EDITOR,
Regarding the proposed Sea to Sky Gondola project: as a longtime frequent backcountry user, I would like to present a few observations. First of all, contrary to what many people somehow believe, access to the backcountry in the lower B.C. Coast Range has decreased, not increased, in the last three or so decades. This is largely due to the deactivation of logging roads because of liability issues. The upper Shannon Creek road, which once serviced a network of spurs in the area that the proposed gondola will access, is a case in point. This road was blocked off with a barrier of large boulders after an unfortunate single-vehicle accident in which several teens were killed some years ago. The Shannon Creek road at one time provided access to a fine recreational area that included Sky Pilot and Mount Habrich. The area that will be accessed by the proposed gondola is not a pristine wilderness area; in has been logged extensively before and in fact was once relatively accessible by road. Dick Culbert's 1974 climbing guidebook had a subsection devoted to this area.
There seems to be a body of opinion out there that backcountry users are overrunning B.C.'s wilderness areas. People of this opinion should actually go out there and look. My wife and I are backcountry users most weekends from spring to late fall and about 90 per cent of the time we encounter no other human beings. Perhaps some people form such a distorted idea of the backcountry after visiting choke points like the Chief, Black Tusk, and Diamond Head trails. The reason that easy access points like these are so severely overrun is that there are so few of them. Without a sturdy off-road vehicle, local knowledge, and the grit for tenacious bushwhacking (I'll be too old for this someday), most of the objectives my wife and I have visited between here and the South Chilcotin would have been inaccessible.
I would like to offer that if Squamish wants to be the Outdoor Recreation Capital of Canada then it has to offer some access to outdoor recreation. Otherwise we will just have to keep driving our environmentally unfriendly commuter mobiles to Vancouver or Whistler for jobs. Or we can close down the town and return it to its natural habitat.
Eduard Fischer
Garibaldi Highlands
