The Flathead Conundrum

The following was published in the Cranbrook Daily Townsman.

And they called it Paradise, I don’t know why.
Call some place Paradise, kiss it good-bye.
- The Eagles, from The Last Resort.

A couple trips to Calgary lately have taken me past the main road leading to the Flathead valley. If you don’t know which road it is, find yourself a map and look it up. I’m not going to tell you.

I half expected a large sign to be erected at the turn-off from Highway 3 directing travelers to nirvana. The news lately seems to have been all Flathead, all the time.

Wildsight has been targeting the valley for a while now. Not content with a moratorium on mineral and petroleum exploration and development, their intent remain firmly set on a National Park.

National Geographic has added to the siren call of the Flathead, highlighting the area in its Crown of the Continent campaign encouraging people from all over to come visit the Serengeti of the North.

Is a national park really in the valley’s best interest? While there may be merits to that extent of formal protection, I have trouble supporting it. The Flathead is advertised by park proponents as ‘wild’ or an ‘intact watershed,’ implying there is no significant development within the river’s drainage basin in Canada.

At times, forestry activity has been heavy – chasing beetle epidemics in the 1970s and 80s – but trees grow back much quicker than mountains ripped apart for coal or minerals. Even a giant geezly clearcut looks all soft and fuzzy from a distance within a few years of replanting.

Ultimately, it’s the Flathead’s wildness that appeals to so many. And if the Flathead is still considered wild after a century or more of being ‘unprotected’, then clearly something is going right.

What is going right is there are few people there. There are no towns and the few roads are unmarked, largely unknown and often in miserable shape.

A National Park could very well bring pressure from Ottawa to plant a large brown road sign with a stylized beaver on it somewhere in the Elk Valley (watch for one pointing out Waterton Lakes National Park heading into Pincher Creek). Will there be pressure to pave the road? Put in formal campsites or a visitor centre? Why take the chance?

The shifting sands of Parks Canada Agency management adds little security. In the early 1990’s, Parks was moved to Heritage Canada with the slogan ‘Parks are for People.’ The notion of environmental protection was a distant whim. Then later in the decade, the tide turned. Parks were moved back to the Department of Environment and a national panel on Ecological Integrity shifted the focus back to environment. More recently, Parks Canada Agency operates almost entirely as its own entity and has swung back to the Parks are for People focus with environmental emphasis downgraded. A new park arising under this mandate is very likely to have significant pressures to be marketed for its vast recreational opportunities.

The Flathead is often cited as supporting the greatest density of inland grizzly bears in North America, one result of long-term research by Dr. Bruce McLellan with BC Ministry of Forests and Range. One of Dr. McLellan’s key findings of what limits grizzly bears? Traffic volume. Not so much the road itself, but how much traffic is on it. Gravel’s better than paved, but the best thing for grizzly bears is lack of human presence. Advertising the Flathead as a destination will not help the local grizzly population.

To me, the best option for protecting the Flathead is designating much of it as a Wildlife Management Area (WMA). This would restrict development, but maintain most, if not all the activities currently taking place in the valley.

One the best examples of selecting a WMA over a National Park is the Columbia Wetlands WMA running from Canal Flats to Donald. Local proponents for the WMA wanted to retain hunting and fishing opportunities and felt the full protection of a National Park was not only unnecessary, but unwanted. The leader of that push was the late Ian Jack of Invermere. His job? Chief Naturalist with Kootenay National Park.

So to those seeking greater protection of the Flathead, I ask that you consider more broadly accepted options that may well achieve the ultimate goal most of us want for the Flathead: a wild valley. And please, stop advertising paradise before we kiss it good bye.