IO GE

CANADIAN PHOTOS OF THE YEAR COMPETITION WINNERS

CT A
N
SE 0-P
EL 2
AV A L
TR ECI
SP

SEA OTTERS AN OLD FRIEND RETURNS

FLYING HIGH TO HAIDA GWAII
CHARTING NEW PATHS
WITH THE RCAF
SNAKE DENS
ANNUAL RITUAL
DRAWS CROWDS
TO NARCISSE,
MANITOBA

+REFLECTING ON NUNAVUT AS THE TERRITORY TURNS 25,

SOARING SONGBIRDS AND HEAVENLY HOT SPRINGS,
NOVELIST KIM THÚY RECALLS HER ARRIVAL TO CANADA
AND MUCH MORE!
 Welcome to Klahoose Wilderness Resort, an award-winning Indigenous
eco-resort in the pristine embrace of British Columbia’s awe-inspiring Desolation
Sound. We take immense pride in being 100% Klahoose Nation-owned where
we extend an extraordinary and completely off-the-grid retreat for those in
pursuit of an authentic Indigenous and wildlife experience. Our resort is expertly
tailored to curate unforgettable 3- to 4-night all-inclusive packages, encompassing
captivating spring bear tours, mesmerizing grizzly bear viewing amidst the fall
salmon run, and immersive Indigenous cultural and wildlife encounters.

2024 Canadian Geographic Departures:

MAY 19-23 with Javier Frutos

RCGS Ambassador and Photographer

JUNE 2-6 with Carol Patterson

RCGS Ambassador, Travel Writer and
Photographer

OCTOBER 8-12 with Scott Forsyth

RCGS Ambassador and Photographer

OCTOBER 15-19 with Jenny Wong

RCGS Ambassador and Photographer

Call us toll-free at 1-833-443-3838 Visit: klahooseresort.com

 CONTENTS

MARCH/
APRIL

2024
ON THE COVER

The photographer encoun-

tered this curious duo while
running a photo tour off
northern Vancouver Island.
Photo by Anthony Bucci
32

32 THE OTTER,
THE URCHIN
AND THE HAIDA
Why the return of the sea otter to Haida Gwaii
is cause for celebration, concern and careful planning
By Brad Badelt

40 RED BIRD
As the RCAF turns 100, Cyle Daniels
from Long Plain First Nation starts their own
journey with the storied service
By Kallan Lyons
Photography by April Carandang

56
46 SNAKES ON A PLAIN
Each spring, a disquieting tangle
of gartersnakes emerges at the Narcisse Snake Dens. 63 CAN GEO TRAVEL
20-plus pages of
Everyone and their mother shows up to see it. summery travel adventures,
including a Nova Scotian
TOP: ISABEL GROC; BOTTOM: AARON WARD

By Leslie Anthony
Photography by Walter Potrebka pilgrimage, an epic hike
inspired by a moose named
Alice, a tasty tour of New
Brunswick, a “quest for rest”

56 CANADIAN PHOTOS OF
THE YEAR 2023
Canadian Geographic presents the winners of
around southern Vancouver
Island, and a hike- and kayak-
themed California sojourn.
our annual photo competition

CANGEO.CA 5
 12

D E PA R T M E N T S 22
16 30
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: KALI WEXLER; BRUCE RABY/CAN GEO PHOTO CLUB; CHANTAL BENNETT; DAVID STOBBE; COREY ISENOR; CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO

DISCOVERY

96 98 19 INTERVIEW
Eco influencer Candice Batista on
the challenge of living sustainably

22 WILDLIFE
Plunging peregrines, booming
seals, waning walrus and the
burgeoning science of pika poo

12 BIG PICTURE 93 YOUR SOCIETY 24 HISTORY

Celebrating Canada’s grandeur
14 EXPOSURE
Showcasing our
photo community
16 IN A SNAP
Sharing Can Geo via Instagram
30 ON THE MAP
As Nunavut turns 25, a heartfelt
call for a future with Inuit self-
determination at its core
News from the Royal Canadian
Geographical Society
96 COMING UP
Advocating for an embattled
river and travelling the waves
with a stand-up paddleboarder
98 OUR COUNTRY
Novelist Kim Thúy recalls being
showered with kindness — and
trips to the zoo — as a young girl
in Granby, Que.
Checking in on Canada’s
first astronomical observatory
in Fredericton
26 PLACE
How the building of the Alaska
Highway helped popularize the
Liard River Hot Springs
28 INFOGRAPHIC
Putting songbirds through
their paces in a specially
designed wind tunnel

6 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

DIGITAL CONTENTS

DISCOVER

MAMA BEAR
On the traditional territory of the Klahoose
Nation, a grizzly catches a salmon for her
young cub, a humpback swims with her calf,
a pair of young eagles take flight. Among the
grizzly bears of Toba Inlet, B.C., at Klahoose
Wilderness Resort, environmental journalist
Aliya Jasmine takes lessons from mother nature
as she navigates her own pregnancy.

Find out more at

cangeo.ca/mamabear

COVER STORY

Double the otters, double

the fun! We couldn’t choose
a favourite, so we put four
covers to a vote. Readers,
on the other hand, had
no trouble picking a
winner — a cuddling duo,
relaxed but alert, took
70 per cent of the vote.

70% 5% 15% 10%

PHOTOGRAPHY CLIMATE NEWS TRAVEL WILDLIFE CULTURE

Canadian Geographic Newsletters

CANGEO.CA/NEWSLETTERS

8 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 WINGS OF HONOUR
Gumption. Character. Comradery. Purpose. That’s what
it took to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force 100 years
ago and that’s what it takes today. Wings of Honour,
a new documentary for Can Geo Films, hears from pilots,
war veterans and astronauts as they look back at a century
in the sky for those who served in the RCAF. The film airs
on CPAC, Canada’s national cable network presenting
parliamentary, political and public affairs.

CLOCKWISE FROM OPPOSITE: COURTESY ALIYA JASMINE; AVIATOR AVERY PHILPOTT, CANADIAN ARMED

CONNECT WITH US ONLINE

@CanGeo

PROTECTING AVIQTUUQ
FORCES PHOTO; THOMAS LUNDY

facebook.com/cangeo
Protecting Aviqtuuq, Nunavut, is about more than protecting a habitat:
it’s about safeguarding a community’s food sovereignty. In episode 71,
David McGuffin speaks to Jimmy Ullikatalik, project manager for the @CanGeo
Aviqtuuq Inuit Protected and Conserved Area, a proposed 90,000-square-
kilometre marine, terrestrial and fresh-water protected area at the youtube.com/canadiangeographic
northern tip of mainland Canada. cangeo.ca/aviqtuuq

CANGEO.CA 9
 EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
This red-sided gartersnake is on a mission
to find a mate in the snake den.
OUR ROMAN EMPIRES
LAST YEAR, a viral TikTok and Instagram trend saw users of
those platforms asking their male friends and relations, on
camera, how often they think about the Roman Empire. The
answer? Quite a lot, apparently. By the end of the year, “my
Roman Empire” had become a catchphrase for something
you can’t stop thinking about.
Around the same time as the Roman Empire hit the main-
stream, new market research was released showing that
Canadian Geographic has the second-highest combined
print and digital readership of any magazine in Canada, and
that our reach among millennials and Gen Z is trending
upward. As a millennial with a child starting kindergarten this
year, I wasn’t surprised. At its core, the magazine reflects
many of the values parents hope to cultivate in their children:
WALTER POTREBKA
10 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
a love of learning, respect for nature and a desire to contrib-
ute to a more just and sustainable world.
But I also think our appeal lies in something much less
lofty: we publish stories about things we can’t stop thinking
about. Sea otters kept coming up in our editorial meetings,
so we commissioned the story on page 32. We’d all heard of
Manitoba’s Narcisse Snake Dens, but needed to know more,
hence the feature on page 46. To mark the centennial of the
Royal Canadian Air Force, we wanted to profile a young per-
son who represents the future of that storied force and were
thrilled when our writer found Cyle Daniels (page 40).
So, tell us: what’s your Roman Empire? We might just
cover it in a future issue.
—Alexandra Pope
To comment, please email For inside details on the mag-
editor@canadiangeographic.ca azine, follow editor Alexandra
or visit cangeo.ca. Pope on X (@XelaEpop) and
Instagram (@xela.explores).
BIG PICTURE
Celebrating Canada's Grandeur

PHOTO BY KALI WEXLER

For millennia, the spring herring spawn along the shores of
Hornby Island in B.C. has drawn seabirds and seals, porpoises
and people. It’s both a spectacle and a feast: the seas turn
milky turquoise as tens of thousands of males release their
milt to fertilize the females’ eggs, lapped by the waves and
blanketing every square centimetre of rock and vegetation.

See more photos and learn more about threats facing Pacific herring in an interview
with wildlife photographer Kali Wexler ( @kwexphoto). cangeo/herringspawn

12 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

CANGEO.CA 13
EXPOSURE
Showcasing our photo community 2023

PHOTO BY BRANDON BRODERICK

A small herd of mountain goats were more
curious than concerned when the Canadian
Photographer of the Year winner approached
them as they grazed along a ridge on an April
morning in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. See photogra-
phy by all the competition winners on page 56.

Join the Canadian Geographic Photo Club at photoclub.cangeo.ca

and upload your best shots for a chance to be featured online or
in the magazine!

14 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 LIKE YOU, WE’RE PASSIONATE
ABOUT CANADA
For more than 90 years we’ve been working with Canadians like you to help
tell stories about Canada’s unique natural and human landscapes.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ISTOCK.COM/BENEDEK; COURTESY ZAC ROBINSON;

TODAY WE’RE HELPING CANADIANS

better understand our rich natural spaces and our diverse
JOSH SCHAEFER/CAN GEO; BAFFIN PADDLE & CLIMB 2019/RCGS

populations in order to educate and inspire tomorrow’s leaders.

With a gift in your will to the Royal Canadian

Geographical Society you can help us shape a more
vibrant, sustainable future for our country
for generations to come.

To learn more about how you can create a legacy with the
Royal Canadian Geographical Society, please email
Sarah Legault legault@rcgs.org or visit rcgs.org/legacy-giving
 IN A SNAP
Sharing Can Geo via Instagram

@randyapostol Randy Apostol

March sunrise, Igloolik, Nunavut

@coreyisenor Corey Isenor @junekrisko June Krisko

Spring surfing, Lawrencetown Beach Provincial Park, N.S. Trumpeter Swans, Burlington, Ont.

@little_stephy0925 Stephen Tam @herry.with.an.e Herry Himanshu

Cherry blossoms, David Lam Park, Vancouver, B.C. Howling coyote, near Avonlea, Sask.

Find us @CanGeo and share your best photos with us using the hashtag
#ShareCanGeo.

16 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

Eagle-Eye Tours

BRITISH COLUMBIA BIRDING

Jun 13 – 19, 2024 with Joachim Bertrands and Myrna Pearman
Visit the highlights of southern British Columbia from the west coast
rainforest to the arid grasslands of the Okanagan. Birding will be diverse
and exciting!

NEWFOUNDLAND BIRDING
Jun 5 – 13, 2024 with Tim Lucas and Dr. Dave Williams
This tour offers spectacular scenery and fabulous wildlife. We visit seabird
colonies along the Avalon Peninsula with thousands of nesting seabirds
and explore the fossils of Mistaken Point.

PATAGONIA BIRDS & WILDLIFE

Nov 1 - 11, 2024 with Paul Prior and Jenny Wong
Explore Patagonia – a land of jaw-dropping scenery full of history,
culture and of course, wild animals! Pumas, condors, penguins,
flamingos and more.
 Presented by

The contest is over but the

journey has just begun.
Visit our website to discover the steps each family took towards living net zero!
Explore content from the challenges to discover how you can reduce your own
household carbon emissions, and while you’re there, sign up to be notified when
applications open for the next competition to Live Net Zero.

In partnership with livenetzero.org


Candice Batista
The environmental journalist
and television personality
dives into the complexities
of sustainable living
INTERVIEW BY ALEXANDRA POPE
GRACE BENNETT
DISCOVERY INTERVIEW
An authority on living sustainably,
television personality Candice Batista
shares her wealth of knowledge in
a new book, Sustained.
C
Candice Batista wants to change the way we shop. The way we clean.
The way we decorate, cook, garden, recycle — basically, everything.
A writer, producer and fixture on Toronto-area cable television for
over 20 years, Batista regularly appears on Cityline and Breakfast
Television to share her tips for eco-friendly living, from how to prop-
erly recycle your takeout pizza boxes (cut off and compost the greasy
part) to how to make your own reusable disinfectant wipes. Now, she’s
compiled those tips into a book, Sustained, to guide Canadians
toward better understanding how our daily routines and purchasing
decisions impact the environment, as well as a better sense of how we
can reduce household waste (and save money in the process).
On being a TV trailblazer
About 15 years ago, I took a leap of faith and left my job at the Weather
Network to launch a television series on Rogers Cable 10 called
A Greener Toronto. It looked at how Torontonians were fostering envi-
ronmental stewardship in many ways, from organic food and regenerative
agriculture to composting, waste diversion, ethical fashion and reduc-
ing textile waste. It was well received, but it was way ahead of its time.
CANGEO.CA 19
[When talking about environmental
issues in mainstream media], a lot of
times you’re in a precarious position
because the advertisers are part of
the problem. You’re always navigat-
ing this very fine line between your
own ethics and biting the hand that
feeds you.
On living sustainably
Sustainable living is not easy to navi-
gate, especially in our current system.
It’s like a Groundhog Day of con-
sumption; we’re stuck in this awful
loop and we just can’t stop consum-
ing stuff. The idea is just to start
somewhere. The ultimate goal of liv-
ing sustainably is to live frugally. It’s to
understand your impact. I always say,
“Do it like your granny did it.” Our
grandparents would never have envi-
sioned that we would buy a product
like a garbage bag or a dryer sheet or
a paper towel strictly to throw it out.
THE ULTIMATE
GOAL OF LIVING
SUSTAINABLY
IS TO LIVE FRUGALLY.
On trying to start a movement
I often get comments like, “I’m not
bothering with this” or “why should
it be on the consumer [to make
change]?” But it’s not about one
person making a difference; it’s one
person trying to reach another person
who then reaches another person.
Ten years ago, when people started
demanding more transparency around
the ingredients in beauty products,
everybody was like, oh, this is a flash
in the pan; it’s just marketing non-
sense. But ultimately, it revolutionized
the beauty industry. Today, the green
beauty industry is worth billions of dol-
lars, and you have massive companies
like Procter & Gamble buying small
indie skincare companies because
they want in on that action. It shows
what can happen when people come
together and demand better.
20 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
On her vision for Sustained
I wanted to put as much information
in the book as I could, because liv-
ing sustainably is so nuanced. Part
of the problem is that we don’t have
clear definitions for certain things.
Consider sustainable fashion as an
example. To me, that might mean
ethically manufactured — no work-
ers were harmed, they were getting
fair wages. But to you, it might be that
the clothing contains no toxic chem-
icals. You’ll see products with labels
like cruelty-free, vegan, eco-friendly,
green, sustainable, natural, non-toxic,
oil-free, sustainably sourced, biode-
gradable, but what do any of these
things mean?
I also wanted to provide a frame-
work for what to keep in the back of
your mind [when a product claims to
be sustainable]. The first thing is,
what is that item made of? The sec-
ond thing is sustainable sourcing
and ethical manufacturing: who
made my clothes? Who made my
skincare? Who picked my coffee
beans? And then the third thing is
looking at corporate responsibility:
what are companies actually doing
to make a difference? Do they offer
carbon offsets? How are they ship-
ping? Do they have repair or resale
programs? My thinking was, “How
can you actually go into the world
after you’ve read all this and navigate
trying to shop sustainably or just be
sustainable in your everyday life?”
On changing mindsets
Part of the problem is we’re so dis-
connected from each other and from
nature. We don’t know where our
food comes from. We don’t know
where our garbage goes. We have so
much stuff, we can’t find our stuff.
We’re in this consumption mindset
because we’re constantly bombarded
with advertising. “Sustainable living”
has become a catchphrase, but it’s
not about buying the newest sustain-
able product. You do not need to buy
beeswax wraps. The most sustainable
product is what you already have in
your home.
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DISCOVERY WILDLIFE

walrus
WANING

T
HE LAST ICE AGE was not kind to walruses. Archeologists from Lund University in
Sweden have been taking a close look at ancient genetic information from walrus
teeth and bones found frozen in Arctic archeological sites. The ice age and
subsequent warming period caused isolation and extinction in many walrus populations
as they migrated with the ice edge. This, combined with human hunting over the last
1,000 years — from Norse settlers to modern industrial-scale walrus culls — resulted in the
remaining Atlantic walrus becoming less and less genetically diverse. Because of this, walrus
are now extremely vulnerable to Arctic sea ice retreat and disruptions caused by
shipping and resource extraction. Unfortunately, climate change will likely force them
to disperse into even smaller, more isolated pockets.

22 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 Long in theTooth
WHAT DO TREES AND TEETH HAVE IN COMMON? They can
both tell time — well, sort of. A brand-new lab at Alberta’s Lethbridge
College is using cementum analysis to examine teeth to figure out animals’
ages. Cementum (the mineralized tissue that surrounds the roots of
teeth) holds teeth in place. It forms annuli (distinct, ring-like bands) as
an animal ages, similar to tree rings. However, unlike a tree, where
you can simply cut into it and count the rings, a chemical process is
required to access the annuli embedded in each tooth to estimate
an animal’s age. Once the lab is fully operational, researchers hope
to analyze 4,000 to 5,000 teeth per year, using what they learn to
help improve wildlife management efforts for various animals.

300 km/h
THAT’S HOW FAST master-hunter per-
egrine falcons can dive. And, according
to new research out of Simon Fraser
University, B.C., these birds are as fast in
thought as they are in flight. Biologists
have previously hypothesized that prey
must prioritize safety over food foraging
OPPOSITE PAGE: BRUCE RABY/CAN GEO PHOTO CLUB. THIS PAGE (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP): PATTI BLACK/UNSPLASH; BRUCE TUCK/CAN GEO PHOTO CLUB;

when threatened by a predator — some-

thing peregrine falcons seem acutely aware
of. Despite preferring to hunt at high tide, the
falcons were seen using low-cost “false attacks”
during low tide to purposefully advertise their presence to
Pacific dunlins in Boundary Bay, B.C. As per the hypothesis, the dunlins
then expended energy flocking over the ocean, safe but unable to forage.
When high tide came, the dunlins were exhausted, allowing the cunning
raptors to hunt for real at an increased success rate.

Pika-poo 7.4 MILLION

U.S. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE/KAITLIN THORESON; MICHAEL BUCKLEY/CAN GEO PHOTO CLUB

THE AMERICAN PIKA — more specifi-

cally, its poop — has a lot to teach us about
climate change, according to University
of British Columbia Okanagan biologists.
The pika, a lagomorph that lives in moun-
tainous fields and grasslands in Alberta
and B.C., is an indicator species for the
impacts of climate change and is in decline
across its range. To figure out what,
exactly, is causing its decline, researchers
are collecting pika scat and analyzing the
genetic material within to better under-
stand family relationships, food webs, the
ecological consequences of rapid envi-
ronmental change — and, ultimately, how
best to help the pika thrive again.
THAT’S HOW MANY harp seals are found off the coast of Newfoundland
and Labrador. Along with the Sable Island herd of grey seals off Nova
Scotia, these blubber-lined sea mammals are the subject of a new inves-
tigation. When Atlantic cod stocks collapsed, the species both they and
the seals preyed on — capelin, herring and sand lance — jumped in
numbers, and seal numbers also boomed. Researchers from Dalhousie
University in Halifax are looking at what impact the seals are having on
the ecosystem by examining their fat. They’ll analyze the types and
amounts of fatty acids in seal blubber to learn exactly what species make
up their diets and where they’re coming from.

