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Wilderness Lockdown

Can B.C.’s tour operators survive another province-wide backcountry ban?

When forest fires shut down all of Southern B.C.’s backcountry last summer, it was a clear signal that we should all mothball our hiking boots, relax into our lawn chairs and take it easy for a while.

But for wilderness tourism operators across the province, the lockdown meant losing their only source of income. Clients were sent home, staff lost their paycheques and owners prayed for rain while they watched their profits disappear. With this summer’s fire season well ahead of last year’s scorching pace (as of July 19, there had been 1,285 forest fires in British Columbia this year, compared to 764 by the same time last year) another province-wide ban seems like a strong possibility. The question is, can the backcountry tourism industry survive it?

Graeme White is the Director of Outward Bound’s Western Canada School in Pemberton. The school is a non-profit organization that attracts students from all over the country, running wilderness courses anywhere from five days to four weeks in length. Their entire program takes place in the backcountry, with courses located in the most remote regions of the Chilcotins, the Coast Range, the Rockies and Vancouver Island. At any one time during the summer, they may have as many as 70 students and 15 instructors out in the wilderness. And if the backcountry shuts down, they have nowhere else to go.

"If a shut-down were to go into effect now and last through to the end of August," says White, "financially that would hurt big time – the kind of loss that would take years to come back from."

Last year, when the province enacted a blanket backcountry ban from August 29 to September 12, Outward Bound came very close to having to cancel its programs. As luck would have it, however, the northern half of Vancouver Island remained open during the closure, and the school moved its entire operation to Strathcona Park. It’s an adventure that cost the school $7,000 in added expenses, as well as untold headaches, and it’s a scenario White doesn’t want to repeat.

At the same time, he acknowledges that things could have been much worse. Had the closure come a few weeks earlier – during Outward Bound’s peak season and also at a time when Strathcona Park sees a lot of public use – there’s no way the school could have relocated, and they would have had to start cancelling courses. It would have been devastating for a school that already operates perilously close to its bottom line.

Asked to comment on the possibility of another province-wide backcountry closure this summer, Tara Wilson, spokesperson for the BC Forest Service, says it’s impossible to know what lies ahead. She stresses that enacting such a ban is an extremely rare occurrence, but also acknowledges that this summer has so far been worse than last year.

"It depends on what happens for the rest of July and August," she says, "which are traditionally the higher (more fires) times of the year."

Meanwhile, members of the B.C. Wilderness Tourism Association are preparing for the worst. Caught completely off-guard last year when the government gave them just a day’s notice for the closure, they’re trying to prepare as much as possible for a similar scenario this year. According to Paul Leeson, an Association board member and also the owner/operator of Purcell Lodge just west of Golden, the BCWTA has been asking the Ministry of Forests for an exemption from a general backcountry ban.

While some might grumble about the possibility of having two different sets of standards — one for the public and one for business – Leeson says that having commercial operators in the backcountry may actually help control forest fires.

"In many cases, our wilderness tourism operators are the best eyes and ears we’ve got, because the province doesn’t have a forest look-out system anymore and the air patrols can’t happen 24 hours a day. We (tourism operators) are often equipped and have risk management plans in place and have communications systems in place to be able to take some definitive action."

But apart from negotiating with the province for an exemption, there’s little else B.C.’s wilderness tourism operators can do.

"There’s really no way to prepare for a closure," says Leeson. "We have bookings, we have obligations, we have people’s money, we have staff hired – it’s all in place. And the pressure on the operator is immense – a lot of these people have bought airline tickets and often are even en route to take advantage of a holiday, so it’s a very awkward circumstance, and it doesn’t paint the province in a very good light as far as its receptiveness to tourism."

If businesses are forced to shut down again this summer, Leeson worries that it will be "just another nail in the coffin" of the wilderness tourism industry in B.C., an industry already struggling under prohibitive insurance costs and restrictive land use policies.

"Media picks up on negative news," he says, "and that word will get out pretty quickly that B.C. is closed for business – that we can be closed at the drop of a hat."

Whistler-Blackcomb is also concerned how a closure would be interpreted by the press.

"The moment the word ‘closed’ is used publicly," says Arthur DeJong, Mountain Planning and Environmental Resource Manager, "the perception out there is that the resort’s closed, when only small components of the overall experience may be closed."

Last year, for example, Whistler managed to keep almost all of its activities running during the widespread backcountry ban, thanks in large part to the resort’s own fire suppression capabilities – snowmaking lines that can act as giant fire hoses, more than 200 staff trained in fire suppression, ski trails that act as firebreaks, vehicles equipped with fire suppression equipment and a helicopter on standby.

But even though DeJong would do everything possible to keep the mountain open in the event of another backcountry closure this summer, he stresses that the resort will always put the safety of the entire valley first.

