Re Quinsam Coal: letter to editor

The Editor,
Dear Sir,

I went to the City Council meeting on September 21 to hear what our
representatives were going to say about Quinsam coal's expansion
plans.
I assumed they'd be against expansion, not only because it directly
threatens the health of the Quinsam River, but also because we're
talking coal, the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive form of energy
available, and it makes no difference to the planet where its burned.
Surely our council has heard of climate change, right?
But what I heard was not encouraging:
1 the Quinsam is already under threat from, among other substances,
arsenic and acid released by the present mine.
2 the expansion would extend the mine's life for only a short time, and
increase the risks of fish-kills and a dead Quinsam exponentially.
3 the organization responsible for approving the expansion is the same
one that permitted the present mine to increase metal and acid
concentrations beyond acceptable limits.
And the councillors? They were being asked to demand that a "complete
environmental assessment" be done, which seems kind of obvious.
But Councillor Moglove wanted to know why such an assessment would be better than the process the government and industry want. What proof was there?  And another councillor was pleased to hear that the presenters weren't against coal mines per se: after all, there were jobs involved. The councillors wanted to hear "the other side" before then maybe asking for a "complete environmental assessment".
Excuse me?! Were these people elected by the coal mine? Don't they get
the issues at all? Isn't a "complete environmental assessment" the very
least we should demand?

Yours very sincerely,

(Published in Campbell River Mirror, October 1, 2010 and in the Campbell River Courier-Islander on October 29, under the headline, "You would think the coalmine elected city council".)

Excellent roadtrip...Part 5...heading south

After our last visit to Whitehorse three Augusts ago, we believe it rains quite a lot there.  Not so much this time, however.  At least, not until we were leaving next morning.
We did manage to replenish our supplies, not at the Superstore, which was having a "no sales tax" special and was consequently attended by the entire population of southern Yukon; not at the SuperValu, which turned out to have closed its doors, leaving only a sign; but at the Extra Foods, where we met Peter, whose place (well, his and Johanna's; they're the only people we know in Whitehorse) we'd just left.  He was doing the same thing.  The liquor store, the next stop, turned out to be very competent and very expensive.  (Maybe we should stop complaining about BC prices, although the private store we found in Fort St John was equally pricey, and had far less selection.)
A little later, while I was blasting the van's truly magnificent mud collection, accumulated on both the Taylor and Dempster highways, at a carwash, Sandy, as is her wont, engaged the attendant in conversation.  Turns out he's not local first nations; turns out he's from the Philippines, a nurse, supervising the carwash seven days a week while he gets his papers and qualifications sorted out.
There must be a message in  there somewhere.
Next day was the Alaska Highway to Watson Lake:

Jake's Corner...





 ...Teslin...

...near Swift River:  the continental divide, separating the water that flows west via the Yukon from water that ultimately flows north via the Mackenzie.






We had decided against the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, because last time we traveled that way we saw very little of the scenery.  It rained pretty-much constantly; the forecast threatened a repeat.  Paul and Shirley hadn't done either before, so we didn't need to chance it improving. We heard later, when we picked up the CBC in Fort Nelson, that we'd made the right choice, as the Stewart-Cassiar had closed because of an accident near Dease Lake for a day, just about the time we would have been there.

So we followed the Liard River...

...took in the Liard Hotsprings...

...and Muncho Lake...

...plus got lucky enough to see caribou, strolling along the road between Summit Lake and Tetsa River.




The road between Fort Nelson and Fort St John is becoming a bit familiar, but it was raining, so there wasn't much to see anyway.

That said, it was a little disconcerting to see signs on many of the side-roads advising people not to stop, due to the possibility of poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas escapes.

From Fort St John we traveled west along the Peace River valley

to Hudson's Hope,

king gethig campground, hudson's hope

lake above the dam

taking in the Peace Canyon Dam,

and then south to 10-Mile Lake and, from there, home.

Excellent roadtrip...Part 4...Gold country

The Taylor Highway, open only in summer, leaves the Alaska Highway at Tetlin Junction near Tok, climbs to Chicken, then carries on to Eagle, on the Yukon River.  From the Eagle turnoff to the Canadian border it becomes Boundary Spur Road, and then, in the Yukon, the aptly-named Top of the World Highway.  This takes you into Dawson City, also on the Yukon River. 
When Nora traveled this route in the summer of 2004, she couldn't actually see most of it because of the smoke, and the fire evidence still remains for as far as you can see, on both sides of the road, until just before Chicken, where we camped for the night. 