Read Canadian Geographic‘s latest wildlife

stories at cangeo.ca/wildlife. CANGEO.CA 23
 DISCOVERY HISTORY
Here comes the sun
Fredericton, home to Canada’s first astronomical observatory, will be one of the few Canadian
cities to experience the total solar eclipse that crosses North America on April 8
BY DARCY RHYNO
C
CROWDED BY TREES on the oldest part of the University
of New Brunswick’s Fredericton campus sits a two-storey
octagonal tower clad in white clapboard. Students hustle
past, likely unaware of its status as Canada’s first astro-
nomical observatory. Today, the William Brydone Jack
Observatory has fallen into disuse, but when it opened in
1851 this national historic site was one of the most
advanced observatories of its time, and Jack a pioneer in
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: UNB, UA RG 340, JOE STONE AND SON LTD. FONDS; UA PC UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK ARCHIVES PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION; UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK ARCHIVES
the development of Canadian astronomy.
An amateur astronomer and founding member of the
William Brydone Jack Astronomy Club, Don Kelly is a
wealth of information about the accomplishments of the
astronomer, engineer and teacher who dedicated his
career to this observatory. As he tours me around, he
rhymes off Jack’s accomplishments.
Born in Scotland in 1817, Jack graduated from the
University of St. Andrews and was recruited in 1840 by
King’s College (as UNB was then known) as professor of
mathematics and natural philosophy. He would spend the
next 45 years lobbying for, building, then equipping his
observatory, all the while recruiting students and bring-
ing the province into the 19th century.
Within seven years of his appointment, Jack convinced
college leaders to approve the purchase of a state-of-the-
art refracting telescope. His colleague James Robb wrote
to lieutenant governor William Colebrooke that, because
of the provincial capital’s geographic location, “the great
Climate influences… Temperature, Humidity, Pressure,
Electricity are free to exhibit themselves in forms more
simple and unmodified than at most other places.”
The colonial government also chipped in. Thomas
Baillie, surveyor general of New Brunswick, warned the
Lieutenant Governor, “Numerous lawsuits are daily spring-
ing up out of the looseness of the old surveys upon which
the first [land] grants were made.” An observatory was nec-
essary to establish a meridian line as the permanent,
unchanging base for drawing boundaries and borders. In
other words, the observatory would not just be a tool
meant for observing the stars, but would also be used to to
settle disputes between neighbouring landowners, claim
territory that was ripe for commercial exploitation and
assert sovereignty over Indigenous lands.
Jack travelled to Massachusetts to tour Harvard University’s
observatory and gather advice on the design and
24 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
equipment. Upon his return, he designed his observatory
with a rotating, copper-roofed dome that could be turned
by a single person. Inside was a two-metre refracting tele-
scope of mahogany and brass, made by the best in the
business, Merz and Sons of Munich.
On three evenings in 1855, Jack made history, taking
precise measurements of nine telegraph signals sent by
colleagues at the Harvard College Observatory and cal-
culating Fredericton’s exact longitude relative to Boston.
The two observatories also compared readings as first
one, then the other passed beneath a chosen star. Feeding
the data into a formula, Jack mapped Fredericton’s exact
longitudinal location: 4 hours, 26 minutes, 33.43 seconds
west of Greenwich, England, the prime meridian. With
Fredericton’s longitude accurately established, Jack then
determined the longitudinal locations for almost 40 other
towns across New Brunswick.
The province and surveyors now had baselines to draw
accurate boundaries. Following Jack’s recommendations,
the province standardized surveying equipment and
insisted surveyors pass rigorous tests. Jack laid out a
length of surveying chain at the university, the length
of which all surveyors had to match. The chain is still
there. By 1859, the year King’s College became UNB,
New Brunswick had its first modern map.
Rummaging among scattered artefacts, Kelly uncovers
a box of slides painted with constellations, comets and
eclipses. Boxes of these slides in hand, Jack would travel
to schools and temperance halls around the province,
using a lantern to project the images onto walls.“Jack was
trying to recruit bright, young kids to the university to edu-
cate themselves and further science,” says Kelly.
In 1861, Jack was appointed UNB’s second president.
While in the role, he advocated for women in higher
education and the establishment of faculties of law and
medicine. In his back yard, he set up a weather station
that would be used by Canada’s meteorological services
into the 20th century, while at the observatory, he focused
on researching comets until his death in 1886.
On April 8, Fredericton will be one of a handful of
Canadian cities to experience the full, total eclipse; if Jack
were around today, you’d likely find him at his namesake
observatory, shoulder to shoulder with his fellow students
of the sky awaiting this captivating celestial event.
Clockwise from top: A 1955 photograph taken at the William
Brydone Jack Observatory during a ceremony to unveil a
plaque commemorating it as Canada’s first astronomical
observatory; a portrait of William Brydone Jack; a photo
of the observatory (left), taken after it opened in 1851.

CANGEO.CA 25
 DISCOVERY PLACE

Nature’s bathtub
Once a stopping point for workers carving out the Alaska Highway,
Liard River Hot Springs is an oasis in northern B.C.

BY MARK STACHIEW

The Liard River Hot Springs are

known to the Kaska Dena as
Tū Tīkōn, meaning “hot water.”

F
FOR THE SOLDIERS and civilians
who battled the elements to build
the Alaska Highway at a breakneck
pace during the Second World War,
creature comforts were few and far
between. When they reached the
warm and inviting waters of the Liard
River Hot Springs in northeastern
British Columbia after months of hard
personnel to rest and relax, in 1942
the U.S. military set up a rough board-
walk and changing huts near the area’s
largest thermal pool.
“In the chill of the clear October air
the whole surface of the water pleas-
antly steams. The center of the pool
is constantly bubbling, replenishing
nature’s bathtub with clean warm water
Topographical Battalion, in a letter
home to his family. “Like the (mythical)
wood nymph, I got into my birthday
suit on the timbered edge of the pool
and strode in! Its soothing warmth was
great! What a swell bath I took!”
Today, the same naturally heated
pools are the main attraction at Liard
River Hot Springs Provincial Park,
LIZA CURTISS

labour, they must have thought they from the bowels of the Earth,” wrote established in 1957. And while the
were in heaven. Recognizing the value Harry Spiegel, a surveyor with the boardwalk and changing areas have
of the hot springs as a place for its U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers 648th been improved since Spiegel’s skinny

26 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024


dip, they aren’t a whole lot different
from the original setup, says Peter
Goetz, a parks and protected areas
section head for BC Parks.
“It’s kind of an oasis in the middle of
the Alaska Highway and is a great place
to stop and recharge,” he says, adding
that the water temperature in the main
bathing area ranges from 42 C to 52 C.
Nicknamed the “Tropical Valley,”
reportedly by the Alaska Highway
building crews who were amazed by
the landscape’s lush ferns, the provin-
cial park is home to unique flora and
fauna. Among them are the heat-
adapted lake chub, which can be
spotted swimming in the main bathing
pool, and a tiny species of snail about
half the size of a grain of rice that’s
found nowhere else in the world. There
are also 14 species of orchids that thrive
in the park, an abundance of birds and
the occasional black bear. Moose are
commonly spotted in the swampy land
Hot water from deep within the earth
pours into a series of swamps that never
freeze in the winter. This creates a unique
microclimate in the boreal spruce forest.
around the hot springs, and the reintro-
duced wood bison are hard to miss as
they graze on the sides of the highway.
Of course, the hot springs were
nothing new to the local Indigenous
Peoples, including the Kaska Dena,
Fort Nelson First Nation and Métis,
who helped surveyors carve out the
best route for the Alaska Highway. The
Kaska Dena, whose traditional territory
spans northern B.C. and parts of Yukon
and Northwest Territories, call these
springs Tū Tīkōn, meaning “hot water.”
Unlike most hot springs that flow
into a stream or river, these thermal
waters pour into a system of swamps.
As a result, the swamps don’t freeze in
the winter, creating a lush microclimate.
The Kaska Dena followed game here,
harvested traditional medicines around
the springs and built seasonal camps
and trail networks through the area,
says Gillian Staveley, director of cul-
ture and land stewardship for the Dena
Kayeh Institute.
“It’s definitely lived history, but it’s
sadly been forgotten in recent times,
and we’ve been spending a lot of
time and energy trying to revitalize
that understanding with visitors to the
area that this is a historical and cul-
tural place for the Kaska Dena, and it
still is,” says Staveley. She added that
the Dena Kayeh Institute is working
with partners on new signage at the
hot springs to highlight the historical,
cultural and ecological significance of
the area to the Kaska Dena.
LIZA CURTISS'; MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO
While the builders of the Alaska
Highway no longer frequent Liard
River Hot Springs, road-weary travel-
lers can take a cue from these early
visitors, as well as from the Kaska
Dena who live on this landscape, by
slipping into the bubbling Tū Tīkōn
to experience the healing heat of this
boreal oasis.
CANGEO.CA 27
DISCOVERY INFOGRAPHIC

Flying high
A new study reveals the amazing ways Canadian songbirds DEEP BREATHING
change their bodies to fly higher during migration DURING MIGRATION, a myrtle
yellow-rumped warbler breathes
BY JULIA ZARANKIN more deeply and slowly to bring
ILLUSTRATION BY DINO PULERÀ more oxygen into its lungs.

M
Migratory birds are extraordinary endurance athletes. Not only is their
migration one of the riskiest and most energetically demanding feats in all
the wildlife kingdom, but in making this journey they outpace any mam-
mal’s aerobic performance by far. The blackpoll warbler is one of the
champions of North American migratory songbirds, managing average
southbound flights of 2,540 kilometres over 62 non-stop hours, all while
MUSCLE CHANGES
MUSCLE FIBRES in the warbler’s pectoralis
muscle, or flight muscle, become smaller
during the migration period, making it
weighing just 12 to 14 grams — about the same as a triple-A battery. While easier for oxygen and fuel (nutrients) to be
the journey has always been perilous, today’s climate conditions — includ- brought into the muscle to power flight.
ing scorching heat, smoke from wildfires, more violent storms and more
intense droughts — make it even more challenging.
How birds respond to their changing environment is the subject of
groundbreaking research at Western University’s Advanced Facility for
Avian Research in London, Ont. Postdoctoral researcher Catherine Ivy STRATOSPHERE HOW DOES IT COMPARE?
is investigating seasonal changes in bird physiology that allows them to
The myrtle yellow-rumped
overcome some of these dangers by flying at high altitudes, where oxy-
warbler’s high altitude
gen is limited. Ivy’s recently published study sheds light on how much
flight in context
songbirds’ bodies change seasonally. “When they get ready to migrate,
their body changes, and they are now optimized to move oxygen to
their flight muscle,” she says. >6.3% 12,000 m
The study compared how six species of songbirds (blackpoll warbler,
myrtle yellow-rumped warbler, hermit thrush, warbling vireo, red-eyed Commercial jet
vireo and Swainson’s thrush) transport oxygen through their body during 11,000 m
migratory and non-migratory seasons. It shows how birds are like magical 10,000 m
shapeshifters, able to adjust their breathing patterns and change the size Mount Everest
8,849 m Wildfire
of their muscle fibres.
smoke
Ivy analyzed birds flying in the university’s hypobaric climactic wind tun-
USABLE OXYGEN

8,000 m 8,000 m (median)

TROPOSPHERE

nel, one of only two in the world, which mimics flight at high altitude
conditions. “Not only can we change the pressure, but we can adjust tem- Great reed warbler
perature, humidity and wind speed. We can simulate anything,” Ivy says. Highest recorded
She found that myrtle yellow-rumped warblers performed especially songbird flight
6,000 m 6,000 m (non-Canadian)
well in high altitude conditions, reaching up to 4,000 metres — almost half
the altitude of a commercial jet. Though they didn’t stay that high for long,
they were able to fly at 3,000 metres for over an hour. Analysis of their Myrtle yellow-
seasonal physiology revealed that the changes they underwent allowed 4,000 m rumped warbler
them to fly in a low oxygen environment with little effect. 4,000 m
Hermit thrush
Not all birds performed equally in the wind tunnel. The hermit thrush 3,000 m
could not fly higher than 3,000 metres and exhibited fewer seasonal
2,000 m
changes. Whether that puts the hermit thrush at a disadvantage in
terms of climate change remains to be investigated. Yet what is certain
is that not only do migration strategies vary among songbirds, but the 21% Sea level
seasonal changes to their bodies that enable their colossal endurance 0m
flights are nothing short of amazing.

28 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 FLIGHT SIMULATOR
THE WIND TUNNEL at the Advanced Facility for
Avian Research can simulate altitudes of up
to 7,000 metres above sea level by altering
air pressure, temperature, humidity and
wind speed.
OXYGEN FLOW
HEMOGLOBIN in a warbler’s blood becomes
better at binding to oxygen during the migratory
season, enhancing oxygen movement through the
body during the long flight.
LONG HOURS
THE LONGEST MIGRATORY flights recorded in the wind tunnel
were a 38-hour stint by a western sandpiper and a 28-hour stretch
by a blackpoll warbler. Flights in the wind tunnel are voluntary.
While some birds refuse, many decide to fly during the migration
season, when their bodies are wired to move.
WELL VENTILATED
BIRDS BREATHE more efficiently than mammals
thanks to air sacs in front of and behind their lungs
that create a constant volume of fresh air in the
lungs — flowing in only one direction. This allows a
bird’s lungs to be more completely ventilated than
mammalian lungs and for its blood to access the
maximum amount of oxygen from the air.
CANGEO.CA 29
 ON THE MAP
Exploring Cartography

Knowing Nuna
As the territory turns 25, a call for an Inuit
self-determined future in Nunavut

BY CHRIS BRACKLEY
WITH TEXT BY DAVID KORGAK

W
We are patient. That’s a defining trait among Inuit. That patience has served us well for thou-
sands of years as we not only survived the harsh conditions of the Arctic but thrived. It took
more than three decades from the initial assertion that Inuit are a distinct Indigenous peo-
ple within Canada to the creation of the Nunavut (Our Land) territory on April 1, 1999. Our
patience was tested. Fortunately, when we exchanged Aboriginal title to all our traditional
land in the Nunavut Settlement Area for the benefits set out in the Nunavut Agreement, we
were able to secure certain rights to protect our way of life. Central to our argument was
that we have always been here, well before it became convenient to Canada.
Now, with Nunavut’s devolution official, and Canada handing over ownership of Crown
lands and natural resources to the territorial government, what will Our Land look like?
The relationship of Nuna (the land) and uummajuit (animals) is integral to Inuit well-being.
Since time immemorial, we have overseen Nuna and the coastline using umiaq and qajaq.
We devote our time to exploring, learning and adapting to our surroundings. Knowing
PROPOSED FEDERALLY PROTECTED AREA: DRAFT NUNAVUT LAND USE PLAN, 2021. MAP 3.2.6; OUTSTANDING LAND CLAIMS: DRAFT NUNAVUT LAND USE PLAN, 2021.

Nuna means you can survive another day. But knowing Nuna will be different in the future.
MAP 4.2.4; SEA ICE TRAVEL ROUTES: DRAFT NUNAVUT LAND USE PLAN, 2021. MAP 4.1.3; LAND TRAVEL ROUTES: DRAFT NUNAVUT LAND USE PLAN, 2021. MAP 4.1.10

We will continue to adapt modern tools and modes of transportation, using them to help
secure a sovereign Arctic for Inuit, Nunavummiut and the rest of Canada. I envision an Inuk
MAP DATA: INUIT OWNED LANDS: NUNAVUT TUNNGAVIK INC.; PROTECTED AREAS: CANADIAN PROTECTED AND CONSERVED AREAS DATABASE, 2023;

as the captain of a coast guard ship monitoring our coast as we have done in umiaq for
generations. Inuit will have expanded guardianship programs to monitor Nuna for its health
and security. And Inuit will have final say on resource and exploration projects — knowing
our surroundings will take on new meaning as we examine the resources within it.
As an Inuk, I am proud of our resilience in adapting to Canada’s colonial efforts. We
fought tooth and nail to create this territory, protecting our way of life — the land, water and
animals; our language and our culture; and our right to Inuit self-government. And over the
next 25 years, that self-government will help guide us forward, with insights from our Elders
and inspiration from our youth. We also fought to firmly install ourselves as active partici-
pants in the global economy, mainly through the arts and culture where our fashion, artwork
and film have been recognized internationally, and we continue to expand commercial
exports of key staples of our diet, such as Arctic char and turbot.
Since Canada has claimed the North as its own, there has been a perpetual push to send
its value south. As part of the Nunavut Agreement, Inuit actually own just 18 per cent of the
land in the territory — the Crown owns 80 percent. But as lands and resource rights are
returned to Nunavut in the coming years, Inuit will expand our guardianship over Nuna. An
Inuit self-determined future means we become the ultimate decision-makers.
As we bide our time above the breathing hole of the proverbial seal, Inuit patience will be
rewarded. When we strike our catch, it will be with the same enthusiasm as that of our ances-
tors to secure the survival of our people. There is one certainty: Inuit will continue to stand up
for ourselves and, through our patience and resilience, adapt to our surroundings. But in the
future I foresee, I am hopeful that our surroundings will adapt to us. Inuit must and will secure
ownership over Nunavut. It is, by definition, Our Land.

David Korgak is from Iqaluit. He works for Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. to advance Inuit rights, culture and well-being.

