Over the Hills and Far Away

by Rob Collister

  Yet the last three or four years has seen the growth of yet another source of pressure, a fresh invasion of the mountains. I am referring to YOP courses and the like. A good idea in themselves, they have been the salvation of many a struggling centre and the making of many an entrepreneur, so criticism is unlikely to be popular. But many youngsters attend only grudgingly, because otherwise they would not be paid, and the prime purpose of such courses is to provide a residential experience, which could be obtained effectively almost anywhere away from home. The educational benefit to largely unappreciative youngsters does not justify the environmental damage to our national parks and other wild places. In Snowdonia, the litter on summits has, if anything, decreased, but, through the clear waters of every lake, tin cans glitter and broken glass makes bathing hazardous. High campsites are betrayed from afar by rings of stones; closer inspection reveals a wider circle of blue Marvel sachets and poly bags, and in all probability a pile of rubbish shoved under a boulder. Even underground, in old mine workings, a powerful sense of recent history is diminished by a trail of sweet papers and torch batteries. Still, long crocodiles of bright orange anoraks and clusters of orange tents destroy the delicate but important illusion that the landscape is empty, or nearly so. And the impact of many an outdoor experience, be it on a mountain top or crag, or in a gorge or mine, is reduced by overcrowding as local centres and, increasingly, inner city groups, flock to the same venues. Some blame must be attached to leaders and instructors. But, really, the situation has been brought about by bringing youngsters, often against their will, to places that they care nothing for.

  There is no doubt that for many an unemployed school leaver, the only prospect for positive living lies in a hobby or sport, and the potential of outdoor activities here is enormous. But expensive residentials are not the most effective way to spark off an enthusiasm, let alone sustain it. Rather than use the mountains as an outdoor gymnasium as we do at present, outdoor pursuits, adventure activities, call them what you will, should start in the city where they will cost relatively little, can involve greater numbers than heretofore, and can allow for continuity, progression and involvement with a project. Those who enjoy this introduction can progress to activities, with or without the acquiring of skills, in the ‘urban fringe’, the countryside accessible from the city. A visit to Snowdonia, or the Lakes, could be something of a climax to a period of training for those who have become hooked on a particular sport, or on the outdoors in general. It does not automatically follow, but often an awareness of the natural world develops alongside the acquisition of skills and a broadening of experience. Therein lies my hope, both for the mountains and for the youngsters concerned.

  Instead of the one-off introductory courses that are their bread and butter, LEA centres would play a more useful role providing advanced courses for groups, not necessarily from schools, who already have the basic skills and really want to be there. Less than 1 per cent of Birmingham’s schoolchildren ever visit Ogwen Cottage. Most of that 1 per cent enjoy themselves, but only a very small proportion appreciate the mountain setting and the personal and social development that undoubtedly does take place, even in a week, could equally well occur nearer home. Terry Nicholls has been making this point for a long time and putting his ideas into practice in Sunderland. Others are now doing the same in London, Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and no doubt many other places. The Community Leaders’ courses, instigated by Roger Orgill, which we have been running at Plas y Brenin for the last four years, must have added impetus to this movement, though being in the heart of Snowdonia they have always been anomalous, and would seem to be no longer necessary.

  Such an approach is not elitist. It makes both the excitement and the multifaceted education of outdoor pursuits available to far greater numbers yet makes it more likely that our fragile and dwindling inheritance of wild country is used by those who value it and treat it with respect. I am not suggesting that mountains be preserved for the privileged middle class or for a mountaineering elite. On the contrary, I see them being more heavily used than ever. What I am suggesting is that we try to bring youngsters to the hills who are already on the way to being canoeists, climbers or hillwalkers, and confine introductory adventure education to the neighbourhood of school or home, which is not, in fact, a great limitation. Wild and beautiful places are important for the well-being of our society: that is the raison d’être for our national parks. My concern is for the inner city as much as for the mountain. What we are doing at the moment is of negligible benefit to the one and disastrous for the other.

