072 Saying goodbye to the father of Global warming, Canmore’s Nuclear Bunker, New Train Service to the Mountains, and watching for the bears to emerge

This week we say goodbye to Wallace Smith Broeker, the groundbreaking climatologist that coined the term “global warming’. I also look at a cold war bunker near Canmore, Alberta that forms a stark reminder of a more dangerous time in our history. A proposed new transit or train route to the Rockies offered more details and finally, it’s time to keep our eyes out for the first bears to emerge from their dens…and with that said, let’s get to it.

Click the play button above to listen to this episode

The Father of Climate Science, Wallace Smith Broeker Passes Away

As a lover of science and nature, there are a few individuals that have achieved superstar status in their chosen fields. As the world begins to look more and more into the challenges of warming climates and rising temperatures, it’s easy to forget the people that first raised the alarm.

On February 18, 2019, we lost a giant in the science of global warming. In fact, we lost the man who coined the term.

Wallace Smith Broeker was the first to connect increases in carbon dioxide from fossil fuels to rising global temperatures. In 1975, when he first coined the term “global warming”, some scientists were predicting the opposite, a cooling trend.

He was quoted as saying:

“by dumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are conducting an experiment that could have devastating effects.”

At times, he was a lone voice focussing the world’s attention on the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions. So much of today’s science is built upon his work. He has impacted every aspect of climate science and as we look to the future, it is ever critical to remember the pioneers that helped to lead us on the pathway to learning.

He will be missed, but his legacy will live on in the research being done all over the world to further our understanding of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and in trying to look ahead at what some of the implications will be in our future.

We have lost a giant in the scientific community. Will we learn anything from his warning? Next up, Canmore secret nuclear bunker

Canmore’s Abandoned Nuclear Bunker – an Important Part of Cold War History

Within a few minutes drive of Canmore is a cold war bunker that serves as a reminder of more dangerous times when the Russians and Americans were actively threatening each other with nuclear war.

I was born just two weeks before the Berlin Wall was erected. For most of my life, I knew a world where the threat of nuclear war was a very real one. I remember my Mom stockpiling canned goods in the basement…just in case.

When the wall came down in 1991, I, like many people in my generation, was glued to the TV to watch the first people cross through its crumbling facade. I’ve lived in Canmore since before the 1988 Winther Olympics, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was a sign of a new era, an era where nuclear war was no longer a real and present danger.

What I didn’t know at the time, was that within a few miles of Canmore there was a nuclear bunker built during times of more heightened tensions, but later abandoned before it was completed.

In the 60s, the thought of nuclear war was omnipresent. Schools had “duck and cover” drills where students were instructed to hide under their desks.

Government brochures showed us how to build a makeshift shelter in our basements. Sirens were places all around communities so that loud warning announcements could be sounded in the case of a real nuclear emergency. If you’d like to hear an actual announcement that was stored and ready to broadcast in Edmonton, Alberta in the case of an attack, The following is an actual recording of an announcement that would have sounded in Edmonton, Alberta in the case of a real nuclear attack. Please be careful where you play it as it could be alarming if overheard by someone not aware that it is a relic of the past.

Emergency bunkers were a critical part of infrastructure planning, however, they weren’t for the average citizen. Some were for politicians, and others to hold municipal officials charged with dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear blast. Edmonton still has one of these shelters located some 5km east of West Edmonton Mall.

Perhaps the most famous Canadian bunker, the Diefenbunker, was commissioned by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1959. This 9,290 square metre or 100,000 square foot structure covered 4 levels and was built to withstand a 5 megaton nuclear blast from 1.8 km distance.

The Diefenbunker was finished in 1961 and operated continuously for 32 years, finally being decommissioned in 1994. It stored enough food and supplies to support 535 people for 30 days. It is now a National Historic Site.

The bunker near Canmore is in no way as dramatic as the Diefenbunker, but it is a fascinating connection to this cold war history. While many bunkers were designed to protect people, the main goal of the bunker in Mount McGillivray, east of Canmore was to protect critical documents in the case of an attack.

Constructed by Rocky Mountain Vaults & Archives, the Calgary company received two permits from the Alberta Government for its construction. One covered the vaults, and the other was for an access road to the site.

It was the brainchild of three brothers: Stan, Joe, and Ted Rokosh. Officially they received their permits to construct the vaults in1969, but they had started the work several years early.

The company felt that there would be no safer place to store important documents then inside a mountain. According to an article in Highline Magazine by local historian Rob Alexander, the companies brochure promised:

“Here, deep inside a mountain, is the worlds near perfect archive. Physically perfect…functionally perfect, built for maximum protection against any form of destructive vice, from mildew to hydrogen bomb. The remarkable limestone vaults have no security limitations. They are Fireproof, floodproof, windproof, rodentproof, mildewproof, cave-in proof, bombproof, theftproof.”