30 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

CANGEO.CA 31
 This is the one
who would eat all day
yet never get fat
whose beauty would be its own undoing
— Guujaaw, artist and a hereditary leader of Haida Gwaii
(from the poem “The Innocent”)

32 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2023

 The otter,
the urchin
and
the Haida
AS THE SEA OTTER BEGINS ITS LONG-OVERDUE RETURN TO HAIDA GWAII,
CAREFUL PLANS ARE BEING LAID TO WELCOME THEM — AND TO PRESERVE
A PROSPEROUS SHELLFISH HARVEST
I
IN A STRANGE TWIST OF FATE, it was
nuclear testing in Alaska that brought
back the insatiable, beautiful, long-
missed, never forgotten sea otter to
the waters of British Columbia. In the
mid 1960s, at the peak of Cold War
tensions, the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission was conducting nuclear
trials in the Aleutian Islands, off the
western tip of Alaska. Public concern
over the testing was rising, and a rag-
tag group of 12 activists set sail from
Vancouver in an old fishing boat. On
the journey over, the group settled on
a name: Greenpeace.
When Atomic Energy Commission
staff discovered a population of cuddly
sea otters at their next test site, they
feared a public-relations disaster. To
avoid an outcry, they captured and relo-
cated hundreds of otters — airlifting
them in aquarium-like tanks to sites in
southeast Alaska, Oregon, Washington
and the west coast of Vancouver Island.
The 89 sea otters relocated to Vancou-
ver Island were the first British Colum-
bia had seen in 40 years.
With the thickest pelts of any mam-
mal, sea otters were highly coveted by
fur traders. Russian ships, followed
by Europeans, arrived on the west coast
of Canada in the 18th century and
BY BRAD BADELT
began selling furs to overseas markets
for high fashion, with China being the
most popular destination. At the peak
of the fur trade in the 1800s, four
luxurious, silver-tipped sea otter pelts
could fetch enough money to buy a
house in Victoria. But as quickly as
the market boomed, it went kaput. The
global population of sea otters crashed
from upwards of 300,000 to just 2,000
by the early 20th century. Along B.C.’s
coast, they were wiped out entirely,
the last one shot in 1929.
As explosive as their demise was, so
too was their reappearance. The sea
otters transplanted to Vancouver Island
quickly re-established themselves,
growing in number and spreading
around the island and across to B.C.’s
mainland. To the north, however, the
similarly affected archipelago of Haida
Gwaii — once home to a thriving sea
otter population, estimated between
5,000 and 10,000 — was left waiting.
Made up of some 150 islands off the
coast of northern B.C., Haida Gwaii
is the ancestral territory of the Haida
people (roughly half of the islands’
population today is Indigenous). Sea
otters — known as Ku or Kuu in the
Haida language, depending on the
clan — are an iconic creature for the
Haida, appearing in dozens of oral
histories and depicted on countless
totem poles. In one Haida history, a
hunter kills a sea otter without giving
thanks for its life. When he gifts the
pelt to his wife, the sea otter springs
back to life and swims away. His wife
gives chase but is captured by a pod
of SGaan, or killer whales, leading to
an adventurous rescue.
For nearly a century and a half, the
archipelago remained otter-free. But in
the last decade or so, rumours began
swirling that the charismatic creature
had returned. Like reports of Bigfoot,
there were intermittent sightings:
usually of lone male sea otters, float-
ing on their backs and munching on
spiny urchins. The nearest population
to Haida Gwaii was some 130 kilo-
metres east, across KandaliiGwii (Hec-
ate Strait) — a gruelling swim, even
for a hungry otter. But in 2019, news
broke that staff with the Gwaii Haa-
nas National Park Reserve, in south-
ern Haida Gwaii, had spotted a female
with pups: proof that sea otters had
finally come home.
The sea otters’ return is often seen
as a heartwarming conservation story,
but it also brings its challenges. Sea
otters are voracious shellfish eaters.
CANGEO.CA 33
Diving to depths of up to 100 metres,
they can gobble a quarter of their body
weight daily in urchins, crab and
abalone — a much-prized seafood for
coastal First Nations. On Vancouver
Island, sea otters have been a point of
tension among Indigenous groups
and shellfish harvesters ever since they
were airlifted in. In southern Alaska,
there have been calls for sea otter culls
(a limited Indigenous hunt is currently
permitted). On Haida Gwaii, too, now-
abundant shellfish have become an
important resource, and there are simi-
lar concerns. What if sea otters change
the coastline in ways that affect liveli-
hoods and limit shellfish foraging?
“We knew the otters were coming; it
was just a matter of time,” says Cindy
Boyko, co-chair of the Archipelago Man-
agement Board, a partnership between
the Council of the Haida Nation and
Parks Canada that oversees the Gwaii
Haanas (“Islands of Beauty” in Haida)
National Park Reserve and Haida Heri-
tage Site. Boyko was born and raised on
Haida Gwaii. She describes spending
34 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
her childhood summers gathering
shellfish and seabird eggs and joining
her family on fishing trips. For the past
two decades, she’s been a driving force
behind local marine conservation
efforts. Still, when she first heard news
that a breeding female sea otter had been
spotted, she admits her response was
decidedly mixed. “I thought ‘oh no!’”
Boyko says. “But then, I knew we had
to do something.”
The shellfish harvesting industry
today employs hundreds of people in
B.C., many in small, remote communi-
ties like those on Haida Gwaii. Demand
comes from a global market, says Geoff
Krause, a marine biologist with the
Pacific Urchin Harvesters Association.
Urchins — spiny, softball-sized creatures
that live on the ocean floor and devour
kelp — are considered a delicacy around
the world, often served in fine seafood
restaurants (their flesh is like salty pud-
ding). Abalone — a marine snail with a
hard, opalescent shell often used in
Haida jewelry, and another sea otter
favourite — is even more coveted.
From left: A beach on Faraday Island,
within Gwaii Hanaas National Park
Reserve, close to the control site where
extensive work has been done to remove
sea urchins and allow kelp forests to
regenerate; Brady Yu (left) and Cindy
Boyko are two co-chairs of the Council
of the Haida Nation’s Archipelago
Management Board, which governs
Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve.
Krause says areas where sea otters
have been reintroduced have seen a
dramatic decline in shellfish. “Back in
the 1980s, about 25 to 30 per cent of the
harvest for red sea urchins in B.C. came
from the west coast of Vancouver Island,”
he says. “Now it’s basically zero.” He
fears the same thing could happen if
sea otters repopulate Haida Gwaii,
Brad Badelt ( @brad_badelt) is a freelance print
and radio journalist based in Vancouver. His work
has also appeared in The Walrus, The Globe and
Mail and Reader’s Digest.

jeopardizing jobs. “When the otters show
up, usually within a couple of years
there’s no commercial quantities of
urchins around anymore,” says Krause.
While a thriving shellfish popula-
tion might be good for business, it also
indicates an environment deeply out
of whack. Because, though Ku/Kuu
consume greedily, they repay with
equal generosity. When an area of the
ocean is devoid of sea otters, urchins
can run amok. Where there should be
waving fields of kelp, instead the ocean
is nearly empty of greenery.
PERCHED ON THE SIDE of an eight-
metre inflatable Zodiac boat, clad in a
wetsuit, mask, snorkel and fins, is Lynn
Lee, a senior marine ecologist with
Parks Canada. The boat is anchored a
stone’s throw from Murchison Island,
an uninhabited rocky outcrop on the
eastern side of Gwaii Haanas covered
with towering western hemlock and
Sitka spruce.
Here, the results of a kelp restora-
tion project provide a glimpse at what
this rugged coastline might look like
when sea otters repopulate it. The
project was launched in 2017 through
a partnership between the Council of
the Haida Nation, Parks Canada and
Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Sea otters are considered a keystone
species, Lee explains. Like wolves in
Yellowstone National Park, they play
an outsized role in shaping their eco-
system. The main way they do this is
by eating urchins, which, in turn, allows
kelp to thrive. When Haida Gwaii’s sea
otter population collapsed, so did many
of its kelp forests. Those kelp forests
provide refuge for a variety of other
marine life, particularly juvenile fish.
It’s an example of what ecologists refer
to as a “trophic cascade.”
PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHASE TERON. OPPOSITE PAGE: GAËTAN LAMARRE. MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO; MAP DATA: SEA OTTER GLOBAL RANGE: DERIVED FROM SEAOTTERS.ORG/OTTERSPOT/WORLD-RANGE.GIF;
SEA OTTER LOCAL RANGE DATA: MAP BY FISHERIES AND OCEANS CANADA, 2017; KELP BEDS - COASTAL RESOURCE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: GEOBC BRANCH, CATALOGUE.DATA.GOV.BC.CA/DATASET
For the kelp restoration project, a
team of commercial shellfish harvest-
ers were brought in to remove most
of the urchins from a three-kilometre
stretch of coastline — essentially
mimicking what would happen if sea
otters lived here. Over a week, divers
hauled out — or simply smashed with
pickaxes — a whopping half-million
urchins. Five years later, Lee says the
difference is striking.
Lee looks down at the choppy water
below, pulls down her diving mask
and plunges into the long, tangled
mats of kelp as thick as garden hoses.
Below the surface, a whole different
world opens up: golden-green kelp
fronds wave in the currents, perch and
sunfish dart among the leaves, and
further down — barely lit by shafts of
sunlight — is an understorey of more
delicate plant life. Closer to the shore,
a giant purple sea star and then a lion’s
CANGEO.CA 35

mane jellyfish, its fringe of orange
tentacles floating beneath it. It’s an
otter’s-eye view of a rich, diverse under-
water forest.
After the urchins were removed, Lee
says the recovery of kelp and other sea
life was almost immediate. Bull kelp,
an annual species that can grow up to
25 centimetres a day, took hold first, fol-
lowed by other aquatic plants and
marine life. The results fluctuated from
year to year (the extreme heat wave in
2021 led to a die-off of kelp and feeder
fish), but overall aquatic health has
improved measurably. “It has started to
evolve into an old-growth forest situa-
tion, where you have different species
coming in and more diversity and dif-
ferent kinds of kelps,” says Lee.
When the project began, there was
virtually no kelp or any other marine
life, aside from the urchins carpeting
36 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
the seabed in what’s known as an
“urchin barren.” Without sea otters, this
is what much of the coastline of Haida
Gwaii looks like today. It’s no wonder,
then, that conservationists get so excited
by their return. It’s not just about a single
species recovering — it’s an entire eco-
system coming back to life.
RATHER THAN ALLOWING the sea otter’s
return to spark the same controversy as
elsewhere, the Council of the Haida
Nation, with support from Parks Can-
ada, decided to develop a sea otter
management plan — one that would
be guided by both traditional knowl-
edge and western science. Boyko says
the plan — named Xaayda Gwaay.yaay
Kuugaay Gwii Sdiihltl’lxa: The Sea
Otters Return to Haida Gwaii — is
expected to be completed in late 2024
and will also rely on community input.
Sea otters are voracious eaters whose
presence significantly limits the density
of sea urchins. This interaction is
powerful, cascading down the trophic
levels of the ecosystem and allowing
urchin-ravaged kelp to bloom into dense
forests that play host to myriad lifeforms.
It’s a potentially risky move, given the
heated debates in other areas. “We
lived with sea otters for thousands of
years, long before colonization,” says
Boyko. “We have a lot of experience
co-existing with these animals that we
know we could draw on.”
The Pacific Urchin Harvesters Asso-
ciation was one of several stakeholders
engaged when the partners began
developing the sea otter management
plan in 2021. Experts on sea otter
ecology were brought in from universi-
ties and non-profit organizations to
share their knowledge. Other First
Nations who already have sea otters in
their midst, such as the Nuu-chah-nulth
on Vancouver Island, were invited to
talk about their experience. A series of
“community conversations” were also
held over Zoom, to gather input from
residents on what the return of sea otters
might mean for them.
“We wanted to really acknowledge
that it’s complicated; it’s not a one-
sided issue for community,” says Niisii
Guujaaw, the manager of marine plan-
ning with the Council of the Haida
Nation, who co-led the community
engagement.
Anxieties were understandable.
While generational knowledge of the
sea otter stretches back far beyond
their lifetimes, the current marine
environment — as out of balance as it
might be — is the only one that today’s
residents have ever known. But com-
munity feedback was mostly positive,
says Guujaaw. There was a high level
of awareness that sea otters are ecologi-
cally important. People were also keen
to restore their cultural relationship
with sea otters. Their furs were often
worn for traditional ceremonies by
chiefs and other high-ranking people
who had the technical skills to hunt sea
otters. The pelts were also used in day-
to-day life as bedding and insulation.
The main lesson the Haida heard
from other First Nations? To plan ahead
and to draw from their traditional
knowledge. “I think the most striking
thing was that when sea otters were
reintroduced [in the late 1960s and
early 1970s], the Nations there weren’t
involved in that conversation at all,”
says Guujaaw. “They were all in a reac-
tionary position, whereas I think we are
better situated to be playing an active
and leading role in the management.”
The Haida have always looked to
the ocean for their food. Ancestral
clam gardens — rock walls built in the
intertidal zone to improve shellfish
habitat — have been discovered dating
back thousands of years. Likewise,
studies of archeological middens (bur-
ied piles of shells, bones and other
waste from Indigenous villages) have
shown that shellfish and crabs have
long been an important part of the
Haida diet.
So how did they peacefully co-exist
with sea otters? Evidence including oral
history suggests that the animals were
hunted, particularly near villages where
shellfish foraging would have been
most intense.
The hunt wasn’t just open season
though. Otter remains in middens
show there was a fairly consistent
harvest of the animals over time,
suggesting their population was care-
fully maintained. In other words, the
sea otter population was managed.
“This idea that sea otters were once-
upon-a-time untouched, that they just
were allowed to roam — we know
that’s not true,” says Lee.
Sea otters have been off limits for
hunting in Canada since 1911, when the
North Pacific Fur Seal Convention was
signed. They’re now designated as a
“species of special concern” under the
Canadian Species at Risk Act (they were
down-listed in 2009 from “threatened”
status). The idea of hunting them is
highly controversial and runs counter
to the “hands off” approach that typi-
cally guides Western conservation efforts.
But the Haida, like many First Nations,
see humans as a part of the ecosystem
rather than separate from it. Hunting
is considered a way of stewarding the
environment. “We have an expression
that goes like this: ‘Everything depends
on everything else,’” Boyko says. “It’s
one of the guiding principles of the sea
otter management plan.”
The next step in the project will be
using a computer model to simulate
different management approaches. The
OPPOSITE PAGE: ISABELLE GROC. THIS PAGE: TIARE BOYES
model, developed through collaboration
among several institutions, including
the Council of the Haida Nation, Florida
State University and independent
consulters Nhydra Consulting, looks at
the impact on kelp, urchins and abalone
if sea otters were to return to Haida
Gwaii without any human interference.
Modellers will also test what might
happen if a limited hunt is permitted,
or if other non-lethal tools are used to
CANGEO.CA 37
 deter sea otters from certain areas like
important shellfish and abalone habi-
tats. The model will predict how these
scenarios might play out over time.
Climate change, which is expected to
hurt kelp, is also being factored in. The
modelling results will then be used to
gather more community input. “We’ll
bring that information back to the
community,” Guujaaw says, “and then
start the process of bringing a plan to
Haida leadership for direction.”
IN SOME WAYS, it shouldn’t come as
a surprise that Haida Gwaii is the
place where a high-powered com-
puter model is integrating ancient
traditional knowledge. The remote
archipelago has long been at the
forefront of Indigenous-led conser-
vation. Gwaii Haanas (designated a
national park reserve, a marine conser-
vation area and a Haida heritage area)
was created in 1993 through an agree-
ment reached between the federal
government and the Haida Nation,
after Haida-led protests halted log-
COLE BURSTON
ging in the area following decades of
clear-cutting. The area has been suc-
cessfully co-managed by the Haida
38 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
and Parks Canada ever since, using
consensus-based decision-making.
The archipelago still bears the scars
of colonization though. After sea otters
were extirpated, beaver and deer were
introduced by Europeans in the early
1900s for fur and meat, but quickly
overran the islands (and remain a prob-
lem today). Earlier still, rats arrived on
ships and threatened many of the sea-
birds that make stops here. Commercial
fishing has taken a toll on the once-
abundant salmon and herring popula-
tions. The Haida, in partnership with
Parks Canada, have worked to undo
some of those harms (rats have been
eradicated from several islands).
On the eastern side of Athlii Gwaii
(Lyell Island), the site of the logging
protest that led to Gwaii Haanas’s cre-
ation, a 13-metre-tall totem pole faces
out to KandaliiGwii (Hecate Strait) and
the B.C. mainland. Known as the Legacy
Pole, it was erected in 2013 to mark the
20th anniversary of the conservation
area. It was the first pole raised in Gwaii
Haanas in 130 years. It’s meant to reflect
the Haida’s stewardship of this area,
from the sea floor to the mountain tops:
a sculpin is featured at the base of the
Sea otters, such as the two photographed
here off Gwaii Haanas National Park
Reserve, are still relatively rare in Haida
Gwaii. But greater numbers will follow,
eliciting celebration, contestation and,
ultimately, balance.
pole, and an eagle perches on top. In
the middle, five people stand in a line
holding hands, representing the log-
ging protesters.
By Lee’s estimate, it will likely be
more than 30 to 40 years before sea
otters have fully repopulated Haida
Gwaii. That timeline gives her hope
that their homecoming will be differ-
ent here than the rocky reception
they’ve gotten elsewhere. “We can
plan ahead for the return of sea otters,
led by the Haida Nation, in a way that
considers culture and ecology equally,”
she says.
Visitors here sometimes make the
mistake of referring to Gwaii Haanas as
a national park, something Cindy Boyko
is always quick to correct. “It’s not a
park,” Boyko says. “It’s our home.” A
home now preparing itself for the return
of a long-lost family member — appetite
and all.
 The majesty of Alaska, the elegance of Cunard ®

