“There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold,” penned the poet Robert Service about the Klondike Gold Rush. Between 1897 and 1899, around 100,000 people voyaged to the Yukon with the dream of striking it rich.

But perhaps the strangest thing yet: 127 years later, Yukon mining is still governed by laws drafted for the Gold Rush era. 

In 2025, placer miners — like that gold-panner you’re probably already picturing — harvested $449,000 million in gold revenue from the territory while the Yukon government took home $33,000 in royalties — taxes earned from said mining.

Yes, you read that correctly: $33,000. Another way, perhaps, to say “fool’s gold.”

The Placer Mining Act was created in 1906 when gold was worth $15 an ounce. It requires placer miners, who extract heavy minerals from loose sediment — typically in rivers or streambeds — rather than digging them out of solid rock, to pay the government 37.5 cents for every ounce of gold they get. Today, the price of gold ranges from $6,150 to $6,500 an ounce.

And antiquated royalty laws are just the tip of the iceberg.

The Yukon’s mining legislation is “grossly outdated,” Sebastian Jones says. A fish and wildlife habitat analyst at the Yukon Conservation Society, Jones says the Yukon’s mining legislation should be “top of mind” for Canadians to understand at a time when all eyes are fixed on critical minerals in the North — and when new mines are being approved by the Yukon and federal governments.

Up here, the habitat of threatened Woodland caribou is already under pressure, while First Nations are dealing with the environmental damage of legacy mines and determined to enforce their territorial rights.

More than one Yukoner warned me that writing about mining in the Yukon is like opening a can of worms. Or a whole barrel, for that matter.

How is mining regulated in the Yukon, which mines are being approved and what’s really at stake?

Grab a can opener, folks.

Let’s get into it.

Two acts govern mining activities in the Yukon — both fundamentally fail to address First Nations land treaties

The rules that govern mining in the territory are divided into two documents: the Placer Mining Act, which governs those surface miners, and the Quartz Mining Act, which governs the extraction of minerals from within rocks by blasting, drilling or heap leaching. (We’ll get into heap leaching in a bit.)

A major gap in the Yukon’s outdated mining acts is any mention of the modern-day context of First Nations self-governance and rights. 

Eleven of the 14 First Nations in the Yukon have signed land-claim agreements under the Umbrella Final Agreement, one of the most important political and legal frameworks in the territory, which came into effect in 1993. The agreement recognizes seven regions and recommends land-use planning within those regions — legal agreements with First Nations governments and the Yukon government to define what activities, mining included, will be allowed where and by whom.

Since 1993, only two land-use plans have been completed in the Yukon, with a third currently in review.

What does this have to do with mining and outdated mining legislation? Well, pretty much everything.

What is free-entry staking and why does it matter?

Free-entry staking, yet another colonial holdover from the Gold Rush, allows anyone — literally anyone over the age of 18; you don’t have to be a Yukoner or even a Canadian — to stake and record a mineral claim that gives them the right to explore for minerals in the area.

Mining claims staked during the Klondike Gold Rush, for example, still have legal jurisdiction, even if they aren’t being actively developed or exploited.

These staked claims are creating enormous legal complexity. And it’s a big part of the reason why land-use planning has been delayed.

First Nations governments, including the Na-Cho Nyäk Dun, have called for a cessation of all mining activities on their traditional territory, including the exploration and development of existing and proposed claims, until their land-use plan is completed.

Meanwhile, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation has taken it one step further. They’re suing the Yukon government for the mismanagement of hundreds of idle mineral claims that were staked before their land-claim agreement was signed in 1998. The First Nation argues the idle claims weren’t properly cleared out or cancelled, and have since caused environmental damages on their traditional territory.

Is change on the horizon?

In 2021, the Yukon government, led by the Liberal party, began meeting with First Nations, industry and other stakeholders. The goal? Develop new legislation to replace both the Placer Mining Act and Quartz Mining Act.

In September 2025, CBC North got its hands on a 30-page draft document using the territory’s access to information laws. The plan was to make major changes to the free-entry system. Staking a claim would no longer automatically grant mineral rights. Only after a certain amount of exploration was done could prospectors apply for mineral rights, and if they wanted to go ahead they’d need authorization from the Yukon government and First Nations.

