Seeing the Whole Landscape

“Both are obvious facts, but they are not truths, because they tell only half the story.”

Aldo Leopold, 1947 foreword draft

 

Elk Valley, British Columbia

 

Beautiful British Columbia has a landscape and a reputation that arrives before you do. Even before crossing Elk Pass, we carried an image of the province shaped by mountains, deep forests, clear rivers, wildlife and the kind of immense scenery that seems almost designed for screensavers, wallpaper, calendars and postcards. None of that image is false. Over the past few days we have walked beneath jagged peaks, followed the Elk River through broad mountain valleys, watched mist collect along forested slopes and stood among conifers where the only sounds were birds, wind, moving water, and us. The province is every bit as beautiful as its reputation suggests – it’s one of the reasons we live on the Sunshine Coast and love to travel on VIA Rail’s Canadian across the province.  With that said, what has surprised me is how quickly the Trans Canada Trail has begun showing us everything that usually sits just outside that popular image of the province.

 

The change began almost immediately after crossing into the Elk Valley. From a distance, the mountains appeared much as we have seen them in the past and imagined on this journey - layered with forest and rising sharply above the river. 

Then, as we continued north toward Elkford, one section of the range began to look different. The slopes were no longer covered in the uneven greens and greys of forest and exposed rock. Instead, entire mountainsides had been reshaped into enormous dark terraces. Machines moved across them at a scale that was difficult to comprehend from where we stood, while dust and smoke hung above the operation. We had reached the Fording River coal mine, and for a long time it was difficult to look anywhere else.

 

What struck me most was not simply the size of the mine but the way it existed within the same landscape we had been admiring all morning. There was no clean dividing line between the beautiful part of the valley and the industrial part.   The same could be said for the vast tracts of clear-cut forest that we had also begun to notice.  The turquoise river still flowed below. Forested mountains rose beyond. Birds moved through the shrubs beside the road while trucks travelled past and the altered slopes dominated the distance. It was all one place.

 

That sounds obvious when written down, but I am not sure we usually experience landscapes that way. When we travel, we tend to look for what we have come to see. We stop at viewpoints, photograph the mountain, admire the river, follow the forest trail and continue onward. Highways and tourist stops are often placed far from such sites.  In other places, industry is more often passed quickly from a vehicle or positioned somewhere outside the scenic frame. Clear-cuts are behind the ridge. Mines are reached by access roads most people would never travel up. Processing plants sit outside rather than beside resort towns. As a result, we can come away from a place with an impression that is entirely genuine and still incomplete.

 

Walking makes that selectivity more difficult.  You cannot simply crop out what remains beside you for several hours.  The logging roads have been part of our route. Clear-cuts intersect the route of the trail before we weave back into mature forest.  Mine traffic has shared the roads with us. From the hills above Elkford we could see heavily logged slopes surrounding the community, with the mine occupying the valley beyond. Instead of taking us from one carefully chosen scenic place to another, the Trans Canada Trail has been carrying us through the spaces between them, and those spaces are proving every bit as revealing.  They are, after all, a huge part of each province and Canada as a whole.

 

Elkford itself made the relationship even harder to separate. We arrived expecting another small mountain town and quickly realized how – much like Sudbury, Ontario - thoroughly life there is organized around the mine. Shift changes bring sudden waves of traffic. Workers come and go according to schedules that have little to do with tourists or trail users. Conversations in town repeatedly returned to mining because mining is not something happening somewhere beyond the community.  It is not an abstraction - it is one of the reasons the community exists as it does. Families rely upon it. Businesses depend upon it. The rhythms of the town follow it.

 

That complicated my instinctive response to the altered mountains around us. I am after all a conservation biologist – though one raised by an executive at TeckCominco – one of the nation’s largest mining corporations.   Regardless, the point is that it is often easy for me to look at a huge open-pit mine and see only environmental loss. Standing beside something on that scale, it is impossible not to think about what has been removed, reshaped or displaced. Yet the longer we stayed in the valley, the more difficult it became to pretend that the question ended there. People work in those mines. Families are supported by them. Communities have grown around them. The roads, schools, businesses and recreational opportunities we are using exist within an economy in which resource extraction plays an enormous role.  And what is extracted supports so much more across the country and around the world.