  – Chapter 24 –

  BEAUTIFUL BRITISH COLUMBIA (1990)

  STOP TREE ROT – BUGGER A HUGGER. The words blared out in strident yellow paint from a bridge near Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We were approaching an environmental frontline where feelings run high on both sides and protesters have not been afraid to step over the legal line into civil disobedience. Conflict between loggers, for whom trees are simply timber to be cut down, and environmentalists, who are prepared to hug a tree to keep the chainsaws at bay, has become endemic in British Columbia – Beautiful British Columbia as the registration plate of every vehicle proclaims.

  For over a hundred years the logging companies have had carte blanche to cut down whatever they like, and have done so in a staggeringly profligate way. When an area is clear cut it is routine for fifty per cent and sometimes as much as eighty per cent of the felled trees to be abandoned as less than perfect. Forests have been regarded as a resource to be plundered rather than carefully husbanded. Although theoretically all felled areas should have been replanted, this has only happened on a small scale and in the more public areas, until very recently. The forestry companies preferred to leave regeneration to nature on the assumption that there would always be more virgin forest to cut into; and government officials seemed happy to turn a blind eye to the fact.

  Now, there is a massive replanting scheme underway – three billion seedlings a year the Forestry Service claims – but it will be many years before there are new forests or, rather, plantations, to harvest on the scale the logging companies are used to. In the meanwhile they are resorting to heli-logging inaccessible areas and developing ways of using aspen and cotton-wood, formerly regarded as weeds. But the main effort is still to mop up what areas of virgin timber remain.

  Forestry is big business in British Columbia. Undeniably, it provides a lot of jobs and is the province’s most profitable export. Nobody disputes the importance of timber in the provincial economy. It is the destructive manner in which logging is carried out and the lack of long-term planning that are causing conflict. The logging companies form an extremely powerful lobby which spends eight to ten million dollars a year ensuring that its political presence is felt. Even bigger sums are spent on publicity campaigns like the primetime TV advertisement which insists that ‘Forests are Forever’. Over the last few years, logging companies have been combining into a few giant cartels. The largest of these are themselves subsidiaries of multi-national corporations not noted for their environmental concern. Recently, for the first time, these companies have been meeting a resistance so vocal and so effective in eliciting public support that the provincial government has been forced to listen. The resistance comes from an alliance of environmentalists, who value wilderness for itself and as a spiritual resource; Indians, for whom areas like Meare’s Island and the Stein valley are traditional sacred sites; and other local residents who see the future lying as much with tourism as with logging, fishing or mining. In the case of Meare’s Island, the campaign was based on the little town of Tofino and after a protracted struggle lasting years the island was saved.

  As we chugged across Clayoquot Sound in the elderly M.V. Superstud, piloted by Johnny Tom, a local Indian, we were travelling in the same direction as the environmental running battle. For the activists of Tofino the centre of attention has now shifted northwards to Sulphur Passage. The Friends
of Clayoquot Sound are campaigning for ‘sustainable development’ of the last big tract of virgin rainforest left in the region. With the backing of the Tofino Chamber of Commerce and a high proportion of local residents, they would like to see selective logging, preserving certain areas, taking only prime timber out of others so that the forest remains a community of different species at different stages of growth rather than the sterile plantations which are all too familiar in Britain. Clear felling, where permitted, should be in small blocks at a time to reduce visual impact and erosion, with careful replanting afterwards. They argue that clear-cutting will not only replace a beautiful wilderness with a hideously scarred landscape that takes years to recover, even partially, and will certainly not be a tourist attraction, but also causes soil erosion and landsliding which will endanger the spawning grounds of salmon and affect fish farms out in the Sound. What the Friends of Clayoquot Sound are proposing is a multiple-use plan for the area which will be in the long-term interests of all its inhabitants.