 That night I wrote in our trip record: 

When we came to our campsite, our next door neighbour was inclined to small talk. No, we weren't planning any gold panning; we were headed for Canada in the morning. He had considered going to Canada, but gave up when they wouldn't let him take his guns. Yes, we agreed, we Canadians are very particular about that. We don't encourage people to arm themselves. So how did we protect ourselves? How about you don't have to if people don't carry guns. Well, apparently crime runs rampant when the citizenry isn't armed, and our claim that the Canadian crime and murder rates are considerably lower than those of the States clearly cannot be true.

Next morning early we lined up to take part in the morning convoy, 

convoy lineup

which took us across the road repairs needed to fix the numerous July and August washouts and left us at a resort just before the border.
That's when the route lives up to its name, becomes truly spectacular.

customs

The famous "Fortymile" Caribou herd was reputedly in the area; in fact, they were so close to the highway that the hunt had closed the day before we got there after only one day.  However, we didn't catch even a glimpse.
We did see a pair of owls up close, however.

northern hawk owl

Dawson City was starting to slow down from the summer

ferry across the yukon

 as we arrived; the hotel employees  in the house across from Kathy's were having their final party.

downtown

most photographed house in dawson

But there was still lots to see and we even got a shot of the town from the Dome, which had seemed unlikely until we got up there. 
It rained buckets in the night.

from the dome

Next day we drove the forty kilometers south to the Dempster,

then seventy to the Tombstone Territorial Campground, where we found one of the last spots.  This is the edge of the tundra, and the vegetation, where the ground isn't flat, hence boggy, is no handicap to walking. 

I walked up the hill across the road to a ridge, and followed it for a couple of kilometers before running out of time.  I'd guess you could spend days...The others did a trail along the North Klondike, easily accessible from the campground.

The next day we went to the 100km mark, where there is no question about being on the tundra. 
And then the clouds moved in, so we elected to head south.
Back to the Klondike Highway...

...with views of the Tintina Trench...

pelly crossing

...and views of the Whitehorse Trench...

...and Lake Leberge, from the Territorial Campground there...


...and ending in Whitehorse, where it joins the Alaska Highway.

miles canyon, yukon river

Excellent roadtrip...Part 3...the Alaska leg

Haines, Alaska prides itself on its scenery (the postcards look good, but thanks to cloud just off the deck we didn't see much above 100 meters while we were there) and, judging from the signs around town, the fact that it isn't on the cruise ship itinerary.

haines from pier

Indeed, it appears to the casual tourist to be a pretty normal small Pacific coastal community, with the exception that it has Fort Seward, reputedly the first permanent American army base in Alaska, built in 1904.

fort seward

These days many of the houses are being maintained by private owners, and that seems to be working just fine.

Haines also has a fine Tlingit pole, the only public Tlingit art I recall seeing on this trip.

tlingit pole

siltat lookout

We crawled into the mountains and, shortly after we were back in BC, the clouds lifted.

haines summit

As Sandy said at the time, the views of Tatshenshini-Alsek and later Kluane from the Haines Road are worth the entire trip: spectacular high country, amazing mountains.  Tourists who do this before going to look at the Rockies might well find the Rockies less impressive than had they done them first.

kluane rv park

We met two other Westfalias in Kluane RV Park in Haines Junction, one  a newish conversion of a Sprinter from Colorado, the other a Vanagon, considerably modified by its California owner.

The temperature dropped to minus 1 that night (the coldest night on this trip) and taking down the bug tent in the morning, while it was still covered in hoar frost, made us wish we had had the foresight to do it before turning in.

There's a sign at the Visitor Information Centre in Beaver Creek, Yukon which explains that the section from Axehandle Lake to Beaver Creek was the most difficult section to construct of the entire Alaska Highway, because of the muskeg on permafrost.

Apparently it took the builders some time to figure out that if they scraped away the soil, the permafrost melted, and then you were towing vehicles out with bulldozers.  Eventually they learned to protect the permafrost by piling more material on, and then covering that with corduroy.  There are still sections of the original corduroy road left, under the blacktop.  Large sections of the blacktop heave every spring, making close attention to driving this part of the road even more imperative than usual.

