Development of prairie risks alpine degradation
Published 12:30 pm Thursday, August 22, 2024
Hudson Bay Mountain has long provided a playground for people.
Its high elevations also provide a home for many other species from bears and mountain goats to marten, marmots and lemmings; from ptarmigan, pipits and horned larks to bees, butterflies and spiders; from krummholz trees to mountain-heathers, wildflowers, mosses, and lichens. It even Includes a globally rare, aquatic lichen that lives in clear, cool, low-gradient subalpine creeks.
The mountain is big and brawny but alpine ecosystems are fragile and very sensitive to disturbance, especially in a time of global overheating and regional drought.
The construction and use (even if everyone stays on track) of recreational trails in the alpine can displace or disturb resident wildlife, cause erosion and sedimentation, remove or trample and kill native vegetation, and facilitate the invasion of noxious weeds (such as the tall yellow hawkweed), impacts you can see along the traditional foot trail to Crater Lake.
The recent blitzkrieg of trail building by the Smithers Mountain Bike Association and Hudson Bay Mountain Resort is troubling.
It is happening despite scant public consultation, an incomplete environmental assessment, no mitigation plan, and incursion onto the "Alpine Prairie" — the broad grassy tundra ridge between the top of the Green T-lift and Crater Lake.
The new bike trail has encroached on the prairie and is headed for Crater Lake despite a 2013 recommendation by the Recreation Access Management Plan that no horse or mountain bike use should occur across the prairie to Crater Lake.
Evidently, this is happening because HBMR expanded their primacy westward over a large part of the prairie via a so-called Controlled Recreation Area, a type of tenure that confers certain rights and powers but provides limited government oversight or regulation of the tenure holder.
Most of the Prairie is still public land but, in my opinion, is not being managed in the broader public interest. The sensitive alpine landscape — a key natural asset — continues to be degraded and public (mostly) money is paying for the misplaced "stewardship," but not for the much-needed repair of the badly braided hiking trail.
Jim Pojar
Smithers