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Contact your Travel Advisor, call (800) 728-6273, or visit Cunard.com/RCGS
Cyle Daniels hopes to join the
RCAF to pursue their dream of
working on plane engines.
 Red Bird
AS THE ROYAL CANADIAN AIR FORCE TURNS 100, CYLE DANIELS
FROM LONG PLAIN FIRST NATION STARTS THEIR OWN JOURNEY
O
ON A WARM AFTERNOON in the
summer of 2021, Cyle Daniels flew
over Long Plain First Nation, nestled
on the banks of the Assiniboine
River in Manitoba, and peered down
at the crowd gathered below. It was
his first time flying since he was a
child — only this time, he was in the
pilot’s seat. His cousins and siblings
whooped and hollered as he circled
around his grandmother’s house for a
third time. It’s a moment none of them
will ever forget — the day Miskwaa-
Bineshiinh-Ikwe (Anishnaabemowin
for “Red Bird Woman,” although
Cylie goes by “Red Bird”) spread his
wings and soared through the skies.
That afternoon, Daniels piloted a
small two-seater plane. “It was very,
very scary,” admits the 20-year-old
Two-Spirit youth from Long Plain
First Nation, but also “very thrilling.”
Daniels is a graduate of the Eagle’s
Wings Flight School in Portage La
Prairie, Man., just a five-minute
flight northeast of his nation. Sitting
next to Daniels on that first flight
was the school’s founder, Royal
WITH THE STORIED SERVICE
BY KALLAN LYONS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY APRIL CARANDANG
Canadian Air Force Captain Josh
Cordery, who runs the summer avia-
tion program for Indigenous youth
from southern Manitoba.
Eagle’s Wings students spend the
first couple of days learning the basics
of aircraft control and the remainder
of the two-week programme in the air.
Cordery wants each student to come
away knowing what they’re capable of.
Some students “have never been in
an airplane, are scared to fly, scared
of heights,” says Cordery. “I want to
show these young people what they
can do that they don’t know — that
they can dream a little bigger.”
Daniels (who uses the pronouns
he/him and they/them interchange-
ably) never imagined that a month-long
program he heard about in his final
year of high school would change his
life. Their goal is now to work on
plane engines as a technician for the
RCAF, which celebrates its centennial
this April. Daniels’ story could be seen
as part of an evolving legacy of the
RCAF as it creates spaces people like
them can aspire to and thrive in.
WHEN JOSH CORDERY joined the
RCAF in 2005 after completing his
civilian flight training, he had no
family in the military nor any prior
knowledge about it. What he did know
was he wanted to work in aviation. Liv-
ing in Portage la Prairie, where around
half of high school students are Indig-
enous, he also wanted to help his
neighbours. That was the inspiration
behind Eagle’s Wings: a volunteer-led
non-profit that came alive through
Cordery’s work with Dakota Ojibwe
Child & Family Services.
The flight school, a registered char-
ity, is funded in part by Dakota Ojibwe
Child & Family Services, as well as
corporate sponsorship and other fund-
ing sources, and takes on six to seven
students each summer from Sioux
Valley Dakota Nation, Canupawakpa
Dakota Nation, and from Roseau River,
Long Plain, Dakota Tipi, Birdtail Sioux,
Dakota Plains and Swan Lake First
Nations. Of the 25 youth who have
graduated since the school’s inception,
only a few have pursued further avia-
tion education. But Cordery’s goal isn’t
CANGEO.CA 41
 From Left: Josh Cordery (right) mentored
Cyle Daniels as part of the Eagle’s Wings
Flight School; Daniels and his dog, Abby;
Jacqueline and Cyle Daniels at their home
in Long Plains.
to turn participants into pilots: he’s
helping them build confidence and
life skills.
“I always had, what I would say,
a God-given dream on my heart — to
give back, but to teach people how to
fly who wouldn’t have the opportu-
nity,” says Cordery, who also teaches
at the 3 Canadian Forces Flying Train-
ing School. “There’s never a day where
I don’t try and actively recall how for-
tunate and blessed I am that I call this
my work.”
Cordery recalls Cyle Daniels as
being bold, courageous and always
up for a challenge. That courage,
Daniels says, comes from the woman
who raised him: his grandmother
Jacqueline Daniels.
Jacqueline’s father, Private George
Daniels, was a Second World War
veteran who fought on D-Day — and
a residential school survivor, who
instilled an appreciation for the value
of education in his children. He
inspired some of Jacqueline’s cousins
and nephews to join the military.
“In Anishnaabe[mowin] there’s a
word we have for warrior, and that
word is ogichidaa. It’s kind of a
42 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
universal word on Turtle Island with
all the tribes. They all know that
when a warrior passed onto some-
body’s territory, all they had to say
was ‘ogichidaa’ for safe passage —
it was like a warrior peacekeeper,”
says Jacqueline.
Her grandchild is now carrying this
role. “That’s why I talked to Cyle about
that: that it’s also a very honourable
thing to be a protector and a peace-
keeper amongst our nation. That
whole concept of ogichidaa is part
of reconciliation but also of decolo-
nizing ourselves and taking back
those teachings. We’ve always had
that warrior spirit.”
Jacqueline is the one who encour-
aged Daniels to enrol in Eagle’s
Wings. “She pushed me to graduate
high school, even when I wanted to
drop out, and told me not many
Indigenous students actually gradu-
ate and make it into the military,”
Daniels says. “She’s just trying to
help her grandchildren achieve things
that we did not think we were going
to achieve.”
Both of Jacqueline’s sons graduated
from post-secondary school and have
successful careers. And with his
grandmother leading the way, Daniels
was the first of several grandchildren
to receive his high school diploma.
Jacqueline has another special con-
nection with Daniels — they share the
same spirit name, Misko-Bineshinh,
“Red Bird.” (Spirit names are given by
an Elder or Medicine Person during a
pipe ceremony that welcomes weeks-
old Anishinaabe babies to the world).
Daniels’ spirit name came to his
grandmother in a dream one week
before the ceremony.
“Sounds like the ancestors had
something planned for me,” quips
Daniels.
Misko-Bineshiinh is a name Jac-
queline also lives up to. “The red bird
is a messenger,” she says, and her
message for her kids and grandkids
has always been the same. “I told
Cyle, and my boys, that you got the
odds stacked up against you not to
succeed. So you’ve got to be out there
and prove them wrong.”
FOR 100 YEARS, the RCAF has
upheld a heroic reputation, mainly
associated with heavy bomber crews
and the Allied victory of the Second
World War. Although most Indig-
enous people could not vote in
Kallan Lyons ( @Kallanlyons) is a freelance
journalist living on the unceded ancestral lands
of the Secwépemc Nation in Kamloops, B.C. April
Carandang ( @peggrammer) is a Filipina pho-
tographer based in Winnipeg who mainly docu-
ments urban life, culture and travel.
Canada until 1960, at least 3,000
First Nations, and an unknown num-
ber of Inuit and Métis enlisted in the
Canadian Armed Forces during the
war — including at least 72 women.
Grace Poulin, author of WWII Aborig-
inal Servicewomen in Canada, writes
that Indigenous “women warriors”
felt the call to sign up, some following
in the footsteps of uncles or
brothers. Others relished the
opportunity to leave home, have
a steady income and further
their education. Some Indig-
enous men and women who
enlisted felt something they
didn’t experience while living
under the Indian Act.
Dorothy Asquith, a Métis
woman who served in the
RCAF women’s auxiliary during
the Second World War, did not
remember experiencing any
discrimination during the years
she served. “Everybody was so involved
in what was happening with the war
that nobody was involved in such
pettiness,” she recalled in Our Women
in Uniform by P. Gayle McKenzie,
Ginny Belcourt Todd and Muriel
Stanley Venne. “I don’t think you
bothered to look at the colour of your
buddies’ skin.”
This sentiment was echoed by army
veteran Howard Sinclair Anderson of
Punnichy, Sask., who also served in the
Second World War. “There was no dis-
crimination, really.… We were right in
there, as a soldier, and that’s how
we were treated,” Anderson told the
Memory Project, a volunteer speak-
ers bureau where veterans and forces
members share their stories. “It was
terrible to come back and find out you
[were being treated differently].”
“the ancestors
Sounds like
had something
planned for me".
Still, Indigenous experiences in the
RCAF weren’t always so positive.
Prior to 1942, racially based recruit-
ment policies required recruits to be
British or of “pure” European descent.
Most Indigenous volunteers ended up
in the army. The RCAF changed its
enlistment policy in 1939 to accept
Indigenous recruits but required edu-
cation levels that disqualified many
Indigenous candidates. A federal
report for 1942-43 said only 29
Indigenous people had enlisted in
the air force.
The RCAF’s uneasy relationship
with Indigenous Peoples goes beyond
enlistment. In the ’40s up to the early
1950s, RCAF Wing Commander Dr.
Frederick Tisdall — who earned the
Order of the British Empire for pro-
viding nutrition advice to the RCAF
and creating nourishment
packages for prisoners of
war during the Second
World War — conducted a
series of unethical nutrition
tests, during which children
in Indigenous communities
and residential schools in
northern Manitoba, northern
Ontario, British Columbia,
Nova Scotia, and Alberta, were
denied adequate nutrition
without their knowledge or
consent. At least one of
these research experiments
was sponsored in part by the RCAF,
according to research by food his-
torian Ian Mosby.
In more recent decades, the RCAF
has acknowledged past discriminatory
and culturally appropriative prac-
tices. It has renamed units that had
appropriated Indigenous terms and
suspended RCAF heraldic crests
that used Indigenous images and
symbols without consultation. By
2019, there were 2,742 Indigenous
CANGEO.CA 43

members in the Canadian Armed
Forces, (according to self-reported data)
and the RCAF had 2.4 per cent Indig-
enous representation, according to the
Department of National Defence.
In its darker past, the RCAF
discriminated against Two-
Spirit individuals like Daniels
on a second front. The Cana-
dian Armed Forces, like many
organizations in Canada and
across the world, haven’t tradi-
tionally been a safe space to
express diverse gender iden-
tities, expressions or sexual
orientations. From the 1950s
to 1990s, 2SLGBTQI+ mem-
bers were expelled from service
in the Canadian Armed Forces
and Royal Canadian Mounted
Police in what became known
as the LGBT Purge. The Purge
affected an estimated 9,000
military veterans, including Sharp
Dopler, a Two-Spirit navy veteran who
served for 14 years as a cadet instruc-
tors officer.
Dopler (who uses he/him, she/her
and they/them pronouns interchange-
ably) comes from a long line of military
veterans, including their father and
44 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
grandfather. It was inevitable that they
would one day don a uniform. After
being purged from the navy, Dopler
still struggles with the grief of losing
a career he loved and the number of
lives the policy has affected.
“ the space
When we create
for people to be who
they are, that’s when
people thrive."
Dopler is now on the board of Rain-
bow Veterans Canada, an LGBT Purge
non-profit. The organization formed
following the successful class action
lawsuit against the federal government
in 2018, which saw Purge survivors
compensated from a fund of up to
$110 million.
This page: Cyle Daniels at the Long Plain
First Nation cenotaph, which carries the
name of Cyle’s great-grandfather and
their relatives. opposite: Jacqueline and
Cyle drum together. The drums were
passed on from Jacqueline’s mother.
In the summer of 2017, Dopler was
working as a traditional counsellor at
the Raven program — which intro-
duces military careers to Indigenous
youth — when they saw something
that made them drop to their knees.
Just outside the barracks, a pride flag
was flying at the top of the masthead.
“My little traumatized brain, who
watched so many people around them
when I was serving hide the fact that
they were gay — I couldn’t believe
what I was seeing.”
Since 2018, the RCAF has run
Positive Space Programs at operational
wings across the country to encourage
2SLGBTQI+ members to bring any
issues forward to leadership and cre-
ate “a place where people feel like they
belong,” says Major Michelle
Backhouse of their work at
Wing 14. Backhouse is a pro-
fessional conduct and culture
officer who, after 21 years with
the RCAF presenting as male,
came out as bigender and,
more recently, as male-to-
female transgender, while still
retaining a bigender sense of
self. Each wing’s professional
conduct and culture officer is
the central point of contact to
coordinate Department of
National Defence advisory
groups for women, Indige-
nous, visible minority and
2SLGTBQI+ members.
“They basically have had an open-
door policy that says, if you ever have
any difficulty, just come see me,” says
Backhouse about their work at Wing
14 Greenwood. “My motto is ‘be the
change, lead by example’ — and part
of that was stepping out of the

shadows fully. And the air force
fully supports that. We want the best
and the brightest, and we want you
to be your authentic self.”
Dopler acknowledges the forces are
now heading in a relatively better
direction. When Daniels applied to
an RCAF program, they were able
to tell the force they were non-binary
and apply under their chosen name.
Dopler’s advice to 2SLGBTQI+ ser-
vice members is to “build a network
of support that is outside of the mili-
tary. Reach out to people like Rainbow
Veterans Canada, like Aboriginal Vet-
erans Autochtones, because in one
direction or the other, we’ve been
there,” they say. “Knowing that history
is really important.”
CORDERY ISN’T THE ONLY RCAF
member committed to creative and
inclusive programs to encourage more
Indigenous participation in the RCAF.
Some of the force’s Indigenous
members are leading the way to build
a culture of acceptance from within.
For example, Sergeant Devin
Beaudry from the Red River Métis
community in Manitoba introduced a
sweat lodge onto the base in Winnipeg
in 2017 after a 35-year career with the
RCAF. And Master Corporal Windy
Lafreniere, a member of the Mohawk
Nation of Akwesasne and mobile sup-
port equipment operator for the Royal
Canadian Air Force at 16 Wing, is sup-
porting Indigenous members and
their families through organizing
sharing circles and other cultural
activities. Then there’s Sarah Leo —
the former president of Nunatsiavut
and a Canadian Army veteran — who
made history just five years ago in
2019 as the first Inuk woman to
become an honorary colonel at 5 Wing
Goose Bay in Labrador.
“When we create the space for
people to be who they are, that’s
when people thrive. And that's when
people want to stick around a little
bit,” says Cordery. He has also wit-
nessed the cultural shifts that have
taken place over the past several
years throughout air bases — from
the addition of sweat lodges to
sacred fire ceremonies — and says
the military would like to add more
Indigenous people to its ranks.
That’s why he makes it his mission
to not only teach his students how
to fly but to educate them on all the
possibilities.
“I tell them about my career. I tell
them about the opportunities,” says
Cordery. “Even if you do choose to
serve 10, 12 years and walk away, you’re
going to walk into your next job really
easily, because of the path you’ve
walked. I’m excited because I know
what lies ahead. It’s a tremendously
rewarding career, in my opinion.”
At Eagle’s Wings, Daniels wanted
to learn more about the mechanics of
flying. Nine months after completing
flight school, he applied for the gas
turbine technician program at Neegi-
nan College of Applied Technology in
Winnipeg. “I’ve always been a hands-
on person,” says Daniels. “Halfway
through, I was like: I want to do this
for a living.”
After the course, Daniels — encour-
aged by Cordery — decided the RCAF
would be his next step. They’ve set
their sights on the Indigenous Lead-
ership Opportunity Year, a paid
one-year program for Indigenous
youth at the Royal Military College
in Kingston, Ont., that’s a possible
pathway to becoming an RCAF offi-
cer. In September, Daniels hopes to
board another plane to Kingston,
this time as a passenger, to pursue
his dream.
As an educator herself, Jacqueline
Daniels is aware of the challenges
Indigenous youth face in post-second-
ary institutions. But her grandchild
has reassured her he’ll be in good
hands: the program has an Indig-
enous support program, including
access to Elders.
“I’m headed in a good direction, set-
ting a good example for my younger
cousins. One also said he wants to
join the military when he’s older now,”
says Cyle Daniels. “I hope young
Indigenous people read this and are
inspired to do what they want to
do with their life.”
CANGEO.CA 45
 The Narcisse snake dens protect
the largest aggregation of red-sided
gartersnakes on the planet.

46 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 SNAKES
ON A
EACH SPRING, A DISQUIETING TANGLE OF GARTERSNAKES EMERGES AT THE
NARCISSE SNAKE DENS. EVERYONE AND THEIR MOTHER SHOWS UP TO SEE IT.
A
AT 11:00 A.M. on a preternaturally
warm day in May, the rock-strewn
parking lot on the eastern edge of
Manitoba’s Narcisse wildlife manage-
ment area is filling up fast. Families
unload strollers, coolers and other lei-
sure paraphernalia as a convoy of vans
from a Winnipeg seniors care facility
pulls in, followed by a bus seeping the
muted squeals of excited schoolchil-
dren. Groups hurry down a short trail
to stake out territory at a cluster of
picnic sites, each featuring a table
partially enclosed by an L-shaped wind-
break of wood set perpendicular to a
large slab of local limestone stood on
end, Stonehenge-style.
Though it surely ranks among the
world’s oddest-themed picnicking sites,
the reaction of many a visitor to the
park’s raison d’être makes the notion of
eating first and seeing the sights later
odder still. For beyond these convivial
tables, a post-prandial stroll along a
three-kilometre loop through grassy
alvars and stands of dwarf aspen deliv-
ers diners to a sight that — fascinating
though it may be — is for some discon-
certing: the Narcisse Snake Dens,
where a fluctuating population of
around 75,000-150,000 red-sided
gartersnakes overwinters in lime-
stone sinkholes and, after emerging
in spring, spends several weeks
Plain
BY LESLIE ANTHONY
WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY WALTER POTREBKA
vigorously mating under a Prairie
sun. The planet’s largest aggregation
of snakes, it is observed by some
35,000 people each year, close enough
to have the amorous animals slither
over their shoes or be picked up by
the more intrepid.
Depending on who you are, this de
facto Wonder of the Natural World is
a scientist’s dream, bucket-list Insta-
gram brag or, for those addled by the
thought of even a single serpent, seri-
ous trigger-fodder. Yet regardless of
where one fits on the spectrum, all
leave Narcisse with two important
gifts: a first-hand, David Attenborough-
free recalibration of nature’s “wow”
factor, and newfound respect for these
mostly misunderstood creatures.
ANOTHER CERTAINTY about the sight
of thousands of cold-blooded snakes
spaghetti-ing in a rocky pit in the cold-
hearted north are the questions it
engenders: Why so many? Once the
answer of “mating aggregation” lands,
more inquiries follow: Why here?
Where do they come from? How long
are they underground? Aren’t they
hungry? How do they find a mate?
What do size differences mean?
These logical queries, sounded by
curious visitors, are identical to those
posed by scientists for whom Narcisse
has long been a biological goldmine,
from which nuggets of data on every-
thing from homing to reproductive
ecology to behavioural neurophysiol-
ogy are continually panned.
I’ve visited several times over the
years, beginning as a young gradu-
ate student loosed from the Royal
Ontario Museum one spring to col-
lect salamanders in Manitoba. For a
herpetologist (someone who studies
reptiles and amphibians) based in Can-
ada, pilgrimage to Narcisse is a rite of
passage. And not just because garter-
snakes — by dint of being harmless
and found in every province — are a
literal carnet for any Canuck kid with
scaly interests. It’s more about unspo-
ken pride that the only place on Earth
where this number of reptiles can be
seen in one go is a frosty wedge of the
Great White North.
On that sojourn, I’d been struck
first by the dens’ relative anonymity. If
an attraction based on snakes was in,
say, the decidedly snakey southern
United States — billboards would hec-
tor you in from all directions for a
hundred kilometres. There’d be souve-
nir stands and cheesy motels, fireworks
warehouses and roadside pie stands.
Instead, with only the occasional tiny,
monochromatic Manitoba Transport
sign as compass, I hadn’t been sure I
CANGEO.CA 47
 was headed the right way until, from
the corner of my eye and far off the
highway, I’d spotted two cartoonish,
intertwined, 10-metre gartersnakes —
MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO; MAP DATA: GARTER SNAKE RANGE DATA 2023: THE IUCN RED LIST OF THREATENED SPECIES. VERSION 3.
known as Sara and Sam — in the town
of Inwood.
It is a little different this morning.
My travelling companion is Randy
Mooi, curator of zoology at the Mani-
toba Museum, and after craning our
necks to catch Sara and Sam, we veer
right out of town into a monotony of
scrub forest and farm field. With the
only directional reinforcement a steady
increase in road-flattened snakes (we’ll
get to this), many kilometres pass
before a large sign announces the
Narcisse Snake Dens. It’s a literal
WWW.IUCNREDLIST.ORG. DOWNLOADED ON DEC. 12, 2023.
middle-of-nowhere, but we have plenty
of company.
Hustling past the picnic-area may-
hem, Mooi and I light out for the first
of four dens linked by trails. Amaz-
ingly, at Den 1, there’s no one save us
and some 50 snakes. It’s both early sea-
son and early in the day, but the dens’
signature phenomenon is already
forming: a mating ball. A single large
female is surrounded by a dozen
48 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
smaller males, wound around her
like strands of hemp rope.
The red-sided gartersnake is one of a
dozen recognized subspecies of the
common gartersnake, a continental
superspecies ranging from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, Mexico to the sub-Arctic.
Red-sided gartersnake males average
40-60 centimetres and females, 60-80
centimetres (though they can reach 110
centimetres). The den is surrounded
by snake-friendly chain-link fencing to
keep overly curious humans from
disturbing the proceedings — or fall-
ing in. A wooden viewing platform
stretches out over the pit, where we
contemplate the fortuitous reasons for
these annual gatherings.
That such a profusion of snakes
occurs this far north may seem strange
at first blush, but makes sense in the
details. While summers here are warm
enough to accommodate a number of
reptile and amphibian species, win-
ters are long and harsh, with surface
temperatures far south of -30 C for
extensive periods and frost moving
deep into the ground. For ectotherms
like snakes, whose body temperature
remains close to air temperature,
decent hibernaculae are at a pre-
mium — they must be below the
frostline but above the water table,
yet humid enough that snakes won’t
dry out over the seven to eight months
they spend in them. The Narcisse
area features classic karst topogra-
phy, where surface water and rain
have dissolved calcium carbonate
along weaknesses in the limestone
bedrock, creating deep fissures and
underground chambers. These cham-
bers often collapse in on themselves
as sinkholes, allowing snakes access to
an extensive labyrinth several metres
below the surface.
The limestone is ancient, composed
of creatures whose skeletons accu-
mulated at the bottom of a tropical
Leslie Anthony ( @docleslie) is a regular contributor
to Canadian Geographic. His last book is The Aliens
Among Us: How Invasive Species are Transforming
the Planet—and Ourselves. Walter Potrebka ( @
wpotrebka_photography) is a nature and wildlife
photographer based in Winnipeg.
sea some 450 million years ago. But
the karst landscape is more recent, a
legacy of Pleistocene glaciation that
scraped the land clean and, in its final
throes 11,500 years ago, spawned Lake
Agassiz, one of the largest freshwater
lakes ever known. Agassiz’s remnants
include Lake Winnipeg and the Win-
nipegosis/Manitoba complex of lakes,
which bracket the Interlake Region, as
well as surrounding water bodies.
As shallow Agassiz scions like Lake
Winnipeg shrank, the draining water
not only helped create the karst for-
mations but left extensive marshland
pooled across the flat landscape — a
giant buffet of worms, frogs, fish and
small mammals for generalists like
gartersnakes. Only a few thousand
years ago, critical sinkhole dens and
prime summer marsh habitat were
adjacent, but retreating lake margins hormone that transmits information to
and, eventually, shrinking marshland members of the same species) known
required snakes to make ever-more- in a reptile.
extensive migrations between the two. Mason — whose name is now syn-
In the 1970s, while pursuing a doc- onymous with this giant, self-contained
torate at the University of Manitoba, outdoor laboratory and who is fond of
celebrated Canadian herpetologist mentioning he met his wife “in a snake
and gartersnake doyen Pat Gregory pit” when she joined his 1997 Narcisse
found that some snakes travelled fieldwork as part of a citizen-science
almost 20 kilometres to summer ecotourism group — continues his
habitat, then made the return jour- voluminous research with a stable of
ney to dens in fall. Here, they gather graduate students to this day. Among
to sun until cold drives them deep their many startling discoveries: not
into the limestone. In late April and only can sex be differentiated by pher-
early May they re-emerge, males omones, but so can breeding versus
first, followed a week or so later by non-breeding body condition; males
females, whose arrival is the reptil- prefer larger females, whose phero-
ian equivalent to Ladies Night, with mones are more attractive; males can
all hell breaking loose among eager differentiate female pheromones from
males milling at the sinkhole bar. different dens and prefer those from
The mating-ball frenzy, in which their own; some males produce female
mobbing males attempt to vigorously pheromones to fool other males and
rub chins along a female’s back, sug- gain warmth and protection within
gested to scientists that females must
exude some kind of sexy snake appeal. A mating ball forms in the snake pit
In a landmark 1989 paper in Science, (opposite). When a mating ball breaks up,
Oregon State University’s Bob Mason it resembles a chaotic high-speed fission,
identified a skin lipid produced by firing ribbons in every direction; a lone
female red-sided gartersnakes as the male (right) emerges curiously from the
first pheromone (an externally secreted undergrowth to slither toward the camera.