  The logging company concerned are not interested. Selective logging is less profitable than clear-cutting and they are accustomed to a Tree Farm License giving them all the rights (but none of the responsibilities) of ownership. The two biggest companies made a clear profit of 500 million dollars in 1987. One cannot help suspecting that their intransigence stems more from a reluctance to be held accountable than from concern over a loss in revenue. It is easier to feel sympathy for the individual logger who fears that his livelihood and way of life may be at stake.

  When we stepped off the bow of the Superstud on to a rocky shore at the head of Bedwell Inlet, and the throb of the engine died away, we realised with something of a shock that we were now totally on our own. True, this was not pristine rainforest. The valley was logged twenty-five years ago and the tree-cover is mostly alder and aspen. But it is a remote area from which there is no easy escape and no means of contacting the outside world. Our only way out was through the mountains by a route much of which was untracked and an unknown quantity.

  Over the next four days we worked our way up the Bedwell river and across the southern portion of Strathcona Provincial Park to Buttle Lake. At first we followed the old logging road, overgrown but still easier going than the scrub on either side. Squidgy, purple droppings full of berry pips were everywhere, but we never actually saw a bear. When the road petered out we climbed 800 metres up a rocky gully to escape a fearsome tangle of devil’s club thorn, thimbleberry and slide alder, a plant so flattened by snow that its stems grow parallel to a slope, instead of upward. ‘This is meant to be a hike,’ I told myself more than once, as I edged gingerly across the top of a waterfall, a thirty-metre drop below, trusting to handfuls of heather or blueberry twigs, or balanced precariously up a steep slope of hard-packed conglomerate. Twice we had to use the rope to protect a rock pitch. I had been reluctant to take a rope, but my brother-in-law John knew better. At the top, we emerged into the alpine zone, a region of streams and waterfalls and little lakes in rocky hollows, in one of which John swam before breakfast while I shivered and was content to take photographs. And there were flowers everywhere, meadows bright with colour even in late September, when we had expected none: blue of lupins and homely harebell, yellow of hawkweed, monkey flower and sedum, purple and orange asters, red and yellow Indian Paintbrush, and many others. Once, we found ourselves breaking all the rules, wandering about a glacier without ice axes. Another time, descending on to an ice field unmarked on the map, we had to resort to a ‘classic’ abseil. I discovered that maps in B.C. do not bother to distinguish cliffs from terrain that is, anyway, predominately rock. Even the most widely-spaced contours may conceal unsuspected steps and bluffs, and anything that looks steep on the map is likely to be impassable without technical climbing gear. This felt like exploratory mountaineering more than walking, with all the enjoyable uncertainty and slight tension that goes with it.

  Finally, we arrived at Cream Lake, a beautiful turquoise tarn, one of the jewels of Strathcona Park which was to have been drained and dammed to provide hydro-electricity for a new open-cast mine. The Friends of Strathcona have made a path up Price Creek to the lake in a successful attempt to make people aware of what was to be taken from them. But it is still a five-hour walk from the roadhead, and the path and a proliferation of fireplaces along the way is a small price to pay for saving the lake and its surroundings. We had not intended to travel out that way, but wind and rain shredded John’s second-hand poncho into a clammy scarf about his neck and forced us down from Green Lake at the head of the creek. After wading crotch deep along swollen side-streams in preference to hideous alder thickets and wind-throw, we were happy to take the easy way out, squelching down through magnificent stands of giant hemlock.

