By Joe Foy

 

On Earth Day my family and I went for a delightful hike in the woods near Horseshoe Bay at a little place you may have heard of called Eagleridge Bluffs. It was just the perfect thing to do in the sweet springtime sunshine with a trio of young boys who had been cooped up due to the incessant rains of the winter of 2006.

 

While my wife and I strolled along the Baden Powell Trail through groves of sun dappled Douglas fir and arbutus trees the boys aged 5, 7 and 10 ran up ahead intent on spying a rare red legged frog.

 

We’d been told to keep an eye out for frogs by a group of campers back at the trailhead. Even though the critters were not ever seen by anyone in our family it was the imagining and listening and looking and breathing the fresh forest air that was the fun part.

 

The thing is these weren’t ordinary frogs. They are on the Species at Risk list as being Vulnerable because somuch of their habitat has been destroyed through urban development,

agriculture and logging. Just as well to let the little hoppers rest in peace, I thought.

 

When the boys finally tired of running up and down the trail we headed back. We sat down to talk a while with the campers. Like the frogs, these weren’t ordinary campers.

 

They were endangered campers.

 

They had pitched their tents and taken a stand to save the forest of Eagleridge Bluffs and the wild creatures like the frogs, that live there too.

 

They were there because Kevin Falcon, BC’s Minister of Transportation has a plan to blast the forest and the very rock on which it grows to smithereens to make way for a new section of road to Whistler in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. There were a lot of banners and signs and things strung up between the trees urging the government to build their new road under the bluffs in a tunnel, or to fix up the existing road which goes around the bluffs.

 

Sitting on a lawn chair surrounded by a group of campers was Grandma Betty, famous defender of BC forests from Clayoquot Sound to the Elaho Valley to the Walbran Rainforest. 

 

Issuing forth a merry chuckle she made sure our three boys all got a taste of the special Earth Day cake.

 

Betty told us that the only way she was going to leave her little tent on the bluffs was when the Premier comes to talk about changing the road building plans so the forest and its inhabitants can be saved – or when she is arrested and carried away to jail. Many of the campers nodded in agreement. Their faces, flush with a combination of sunburn and pride, shone like the spring time sun.

 

I couldn’t help but think that this had to be the most hopeful spot in Canada’s Olympic Forest, that great green world that surrounds the future site of the 2010 Vancouver Whistler Winter Olympic Games.

 

In this forest that stretches from Whistler to Manning Park and from Vancouver up to Lillooet there are many species like the red legged frog being snuffed out because of the BC government’s chainsaw and bulldozer policies. But currently there are too few campers willing to hold the line the way the fine folks at Eagleridge Bluffs are. And that’s a shame because some species are literally at death’s door.

 

If that saddens you then may I suggest a hike at Eagleridge Bluffs where hope still shines. May it one day light all of Canada’s Olympic Forest.