CANGEO.CA 49

mating balls (in experiments, female-
performing males warmed to 28 C
would cease impersonating females,
while males whose body temperature
remained at 10 C kept up the phero-
mone drag show). All this sensory
showmanship comes courtesy of
snakes’ ability to detect sexual, prey
and same-species scents at mere
parts per million — the reason for
the constant flicking of their tongue,
which delivers airborne molecular
cues to the sensitive vomeronasal
organ in the roof of their mouth that
detects scents.
But while scientists inform much
of what we know about the biology
50 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
and behavioural ecology of these
snakes, there’s plenty of nature on dis-
play for visitors to get their own sense
of how the snakes fit into the larger
ecosystem. “This trail is usually lit-
tered with de-livered snakes,” remarks
Mooi as we stroll toward the second
den, referencing the favoured snack
crows extract from easily caught ser-
pents. “But then, we’re early.”
Recalling the fastidious re-cre-
ation of a snake den in the Manitoba
Museum that Mooi showed me yes-
terday, replete with a hungry crow
lurking in an aspen, begs a question:
what is the value of an actual visit?
“The dens provide huge opportunity
Clockwise from left: The Mother’s Day
crowd at Den 2; interpreter Brandon
Stuebing gently shows a gartersnake
to a curious group of children; fascinated
visitors watch the snakes from a viewing
platform at Den 3.
for learning about all sorts of aspects
of ecology,” he says. “In a day and age
where it’s harder and harder to find
natural experiences because we’ve
surrounded ourselves with concrete,
something relatively close that you can
bring a school group to opens up whole
new worlds. Kids can also learn how
this is a professional opportunity —
that they could grow up to study these
kinds of things for a living.”
ONLY A HALF-KILOMETRE DISTANT,
Den 2 is a completely different story
from the first den.
We’re within sight when smallish
snakes rush the path. Like grass blades
fluttering flat in a strong wind, threads
of desperate males hard on the scent of
a female fire off in waves, oblivious to
our presence. From the viewing plat-
form come screams, groans and all
manner of exclamation as kids and
adults alike make first visual contact
with a three-metre-deep sinkhole car-
peted with thousands upon thousands
of wriggling snakes.
This is more like it.
Dispersed in great, Medusan
clumps, snakes cover the floor, hang
from fissures and holes, and drape
over rocks and branches. Smaller
aggregates ply the sinkhole’s edges,
and care is needed to step anywhere as
snakes whip across startled feet and
pop bug-eyed heads from cracks in
the viewing platform to swivel like
prairie dogs. There’s no avoiding the
subject, no distant viewing opportu-
nity through binoculars, no chance to
be anything but among and within.
Remember the movie Snakes on a
Plane? A campy joke of mostly CGI
snakes that reflects zero biological
reality? Forget it. How about the “Well
of Souls” snake scene in Raiders of the
Lost Ark? Closer, but multiplied sev-
eral thousandfold with you in it.
“Gross!” from up ahead. “Eeeeeek!”
from another quarter, perhaps the only
time outside a comic book you can
justify such a spelling.
“Wow — cool!” from a boy whose
father physically restrains him from
going over the rail.
“Oh my,” moans a woman just to my
right, holding a hand to her forehead.
“What do you think?” says her
friend.
“Well, it looks pretty much like I
expected. I just hoped it wouldn’t.”
The crowd at the rail eventually
dissolves to reveal a young girl named
Gabi who practically glows with won-
der, the little snake wrapped around
her arm calmly soaking up both
warmth and adulation. “Snakes have
always been my favourite animal,” she
says. And, lest I dismiss her apparent
longstanding ophidiophilia as the
hyperbole of an eight-year-old, “she’s
actually waited four years for this,”
adds mom. The Winnipeg resident
first promised her snake-charmed
child a trip to Narcisse in 2020, but
the pandemic closed the site that once it wriggles free. “Let’s go to the
spring; ditto 2021, while severe flood- next den to walk off your anxiety.”
ing in 2022 discouraged visitation. The family’s patience pays off. At
But Gabi’s dream has finally come Den 3, where snakes clump in rocky
true, and she’s making the most of it. crevasses, on a limestone ledge, beside
In another visiting family, the a log and in a bush — places where
younger of two tween girls is terrified females are trapped by a frenzy of
by every snake she sees, shrieking as males — dawning realization that
the creatures streak past on all sides. these animals are going about their
“I’m good,” she says, backing away business unconcerned with her notice-
DEPENDING WHO YOU ARE, this
de facto Wonder of the Natural World
is a scientist’s dream, BUCKET-LIST
Instagram brag or serious trigger-fodder.
every time her sister urges her to join ably calms the girl. By the end of a
her at the rail. When her brother says, long stint at Den 4, for a nanosecond,
“there’s one behind you,” she literally the molecules of her fingertip come
jumps. He picks it up, calms it down close enough to a snake held by her
with gentle handling and passes it to sister to claim — at least by the laws of
her sister. Even mom briefly holds it, physics — to have actually touched it.
though she has to close her eyes. “OK,” “You’ve come a long way in an hour,”
the mom says to the petrified daughter laughs mom.
CANGEO.CA 51
 Given humans’ generally negative
association with snake dens (histori-
cally, we’ve dynamited, burned and
filled them, and still use the phrase
“den of snakes” to describe any worst-
of-the-worst group of humans), a lot of
people come a long way here. Beside
us, a young, initially trepidatious boy
is now naming every lone snake that
crosses the platform. “Bye Skittles!”
he calls as his latest pet-for-a-second
glides off into the underbrush.
“You better have a lot of names
ready,” Mooi advises. “Because you’re
going to see a lot of snakes.”
“The best for me is seeing people
turn like that,” says interpreter Gary
Chikousky, who has been watching
with us. “A busload of kids arrives, and
probably half of them don’t really want
to be here, you know, saying ‘Why do
we have to go to this stupid place?’ or
begrudging it in some other way. But
then they see something they didn’t
even imagine and get interested. And
by the time they leave, they’re enjoying
themselves, naming snakes and learn-
ing without knowing it.”
When Chikousky moved to the Nar-
cisse area from Winnipeg to farm
cattle, he’d never heard of its local
52 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
snake dens. But once he retired, they
provided a spring job he’s looked for-
ward to for 20 years. In his time as an
interpreter, he’s seen everything, taking
the good with the bad and weighing in
where and when he can. Grizzled, with
a close-cropped grey beard, he seems
as unflappable as 450-million-year-old
limestone, easily answering any ques-
tion thrown his way.
“How long do they live?”
“Fourteen to 16 years in the wild,
up to 25 in captivity. The problem for
snakes is they grow continuously, so
the oldest ones are bigger targets for
predators.”
“How many snakes are actually
here?”
“The estimate fluctuates between
75,000 and 150,000. There’ve been
low numbers for five or six years now,
but this year they seem to be bounc-
ing back.”
IT WOULDN’T BE the first time the
Narcisse snakes have made a come-
back. In 1987, as an aspiring
provincial wildlife biologist, Dave
Roberts moved from Winnipeg to
Gimli, regional headquarters for the
Interlake Region. At the time, the
dens were in ecotourism infancy,
today’s parking lot a gravel quarry.
Visits, while not prohibited, were
a difficult-to-access free-for-all that
included snake-hunters who ran-
sacked the dens, selling thousands of
snakes to biological supply houses.
People familiar with the site helped
convince the provincial government
to add it to the pre-existing Narcisse
wildlife management area, and
Roberts began the process of orga-
nized visits, overseeing a few staff
each spring and — as funds became
available — developing trails, inter-
pretive material and the picnic area.
Originally a reservation-only guided
tour, significant interest in the dens
and the impossibility of stopping
those without reservations prompted
a switch to open access, with staff
keeping an eye on things and answer-
ing questions. “But it grew beyond
what we could successfully manage
on busier weekends, and people were
way harder to handle than we were
capable of, which made staff difficult
to keep,” Roberts recalls.
Narcisse interpreters have plenty
on their plates: they’re also respon-
sible for cleaning washrooms and
 Clockwise from far left: A snake can
detect pheromones at mere parts per
million; interpreter Gary Chikousky;
a significant mortality factor for the
red-sided gartersnakes is vehicle
collisions when they try to cross the
highway; a mating ball of snakes
clings onto a branch.

waste management. Despite abun-

dant waste receptacles, they still haul
bags of garbage from the more pop-
ular dens that include cigarette butts,
candy-bar wrappers and lens caps. “I
had a new one yesterday — went down
into Den 2 to get a lady’s credit card,”
says Chikousky.
I’ve seen the challenges interpreters
face first-hand, including the mishan-
dling of snakes — for example, kids
squeezing too hard and parents getting
pissy when staff try to gently intervene.
One day I found myself behind a group
carrying a snake between two dens
with seemingly no idea they were dis-
placing an animal that had been where
it was for a reason (snakes have high
fidelity to the same den). A kilometre
journey for an animal this size is equiv-
alent to 10 kilometres for a human.
I recall this tableau when Roberts
alludes to the double-edged sword
between promoting ecological val-
ues to the public and having the
place swarmed. “We talk about how
important this spectacle is, but we
don’t really even know how many
snakes are here or precisely where familiarity can also be good because ecological importance was becoming
they all go in summer — it’s just repeated visits allow people to develop better-known and people were taking
kind of assumed they’ll be here for- a healthier attitude toward snakes — more interest in the environment and
ever. These are things [government] even if they don’t quite grasp how conservation. It all fed into a desire
should put money and resources special the phenomenon is.” to deal with a perennially upsetting
into understanding but hasn’t.” Dealing with the dens was supposed problem: the mortality of snakes
When governments actually value to be 10 per cent of Roberts’ time but crossing Highway 17—particularly as
the nature they’re purporting to pro- most years took up a lot more. “For bet- they returned to dens in the fall when,
tect, it directly contributes to public ter or worse, I also became the regional according to a report Roberts wrote in
appreciation and stewardship. “When snake guy,” he says. “If anyone had one the late ’90s, some 30,000 were killed
you grow up with something like this in their basement I’d get the call. each year. In a joint project between
in your backyard, it’s hard to know Then came the tunnels and fences.” Manitoba Hydro, Manitoba Conser-
how special it is,” Mooi told me. “But Around the new millennium, the dens’ vation, Manitoba Highways and local

CANGEO.CA 53
organizations, tunnels bored beneath
the highway roughly every 100 metres
over a kilometre-and-a-half stretch
were fitted with pipe passages and
low drift-fences to encourage snakes
into them. Since snakes don’t like
cold, dark tunnels, it could have
been an expensive but ineffective
gesture if it weren’t for Bob Mason.
In an applied-science conservation
It’s de rigueur to TAKE MOM, beleaguered
by her OWN REPRODUCTIVE SPOILS,
to watch snakes mate.
collaboration, Mason put his Nar-
cisse research to work by painting
the tunnels with synthetic red-sided
gartersnake pheromone to entice
the animals to travel through. The
snakes responded; fortuitously, they
also left more pheromone along the
way, compounding an effectiveness
that saw the road toll drop to 1,500
per year.
When the system was first installed,
some 25,000-30,000 snakes used the
54 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
tunnels during fall migration. “I’d put
a box trap at a tunnel in the morning
and come back in the afternoon and
there’d be 300-400 snakes in [it], so
we were having significant success in
reducing mortality,” says Roberts.
Protecting the snakes remains an
uphill battle. Snowmobiles and snow-
plows damage the fence each winter,
requiring extensive annual repair.
Other initiatives have waned. At one
time, “snake-crossing” highway warn-
ings were erected and taken down
annually. “Not many people slowed,”
recalls Roberts. “And most locals
didn’t care, so the highway depart-
ment flat-out refused to lower the 100
kilometre-per-hour speed limit. That
was frustrating.”
The embattled fence remains an
issue — every hole and downed sec-
tion a potential death for hundreds of
snakes. As any good road ecologist
would advise, Roberts would like to see
a more permanent tunnel-and-fence
system. “Before I retired, I provided a
highways biologist with a drawing of
what they could do based on what I’d
seen elsewhere in North America. If
they ever redo that highway — not a
priority because few people live out
there — maybe that could happen, but
it’s unlikely.”
Roberts believes the Narcisse snake
dens should have been an ecological
reserve in which no one was allowed,
but a decision was made early on that
it would be a place for public inter-
pretation. “That’s been successful, but
the downside is the population has
been impacted by the cumulative effect
of everything going on there. We’ve
never really done enough.”
BY FAR THE BUSIEST DAY (and perhaps
the strangest) at the Narcisse Snake
Dens is Mother’s Day. A traditional
outing for many Winnipegonians, it’s
a far-fetched scenario on a continent
where pancake breakfasts and visits to
botanical gardens are the norm. Here,
however, it’s de rigueur to take mom,
 As cold-blooded creatures, gartersnakes
(left) need the spring sunshine to
emerge from their winter dens. By all
accounts, 2023 wasn’t a great year for
snake viewing, but numbers seem to
be back on the upswing. An older sister
(right) carefully hands a snake to her
gleeful sibling at Den 2.

beleaguered by her own reproductive

spoils, to watch snakes mate.
I’m here solo because Mooi’s col-
leagues have told him to avoid Mother’s
Day at all costs, and I can see why — by
10 a.m. not only is the parking lot
overflowing, but vehicles line both
shoulders of Highway 17 for a kilome-
tre. I head directly to Den 2 where,
with the temperature already closing
on 20 C, the ground is literally alive
with males, females sight unseen.
The snakes seem extraordinarily busy,
perhaps following trails from the pre-
vious day’s activity given the blinding
power of the female pheromone. As
one of Bob Mason’s graduate students
remarked: “If you handle too many
females, the males will try to court
your hand.”
I run into Gary Chikousky and ask,
why Mother’s Day? “It started as a way
to give mom some time off,” he says.
“This place was close to the city and
kid-friendly, so dad brought them out
here for a few hours. But then about
10 years ago, something flipped and it
was the whole family — mom, grand-
parents, dogs.”
As we speak, people around us are
having photos taken with snakes,
interpreters, signs — anything. It’s
the Instagram generation and this
place is as ’Gram as it gets.
Still, there’s a depth to nature here
that the sheer spectacle of a Mother’s crow hops across the tarmac with a months, mate for two weeks, make a
Day crowd denies, and I experience it freshly flattened snake in its mouth. trip to the marsh and back, then do
that afternoon as the park shuts down. And the snakes? They notice noth- it all again. And maybe, just maybe,
Once the people leave, the birds move ing, addled by hormones, sliding somewhere along the way a girl named
in; a hawk flies down the path with a through a cycle thousands of years Gabi falls in love with you long enough
snake clutched in its talons; a happy in the making — sleep for eight to learn something.

CANGEO.CA 55
56 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
 2023

CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC
PRESENTS

THE WINNERS OF OUR ANNUAL PHOTO COMPETITION

A
Canada lynx crouching on snow-dusted earth.
Aurora borealis dancing across the sky. Judged
by Canadian Geographic Photographer-in-
Residence Scott Forsyth, award-winning photographer
Christian Fleury and Canadian Geographic director,
brand and creative Javier Frutos, the winning images
in Canadian Geographic’s 2023 Canadian Photos of
the Year competition are a testament to the patience,
dedication and skill that produces an unforgettable photo.
This year, Canadian Geographic is pleased to award
Brandon Broderick of Tumbler Ridge, B.C., the grand
prize of $5,000 and the title of Canadian Photographer
of the Year. After claiming runner-up in last year’s “epic
landscapes” category, Broderick turned to his wife and
made a resolution. “Next year, I want to win the whole
thing.” The 37-year-old meant what he said. He spent
the next year collecting as many shots as he could with
a focus on ethical wildlife photography.
Broderick’s Tumbler Ridge surroundings offered
chances to capture some of his favourite species — par-
ticularly the Canada lynx. Indeed, his most intimate
encounters as a photographer have been with lynx and
cougars. “They’re a challenge,” he says. “And, you know,
cats are cats. They’re very entertaining to watch.”