 

At the same time, those benefits do not erase the costs.  Being in Elkford also meant meeting and overhearing miners themselves. Some had gravelly voices and persistent coughs that surprised us. We heard sirens moving through the valley and later learned that there had been an accident at one of the operations. The reaction among local workers made clear how closely risk sits beside livelihood here. It is one thing to think about coal in terms of tonnage, energy or economics. It is another to stand in a town where the consequences of extracting it can be heard in someone's breathing or in the sudden sound of emergency vehicles moving toward a mine.

 

The landscape carries those costs too. The same mountains that draw hikers, cyclists, anglers and wildlife watchers into the region have been terraced and transformed for coal. Forests that appear continuous from a distance become patchworks when seen from the trail. Some areas have been logged recently enough that only stumps and slash remain; others are already filling with young trees. Even this is more complicated than the simple contrast between untouched forest and destruction. We have walked through mature stands, active cuts and regenerating areas within the same day. The landscape is constantly being used, altered, repaired, regrown and used again.

 

Perhaps this is why I find the Trans Canada Trail through the Elk Valley so interesting.

 

It does not seem particularly interested in protecting the illusion that British Columbia is composed only of pristine wilderness, epic wildlife, and postcard landscapes.   Instead, it keeps placing different realities beside one another. A clear-cut leads back into mature forest. A mountain-bike trail overlooks a mine. A river popular with anglers flows through a valley shaped by industry. A community advertised for outdoor recreation depends heavily on resource extraction. A mountain can be spectacular and altered at the same time.

 

None of those statements cancel the others.

 

I suspect our tendency is to want landscapes, like our communities, to be easier to interpret than this. We prefer categories. Wilderness or industry. Conservation or development. Beautiful or damaged. Recreation or work. Yet the country we have been walking through rarely behaves so neatly. The same place can sustain wildlife, provide livelihoods, attract visitors, carry historic and cultural meaning, and show obvious evidence of human alteration all at once. To be clear - walking through it slowly does not necessarily provide an answer about how those competing demands should be balanced. What it does provide, however, is less opportunity to pretend that only one of them exists. We all buy things, use things, and throw out things – each of these things requires extracted resources, has external costs, provides benefits, and has an impact.

The range of materials required for our backpacking gear alone is immense and despite the goals of our #Hike4Birds on the TCT the purchase and use of them have an impact. 

 

That may be one of the larger changes in how we have begun looking at landscapes during this journey. Early on, much of our attention naturally went toward the things we hoped to find: birds, rugged coastlines, boreal forests, clear rivers, stunning mountains and places where people had protected or restored nature. And of course, those things still matter enormously to us. But travelling across the country on foot has increasingly meant seeing what connects those places as well: highways, farms, mines, hydro corridors, clear-cuts, railway lines, towns and all the other working landscapes that support the way Canadians live. They are not interruptions between the real scenery. They are part of the larger and more complete story.

 

That realization feels particularly important here because British Columbia's beauty is so powerful that it would be easy to let it dominate everything else. Even today, after walking along logging roads and through industrial landscapes, it would not be difficult to point a camera toward a ridge, wait for the right light and create an image that looks almost untouched. The photograph would not be dishonest. It would simply be incomplete.

 

Perhaps the challenge is not to stop admiring beautiful landscapes and critiquing industrial regions, but to resist confusing beauty with an incomplete understanding of a place or situation.

 

Tomorrow we will continue south through the Elk Valley toward Sparwood and Fernie. There will undoubtedly be more forests, mountains and rivers worth stopping to photograph, and we will stop for them because that is part of why we are here. But I suspect we will also notice the haul roads, the rail lines, the clear-cuts and the communities built among them a little differently now.   If slow travel is teaching us anything, perhaps it is that seeing a place means allowing more than one version of it to remain in view at the same time.  Not because they are equivalent, but because together they are part of the landscape we are actually walking through.

 

See you on the trail.