Tok is in Alaska.  Besides at least one most acceptable RV Village, it has some 3300 people and a courthouse. 

tok courthouse

Which looks just like the washrooms of the RV Village and is located right next door, as Sandy found out when looking for the latter. Fortunately the Assistant Magistrate set her straight, or we might have had to extract her from an unfortunate mistake.
And Tok is, in fact, pronounced "toke". The Alaskans we met were all able to say this without smirking, which is perhaps because they're Republicans by massive preference, and thus have never felt the need for an alternate pronunciation.

The part between Tok and Glenallen is undistinguished if you cannot see the promised vistas of the Wrangell-St Elias National Park.

copper-gulkana confluence

We did catch occasional views of the Copper River, which the road apparently follows.  And we did see our first moose here, not far from Gulkana, but didn't get a photo: no shoulders on the highway.  We've noticed this, very uncommon on Canadian roads, is the norm on most --maybe all-- the secondary highways of the USA.  At least, in the parts we've explored.

nelchina glacier

After Glenallen it quickly gets mountainous and we were able, in spite of the occasional drizzle, to get views of both the Nelchina and Matanuska glaciers.

matanuska glacier

That drizzle had turned to rain by the time we arrived at our campsite in Palmer.

We were a bit worried that we wouldn't find a place, as the Alaska State Fair, held at the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer, was in full progress.  But maybe thanks to the rain, maybe thanks to Palmer's relative proximity to Anchorage, this proved to be no problem.

devil's club

 We didn't much take to Palmer, reputedly a hotbed of Alaskan agriculture during the 30's, but it does have a large Fred Meyer grocery store with a very adequate wine selection, so we stocked up.  We didn't see any evidence of agriculture except the occasional hay field and a sign pointing to a muskox farm.

The next day it was off to Anchorage, just 35 miles down the divided highway.  It's an American city, and American cities, even those on the fringes of the civilized world, all seem to follow a common development plan, so we followed the freeway right through the middle until we could turn off on the road to Landslide Park, which commemorates the 1964 Good Friday earthquake (9.2) and tsunami that destroyed much of Anchorage's infrastructure, wiped out a number of nearby villages, and killed 131 people directly.  This is of more than academic interest to people living in our part of BC, as it was a subduction zone quake, the kind we're expecting to have here sometime in the next 300 years.  The commemoration is a concrete "totem", depicting blocks of land separating, which pretty much sums up the science of the event, if not the emotional context. 

anchorage

Landslide Park is beside the airport, and planes taking off sounded as if they were directly overhead.  By that time, however, they were high enough that we couldn't see them from the ground.  Happily, the fog lifted just long enough for a telephoto shot of downtown Anchorage.
We headed south from Anchorage along Turnagain Arm (apparently Captain Cook thought the Kenai Peninsula was an island, and rather than attempt to navigate through the glacier at its head, turned around and exited the area via Cook Inlet) as far as Girdwood, one of the villages wiped out by the tsunami, and presently the site of a ski hill.

mt mckinley?

When the weather permits it is apparently possible to see both Mt Foraker and Mt McKinley in Denali National Park from Landslide Park, but we didn't see anything until we got to the viewpoint at Denali State Park.  And that was it.

broad pass

However, We didn't feel cheated.  The areas of both Broad Pass, before Cantwell, and Nenana River Canyon, right after the entrance to the park, are gorgeous, made even more spectacular by the fall colours.

nenana canyon

The road follows the Nenana River until it flows into the Tanana River, and then follows that upriver to Fairbanks. 
The Tanana is navigable, and is still used to transport goods to remote villages.

tanana plain

As it approaches Fairbanks, the road climbs onto a ridge.  This provides views of what used to be, during the last ice age, an ice-free corridor that stretched from Siberia to the Yukon.
In the late summer Fairbanks doesn't look very much like the northern city it undoubtedly is.  This may be due to its typical North American city infrastructure,and the fact that it appears to take up much more space than its population (36,000 in town; area population 100,000) would suggest: it has the road system of a city many times its size.  It also has large army and air force bases; it's probably not a coincidence that the highway reverts back to typical at the end of the airport runway. 
There are signs on the highway running alongside the base prohibiting parking, stopping, or photographing in the area.  So we didn't.

tanana river

From Fairbanks to Tok is miles and miles of taiga, punctuated by the occasional river that meanders (however briskly) through its bed. 

gerstle river

alaska pipeline

We had always associated Alaska with mountains; it turns out that large areas are flat as the proverbial, and filled with the most delightful, and sometimes colourful, muskeg.

taylor highway