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magazine / ma00
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March/April 2000 issue |
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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
Vancouver’s fatal attraction
FOUL WEATHER and fearsome topography make short work of the unprepared in
this country. You don’t have to live in Canada for very long before you understand,
at some basic level, that not putting snow tires on the car or failing to
bundle up for the cold can be fatal. So imagine a city of some two million
within stunning view of a range of snow-capped peaks - Vancouver - and imagine
how many feckless hikers succumb every year to the temptations of those mountains.
For our cover story in this issue, we invited Vancouver writer and hiker Shawn
Blore to spend some time with the volunteers of the North Shore Rescue squad
(right, on a training exercise). Get lost or trapped in an avalanche or injured
in the mountains and they’ll likely be the people who haul you out. They know
all about how the beauty of the slopes blinds the blithe, coaxing them upward
often clad in little more than sandals and T-shirts.
Last winter a record snowfall in the mountains coupled with a rapid melt
resulted in a series of avalanches that claimed two lives. Blore writes about
one avalanche that left four people badly injured and one dead. His story
takes us out to the Grouse Grind, a trail that rises as steeply as a staircase.
Many of the hikers using it that day were less prepared than they would have
been for a trip to the beach.
"The fact is," says Blore, "no amount of education is going to
make any difference. Despite the accident, nothing’s changed. I was up there
two weeks ago and, when I was coming down on the tram, I heard a girl say, ’I
used to carry a pack but you get up and down so fast, why bother?’ All she had
was her Lycra and a water bottle." This on a forested mountain trail that
begins at about 300 metres above sea level and shoots straight up to 1,100 metres.
PART OF BEING prepared is checking the weather before you head out.
For most of us that means turning on the radio or TV. Yet one of the easiest
means of doing your own forecasting is by looking at the sky. Clouds are visible
manifestations of what Mother Nature is planning. For our poster feature in
this issue, photo editor Margaret Williamson and photo researcher Susan Fisher
pulled in cloud images from sources far and wide. Then, contributing editor
Dane Lanken talked to meteorologists about how to read them. After you’ve
read his text and pondered the photos, you’ll know as much about clouds and
what they portend as most television weather forecasters.
FIFTEEN TRAPPERS raced to the Thousand Islands area last summer in
response to an emergency call sent out to them by Rick Rosatte, a scientist
with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources. A deadly strain of raccoon
rabies had crossed the Canada-U.S. border along the St. Lawrence River, and the trappers
were the first line of defence in a desperate effort to stop its spread. Toronto
writer Scott Gardiner met members of the response team while doing research
on trapping for his forthcoming novel, The Dominion of Wyley McFadden.
For reasons that aren’t clearly understood, says Gardiner, 85 percent of all
rabies cases in Canada occur in Ontario. Over the past 30 years, the province’s
Ministry of Natural Resources has developed innovative techniques for immunizing
the province’s foxes. But raccoon rabies is much more worrisome. The possibility
of raccoons, masters of the midnight trash-can raid, transmitting rabies to
humans is greater, and there are an estimated one million raccoons in southern
Ontario alone. Gardiner’s story reveals the complexity of the threat and the
staggering costs the province will incur over the next decade as it attempts
to control the spread of this lethal disease to the most densely populated
and largest urban areas of Canada.
— Rick Boychuk
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