It was a grand plan and would have included 5 private vaults, complete climate control, and a metre thick sliding concrete door.

The brochure continued:

“In the event of a catastrophic happening, whether localized or widespread, man-made or from natural perils, many of these data and documents must be protected and preserved in order for business in general to survive and successfully recover from any major disaster…

With this in mind, Rocky Mountain Vaults & Archives Ltd. has planned a vault storage area designed to eliminate many of the problems associated with safekeeping and industry and government in the event of a catastrophe.”

Local naturalist and geologist Ben Gadd did a survey of the remains of the bunker. The main tunnel goes almost 60 metres into the mountain wall and is essentially 3 m high and wide. You can comfortably stand up as you wander the tunnels. After you walk 34 metres beyond the entrance, a tunnel forks off to the left.

It’s this tunnel that holds the five would be vaults. Today, you can see three rooms carved into the left side of the passageway and two to the right. Each is between 9.3 and 12.3 metres deep.

The side passage runs for 47 metres before ending at a graffiti coated wall.

According to another article in the Atlas Obscura, the Rokosh brothers hoped that the Royal Bank of Canada would use the Mount McGillivray site for its banking documents, but when they chose a site in Montreal, the project ran out of financing before it was ever finished.

the site of the bunker is within Bow Valley Wildlands Provincial Park and is also listed on the Municipal Districts list of historic resources. Despite this, it is not an official national or provincially designated historic site.

Over the years it has seen its share of vandalism and often has evidence of former partiers. If you visit the vaults, please take a moment to pick up any trash that may have been left behind by less thoughtless visitors.

If you’d like to take a hike to the bunker, I’ll share a video from my YouTube page that tells you everything you need to know about the hike, and also about photographing the bunker once you arrive. Next up, should passenger trains return to Banff?

Should Passenger Rail Service be Restored to Banff?

This week, a new feasibility study was released looking into the potential for a new passenger rail or bus service linking Calgary, Canmore, Banff, and Lake Louise. Over the past few years, more and more visitors have been arriving in the mountain parks, and with them, have come increased congestion on the many park roads.

The main idea behind this study is that options for bus or train travel to the mountain parks will reduce congestion. The fact that the parks are quickly becoming overrun, is no secret. The report offers an enticing list of options.

This is an ongoing challenge in the mountain parks. Way back in Episode 4. I shared tips for avoiding the summer crowds. In Episode 29, I welcomed a number of new transit options within the Banff and Lake Louise areas. These buses between Banff and Lake Louise, as well as Lake Minnewanka, have been very well received. I have links to those episodes in the show notes at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep072.

Last year, for the 150th birthday of Canada, the Federal Government chose to make entry to the National Parks free for the entire year. This really ramped up the pressure on the Banff-Lake Louise-Jasper corridor.

This most recent study looked into developing both a commuter bus and/or train service linking Calgary, Canmore, Banff, and Lake Louise. It’s an exhaustive 300+ page document that breaks down all of the minutiae necessary to let officials determine the viability of the proposed services.

The report did find that there was potential for both services, although they would need to be heavily subsidized by the provincial government. If they launched a year-round bus service, the capital costs would vary between $8.1 and $19.6 million dollars. Operating costs would be between $4.5 and $5.8 million dollars annually.

To build a train route into the mountains using the existing Canadian Pacific Railway right of way would be spectacularly expensive. The report estimates a capital cost of $660 to 680 million dollars. Operating costs would be in the area of $13.4 to $14.3 million dollars annually based on ridership of between 220,000 and 620,000.

The Town of Banff, in particular, has been feeling the crush of ever-increasing tourism. While this is good for the businesses in the community (full-disclosure, I’m one of the tourist businesses that benefits from increased tourists), there comes a point where the experience begins to become degraded by the simple fact that the infrastructure simply can’t support the numbers of people looking to use it.

According to this report, Banff National Park has seen visitation increase by, on average, 2.6% each year since 2007. Ninety-three percent of those visitors, or some 3.89 million, come in private vehicles.

In the town of Banff, the congestion limit is 24,000 cars. In July and August, 97% of the days in Banff far exceed that limit. in 2013, the number was just 15%.

The report looked at four different scenarios based on whether buses were selected or trains.

1. A normal highway motorcoach if ridership is on the low end of estimates.
2. a double-decker coach if the numbers warrant it.
3. a C-Train like unit with sets of three cars or
4. A full-on passenger train pulled by locomotives.

The choice of any one or two of these options depends solely on the buy-in expected after much more intense market research.