But then came an election. In November 2025, the Liberals lost power after three successive terms. The conservative-leaning Yukon Party took the reins, winning the largest majority in the territory’s history. It’s unclear if any parts of the draft document are still being considered.

Premier Currie Dixon, leader of the Yukon Party, campaigned on bolstering the mining industry and tells me modernizing the Yukon’s outdated laws is a priority for his government. He cites a long list of issues from the way mines are assessed, regulated and monitored, along with processes for ensuring that companies adhere to regulations. “We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to find a way to engage with First Nations through a process that will lead us to a new mineral legislation sometime in 2028,” he says.

What projects are being approved?

For those concerned with Indigenous Rights and environmental issues, the new legislation can’t come soon enough — particularly as the Yukon government approves new mines.

In mid-April, the Yukon and federal governments approved the Kudz Ze Kayah mine, a proposed zinc, copper and lead mine, owned by Vancouver-based BMC Minerals. 

The proposed mine is located 115 kilometres south-east of the community of Ross River on the traditional territories of the Kaska First Nations. The Ross River Dena Council has expressed fierce opposition to the project.

The Kudz Ze Kayah mine, Jones says, would be “right slap in the middle” of a threatened caribou herd’s range. The Finlayson caribou, a woodland caribou herd, was recently declared a “living ecological person” by the Ross River Dena Council, which grants caribou the inherent rights to thrive in their natural range and be legally protected from industrial harms. 

Yukoners are also paying close attention to the Coffee Gold Mine, located 130 kilometres south of Dawson City on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and Selkirk First Nation and on the claimed traditional territory of White River First Nation. It’s getting closer to obtaining the necessary permits to start building.

Who is going to clean up the mess?

While past and present Yukon governments continue to tout the economic development benefits of mines, the territory is paying millions of dollars to clean up a long list of failed and abandoned mines. 

In 2024, the Yukon government paid nearly $190 million for mine remediation. That didn’t include the cost of the Eagle Mine disaster, one of the biggest mine failures in the territory’s history, which occurred on June 24, 2024.

The Eagle Mine, formerly owned by Victoria Gold, is located near the community of Mayo in north-central Yukon on the territory of the Na-Cho Nyäk Dun First Nation. It’s a gold mining operation that uses a technique called “heap leaching.” 

To understand what that looks like, think of a pour-over coffee. Heap leaching involves crushing rock, piling it on top of an impervious liner pad and then pouring a cyanide-liquid over the heap that selectively targets the gold, dissolving it into a liquid that pools in the pad. It’s relatively common in the Yukon because it’s cheaper than drilling or blasting. Companies extract the ‘liquid gold’ from beneath the pile and pump it out to be processed. The remaining ore stays piled and enclosed by containment berms.

The Eagle Mine disaster happened when one of those protective berms suddenly collapsed, causing a massive landslide of cyanide-contaminated ore. An independent review found that 1.8 million tonnes of contaminated material spilled into nearby Haggart Creek and the surrounding groundwater.

All operations were immediately halted, while Victoria Gold, unable to afford environmental clean-up, entered into a court-ordered receivership and filed for bankruptcy. It took a full month after the initial failure for the government to begin groundwater remediation. 

Kate White, leader of the NDP, the official opposition party in the Yukon, describes the events of the Eagle Mine failure as “the biggest environmental disaster” the territory has seen. “No one knows the full cost … no one will know what has leached into the water,” White says.

The costs to clean up the mess are projected to reach upwards of $377.5 million by this fall, with a $220-million payout from the Yukon government. 

In December 2025, the Na-Cho Nyäk Dun filed a $150-million lawsuit against the Yukon and federal governments, claiming treaty obligations were not upheld and the Eagle Mine was not adequately regulated. In a letter penned to the Auditor General of Canada, the Nah-Cho Nyäk Dun blamed the Yukon government’s “lax approach to permitting, compliance, monitoring and enforcement of mineral activity in the Yukon.” The First Nation is also calling for a public inquiry.

