footprints weave through every corner. I’m impressed.

While the protection of a rare Carolinian ecosystem may be one integral part of the Rouge National Urban Park, its twin – and equally ambitious – goal is to combat the exploding public disconnect from nature. Canada is blessed with great tracts of forest, mountains and tundra. Alongside such lonely outposts as Mongolia and Iceland, Canada ranks among the most sparsely populated countries (roughly three people per square kilometre). Yet a recent United Nations report reveals that 82 per cent of us reside in urban settings.

At the Rouge, youth will be a priority audience, along with new Canadians. Plans call for pavilions to introduce all of Canada’s national parks, along with plentiful interpretive events such as the popular Learn-to-Camp program.

“Some people have to be taught how to interact with wild places,” says Parks superintendent Pam Vienotte. “It’s not because they’ve chosen to ignore them. Just that they’ve not had access.”

Beyond Meadowvale Road we enter no-man’s land; a stretch where no official trails run. We push past branches, duck under deadfall and are occasionally forced to crawl or scramble over obstacles. We wander past abandoned bridge pilings and through shady cedar groves. Not until we near Steeles Avenue, and our waiting car, do we bump into dog walkers.

Two Toronto Parks employees preparing for a tree survey approach us. “What were you guys doing?”

“Just out for an overnight hike,” we reply. “Are we in trouble?”

“Oh no!” they say with a smile. “We’re just curious. It’s not often we see people with backpacks.”

As we change into clean clothes, I’m aware of that familiar sensation of “re-entry.” It feels like ages since we left the car. Our cheeks tingle with sun and wind, and our eyes sparkle with the lightness that comes from time away.

Despite passing a few power lines and roadways, it truly was an escape.

A CANADIAN FIRST

When it comes to reconnecting urbanites with nature, a National Park moniker comes with a gravitas no city park can match.

Last May, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Environment Minister Peter Kent announced that $143.7-million would be spent over 10 years to turn the Rouge River watershed into Canada’s first National Urban Park. (Parks Canada is vague on when the transition will be official.)

It is “a brand new concept,” says veteran Parks Canada superintendent Pam Veinotte, who’s led Banff, Yoho and Fundy and is now in charge of the Rouge. “It will require an innovative approach to conservation and management.”

For example, Parks Canada can’t use fire and flooding – the norm in other national parks – to regenerate plant life. Further complicating matters are the farms, roadways, train tracks and transmission lines that stand within the proposed boundaries.

Some conservationists are concerned that handing over these fragile lands to the federal government might actually diminish protection. “If it truly is a National Park, we welcome the idea,” says Jim Robb, general manager of Friends of Rouge Watershed. “We have great respect for Parks Canada, but we want to ensure this becomes a bone fide national park – where ecological health is given top priority – and not some pale imitation.”

If the Rouge works, it could sweepingly change our country’s relationship with national parks. “It is critical we get the legislative framework right, because the Rouge is not a one-off,” says Faisal Moola, director general of the David Suzuki Foundation. Communities the across country are campaigning for similar projects, he says, citing examples of Bowen Island (just offshore from Vancouver) and the Gatineau Hills (north of Ottawa).

Just think of the benefits: No puzzling over which tent pole goes where, no snapping at the kids as your half- erected shelter tips perilously sideways, no embarrassment as it collapses in the middle of the rainy night.

Parks Canada deserves kudos for its proposal to erect 10 oTENTik – it’s pronounced “authentic” – tents in each of Banff National Park and Kootenay National Park this summer. The Canadian-made tents are being described as a cross between a prospector’s tent and a cabin, and boast a wood floor, canvas walls, a table, chairs, and three beds with mattresses that accommodates up to six people.

 “Parks Canada is thinking on its feet right now with this project,” says Monica Andreeff, Executive Director of the Association for Mountain Parks Protection and Enjoyment. “It’s a way of moving forward and recognizing that the target market has shifted to urban people who might live in small condominiums without room to store camping supplies, or people who just don’t understand how to do all of the stuff that our parents may have shown us on camping trips.”

We agree. Parks Canada is not only putting forward a way of generating new revenue – the shelters will rent for between $145 and $150 a night and will also be available in Jasper in 2014 – it is reaching out to Canadians who aren’t familiar with tenting but still want to experience the great outdoors.

Everyone, including Parks Canada, should enjoy a good night’s sleep with this clever idea.

Photograph by Parks Canada, Handout. Calgary Herald. Story by Colette Derworiz. April 16 2013. 

Parks Canada bringing oTENTik to Banff and Kootenay by July.

Think you might enjoy camping but prefer the comforts of home too much to live out of a tent for the weekend? Parks Canada has another option for you.

Twenty oTENTik (authentic) tents — described as a cross between a prospector’s tent and a cabin in the woods — will be coming to the mountain parks in mid to late summer.

“It’s a new visitor experience in the park,” said Judy Glowinski, Parks Canada’s product development specialist in Banff. “I’m totally stoked about it.”

In Banff National Park, there will be 10 tents available along the shoreline at Two Jack Lakeside campground on the Lake Minnewanka loop road. Another 10 tents will be set up at Redstreak campground, near Radium Hot Springs, in Kootenay National Park.

Ten more tents will arrive in Jasper, where there’s already one prototype available, in 2014.

Park enthusiasts said it was a good way for the agency to offer another camping option for its visitors.

Photograph by Parks Canada, Handout.

“Parks Canada is thinking on its feet right now with this project,” said Monica Andreeff, executive director of Association for Mountain Parks Protection and Enjoyment. “It’s a way of moving forward and recognizing that the target market has shifted to urban people who might live in small condominiums without room to store camping supplies or people who just don’t understand how to do all of the stuff that our parents may have shown us on camping trips.”