Canadian Photographer of the Year

Winner
Brandon Broderick
The photographer’s portfolio includes a Canada lynx (opposite) crouching on
a snow-dusted ridge near Fort Nelson, B.C., and a grizzly (above) munching
clover on a foggy morning near Muncho Lake, B.C.

CANGEO.CA 57
 Outdoor Adventure
Winner
Alan McCord
A trio of surfers heads for shore,
leaving the beach to the blackbirds
as fog begins to roll in at Cox Bay
in Tofino, B.C.

Outdoor Adventure
Honourable mention
Sara Kempner
A racer takes on the Creeper Trail near
Nanaimo, B.C., during the BC Bike Race, a
seven-day, multi-stage mountain bike race.
Dry trail conditions made for some atmo-
spheric shots as the morning sun filtered
through dust kicked up by the racers.

Outdoor Adventure
Runner-up
Chandresh Kedhambadi
An ice climber scales the inside of a glacier cave on the
Icefields Parkway in Banff National Park, Alta. Months
later, the photographer returned to the area to find that
this section of the glacier had disappeared.

58 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 2023

Urban and Natural Landscapes

Winner
Aaron Ward
The rising sun shines through a gap between the
horizon and a blanket of dark clouds, illuminating
Vancouver’s Science World building.

Urban and Natural Landscapes

Runner-up
Murray Cotton
The sun sets over the badlands of Dinosaur
Provincial Park, Alta., a UNESCO World
Heritage Site known for its iconic hoodoos
and abundance of dinosaur fossils.

Urban and Natural Landscapes

Honourable mention
Bing Li
The Three Sisters mountains are reflected
in a small lake at sunset in Canmore, Alta.

CANGEO.CA 59
 Weather, Seasons and Skies
Winner
Todd Mintz
Storm clouds gather over Powell Inlet
on Devon Island, Nunavut.

Weather, Seasons and Skies

Runner-up
Joel Waghela
A G3 geomagnetic storm produces
a dazzling display of aurora borealis over
dilapidated farm structures in Pense, Sask.
The G-scale is used to measure the intensity
of geomagnetic storms, with G1 being the
weakest and G5 the strongest.

Weather, Seasons and Skies

Honourable mention
Braydon Morisseau
Alberta’s strongest tornado since
the infamous 1987 Black Friday twister
etches its mark on the landscape
southeast of Didsbury on July 1, 2023,
while a chase vehicle looks on.

60 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 2023

Wildlife in Action
Winner
Liron Gertsman
A female pink salmon has completed its long journey
from the ocean to its home river in central Vancouver
Island to spawn — and perhaps become a meal for a
hungry black bear. The photographer worked for three
days to capture this split shot highlighting the relation-
ship between these two keystone species.

Wildlife in Action
Runner-up
Matt Parish
A common loon shakes water from
its feathers as the sun rises over
Mitchell Lake in Kirkfield, Ont.

Wildlife in Action
Honourable mention
Shaun Antle
Water cascades over the eye of a great blue
heron as it plunges its bill into Lake Chipican,
near Sarnia, Ont.

Subscribe to our Photo Club newsletter to be notified

of upcoming competitions. cangeo.ca/newsletters.

CANGEO.CA 61
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Where THE LAND ends

A PILGRIMAGE TO NOVA SCOTIA
REVEALS THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN
SCOTTISH SETTLERS AND THE MI’KMAQ
WHO SAVED THEM
By Liz Beatty

p. 72 WALKING THE WILD WAY

Following in the footsteps
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p. 64 HAPPY TRAILS p. 66 ITINERARY p. 70 FOOD AND DRINK

THE ALLENBY PASS SAND AND WAVES IN LOBSTER AND LATTES
ON HORSEBACK SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IN NEW BRUNSWICK

TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 63
 Window Seat
DEPARTURES
SCOTT FORSYTH

64 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

ALLENBY PASS, ALTA.
Banff Trail Riders guides Emi Gowans (left) and Natalie Cowan
(right) were as remarkable as the scenery, according to the
photographer, as the two effortlessly guided six guests on
horseback through the wild terrain of Allenby Pass at 2,500
metres of elevation. This amphitheatre of mountain peaks
was once the bottom of an ancient sea and fossils are still
visible beneath the horses’ hooves.

Join this and other Can Geo Adventures at cangeo.ca/adventures

TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 65
The Essential Itinerary
SEA CAVES TO DESERT
IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
DEPARTURES
f the Eagles’ “Take it easy” were a place, this corner of
I southern California would be it. Tucked away from
the hum of Los Angeles, Ventura’s laidback surf-town
vibe makes it the perfect gateway to the region’s storied
landscapes, from the sea caves of Channel Islands
National Park to the pine forests of the San Bernardino
National Forest to the sparkling desert skies in Joshua
Tree National Park. While you can blaze through this
itinerary as is, it’s more fun to explore along the way. And
remember, lighten up while you still can.
—Michela Rosano
DAY 1 WAVES AND CAVES | 8 a.m.
Spend a day exploring Santa Cruz Island in Channel Islands
National Park, just a 90-minute ferry ride from the Ventura
Harbor. Trails offer stunning ocean vistas and opportunities to
spot endemic species, like the island fox and scrub-jay, while
guided kayak tours take visitors over kelp forests, alongside
seabird colonies and into sea caves perforating the island’s
volcanic rock. You might even spot a shark or two.
WHALE WATCHING AND TACOS | 5 p.m.
Crack a Modelo on the 5 p.m. return ferry — don’t miss it,
or you’re sleeping on Santa Cruz — and spend the ride
watching whales breach in the sparkling waves. When you
dock, beeline wind burnt and salty to Spencer Makenzie’s,
a local institution famous for its tempura-fried
fish tacos. Wash them down with a pink lemonade
while you watch the skies turn the same hue.
DAY 2 OLDIES AND BACON | 8 a.m.
Dine unbothered at Frontside Café, a modern
breakfast and lunch spot serving Australian-
inspired fare. Let the ’70s soft rock playlist
transport you to a time when bacon and
caffeine weren’t considered dangerous, and order a
soup bowl-sized coffee alongside a full Aussie breakfast.
SCENIC ROUTES AND SIDE QUESTS | 9:30 a.m.
Cue up the music and hit the road to Big Bear. It’s a four-hour
drive if you take the scenic route, and the 126-E to Santa Clarita
66 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
WHERE TO STAY
Revel in the shiny chrome and wood-panelled nostalgia of the vintage
trailer accommodations at the Waypoint Ventura, situated near the
beach, historic downtown and, most importantly, the fish taco spot.
And a luxury yurt at 28 Palms Ranch’s stargazing yurt village is the
perfect way to take in the landscape — a morning coffee hits
different when you’re looking out over the Mojave.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MICHELA ROSANO; NPS/BRAD SUTTON; MICHELA ROSANO;
up to the 14-N to Palmdale and San Bernardino is a worthy
side quest, taking you through sagebrush-topped coastal hills,
Joshua-treed Mojave and forested mountains.
BITES AND HIKES | 2 p.m.
Congratulations, you made it! Refuel at Amangela’s Sandwich
and Bagel House in the village before hitting the trails in
the San Bernardino National Forest. The Pineknot Trail is an
11-kilometre trek through towering pines and rocky outcrops
with stunning lake and mountain views along the way.
DAY 3 WESTERNS AND HIPSTERS | 11 a.m.
Head back up to the Mojave to visit the Old West-themed MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CANGEO
Pioneertown. Originally built in 1946 as a movie set, Pioneer-
town sits at the precise intersection where kitsch meets cool.
Leave the gun-slinging show at high noon to the kids and head
to the Red Dog Saloon, a hipster hangout slinging cold drinks
while a DJ spins Hank Williams and the like. And definitely don’t
miss Pappy and Harriet’s, a former biker bar turned exceptional
barbecue eatery (try the brisket!) and legendary
music venue played by the likes of Patti Smith,
Paul McCartney and Lizzo.
DARK SKIES AND NERDS | 8 p.m.
You’ve probably never seen the Milky Way like
this. As an International Dark Sky Park, Joshua
Tree National Park offers opportunities to gaze
into the crystal-clear heavens year-round. But real
astronomy nerds visit in the fall for the Night Sky
Festival, where pros and amateurs alike share their
knowledge and their telescopes.
Mapping Adventure

IN THE WORDS of the great philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast.
If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” For those in need
of a change of pace, a self-guided road trip around the Spirit Loop from Langford
DEPARTURES

to Port Renfrew and back, on south Vancouver Island, is just the ticket.
Scout for whales in Sooke, hike to secret waterfalls on the
Juan de Fuca Marine Trail and thrill your inner child by taking
the slide down from the top of the Malahat Skywalk.
— Illustration by Jana Curll, with words by Alexandra Pope

Read the full story at cangeo.ca/spiritloop

Food & Drink
TIDE AND JOY
NEW BRUNSWICK
DEPARTURES
N ew Brunswick has long enticed
seafood lovers with its roadside
clam shacks and bountiful lobster plat-
ters, which have buttered up the palates
of many. But in recent years, culinary
tourism in this easterly province has
grown drastically (and deliciously),
offering up myriad new adventures for
the epicurean traveller that range from
riverside coffee roasting to Indigenous
medicine walks. Here’s a sampling of
what’s on the menu.
A FOREST BUFFET
The old-growth forest in the centre of
Fredericton is home to Odell Park and
the city’s most interesting foraging
tour. Take a medicine walk with Cecelia
Brooks, a St. Mary’s First Nation (Sitan-
sisk Wolastoqiyik) Elder, and her son,
Anthony Brooks, who run Wabanaki
Tree Spirit Tours. They guide you
through the forest, teaching the his-
tory of local medicinal plants and
trees along the way. Afterwards, they
prepare wild rice and corn fritters,
acorn cookies and three-sisters salad
made with ingredients straight from
Cecelia’s garden, all enjoyed in the
park lodge.
LOBSTER TALES
Captain Ron starts the Shediac Bay Lob-
ster Tales cruise with a joke and finishes
with one too. What at first might seem
like your typical three-hour tour is really
a lesson in lobster basics; Captain Ron
recounts life as a lobster fisher and the
best cooking methods. But in between
jokes and getting young passengers
to clip a lobster claw, he makes time
to convey a serious message about the
importance of conservation and sus-
tainability to a healthy Atlantic lobster
fishery. The pinnacle of the tour is, of
course, the food. Guests enjoy supper
on board — a whole lobster you just
learned to break down, served with
potato salad and coleslaw.
70 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
DINE BACK IN TIME
Stepping back in time is easy at Kings
Landing near Fredericton. Strolling the
open-air museum’s historic buildings
and chatting with period clothing-clad
interpreters about life in the Wolastoq
(Saint John River) valley in the 19th
century is an immersive cultural expe-
rience, but eating history is next level.
Sip on an ale by candlelight on the first
floor of the King’s Head Inn or savour
a taste of the past in the upstairs dining
room, which specializes in traditional
pub fare like a ploughman’s lunch and
Mrs. Long’s turkey pot pie served with
a side of the dense brown bread the inn
is famous for.
RIVERSIDE JAVA
Paradise smells like roasting coffee
blended with morning river mist.
Fredericton-based Second Nature Out-
doors offers a sunrise paddle tour on
the Saint John River that starts with
a canoe out to Hartt Island, where
your paddling baristas and guides
will explain how to roast coffee over
a campfire. Sipping on maple lattes
and munching on local pastries and
cheese with river views is the perfect
way to begin the day.
Clockwise from top: Ganong’s chicken
bones candies; Shediac Bay Lobster Tales
cruise; the Garrison Night Market in
Fredericton; King’s Head Inn; Wabanaki
Tree Spirit Tours’ three-sisters salad.
CHOCOLATE DIP
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY GANONG; TOURISM NEW BRUNSWICK/MATTHEW HEWITSON; FREDERICTON TOURISM; GABBY PEYTON; GABBY PEYTON
It’s all about dipping at Ganong’s
factory in St. Stephen. The secret tech-
nique of hand-dipping the chocolates
is so prized you aren’t allowed to take
pictures of the live demonstration at
the Ganong Chocolate Museum (but
there are free samples). Founded in
1873, Ganong claims to have been the
first to popularize the heart-shaped box
for Valentine’s Day. As the scent of
warm chocolate floats through the air, a
museum tour includes everything from
the early methods of chocolate making
to the story behind the Ganong candy
dynasty’s famous Pal-o-Mine bar.
NICHE MARKET
Every Thursday night in the summer,
Fredericton’s historic downtown awak-
ens as live music and delicious aromas
emanate from the Garrison Night
Market. Food is the main draw at this
bustling market and a stroll down Food
Alley is a global journey, with vendors
serving up delectable dishes from Indo-
nesia and the Philippines, Mexico and
Senegal, El Salvador and Jamaica.
— Gabby Peyton
DIGITAL
For even more travel stories, reviews,
guides and videos visit cangeo.ca/travel
FORAGE AND FEAST
From creeping snowberries to
crushed larch needles and juniper
berries, the lush coastal forest of
Newfoundland offers a bounty of
unexpected cooking ingredients.
Travel writer Robin Esrock heads
to the Alder Cottage Cookery
School near St. John’s to forage,
then takes his bounty to the kitchen
to cook up a feast.
cangeo.ca/forageandfeast
MICHELIN INSIDER
Alex Chen’s Boulevard Kitchen &
Oyster Bar made the esteemed
Michelin Guide’s latest round of
recommendations. Travel writer
Bianca Bujan sits down with the
Malaysian-born chef to chat about
his childhood, his culinary journey,
the joy of mentorship and how he
always manages to find new ways
to unleash his creativity.
cangeo.ca/chefalexchen
GASPÉ HIKING
Drag yourself away from the
stunning coastal scenery and turn
your sights to the equally inspiring
mountains. Quebec’s Parc national
de la Gaspésie is a world apart
from maritime Gaspé — and worth
every challenging step. Over the
course of five nights and four days,
four friends bag the park’s five
crown jewels — the Jacques-Cartier,
Albert, Xalibu and Richardson
peaks… and the bistro-bar at
Le Gîte du Mont-Albert.
cangeo.ca/hikegaspe
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SÉPAQ; CCXA; LEILA KWOK; JAY CREWS PHOTOGRAPHY
A GREENER TORONTO
Complete with a mini Miyawaki
forest, a lookout tower and a public
beach, Leslie Lookout Park is sched-
uled to open this summer. The
3.6-square-kilometre park in the
city’s Port Lands area shows how,
with imagination, a former industrial
landscape can become a natural
recreation area filled with carefully
selected native trees and plants.
cangeo.ca/leslielookoutpark
TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 71
 Walking THE
WILD
WAY
FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS
OF ALICE THE MOOSE ON THE
A2A “PILGRIMAGE FOR NATURE” TRAIL

BY JAMIESON FINDLAY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID TRATTLES AND MARK RAYCROFT

72 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

A
ANY WELL-TRAVELLED backcountry
trail will have its ghosts, still intent on
old destinations. Early on in our trek,
we stopped to summon one.
My hiking buddy Bill and I were in
the Five Ponds Wilderness of New York
State’s Adirondack Park, and we’d
come to a wetland — fern-fringed and
hemmed by the typical regional forest
of yellow birch, white pine, sugar
maple and striped maple. The air was
soft and still, the water a pellicle of
light. The trees gathered themselves
against time and storms and insects.
With the record amounts of summer
rain, we were walking through a
drenched landscape: brimming ponds,
breached beaver dams, wooden bridges
strewn with flood debris and overflow-
ing streams panicking down the rises. I
was glad for a chance to take off my
heavy pack.
“Call her, Jamie,” said Bill.
When I looked at him quizzically, he
looked out over the marsh and called
out, “Alice!”
He reminded me a bit of Marlon
Brando in the film A Streetcar Named
74 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
Desire — “Stella!” — except that
Brando hadn’t been wearing a T-shirt
with a moose on it.
Yes, a moose. Decades ago, an
intrepid cow moose named Alice was
radio-collared in Adirondack Park and
tracked by scientists as she wandered
into Canada. She swam the St. Law-
rence River and walked across one
of Canada’s busiest highways, the
401, eventually living out her days in
Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park.
Her journey highlighted the impor-
tance of the Algonquin to Adirondacks
(A2A) ecological corridor as a travel
route for wildlife. And it inspired
the work of the A2A Collaborative,
a cross-border conservation charity
that works to protect and enhance the
A2A corridor. That group had created
the A2A “Pilgrimage for Nature” Trail
— the path we were walking.
But no moose, real or ghostly,
raised its head from the water to won-
der who was disturbing the peace of
the wilderness. I hoisted my pack to
my shoulders, feeling a twinge in my
upper back. Here we were, two guys in
their mid-60s, walking 640 kilometres
in the footsteps of a moose. I wished I
had trained more, beyond just carrying
cases of beer home in my knapsack.
“Do you think we might end up
with permanent damage from these
packs?” I asked Bill.
He shrugged. “Well, what do you
and I have left — maybe 15 years or
so? Not long to suffer.”
“AFTER WE DIE we may be set to write
an essay about our life story,” wrote
Stephen Graham in his 1926 classic
The Gentle Art of Tramping. “Fifty years
in an office will be found shrivelled up
to a dot, and a few days in the wilds
will expand into the whole essay.”
In early 2023, I was ready for an
infusion of the wild. I worked for a
nature organization, but most of my
time was spent in front of a screen.
Jamieson Findlay is a storyteller and grant writer at
Nature Canada. His most recent novel is Pilgrims of
the Upper World.

Jamieson Findlay (opposite) spent
five weeks walking and cycling the
A2A “Pilgrimage for Nature” Trail,
which runs between Adirondack Park
in upper New York State and Ontario’s
Algonquin Provincial Park. This
ecologically connected landscape is
a critical link for wildlife movement
in eastern North America.
I wanted a broader margin to my
life. A trek to raise funds to support
the A2A ecological corridor fired my
imagination. I had first heard about
it while working for Parks Canada,
when I was researching a web article
on “animal travellers” and stumbled
across Alice’s story. The A2A region,
I learned, was home to some of the
last large-scale forest and wetland link-
ages left in eastern North America.
For many millennia, it had served as
a “wildway” — a travel route for ani-
mals — that followed the Frontenac
Arch, part of the Canadian Shield that
extends down across the St. Lawrence
to form the Adirondack Mountains.
My employer, Nature Canada, was
ready to get behind the trek, and the
A2A Collaborative was keen, too. That’s
how I ended up in Newcomb, New
York, on Aug. 12, 2023, determined to
be the first to cover the entire stretch of
backcountry paths, roads and rail trails
that make up the A2A “Pilgrimage
for Nature” Trail. Thankfully, I wasn’t
alone. I’d talked my high school friend
Bill Barkley into accompanying me.
“I enjoy in a companion a well-
stocked mind, or observant eyes, or
wood lore of any kind,” wrote Graham
in the aforementioned Gentle Art of
Tramping. Bill had these qualities in
spades. He couldn’t take a step on the
trail without spotting an edible mush-
room, or a curved section of tree that
PREVIOUS SPREAD: MARK RAYCROFT; THIS SPREAD: DAVID TRATTLES/CAN GEO; MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO; MAP DATA: ROUTES BASED ON MAPS CREATED BY A2A COLLABORATIVE
might have gone into the construction
of a Viking longboat, or a bit of chagga
(a medicinal fungus that grows on yel-
low or white birch).
“Did you know you have erectile tis-
sue in your nose?” he said to me once,
during a discussion on breathing.
I learned a lot in those first few days
as we trudged through mud, clam-
bered over storm-toppled trees and
forded beautifully clear streams the
colour of purest amber because of
the natural tannins. Nothing broad-
ens the mind like travel, especially
backcountry travel with backcountry
people. From Bill I learned the value
of collecting dry twigs and bark (so
you’d have something dry to start a fire
in wet conditions). From a wilderness
citizen we met at one of the primi-
tive campsites, I learned what a bear
smells like (“somewhere between a
porta-john, a dumpster and a skunk”).
And from Alex French, an American
TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 75
 Writer Jamieson Findlay (opposite) walked and
cycled through the Algonquin to Adirondacks
(A2A) ecological corridor to raise funds for,
and awareness of, the work of Nature Canada
and the A2A Collaborative. Beyond the famous
Alice the Moose, white-tailed deer, red fox
and black bear (this page) are a few of the
larger mammals that populate the corridor.
This rich mosaic of interconnecting wildlife
habitats is impacted by the density of the
human population in this region.