Yukon’s modern-day ‘mineral rush’ despite century-old legislation

It’s hard to keep up with the number of mines currently being advanced in the Yukon. The list is long and projects are at various stages of development.

In Whitehorse, residents don’t have to look beyond the city limits to encounter drilling sites. Gladiator Metals, a B.C.-based company, has been looking for copper, silver and gold in Whitehorse since 2023. In April, the Yukon government approved the company to expand exploration, with some drilling sites located only 800 metres away from residential areas.

The Casino Mine — what would be one of the biggest open-pit copper, silver, and gold mines in the Yukon’s history — is currently under review by the Yukon’s environmental and social assessment board. The mine is owned by Western Copper and Gold Corporation, a Vancouver-based company.

And then there’s the Mactung mine, owned by Fireweed Metals, which is one of the world’s largest-known deposits of high-grade tungsten. 

What is tungsten? It’s an exceptionally hard, heat-resistant metal that’s sought after for industrial and military manufacturing. Tungsten replaces lead in ammunition. It’s used to make rocket engine nozzles and aircraft parts.

The Mactung mine, located at the end of the North Canol road near the Yukon-Northwest Territories border, is drawing major investment from the Canadian and U.S. governments.

In 2024, Canada and the U.S. Department of Defense announced they’d be investing a combined $35 million toward studies and designs for improving the North Canol road and connecting the electrical transmission line to power operations.

Over a century may have passed since the Klondike Gold Rush, but perhaps it’s never really ended in the Yukon — it’s just traded gold pans for open-pit mines. Today’s national agenda is resulting in a new rush for critical minerals yet the Yukon’s mining legislation remains a century behind.

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My dad was known as “the bear guy” in Peace River. He often got the call to advise on what to do with “problem bears” reported by the public. Now and then they’d get a call from a farmer about a grizzly bear, but for the most part the culprit was a black bear that had wandered into town or was nosing through somebody’s trash bins. “Problem bear” or “nuisance bear” were the terms commonly used by wildlife managers to describe bears that showed no fear of people, fed on anthropogenic food sources and edged close enough to threaten a person’s perception of safety. Perception being the key word there, my dad would later grumble. It was a tricky thing to assess and manage, because everyone’s perception of risk was different. Some people tolerated a bear wandering through their backyard. Others viewed the bear as a threat to their children’s safety. For everyone, the distance or threshold between the bear and their circle of comfort, the perception of a situation going from harmless to dangerous, could be markedly different. There was no clear line, no border drawn in the sand, that signalled to bears: You shall not pass. 

Reports of problem bears were most frequent from late April, when bears crawled out of hibernation, through the spring and summer months, and into October, when they entered hyperphagia, a state of extreme hunger. Most of the calls to conservation officers about “problem bears” were regarding black bears, hands-down, owing to the fact that the grizzly population in northwestern Alberta was significantly less and, for the most part, tended to avoid people. The expression “problem bear” almost always refers to a black bear, even today.

“There’s a goddamned bear breaking into my shed!”

“There’s a bear prowling the riverbank. I’m scared for the safety of my kids.”

“There’s a bear up in a tree behind my house. I threw rocks at it, but it won’t budge.”

“Human safety is always our number one concern,” my dad would say. “But it’s about keeping the bear safe, too.”

One evening, our community made the national news when a black bear waltzed right through the automatic doors of the IGA grocery store and beelined for the bakery. Brendan and I laughed when we watched the footage captured by the store’s security camera: the bear strolling through those doors as if he’d done it a thousand times before, eventually chased out by the store manager with an industrial broom. The story made for a comedic segment on the six o’clock news, as no one was harmed, the bear included. My brother and I were excited, even proud, that the news of the bear had put our small town on the map. Maybe it was a problem bear, but it was our problem bear. For my dad, it was just business as usual.

Another day, another nuisance bear.