Parks officials have been trying to find new ways to bring visitors to the park, despite experiencing budget cuts and having fewer staff.

The agency will invest $455,000 for installation and infrastructure costs to bring the 10 oTENTiks to Banff National Park (similar costs are estimated in Kootenay), but they expect to recover those costs with the camping fees within three or four years.

It will cost $150 a night to rent one of the tents in Banff, which will have electricity. Kootenay’s tents, which won’t have power, will be $145.

Made in Canada, Parks Canada said oTENTik will provide visitors with a comfortable camping experience.

“We’re trying to diversify the camping offer in the national park and attract new audiences,” said Glowinski. “We want to connect to urbanites, youth and new Canadians.

“So maybe some of those who aren’t familiar or comfortable with the camping experience can try this as an introduction to camping. Others are looking for a new type of camping experience, so this will appeal to them as well.”

Each site will include a tent, which has a wood floor and canvas walls in a 19-foot by 24-foot space. They’ll also include a table, chairs and three beds — complete with mattresses — that fit up to six people.

Visitors will need to bring their own food, personal effects and sleeping bags.

Katie Morrison, conservation campaign director with the southern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, said it’s a good idea to get people outdoors to connect with nature.

“They need to make sure people using those sites have proper education and interpretive programs, so they are learning for their own safety as well as minimizing damage around the campsite,” she said.

To reduce conflict with wildlife, officials said strict protocols will be in place about cooking or eating within the tents.

Instead, visitors will be able to use fire pits, cooking shelters, storage lockers, dish washing sinks, a picnic table, bear-proof garbage bins and cleaning supplies.

The tents, expected to be set up by July, will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. Next year, they will be included in the Parks Canada reservation system from June until mid-September.

This video takes a deeper look into the bigger issue threatening the conservation of Canada’s woodland caribou. David Suzuki shows how oil, gas and timber harvesting companies are occupying 90% of the caribou habitat in Northern Alberta. Very little is being done to seriously implement land use guidelines that protect these animals.

As Albertans we need to start working on a more effective plan to ensure the continued care and protection of our wildlife.

Through its beautiful and elusive Canadian icon – the woodland caribou – and their passionate advocates Billion Dollar Caribou will reveal that even in the 21st century the conservation of natural spaces and the species that live there is much contested territory; mired in controversy, drama and debate.

To see the full video click here.

Jasper National Park plans to ban backcountry skiing in high elevation areas from Nov. 1 to March 1 in an effort to protect woodland caribou from predators.

Caribou are a threatened species.

The animals move to higher elevations in the winter and the restrictions are necessary to protect them, according to John Wilmshurst, acting resource conservation manager for the park.

“By track-setting with skis into those high elevation areas, we make it easier for wolves to have access to that terrain in the winter,” he said.

But the plan isn’t going over well with some outdoor enthusiasts.

Back-Country skiing At Shangri-La in Jasper National Park. Photo by Loni Klettl

AMPPE Executive Director Monica Andreeff comments on how vast the proposed 2,500 kilometer closure is.

To watch the full video click here.

The measure will affect about 18 per cent of the park and skiers say they’ll be shut out of the most popular areas for most of the season.

“All the places we ski is all the places where the caribou live and there’s reasons why we go there,” said skier and Jasper resident Loni Klettel.

“There’s access, you can get up the valleys, the roads take you up to a certain elevation, which is 1,500 metres and that’s where you start your ski.”

Parks Canada has held public meetings on the issue in Jasper and Edmonton.

Concerns have also been expressed that the restrictions could hurt the Jasper economy, but Wilmhurst says the local chamber of commerce believes that this isn’t a large user group so members aren’t concerned.

The public can still voice their opinion on the plan on the Parks Canada website until the middle of April.

Parks staff hope to have the restrictions in place by November.

They’re not just taking on one radio station, but three.

The Banff Centre is asking the CRTC for permission to launch a commercial radio station, so far known as CJXB-FM Banff, which will be at 107.9FM.

The centre had already indicated they’d be taking over Park Radio and the French version of the station, Radio du Parc. But limits on those station licenses means only 16 per cent of Park Radio’s content can be music, and The Banff Centre wanted a way to share concerts, indie music and local recordings.

“This becomes another platform for us to share our concerts and share Canadian music with the town,” said Joe Fingerote, senior audio broadcast producer with The Banff Centre. “One of the aspects we’re most proud of is we’re going for 90 per cent Canadian content.”

CJXB will also include daily local and national newscasts and local information about Banff. The plan is to have Park Radio remain much as it is with tourist information and historical programs, “but with a lot more content from The Banff Centre,” Fingerote said, noting speaker series talks or speeches at the film fest could air on the station.

They also intend to stream all content online and have podcasts.

While the centre went from taking on Park Radio to three stations, Fingerote is confident they’ll be able to manage the different broadcasts. He said most radio station now are run with a small staff, and they recently invested in modern equipment to make the day-to-day workings of the station easier.

A nearly 15-year veteran of the CBC, Fingerote has been interested in a Banff Centre radio station since he completed a work study program at the centre in 1996. He envisions the station focusing heavily on the centre and community.

“We’re really looking at keeping the station focus on Banff. Canmore is very well served by radio right now, while Banff is less so, but we certainly welcome listeners from Canmore,” he said.

“I’m really looking forward to engaging with the community. Part of this, too, is we want to get the bubble off The Banff Centre.”

The CRTC’s public comment period is now open on both Park Radio and CJXB’s application, and can be viewed at crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2013/2013-154.htm#bm6

Further details on the application and letters of support can be sent to radio@banffcentre.ca

“There are few places in North America where a new terrestrial radio makes sense, but here it does,” Fingerote said.

A sample of CJXB’s future content can be heard at banffcentre.ca/live

larissa.barlow@sunmedia.ca