  We knew we were returning to civilisation when we saw the sharp zigzags of a logging road slashed across a clear-cut hillside and soon afterwards heard the humming of extractor fans at Westmin mine, several miles away. Situated in the middle of the park yet currently employing 750 people, this mine epitomises the shabby treatment that has been meted out to Strathcona over the years. Originally established in 1911, the park now covers an area of 230,000 hectares of forests, lakes and glaciated mountains. Unfortunately, being a provincial rather than a national park, it has been possible for provincial governments to change its status at will without reference to the legislature. The history of the park is a long, sad story of government-sanctioned depredation for logging, mining and hydro-electricity. Recently, yet another Order in Council arbitrarily altered the status of several sections of the park to that of Recreational Area, a euphemism that permits logging and mining. This time the government bit off more than it could chew. Environmentalists were more organised in mobilising support, setting up a campaign of civil disobedience that despite sixty-four arrests, successfully prevented exploratory drilling. Moreover, residents of Campbell River township were deeply disturbed at the effect further mining might have on their drinking water. Buttle Lake, twice dammed and enlarged despite protest, is already polluted with heavy metals that have leached out from mine tailings. Taken aback by the furore, the government appointed a commission to report on the future of Strathcona Park. To the astonishment of government and environmentalists alike, the commission came out wholeheartedly in favour of preserving the integrity of the park from all further exploitation, making some trenchant criticisms of past policy in the process. The government accepted the gist of the report and Cream Lake has been reprieved – in the context of the park’s history, a remarkable triumph.

  Our five-day journey through this wild and beautiful area made me aware how much we owe to groups like the Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the Friends of Strathcona. Regarded as pests by those whose only motive is profit, and vilified as cranks and hippies in smear campaigns, it is they and others like them who are ensuring that British Columbia remains beautiful.

  Visiting Vancouver Island again last summer it was clear that the environmental battle is far from over, and climbing in the Coast Range brought home to me how little virgin forest there is left to save. The directors of the multinationals in their plate-glass offices in faraway cities neither know nor care about anything other than short-term gain. But the times they are a-changing. The headline in the local paper the day I arrived read ‘Loggers refuse to cut forest of 300 year old trees’. When the men who wield the chainsaws start to become concerned, there is reason to hope.

  – Chapter 25 –

  SMALL EXPEDITIONS IN THE HIMALAYA (1980)

  Ever since climbers first began to visit the Himalaya at the end of the last century there have been large expeditions and small ones. Mummery, invited to join Conway’s lavish investigation of the Karakoram, preferred to go to Nanga Parbat with Hastings and Collie and a couple of Gurkhas. While the Workmans and the Duke of the Abruzzi were invading the Karakoram with their miniature armies, Dr A.M. Kellas was making some remarkable journeys of exploration in Sikkim and climbing peaks up to 7,000 metres with onl
y a few local porters for company. Between the wars there was a sharp contrast between the series of heavyweight expeditions to Everest, Kanchenjunga and Nanga Parbat, and the explorations of Shipton and Tilman or the success of Spencer Chapman on Chomolhari. During the so-called golden age of the fifties and early sixties when the majority of big Himalayan peaks were being climbed, most expeditions were large, for nationalism, was more blatantly and internationally rife than ever it had been on the Eigerwand and the Grandes Jorasses. But there were notable exceptions – the Austrians on Cho Oyu and Broad Peak, the British on the Muztagh Tower and the American four-man attempt on Everest.

  The last fifteen years have seen Everest firmly established as an international status symbol, permanently booked up five years in advance. Not only Everest but all Nepal’s 8,000 metre peaks have been repeated time and time again, confounding Longstaff’s hope that once Everest had been climbed mountaineers would forget about mere height and ‘turn to the true enjoyment of the Himalayas, most likely to be found at 20,000 feet or less’. More recently, the re-opening of the Karakoram by Pakistan has sent a fresh series of massive caravans winding up the Baltoro. At the other end of the scale, there have been the groups of two, three or four climbers posing as tourists in an effort to evade increasing restrictions, regulations and expense, unobtrusively penetrating the remotest corners of the Himalaya and making many fine first ascents among the lower peaks. Initially most of these small expeditions were Austrian or Japanese, but numbers of British climbers have begun to follow suit. This trend must have been strengthened by articles by Dennis Gray, Trevor Braham and Joe Tasker which have appeared over the last few years, arguing basically that large expeditions are anachronistic. Dennis Gray in 1971 was describing the ‘approach and style of application’ of the first ascents of Annapurna and Everest as being ‘as relative to this day as the stage coach to jet travel’.