In the 1990s, wildlife managers relied on a bear management concept called “mutual avoidance,” a term that was coined and popularized by Stephen Herrero, a behavioural ecologist and author of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, a book published in 1985 that became, and remains today, widely influential. “Mutual avoidance is a desirable end state,” Herrero wrote in Bear Attacks. He called for a “standoff between bears and people rather than the petting, feeding and garbage eating that have characterized the past.” Herrero argued that a century of tolerating, and in some cases even encouraging, bears feeding on anthropogenic food sources had created a legacy of food-conditioned and habituated bears. Bear Attacks was one of the first books to draw a connection between food habituation and fatal maulings, arguing that a food- habituated bear is a dangerous bear. His logic was sound: Close the garbage dumps, clean up unmanaged food sources, and scare away food-habituated bears through persistent negative, or adverse, conditioning. My dad agreed.

He and his colleagues used negative conditioning to send problem bears a message, loud and clear: You aren’t welcome here. Mostly, they’d rely on non-lethal methods, driving bears off by vehicle, honking the horn or turning on a loud siren. They’d fire off a round of cracker shells at the bear, or shoot them with rubber bullets.

“We aim for the fat on the bear’s rump,” my dad told me. “The rubber slug will certainly sting and send them a message, but it won’t cause any harm to the bear.”

Some of the problem bears would be captured in culvert traps, a live bear trap designed like an open culvert: long enough for a bear to worm in, pull on bait at the back of the trap — typically a beaver carcass or roadkill — and trigger the door to slam behind them. Biologists would tranquilize the bear and take its physiological measurements: body weight, length, sex and general health. They’d age the bear by examining its teeth, the wear on its canines and incisors, looking for the presence of yellow dentine, which would indicate an older bear. Sometimes my dad would extract a tooth with pliers and send it for analysis in Edmonton. Under a microscope, a lab technician would count the number of rings on a tooth root, like the growth rings on a tree stump, to determine the bear’s age. The problem bear would receive a bright yellow or orange ID ear tag. Some would get a radio collar, so biologists could follow its whereabouts like a prisoner released on parole. The problem bears entered the system as numbers, so repeat offenders could be identified.

Most wildlife managers had a three-strikes-you’re-out policy. For bears that didn’t get the memo on mutual avoidance, their story ended with a lead bullet. “Put down” was the common expression, or “cull,” like kill made soft, or “euthanized,” as though the bear were akin to our family’s dog, Sage, whom we said goodbye to on the operating table at the veterinary clinic. “Destroyed” was another word used by wildlife managers, and as a child I imagined them blowing up the bear into ten thousand tiny pieces the same way they detonated the Death Star in Star Wars.

Bears that remained afraid of people and avoided areas used by humans would have the best chance at survival, my dad reminded us. 

The calls from the public about problem bears wore on him, however. 

“Who’s really the problem here — bears or people?” he’d complain.

Bears were just being bears, he’d say, drawn by their noses to unmanaged food sources, including unsecured garbage bins, or cooking oil dumped behind a restaurant in town, or an apple tree, or raspberry bushes in somebody’s backyard. Or maybe someone left their barbecue wide open, or forgot a bag of dog food out on the front steps of their house. Or perhaps it was a bear just passing through town, using the paved walking trail as a corridor to travel. In cases where bears would refuse to budge from people’s backyards, sometimes they’d discover small cubs clinging to the upper branches of nearby trees, which the mothers guarded from below.

At the root of every problem bear, my dad would say, is a human problem. The idea of a “bad bear” was solely a human construct. The bear was just trying to pack on enough pounds to survive the winter. If it discovered a human-made food source, that was our fault, not the bear’s.

But for all the resources that went into dealing with these so-called problem bears in town, the bears that actually killed people seemingly appeared out of thin air, like a sleight of hand. Their victims never saw it coming. These black bear attacks, although incredibly rare, mostly happened in remote areas where human activity encroached on their habitat.

‘When they get into predatory mode, it’s like the flick of a switch’

When I was in Grade 10, my forestry class was preparing for a two-week field course outside Swan Hills, Alta., an area located to the south of Peace River where there’s a high density of grizzly bears and black bears. My dad came to my high school to give a presentation on bear safety, specifically, how to protect ourselves from or avoid bear attacks. I’d grown up listening to these cautionary stories and instructions, but somehow the repeated telling felt as visceral as the first. He told us a story about 63-year-old Cree trapper Bella Twin, who, in 1953, encountered and defended herself against one of the world’s largest recorded grizzly bears in this same region and astonishingly put down the bear with a .22 rifle, a firearm meant for hunting small game like grouse and rabbits. I shivered in awe of Bella’s bravery, and my classmates’ eyes were wide with admiration. Even the boys nodded with respect. I was proud of my father, standing in front of our class like a bear guru of sorts. 