One aspect that I find interesting has to do with the viability of building a completely new set of tracks all the way from Calgary to Lake Louise. When I first heard about this plan, I thought it absolute folly. After all, the same people behind this plan were also the proponents of a gondola to the gondola in Banff.

Adam and Jan Waterous are behind Liricon Capital. They currently own Mount Norquay Ski Hill and have also leased the historic Banff Train Station and 13 hectares of adjacent lands from the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Their plan is to build a huge collector parking lot here to try to reduce the number of cars adding to the congestion within the townsite, but also to make the train station a hub of all access to the town.

Now, looking at the cost of a new rail line has been estimated at between 660 and 680 million dollars. There is no way that kind of money is floating around. Surely, it would have already been done if that were the case…right?

Well, as it turns out, they already have investors willing to cover up to 700 million dollars for the capital costs of the line. I know! That blew my mind as well. The challenge would the fact that, after earnings were counted, it would need to be subsidized by between $8 and 9 million dollars each year.

Wow! That’s a big ask from the provincial government. I’m sure the investors are not going to shell out the hundreds of millions of dollars to build the rail line without a longstanding commitment to ongoing funding.

Communities like Banff, Canmore, and Lake Louise are not able to support these kinds of costs. It would have to be a provincially funded line. Do governments have that kind of money these days?

I’m not against a new rail or bus service to Banff. As an environmentalist and ecologist, anything that can provide visitors with options other than driving a car to the mountains, to me, is a good thing. The challenge in my mind is that while I see lots of talk about new options for coming to the mountains, I don’t see any disincentives to coming the old-fashioned way.

Are we actually looking into a service that will change behaviours and reduce the numbers of vehicles trying to drive Banff roads, or are we just finding another way to bring more and more people to an already overburdened landscape?

I remember, way back in the early ’90s, I was of the mind that if we just stopped building hotels, we had a natural limit to the amount of tourism that could take place in the valley. This was long before roads were running far beyond capacity.

It was a time when the number of hotel rooms provided a natural limit to the number of tourists that could experience the mountains. It was, I thought, a good thing. The sites had a large number of visitors, but each of those visitors left with fond memories.

Unfortunately, the building of hotels was about to explode. Since then, Canmore and Banff have added more and more rooms, and this has allowed the number of visitors to increase accordingly. Now, the experience for visitors is quite the opposite. I know, I’m often the one guiding them.

A few years ago I spent two and a half hours trying to get between the village of Lake Louise and the actual lake. If you’re wondering, that’s a distance of just 4.2 km. We eventually gave up at the junction with the old 1A Highway and spent the next hour and a half trying to get back to the train station.

This wasn’t an uncommon experience. I’ve also spent more than an hour simply trying to get from Sulphur Mountain Gondola to Banff Townsite. The lights at the bottom of the hill create a huge backup which can simply stop traffic.

In Lake Louise, beginning with Banff’s 150th birthday in 2017, Parks began hiring ATS Traffic to help manage the bottleneck. Their staff are charged with the difficult task of keeping the cars moving.

They’re yelled at and abused by people unhappy at being turned away from Lake Louise because there is simply no more room for additional vehicles. Despite this, they do their job and, since 2017, I have taken every opportunity I have had to say thank you to their workers because they really have done an amazing job.

Increased transit service between Banff and Lake Louise has also offered huge relief. since ATS first arrived on the scene, I haven’t had a repeat of my 2.5-hour epic trying to cover just a few miles.

The challenge though, again, is nothing is being done to reduce numbers. All of the efforts are focused on reducing the congestion on the roads, but not a single initiative has been directed towards finding a balance between visitor growth and visitor experience.

The following video, taken at Peyto Lake in 2016 shows an absolute crush of people. In 35 years of guiding I’ve never seen anything like it…but I will see it again.

We are at a point in the Mountain Parks where we need to begin to de-market them, and we’re not alone. Parks across the mountain west, on both sides of the border, are feeling the crush of ever-increasing visitation. Whether you’re talking about Yellowstone or Banff, visitor experiences are being constantly eroded by the simple fact that the visit does not match the marketing.

The idyllic scene on the brochure has no resemblance to the endless masses of tourists and Instagrammers perched on every single prominent point making it impossible to get that perfect photo.

I’ve been a guide and a photographer for a very long time. Years ago, I worked as a photographer for Travel Alberta. I still make part of my living by selling my photography. Images like those in this video don’t help marketing efforts. Tourism agencies want pristine landscapes with a couple or a family group taking in unobstructed views.

That just isn’t the reality awaiting tourists coming to the Mountain Parks this summer, or any time in the foreseeable future. From the very early days of this podcast, I’ve been talking about the need for the various levels of government to recognize that certain destinations were either at or exceeding their practical capacity.

