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Our uniqueness has a price
e-KNOW editorial
The East Kootenay is a unique place.
The people who call the East Kootenay home share a special bond with the wilderness that wraps around our communities like thriving, protective arms.
We are people drawn more to wilderness than civilization and we are people of and from the land.
But none of that makes the East Kootenay unique.
What separates us from other regions in British Columbia is, quite obviously, our geographic location.
We are the camper van parked next to the idling party RV caravan also known as Alberta.
We are the primary escape draw for much of the population of southern Alberta, including the million-soul strong Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat and numerous locales between. We are also ‘the way to Banff’ for traffic coming from Washington, Idaho and Montana.
Location, location, location, eh.
The benefit of being the favoured playground for more than two million people from Canada’s most affluent province is the cha-ching in cash registers all over our region, a tourism paradise for those seeking wilderness, in-your-face Rocky Mountain beauty, backcountry escape and boundless recreation opportunities.
However, there is a price to be paid for our uniqueness. Along with the surge in visitors seeking escape comes the rabble – the despoilers of paradise.
The recently passed Victoria Day long weekend produced what has sadly become a norm along the Koocanusa Reservoir, as it has been in the Columbia Valley for decades – drunken party camping.
The average drunken party camper has the intelligence quotient of a tasered watermelon; oscillating and juiced. They quiver about in slurring, drooling, giggling masses, leaving garbage, excrement and sweeping signatures (vandalism) on the landscape.
Due to endless elbow tipping they cannot bend down to pick up their mess so they kick it into filthy piles, assuming someone else will pick it up (think child dropping food on kitchen floor) and thanks to massive brain damage from cheap synthetic narcotics that riddle already weak minds with lesser urges and base responses, they blaze through their getaways into paradise in rare primordial form. Though to say they are primordial is an insult to anyone with a mind that cannot at least outperform a trout in a counting contest.
Before I go on, please note that I am not saying all Albertans who visit are such creatures. It is a small percentage of them.
But the fact remains – our nearby backcountry escapes continue to suffer from shit and abuse and it has got to stop.
Certainly, some locals get involved in the mayhem but the really offensive stuff, which occurs on the long weekends in usually semi-organized fashion, comes from the east.
We can demand they be accountable and clean up after themselves, as has been done the past few decades to rapidly fading success. Or we can bar them completely from our backcountry, which would be tourism suicide.
In the past two weeks, many Albertans have made it clear they do not appreciate their good names being marred by these lousy louts and booze-boggled bambis and we can hope they will police their own.
Dream on.
So what remains to be done?
Here’s a suggestion though it won’t sit well with the law-abiding and respectful visitors from out-of-province: create a non-resident Crown land use permit, with a set fee – say $50 a year.
A permit would/should contain pertinent info and allow the holder to visit Crown land in B.C. for two weeks. It should also formally declare the fines for assorted violations to the law, thereby removing excuses from the equation and perhaps inspiring a bit more sanity and respect.
The funds collected in a given region, such as the East Kootenay, stay in said region and be used on funding for increased enforcement in high traffic party zones, such as along Koocanusa and in the Columbia Valley.
It is obvious we cannot rely on the provincial government to find a solution, though the Koocanusa area is coming under some organized focus from the province and local governments.
It is time this region’s uniqueness – its adjacency to Alberta – is considered and such a measure be allowed and supported by Victoria. Or find another solution because ongoing incidents such as the ones along Koocanusa May 16-19 will assuredly lead to greater tragedy.
Enforcement can be costly but solutions can and need to be created. A solution should have been derived two decades ago. This isn’t a new problem – so get on it Victoria.
It is your land that is being sullied. We keep cleaning it up; we try to defend it but we need your support.
Ian Cobb