For example, if the Sea to Sky corridor is threatened by a fire, he says that the mountain could very well shut down its operations and put its staff to work helping to put out the blaze. It’s a position that not only makes good moral sense, it also makes good economic sense – if a forest fire roars through Whistler itself, trying to keep the mountain bike park open quickly becomes irrelevant.

It’s a sentiment that most local tourism operators seem to agree with. According to Seth Heald, manager of Whistler Outback Adventures – a company that specializes in hiking, biking and rafting trips – the forest "is a resource that’s so precious it’s probably worth the inconvenience and the monetary loss that it (a backcountry closure) costs. When you consider the alternative, which is to lose the forest for multiple years or even forever, it’s not a good alternative."

He doesn’t have exact figures for what last year’s shutdown cost the company, "but it was in the tens of thousands of dollars." Like Graeme White at Outward Bound, Heald is just thankful that the closure didn’t happen in August. If that were to happen this year, he estimates that they would lose close to $100,000 in revenues.

And while businesses across the province would take a hit to their bottom lines if another ban were imposed this year, it’s likely that their employees would suffer just as much, if not more. In a seasonal industry well known for its low wages and lack of job security, a province-wide shutdown would mean instant lay-offs for thousands of employees. And, unlike regular jobs that would just start up again once the closure ended, many seasonal jobs would likely disappear until the following summer, leaving workers scrambling to make ends meet until their next job starts.

Gabe Jutras is in the middle of his second year working at Outward Bound. At 25, he’s already been working seasonally for seven years as a treeplanter, outdoor educator and sea kayak guide. During the off-season he studies geology at UBC, and he uses the money he earns in the summer to pay his tuition. This summer he’s working a total of 62 days, almost all of them in the mountains, and during the peak season he’ll work 42 days in a 43-day stretch.

But if the Ministry of Forests closes the backcountry because of extreme fire hazard, he’ll be out of work almost immediately. Not only that, he won’t be eligible for employment insurance because he only works during the summers.

"I’d be digging further into my line of credit" in order to pay for university, he says. Needless to say, it’s not a prospect he’s looking forward to.

At Whistler Outback Adventures, the employees have also learned to roll with the punches. Many of the hiking and biking guides there work casually and on contract, trying to keep their schedules flexible enough that if the phone rings with an offer of work, they’re ready to go. According to lead guide and operations manager Matt Delany, most of the guides have other jobs, and they’d have to rely on those if the company’s touring business were shut down by a backcountry closure.

Despite the losses suffered by businesses and workers during last summer’s wilderness closure, and the very real potential for similar losses in the future, there has been no word from the provincial government about any kind of compensation for those losses. According to Leeson of the BCWTA, that’s because the tourism industry doesn’t have a lot of political clout. "Traditionally tourism doesn’t rank very high on the government’s radar screen," he says. "It’s overwhelmingly small business, so where compensation seems to be taken for granted when you’re talking about cows or chickens or steel or lumber or whatever, the tourism sector is pretty much left out of those discussions normally."

Ironically, tourism is actually B.C.’s second largest industry, bringing about $10 billion a year into the province, and wilderness tourism brings in more than $1 billion a year and provides 15,000 jobs.

But the saddest part about the growing forest fire problem we’ve been experiencing in the last few years is that, according to some experts, it’s at least partly our own fault.

Bob Gray is a Chilliwack-based fire ecologist who works throughout B.C. and in the US. In his opinion the natural forest fire cycle is way out of whack across much of the province.

"Fire severity is certainly a lot worse than it used to be," he says. "The southern half of the province, with its dry forest types — Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine – used to burn very frequently. So the fires you had were very low severity, low intensity fires."

Now what we see are very infrequent but severe forest fires. "We started putting fires out," says Gray, "so we upset the occurrence of fire. And then with our harvesting practices, we started to create a lot more fuel – we started prescribing higher densities of trees than were historically there, and we started cutting trees and not treating the fuels. So we really altered the structure of the forest…and we created conditions that can now support crown fires (the movement of fire through the tops of trees) that never used to occur."

As a result, forest fires now burn much hotter than they used to, incinerating everything in their path, often including the topsoil. In some cases, burnt forests may take centuries to regenerate.

The only way to get the province’s fires under control, says Gray, is to change the way we manage the forests, a process that would include changes to logging practices as well as the widespread use of prescribed burns to reduce forest fuels. It’s a plan Gray says the provincial government has promised to implement, but as yet he hasn’t seen any money on the table. "Come next budget," he says, "they’d better start to get a handle on this because it’s not going away."

In the meantime, people like Gabe Jutras, Seth Heald and Graeme White remain in the unusual position of praying for rain on the West Coast.

Because if they don’t get some soon, they may find themselves taking a forced vacation, staring longingly at the backcountry from the safety of a paved road.



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