Services like Trip Advisor play an oversized role in the global travel market. If more and more visitors to the mountain parks say negative things about their experience, it may not take long before we see visitors drawn to other, less sacrificed landscapes.

From Banff and Jasper’s earliest days tourism has been their mainstay. There comes a time when we, as communities, need to begin to make some hard choices. There will always be organizations that are focused on the dollar, and they will always oppose these moves.

We’re facing an existential crisis at the moment. What kind of destination do we want to be? This is our last chance to make decisions towards a sustainable future.

Harvey Locke is another long-time local that has been calling for a moratorium on marketing. Last August, he told the Calgary Herald that Banff needed a holiday from tourists.

As I have been saying since the beginning of this podcast, Harvey told the Herald:

“It’s time, he said, to seriously consider tightly controlling and even capping the number of visitors to certain popular sites…he continued

“We’ve reached the carrying capacity not only from an ecological point of view but from a pleasure of experience standpoint,”

I’ve put a link to the Herald story in the show notes for this episode.

What I would call for is a complete re-examination of what we as mountain people want to see for our future.

I’ve been shooting more and more YouTube videos lately, and it has also made me reflect on where the mountain west seems to be moving. I worry about the Whistlerization of the Bow Valley with development becoming the primary driver for community wealth rather than the tradition of tourism.

It’s time that we as a community make some hard decisions. No-one in Parks Canada wants to be the guy…the guy who makes the hard decision to put a cap on tourism. Unfortunately, someone has to be the guy (or girl) that makes the hard choice.

Unfortunately, we have a funding model, that ties the parks funding to the gate revenues. This is like tying the budget of the RCMP to the number of fines they can issue. It’s an absolute folly that makes it almost impossible for park managers to make decisions based on their stated goals – ecological integrity.

The only decision that matches their mandate is to reduce the actual number of visitors to the mountain parks. That would allow ecosystems to respond, and give wildlife a little breathing space.

There are many parks around the world that limit the number of visitors. We can examine a diversity of models to choose the one that best matches our landscape and its carrying capacity.

I’m all for a train, or even a bus service to the mountain parks, but only if it comes with some mechanism to limit the total number of tourists. We can’t continue to focus all of the marketing dollars towards more and more people. The landscape can’t support it and the visitors won’t stand for it. Eventually, they’ll just go somewhere else…somewhere that cares about their experience.

Bears beginning to wake up soon

I spent several hours shooting a video about winter photography last weekend at -34C. Within 30 minutes two of my small VLogging cameras batteries had died. Luckily I had a huge supply of fresh ones carefully warmed in my pocket.

At this time of year, we usually think of the bear blissfully sleeping away the frigid temperatures in their dens. In reality, that’s not always the case. Our big male bears, bears like Grizzly 122 also known as the Boss, will soon be beginning to stir.

Grizzly 122 is one of the most important and most dominant male bears in the central Rockies. He, along with his rival, a bear known as Split Lip, are the two patriarchs of the front ranges at the moment.

Any day now, we’ll begin to hear reports of the Boss being spotted along the Bow Valley Parkway, likely near the railroad tracks, as he makes his first forays out of his winter den for the 2019 season.

It’s always the big males that emerge from their dens first. There’s not a lot of food for them to eat so they stay fairly lethargic as they wait for the earliest signs of spring. The day-to-day temperatures will impact when they actually emerge, but regardless of the temperatures, they should be emerging soon.

On the short-term, the Boss may find train killed carcasses to help satiate his winter hunger as he waits for the spring to properly arrive.

When I was filming last weekend, the idea of bears waking up was the furthest thing from my mind. I was thinking of my most beautiful lady, cozily curled up in our warm bed. However, for the Boss, it’s just about uppy time. He might stay curled up for a little longer based on this year’s conditions, but he’ll also be anxious to put his stamp on his turf as the temperatures warm up.

Every spring, locals are on the lookout for him. Forget the groundhog, in the mountain parks, grizzly 122 is the true harbinger of spring.

If you’re lucky enough to see an early season bear, please realize they are trying to conserve calories at the moment. Once they leave their den, they’ll continue to survive on their fat reserves with the exception of the occasional morsel they’re able to discover.

The Boss won’t be on any major walkabouts investigating his vast range. He’ll be hanging around hoping to sniff out a rotting carcass or two. Thankfully, while he has been sleeping, trains have been regularly retiring the occasional elk, deer, or moose. This is what will sustain him in the early part of the season.

As a mountain person, I orient my year not by groundhogs, but by these patriarchs. But if I were the Boss, I’d hang around my den a few more weeks this year. This winter is neither fit for human or bear.