76 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

conservationist and board member of
the A2A, I got a vision of a rewilded
Adirondacks (“I want to see the wolves
and mountain lions come home”).
That last sentiment was something
I could definitely get behind. Wolves
and mountain lions — or cougars —
are seen, rarely, in Adirondack Park,
but the area doesn’t have its own pop-
ulations. The ones that appear come
from somewhere else. Wolves come
down from Algonquin Provincial Park
using A2A — which again underlines
its importance as a wildway.
After about 10 days, we left the back-
country and started walking roads.
That’s the funny thing about the
A2A “Pilgrimage for Nature” Trail:
a good part of it is not trail. Once you
leave Adirondack Park, just east of the
town of Harrisville, you’re on pavement
until well into Ontario. To be fair to the
A2A Collaborative, they had designed
the route to be multi-modal (biking,
canoeing and walking), but I hadn’t
done the necessary planning to vary
my transportation.
Roads have their own ecology and
archeology — Bill found dozens of
items on the shoulder, including a pair
of Panama sunglasses that he cleaned
up and wore — but after a while, pave-
ment calcifies the spirit. We saw more
dead animals than live ones. Our
packs seemed to grow heavier with
each day. I started to get blisters. At
that point, Bill suggested a respite.
Just north of a small upstate town
called Gouverneur, we approached
a simple white building with tiered
birdhouses out front, horses in a
paddock and kids in bare feet dart-
ing about on the front porch. A
bonneted young woman opened
the door, and Bill and I explained
our trek — how we wanted to travel
without using mechanized transpor-
OPPOSITE PAGE: MARK RAYCROFT; THIS PAGE: DAVID TRATTLES/CAN GEO
tation, and how we needed to cover a
stretch of county road that day. Bill’s
intuition turned out to be sound: the
Amish family was willing to help.
We ended up getting a two-hour ride
in a horse and buggy, driven by an
amiable young man named Levi. At
one point in our journey, a pickup
passed us on the road, stopped just
ahead and spun its tires so that
smoke drifted in our faces. I thought
it was a local yahoo trying to make
trouble, but Levi just chuckled.
TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 77

“We sometimes do work for that
guy,” he explained.
If you have a big pickup truck and
your friend has a 19-century buggy, I
guess this is how you josh him.
Every traveller finds ,
when recounting their voyages, that the odd and
unsettling experiences often make
better telling than the uplifting ones.
WE ENTERED CANADA on Aug. 25,
2023, walking across the Thousand
Islands Bridge, and then Bill had to
go home to his apple orchard to
bring in the crop. I was joined briefly
by my friend Lisa, who arrived at
the start of a blisteringly hot week
in early September. But then Lisa
had to leave, and I was facing roads
once more.
And I still had two-thirds of the
route to go.
Just outside the town of Calabogie,
Ont., I stayed with Dave Miller, former
78 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
Writer Jamieson Findlay, pictured here
and (left) with friend Bill Barkley, travelled
the A2A route on foot and by bike.
A2A executive director and current
board member, and his wife, Debbie.
Around the campfire, Dave got out his
guitar and treated us to some finger-
style magic, including one of his own
songs about “Nimblewill Nomad,”
a wanderer and the oldest person to
have completed the Appalachian Trail.
I wondered if Nimblewill Nomad had
ever experienced road fatigue like
mine. I was tired of having to get up
every morning and just cover distance.
The days were starting to feel averaged
out, smeared into a dull paste. And I
was way behind schedule.
That’s when I decided to take Dave
up on his offer of a bike.
It was certainly allowed, according to
the self-imposed rules I had outlined
to the Amish family. At Renfrew, I set
out on the bike Dave had lent me,
feeling freed of gravity (he had also
taken my pack and given me bike pan-
niers). Soon I found myself on the J.R.
Booth Heritage Rail Trail, a multi-use
path that follows the original railway
bed for the Ottawa-Arnprior-Parry
Sound railway built in the late 1800s.
And I started to take things in again.
Wetlands with dead trees sticking up
like porcupine quills. Smudges of
autumn reds and yellows in the trees.
A turtle, and later a man, walking the
trail. The turtle didn’t stop for me,
but the man did. He turned out to be
one of the local volunteers who main-
tained the rail trail, and he told me the
original railway had brought soldiers
east to fight in two world wars — and
BOTH PAGES: DAVID TRATTLES/CAN GEO
then brought them back at the end of
the fighting.
“The ones who rode this trail east
were singing,” he said. “But on the
train back, there was no singing.”
In Barry’s Bay I enjoyed the hospital-
ity of Bill Schroeder, a retired teacher
and friend of A2A, who had arranged
for me to speak to several classes of
Grade 9 students at Madawaska Valley
District High School. The students had
written out their questions beforehand
on large flip-chart pages: Did you hunt
and fish on your trek? How did you
maintain personal hygiene? What was
the most memorable part of your trip?
No hunting or fishing, I told them; just
foraging for berries and mushrooms.
As for personal hygiene, I had treated it
as a journey rather than a destination.
But the most memorable part of the
trip? That was harder to answer. Every
traveller finds, when recounting their
voyages, that the odd and unsettling
experiences often make better telling
than the uplifting ones. There was the
time in upstate New York when Bill
and I did some rough camping (on
a patch of land that wasn’t an official
campsite). A state trooper stumbled
upon us at 10 p.m., looking for some-
body wanted by the law. He listened
with interest to our explanation about
the A2A trek and said he would check

TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 79
 Jamieson Findlay and Bill Barkley at the western
gate of Algonquin Provincial Park, where their
trek ended. Findlay, who was the first to walk
and cycle this vital wildlife “wildway” from end
to end, raised funds to support maintenance,
mapping, conservation planning and protective
fencing along the trail.

with Leonie, who aced the dignitary

“fifty years in an office thing, we cycled ahead to the Algon-
will be found shrivelled up to a dot, and a few days quin visitors’ centre, where we opened
a celebratory bottle of cider from Bill’s
in the wilds will expand into the whole essay.” orchard. Then it was back to Whitney
to gather up our gear and head home.
— Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping
It’s all in the past now — rain, wind,
wildflowers, clouds, sun, mud, rivers,
to see whether we could camp there Trattles. Both of them had brought lakes, pavement, ospreys, foxes, coy-
— “If I don’t come back, you can stay bikes, and together we cycled into otes… and people. I was continually
put!” Before he went, Bill asked if we Algonquin and stopped at the eastern struck by the goodwill and interest peo-
should be worried about the person gate office. ple showed in our trek. Almost nobody
he was seeking. “No, no,” said the “We’re looking for a dignitary,” said had heard of the A2A corridor, but
trooper casually. “Just keep your per- Bill to the woman behind the desk. the story of Alice the Moose struck a
sonal belongings close at hand.” Here was another occasion when chord with all. People understand that
He never appeared again, and nei- I should have done more prior plan- animals, like humans, need to move.
LEFT: MARK RAYCROFT; RIGHT: DAVID TRATTLES/CAN GEO

ther did anybody else, but I wouldn’t
say it was my most restful night.
“The curve of your adventure,” wrote
Stephen Graham, “is a broken arc.”
THE LAST STOP on the route, before
entering the eastern gate of Algonquin
Park, was the hamlet of Whitney,
Ont. There, Bill Barkley rejoined
me, along with photographer Dave
ning. We needed a dignitary, of course,
because we planned a photo-op at
Algonquin and wanted someone
authoritative but smiling, who could
shake our hands for the camera. I
was thinking we’d have to get Dave
Trattles to be our dignitary when up
stepped Leonie Coleman, the park’s
group leader for backcountry pro-
grams at Algonquin. After the photos
Yet we put up deadly barriers to their
movement — roads and railways — to
facilitate our own. An ecological corri-
dor like A2A seeks to restore the flow
of life around us. As I wrote on the
Parks Canada website, “it is an artery of
nature, oxygenating entire ecosystems.”
For five weeks I breathed that oxy-
gen, and found the broad margin to
life that I’d been missing.

80 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

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 Where
LAND
the
ENDS
A PILGRIMAGE TO KEJIMKUJIK REVEALS CENTURIES-OLD
CONNECTIONS BETWEEN DESCENDANTS OF NOVA SCOTIA’S
FIRST SCOTTISH COLONISTS AND THE MI’KMAQ WHO SAVED THEM

BY LIZ BEATTY

TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 83
F
ROM BEHIND LOCKED gates, we
spy the grey-tarped profile of
the 18th-century Dutch-style
tall ship at the Hector Heritage Quay
in Pictou, Nova Scotia. No masts. It’s
in mid-restoration in spring 2022
when we visit. Massive new Douglas
fir ribs contrast with grey, rotted oak
planks, yet to be replaced. The whole
work site and visitor centre won’t open
for the season until tomorrow. But
still, I can’t believe we’re here. Finally.
For as long as I’ve known my
husband, Tim, Hector, a 26-metre
three-masted brig-style ship, has been
part of his family lore. Some call it
the Canadian Mayflower. Its harrow-
ing 11-week voyage from Ullapool,
Scotland, delivered some 189 souls
to the shores of Pictou Harbour on
Sept. 15, 1773. A framed copy of the
ship’s manifest has hung on our den
wall in Caledon, Ont., for more years
than I remember. Eighteen of the chil-
dren listed onboard were buried at sea.
When the vessel finally landed, it was
too late for the growing season, with
none of the promised accommoda-
tions, and limited provisions. If not
for the Mi’kmaq, those who made it
84 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
ashore would have perished that first
winter, too.
Of course, the Voyageurs and the
Acadians arrived to this Mi’kmaw
homeland long before. Still, for all
sorts of reasons, they didn’t so abruptly
and overwhelmingly alter the trajec-
tory of the people and the land that
was here long before them — nothing
like the landing of Hector would. Tim’s
Fraser clan and their fellow passengers
would be the first of an onslaught of
Scottish colonists — almost 185,000
over the next 100 years — all starting
not long after the British conquest of
New France. And the American Rev-
olution would deliver another wave of
colonists to the region.
Now it’s time for Tim to embark
on a family roots journey in Nova
Scotia. And somehow the timing of
this journey seems fitting. Maybe it’s
the moment we’re in as a country as
the impacts of colonization finally
become mainstream knowledge. Or
maybe it’s this one stark fact: If not for
the Mi’kmaq, Tim wouldn’t be here.
“I wonder if we can find places in
Nova Scotia that can help us envision
what the Mi’kmaw world was like
before Hector arrived — to imagine that
moment before everything changed?”
Tim asked the question months before,
when we first imagined this trip. It
was a good one. “My dad, my sisters
all talked about coming from Scotland,
but what about the people who greeted
us, those who helped our ancestors
survive? How did we change their
world?” Now in early spring, we’re
hitting the road to find answers in a
part of the Mi’kmaki, the traditional
territory of the Mi’kmaq, that might
not look too far different from what it
was before 1773.
The Mi’kmaki district of Kespuk-
witk at the south end of Nova Scotia
translates to “land ends.” It is home
to the Tobeatic Wilderness Area, the
Maritimes’ largest protected wilder-
ness area. These 120,000 hectares
encompass massive stretches of Aca-
dian forest, wetlands, rivers, barrens,
Liz Beatty ( @blackcabingirl) is an award-
winning writer, podcaster and broadcaster appear-
ing weekly on SiriusXM Canada Talks. Listen to her
work at northamericanapodcast.com.
 Birchbark canoes (previous), made
by Mi'kmaw Elder Todd Labrador,
on the shore of Kejimkujik Lake.
A pre-restoration Hector (left) is
docked at the Hector Heritage Quay
in Pictou Harbour. In spring 2022,
Hector (below) was in the middle
of being restored.

outwash plains and kettle lakes,

all undeveloped, unmaintained and
home to the Mi’kmaq for thousands
of years. Bordering on a big chunk
of the massive Tobeatic is Kejim-
kujik, or “Keji,” National Park and
National Historic Site — Canada’s
only national park with both desig-
nations. Early colonists like Tim’s
family began settling on this ancient
Mi’kmaw homeland from around the
1820s. But even its recent history is
complicated. In the early 20th century,
the Keji area became a sport hunting
and fishing reserve, then later, private
cottages began appearing. By the late
1960s, the national park formed. Keji
got a national historic site designation
in 1995, finally spotlighting its true
Mi’kmaw heritage.
PREVIOUS: PARKS CANADA/ALICIA BRETT. THIS PAGE: LIZ BEATTY; MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO; OPPOSITE: NOVA SCOTIA TOURISM

Since the end of the last ice age more

than 10,000 years ago, the Mi’kmaq
and their ancestors used this region’s
complex system of rivers and lakes to
travel between the south and north
coasts, with Keji a meeting place at
the centre of the network. A hand-
ful of other Mi’kmaw archeological
sites in Nova Scotia might be as old
or older, but none encompass such
diversity — the remains of seasonal
camps, burial grounds, eel weirs, por-
tages and other sites spanning the
entire period from the late Archaic
(about 5,000 to 2,000 years ago) to dozens of images scratched into an Inviting coves flank us on both
colonial times, when Tim’s ancestors outcrop of exposed bedrock on the sides. Views of cottage-less islands
enter the picture. Our journey here shores of Kejimkujik Lake. Our bare span out before us. This is the sec-
begins with one of the most dramatic feet are a sign of respect, but also an ond largest collection of petroglyphs
of these sites. act of preservation, reducing the wear in Canada. Whynot’s direct ancestors
and tear of shoe soles on these fragile left these marks here over the past
“I WOULD DESCRIBE this as a library or etchings as we venture out onto the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of
textbook,” says Parks Canada cultural rock. “A lot of these images may be years. A couple of hours is not enough
interpreter Nick Whynot. Together, just doodling or a kid playing. But a time to take in all the stories these
we stand barefoot, surrounded by lot, I feel, have to have a story.” images inspire.

TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 85
 “We see a lot of these peaked hats.
They were only worn by the women,
and the design on each hat is unique,”
says Whynot of images from a wom-
an’s clan, or family. “They’re almost a
portrait.” Whynot then points out a
handprint and a face that he says are
probably very old as well. “Here’s one
that’s been damaged over the years
from canoe strikes, and there’s writing
all over it.” He then pivots our point of
view, and a clear image emerges. “It is
actually [a drawing of ] two feet.”
This spot here is one of five highly
protected sites across the park, display-
ing about 500 known petroglyphs, all
on the shores of Keji Lake. Despite the
care, erosion from Mother Nature and
desecration by paddlers have already
claimed many images. But a few of the
images that Whynot shares take us
aback. They are more recent.
“You see here ships, big sailing
ships. You wouldn’t have seen them on
this lake. That’s obviously a story from
along the coast, brought back here to
be told,” explains Whynot. “So you’re
going out on the ocean waters to hunt
for porpoise and seals in a birchbark
craft. And then you start seeing these
massive sailing ships. You’re not going
to forget it. You’re going to come back.
You’re going to draw and tell people,
‘You’re not going to believe the size of
the canoe I just saw!’”
Tim and I exchange glances. It’s
entirely possible that one of these
86 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
images of a European sailing ship is
Hector. It feels like we’re standing at
the intersection of two cultures, and
in a moment in history that would
change both forever.
Later, Tim and I paddle the inlets
and coves of Keji Lake, then settle in at
our campsite in the park. We gaze at
the remarkable heavens, before falling
asleep to a chorus of spring peepers.
AS MASTER NAVAL architects and revered
shipwrights in Pictou reclaim the
history of New Scotland through the
restoration of Hector, the Mi’kmaq of
Keji are doing exactly the same with
their own ancestral vessels.
“It’s good if you can find a hard-
wood hill where birch trees are, but
you spend a lot of time checking
hundreds of trees before you find
the right one,” says Todd Labrador,
Mi’kmaw Elder, cultural archeolo-
gist and renowned birchbark canoe
builder, who lives in the nearby
Wildcat community. The plan today
was to join Todd and his daugh-
ter, Melissa Labrador, in digging
for spruce root in Keji’s mossy for-
est floor — a ritual for them every
spring. More than 200 metres of root
go into each canoe to secure the ves-
sel’s seams. But Mother Nature has
other plans. It’s pouring rain today.
Instead, we meet beside Todd’s 6.5-
metre birchbark canoe on display
within the park’s visitor centre.
Clockwise from above: A spring-
time view up Grafton Brook from
Kejimkujik Lake; visitors tour a
petroglyph site with guide Donna
Morris; Parks Canada cultural
interpreter Nick Whynot; a view
of the lake; petroglyphs at the
Peter Point site on Kejimkujik
Lake depict a European sailing
vessel with two Mi'kmaw men.
It likely dates to the period of
British colonial rule (late 18th
and early 19th centuries).
“We put a sail in the centre and
sailed this one with the Bluenose II
last summer,” says Todd, resting his
hand on the gunnels. Todd’s great-
grandfather Joe Jeremy built the mast
hoops for the original Bluenose in
Lunenburg. He’s also the namesake of
nearby Jeremy’s Bay.
As Nova Scotia’s last practising
Mi’kmaw birchbark canoe builder,
Todd’s knowledge on sourcing the
materials and crafting his vessels
reaches back many generations and
from both sides of his family. He has
also spent decades reclaiming addi-
tional knowledge through archival
photographs, speaking to Elders and
just being on the land here, along with
Melissa. These days, they’re concerned
that a bark disease, possibly aggravated
by climate change, is threatening their
local supply.
 OPPOSITE PAGE: PARKS CANADA/ERIC LE BEL. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LACHLAN RIEHL; LIZ BEATTY; PARKS CANADA/ERIC LE BEL; PARKS CANADA

TRAVEL
CANGEO.CA
87
 Indeed, this landscape has long
been a sanctuary for the Labradors.
In the 1840s, Todd’s ancestors were
granted the tract of land that included
the main petroglyph site we had just
visited. As young children, Todd’s
father and his siblings hid in these
forests from residential school agents
who came to collect them. Today,
Todd and Melissa find solace prying
out lengths of spruce root across Keji
in spring and harvesting birchbark
as thick as a loonie on steamy July
days. Their people have connected
THIS PAGE: PARKS CANADA/ALICIA BRETT; OPPOSITE: PARKS CANADA/NATASHA HIRT
to and moved through this homeland
for millennia.
“Sometimes we lived by the ocean
year-round. Sometimes we travelled
inland. And Keji was sort of the cen-
tre between the Bay of Fundy and the
Atlantic Ocean,” explains Todd. “Our
ancestors didn’t have boundaries. This
is Keji. This is where we live. But then
the settlers start moving in. And then
when our ancestors came back, there
was no room.”
In his gentle way, Todd makes clear
how the wrongs of the past are not
just part of some distant colonial era.
88 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
“When I first started working here at
Keji back in 1982, as a Mi’kmaw per-
son, I was not allowed to go to the
petroglyphs sites,” he explains. He
and Melissa’s late mother both worked
here. For 10 years, they pushed for
permission to build a birchbark wig-
wam but were told it wouldn’t fit in the
national park. “Well, I was thinking,
okay, if it wouldn’t fit in Keji, where
would it fit?”
Later, he suggested building a
canoe as part of an interactive park
program with visitors. The answer
was no again. So in 2004, Todd quit
his job with Parks Canada to build
canoes elsewhere. He travelled to
France, where his skills were widely
celebrated. In 2009, Parks Canada
asked Todd to build the canoe that
now takes pride of place in the visi-
tor centre. And finally, in 2014, Parks
Canada asked if he would run the
canoe-building program that he had
suggested a decade earlier. He agreed,
and today people from all over the
world sign up to help Todd build a
canoe on summer Sundays. “The
response has been incredible,” he says.
Clockwise from above: Todd
Labrador (rear) and his daughter
Melissa Labrador launch a
birchbark canoe they made in
2022; Todd Labrador is hands-
on during his canoe-building
workshops; he shows a visitor
how to process spruce root.
At first, Melissa stands behind her
father quietly as he speaks to us. Still,
her work for her people is far from in
the background. She is also a revered
community leader. “I’m an artist, but
first I’m a mother. The term Indige-
nous Guardian kind of covers the rest
of what I do,” says Melissa, “as far as
the preservation of landscape, culture
and history together.”
This work starts with the home-
schooling of her 10-year-old twins
to ensure they fully absorb their cul-
ture. Melissa is also an assistant canoe
builder and a well-known artist in her
own right, with paintings showcased in
both galleries and magazines. Finally,
there’s her cultural guardianship.
TRAVEL CANGEO.CA 89
 “Just outside Kejimkujik Park, there
are a couple of wilderness areas that I
helped to create and to reclaim their
Indigenous names,” says Melissa.
She’s drawing attention as well to some
culturally rich Mi’kmaw areas on Kes-
pukwitk’s south shore. Melissa also
partners with her father to pass down
their canoe-building knowledge to
Mi’kmaw youth in communities across
the province and spends time research-
ing documents in the provincial and
national archives that corroborate the
oral histories of her family’s prominent
standing in the region.
One of the stories she shares has
been handed down from an elderly
distant cousin. It’s about ancestors
in ocean-going canoes coming back
and telling others about seeing bears
on floating trees appear over the
horizon. “But what it was, was the
Europeans with big beards. From
a distance, they looked very hairy,
going up and down the masts on the
90 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
sailing ships. It was something very
strange for them to explain,” says
Melissa. There it is again. That sur-
prising, long-past intersection point
between our two families, our two
cultures. It’s an oral artifact of two
worlds converging.
As we say our goodbyes, I’m feel-
ing our time today with Todd and
Melissa hasn’t been about the past.
It’s been about helping us learn what
this 1773 moment — this unheralded
part of the New Scotland story —
means today. For certain, Tim and I are
experiencing a sea-change moment
happening across this province — a
period of emerging celebration of the
Mi’kmaw culture, as well as the myr-
iad other voices of Nova Scotia’s past
and present.
“People will sometimes ask me,
when was the last time you faced rac-
ism? I say, ‘yesterday,’” explains Todd.
“And although we face a lot of hur-
dles and a lot of barriers, we just keep
going. We just want the story to be
told truthfully and that our ances-
tors here get recognized for what they
were and who they were.”
IN SEPTEMBER 2023, Todd and Melissa
were in Pictou to mark the 250th anni-
versary of the Hector’s landing and
the re-opening of the Hector Heritage
Quay Interpretive Centre. For the
first time, the centre now includes
the story of the Mi’kmaq before and
after these first colonists landed.
With even Bluenose sailing in for
these quarter-millennium celebrations,
the plan had always been to launch
the sparkling new version of Hector.
But COVID, supply-chain issues and
then hurricane Fiona had other plans.
Instead, this old brig will set sail again
(under electric motor power) on the
waters of Pictou Harbour sometime
in 2024. Tim and I hope to be there.
Maybe we’ll see Todd and Melissa
there too.
Shell Canada is inspired by
John Williams’ commitment
to his art, his family and the
Aamjiwnaang First Nation.

We are honoured to share his artwork,

and we welcome the ongoing
opportunity to listen and share
with our Indigenous neighbours.
 ROYAL CANADIAN
GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

You can help

Make Canada better known to Canadians and to the world

The RCGS is one of Canada’s largest educational non-profits.

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 YOUR SOCIETY
NEWS FROM THE ROYAL CANADIAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

SOCIETY BRIEFS
CANADA ̛ S NEWEST ASTRONAUTS
RECEIVE PRESTIGIOUS ASSIGNMENTS CAROLYN BENNETT
was recently welcomed as
an Honorary Fellow
in recognition of her
many accomplish-
ments, including
her achievements
during 26 years
as a member of
Parliament and six
years as minister of
Crown-Indigenous Relations.

FELLOW MAXWEL HOHN

wo more of the Society’s high-
T flying Fellows are one step closer
to heading into space! Congratulations
to Canada’s two newest astronauts,
who both received exciting assign-
ments this past November.
Joshua Kutryk is scheduled to travel
to the International Space Station in
2025 on a six-month mission, while
Jenni Gibbons has been named to the
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LINSDAY RALPH; JOHN GEIGER; COURTESY MAXWEL HOHN; MARK REEDER
has received well-deserved
accolades for his work on
Netflix’s Island of the Sea
Wolves, which won Daytime
Emmys for outstanding
cinematography,
as well as camera
Hansen for the lunar mission,” Gibbons editing, sound
said in the wake of the announcement.
“[Canada is] the only international part-
mixing and writing.
The cinematogra-
ner assigned to the most critically pher was part of an
important mission NASA has planned eight-person crew
in over 50 years — human space flight’s working on the
return to the moon.” documentary.
Kutryk and Gibbons both joined
the Canadian Space Agency in 2017 ON THE HEELS
and completed their astronaut candi- of two sold-out

backup crew for the 10-day Artemis II
mission, currently scheduled to orbit the
moon in late 2025 aboard NASA’s new
Orion spacecraft. Fellow Canadian astro-
naut Jeremy Hansen is already part of
that mission, meaning if he can’t make
the trip, Gibbons will fly in his place.
Kutryk, a trained engineer, has been
working for the past few years on the
Starliner, a Boeing-built spacecraft
designed to transport crew to the space
station. His mission to the space sta-
tion will be the Starliner’s first.
Gibbons, who is both Canada’s
youngest astronaut and its only active
female astronaut, was thrilled with
her assignment. “For me, it’s a privilege
to be support for astronaut Jeremy
date training in 2020. shows last November
Attendees of the Society’s most recent featuring explorer
Geographica Dinner, held last November Adam Shoalts,
at the Canadian War Museum, had the Can Geo Talks
opportunity to hear Gibbons speak in launches its spring
person. She wowed the audience with series on Feb. 22
photos and insights from the specialized with journalist
geology training NASA and Canadian Roy MacGregor, a
Space Agency astronauts have been fellow canoe enthusiast.
doing in northern Labrador with guid-
ance from planetary geologist and
Society Fellow Gordon Osinski. She also PRESSURE CONTINUES!
explained why lunar and space explora- The exhibit at 50 Sussex in
tion matters: “We are doing this for the Ottawa, which highlights the
Earth,” Gibbons said. “We need Earth DEEPSEA CHALLENGER deep
observation; we need to understand the ocean submersible, is on
processes that are changing our Earth, display until May 1.
like climate change.”

CANGEO.CA 93
 YO U R S O CIE TY | F EL L OWS
FEATURED FELLOW: STEPHEN HUI
Author Stephen Hui on the
West Lion Trail, a 14-kilometre
route with outstanding views.
S outhwestern British Columbia
is home to dozens of trails with
hundreds of Instagram-worthy photo
ops. But some of these hikes are a
whole lot more challenging than they
might appear on social media, and
it’s important to know what you’re
getting into before heading out.
Vancouver-based hiking enthusiast
and Fellow Stephen Hui has every
level of hiker covered. A writer and
photographer, Hui has published
three detailed hiking guides to the
region: 105 Hikes In and Around
Southwestern British Columbia, Destina-
tion Hikes In and Around Southwestern
British Columbia and Best Hikes and
Nature Walks With Kids In and Around
Southwestern British Columbia.
On how he got into hiking
I grew up in Vancouver, and a series
of outdoor education opportunities
when I was young inspired me to get
into hiking. We didn’t do outdoor
[activities] as a family, but my parents
put me in Scouts, which taught me
how to camp, tie knots and make
fires. My elementary school sent us
to an outdoor education camp for a
few days. And in high school, some
teachers ran an outdoor club, and we
94 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
did a weeklong history hike on a gold-
rush trail for social studies class. I had
these opportunities because teachers
went the extra mile.
On writing his guides
It has been overwhelmingly reward-
ing. Writing each of my books has
been a great excuse to learn a lot about
the land, the water, the culture and the
geography of the places we hike. My
books have helped some readers learn
more about environmental responsi-
bility and the cultural history aspects
of the hiking trails they visit. It seems
like there’s an appetite to learn more
about the trails of B.C.
On Indigenous knowledges
Cease Wyss, the Skwxwú7mesh edu-
cator and ethnobotanist, wrote the
foreword for 105 Hikes; Cecilia Point,
a Musqueam activist, wrote the
foreword for Destination Hikes; and
Myia Antone, a young Skwxwú7mesh
language teacher who encourages
young people to get back on the land,
wrote the foreword for Best Hikes and
Nature Walks With Kids. Each of
these contributors have a lot of local
knowledge, and they would say that
they don’t hike — they just go out
on the land and harvest. Theirs is a
different way of looking at the envi-
ronment. I’ve learned that so many
of the places we go — the beautiful
places, especially — tend to be sacred
places, and there are sacred stories
associated with them, so it’s impor-
tant to be careful with them and not
remove or disturb anything.
On his favourite hikes
Mount Rohr is beautiful. There’s a
stunning turquoise lake, great moun-
tain views, meadows, some stone and a
little bit of scrambling. I like to put a
few Washington hikes in the books,
and there are beautiful hikes near
Mount Baker. Closer to home, there’s a
hike called Killarney Lake on Bowen
Island — that’s one I like to do with
my son. Seeing wolves on the Nootka
Trail on Nootka Island and seeing
grey whales from the North Coast
Trail [on northern Vancouver Island]
was really cool. My favourite trail is
the Sunshine Coast Trail [on main-
land B.C.], because that was the
longest I’ve done — it’s about 10 days.
ALEXANDRA JUZKIW
Getting lost in the woods for that
long is a different experience. That was
really special.
—Interview by Tori Fitzpatrick
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Sir Christopher Ondaatje, secretary
chief executive officer vice-president, learning O.C., C.B.E. Carl Gauthier, M.M.M., C.D.,
John G. Geiger, C.M. and reconciliation Lord Martin Rees, O.M. Ottawa
Charlene Bearhead Hon. Margaret M. Thom,
executive vice-president treasurer
John Hovland director, society programs O.N.W.T. Jim Carter, CPA, C.D.
Sandy Couto honorary president Lethbridge, Alta.
vice-president, operations
and publisher director, storytelling Chief Perry Bellegarde, S.O.M. immediate past president
Nathalie Cuerrier and partnerships honorary vice-presidents Gavin Fitch, K.C., Calgary
Dan Mullen
executive assistant Roberta Bondar, O.C., O.Ont. governors
Sandra Smith director of research Arthur E. Collin Janis Field, Toronto
and education Wade Davis, C.M. Mark Gallop, Trois-Ruisseaux,
vice-president, Michelle Chaput
philanthropy Gisèle Jacob N.B.
Sarah Legault manager, education programs Denis A. St-Onge, O.C. Nellie Kusugak, O.Nu.,
Sara Black Joseph MacInnis, C.M., O.Ont. Rankin Inlet
vice-president, facilities
Mike Elston editor and social media specialist explorers-in-residence Akaash Maharaj, Ottawa
Tanya Kirnishni Emily Choy, Jill Heinerth, Christopher P. McCreery,
building caretaker
Mike Marshall education program coordinators George Kourounis, Mylène M.V.O., Halifax
Eric Nadeau, Dominique Patnaik, Paquette, Mario Rigby, Antoine Normandin, Ottawa
director of finance Mitchell Taylor Adam Shoalts (Westaway Zac Robinson, Edmonton
Jean Mignault
Explorer-In-Residence),
Ray Zahab
COMING UP
A PRAYER FOR THE RIVER
The South Saskatchewan River is life-giving — yet under threat
from climate change, irrigation expansion and pipelines.
Writer Candace Savage unbraids the currents of this story
in the July/August issue, speaking with Water Walkers,
irrigation advocates and academics.
CALL OF THE WILD
Celebrating all that is wild! Our Canadian Wildlife
Photography of the Year competition launches March 1.
As always, we’re looking for showstopper shots of
wildlife from every corner of Canada — and offering
cash prizes for the winning photos.
96 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024
THE GREAT ONES
They’re here! Great white sharks have
been spotted with increasing frequency
in recent years off the coast of Canada’s
Maritime provinces. In the May/June
issue, Nova Scotia-based journalist
Karen Pinchin dives into the shark
debate, exploring the reaction of
locals — and what more sharks mean
for the ecosystem.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DAVID STOBBE; NICHOLAS WINKLER PHOTOGRAPHY; KATH TWIGG; MARY MADDEN
ON BOARD
From June through September 2023, stand-up
paddleboarder Dan Rubinstein immersed himself
in “blue space,” making his way from Ottawa to
Montreal, then New York City and back to Toronto.
Come along for the ride in the May/June issue.
Subscribe or renew today at canadiangeographic.ca/subscribe
or by calling 1-800-267-0824. The May/June 2024 issue hits
newsstands on April 17.
 To advertise,
ADVENTURES contact Lisa Duncan Brown at:
brown@canadiangeographic.ca
OUR COUNTRY
Revealing Canada

G
Granby was where I first arrived, and it was my first contact with Canada.
Kim Thúy I had never seen snow, and it was amazing to see the cleanliness. When
you live in a refugee camp in a war zone, it’s impossible to have this kind
The acclaimed novelist of silence and luminosity. And that was the first shock.
on experiencing both But the most important shock was when we stepped out of the bus,
and there were so many people in the hotel parking lot waiting for us.
kindness and lots of trips
Everybody was so tall. They were giants to me. I was so skinny as a
to the zoo in Granby, Que. 10-year-old. All the men had big beards and coats with fur all around. As
Asians, we don’t express our emotions physically. But these people were
just holding us — I was not even touching the floor. I still question how
they could hold us in their arms when we were covered with infections
from mosquito bites and had lice in our hair. But they did not hesitate.
In a refugee camp, you don’t feel human. And then, they looked at
me, and I swear to you, I had never seen myself as beautiful. But that
purity in their love for us — they gave me back my humanity, my dignity,
all that we had lost in the camp. The people of Granby gave me back
the humanity that I had lost. From that point on, I was not an immigrant
from Vietnam; I was an adopted child arriving in a new family. When
summer arrived, different families would take us to the zoo. We went to
the zoo every single weekend. Now I realize how expensive it was for
CHANTAL BENNETT

Granby is located on the traditional and

unceded territory of the Abenaki, part of these families to take us there. The zoo illustrates all the kindness and
the Wabanaki confederacy. generosity that I have received from the people of Granby.
—As told to Catherine Zhu

98 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2024

 Embark on a
Canadian Safari
Boutique Nature Expeditions in Alaska and B.C.
he Serengeti may have a lock on
our collective imagination when
it comes to safaris, but there are other
places where you can come
face-to-face with wildlife in its natural
habitat, and you don’t have to look
further than Canada’s Great Bear
Rainforest.
Its 6.4 million hectares of fjords,
rainforest and islands have become a
global beacon for ethical and
sustainable nature travel. One of the
companies responsible for that
reputation is BC’s Maple Leaf
Adventures, which developed its
yacht-based safaris here in the early
1990s. The company offers several
itineraries this summer and fall.
A Different Kind of Safari
Like all great safaris, these trips are
designed to highlight and work in
harmony with the place. And what is
the place like?
Once guests board the yacht, and
the crew unties the lines that tether it
to the end of the road, they’ve left
behind the humdrum of modern
urban life. As the bow points down
the channel, into the maze of coastal
islands, mountains rise up to hide that
road and soon the pathways are
made of water and all one can see,
and hear, and smell is nature.
It’s a world where time is measured
in the rise and fall of the tide, or the
millennia it took a river to erode a ALASKA
mountain and spill mud at its mouth
where a meadow now grows.
Indicators of change are the
yellowing of meadow sedges, the
muscular pulse of salmon into the
creeks, and the return of bears to the
meadows in August to fish.
Haida
Gwaii
Because the region’s fjords and BRITISH
archipelagos have no roads, guests Great Bear COLUMBIA
move between locations and live and Rainforest
dine aboard one of Maple Leaf’s three
expedition yachts. They go ashore
multiple times a day for guided
wildlife viewing, beach explorations,
rainforest walks or other activities. THE SHIPS: PACIFIC
MV Maple Leaf
OCEAN
8-guest, Classic Schooner
Desolation
DATES & ALL-INCLUSIVE FARES MV Swell Sound
12-guest, Converted Tug
SUMMER WHALES & WILD ISLES MV Cascadia
24-guest, Expedition Catamaran
All inclusive fare $7,350 aboard SV
Maple Leaf, July 21 - 29 & Aug 21-29.
VANCOUVER
Starting at $5,900 aboard MV ISLAND
Cascadia, for five days, Aug 12-16, and
starting at $11,740, for nine days, July
23-31, Aug 3-11, Aug 17-25.
GREAT BEAR RAINFOREST IN FALL
All inclusive fare $8,800 aboard SV
Maple Leaf, starting at $11,920 aboard
MV Swell, and starting at $11,740
aboard MV Cascadia. Weekly through
Sep and Oct, starting Aug 26 (Casca-
dia), Aug 31 (Maple Leaf and Swell).
Contact us for 2024 itineraries.
Call 250.386.7245 or visit MapleLeafAdventures.com
LET YOUR
PASSION
DEFINE
YOUR
LEGACY

Your passion for Canada’s natural spaces defines your life; now it can define
your legacy. With a gift in your Will to the Nature Conservancy of Canada,
no matter the size, you can help protect our most vulnerable habitats and the
wildlife that live there. For today, for tomorrow and for generations to come.

Ord!r your Fr!! L!gacy Information Bookl!t today!

Call 2acki! at 1-877-231-3552 x2275 or visit D!fin!YourL!gacy.ca