We were instructed to respond differently in a close encounter with a grizzly bear versus a black bear. The two species had, behaviourally speaking, evolved differently. Whereas black bears evolved in trees, often fleeing and climbing to safety in frightening encounters, grizzly bears evolved on treeless plains where they had to stand their ground and fight back in defence situations. If it was a defensive grizzly bear attack, a mother protecting her cubs, for example, he advised us to play dead, which would potentially defuse the attack. “You’ve got to convince her that you’re not a threat,” he said. Often, in defensive grizzly attacks, bears would eventually leave after initially wounding or impairing a person. 

“Cover the back of your neck with your hands,” he told us. “Try to stay on your stomach. The bear will likely try to flip you over, but if you can, stay on your stomach and protect your vital organs.”

If it was a black bear attack, he said, “you’ve gotta fight with everything you’ve got.”

We learned of a 10-year-old girl from Williams Lake, B.C., who fought off a black bear with an axe and a pot of boiling water, which she flung in the bear’s face.

Black bear attacks in North America occur more frequently than grizzly bear attacks, he explained, but when grizzlies do attack, it often results in serious injury or death. There were other key differences between grizzly bears and black bears.

He pointed to research from Herrero’s Bear Attacks that found the majority of fatal grizzly bear attacks occurred in national parks, where bears had become food-habituated and accustomed to people. On the flip side, nearly all the fatal black bear attacks took place in rural, remote areas — not so different from Peace River or the Swan Hills. Although these incidents were extremely rare, Herrero found that black bears would stalk and attack their victims in broad daylight, whereas the majority of grizzly bear attacks occurred at night. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that grizzly bears, as their habitat has shrunk in size and fragmented, have adapted to become more nocturnal. In over half the accounts, black bears preyed on people of smaller stature, their victims often women or children. There was an assumption that grizzlies were more dangerous than black bears, but just because black bears tended to be smaller didn’t mean they were any less deadly. “[Black bears] can bite through live trees thicker than a man’s arm,” Herrero wrote in Bear Attacks. “They can kill a full-grown steer with a bite to the neck.”

“If a black bear is stalking you, you’re probably not going to see it coming,” my dad told us. “When they get into predatory mode, it’s like the flick of a switch. They’re on. They’re focused.” 

A collective hush fell over the room, all eyes glued to my father.

No doubt he was thinking of the tragic bear attacks that had occurred only a few years earlier at Liard River Hot Springs, a remote campground in northern British Columbia. On August 14, 1997, an adult black bear stalked a woman named Patti McConnell and her 13-year-old son, Kelly, near the upper hot springs pool. The bear attacked McConnell and then turned on her son, who had attempted to beat the bear off his mother with a stick. When Ray Kitchen, a 56-year-old trucker, heard their screams, he went running to intervene, but the bear charged and knocked him over. As people heard the attacks, they fled from the hot springs for the parking lot, and in the ensuing panic the bear mauled a fourth victim, a 28-year-old man. Eventually, two bystanders came running with rifles. They shot the bear, but both Patti McConnell and Kitchen died from their wounds. 

My classmates and I had learned about the gruesome attacks, right down to the goriest details, on the television news. It made the front page of the newspapers with headlines that read: DEADLIEST ATTACK IN NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY. Reader’s Digest published a story called “Rogue Bear on the Rampage” that depicted the 13-year-old boy watching the bear “engulf his mother’s almost naked body.” The story read like a thriller novel; it was impossible to tear your eyes away from the sensational account. “[Kelly’s mother] lay beside him, her skin ashen, her eyes open and unblinking,” the article read. “The animal’s foul, rancid breath made Kelly want to vomit. He closed his eyes. He knew he was about to die.”

There was something unsettling about the way people leaned in to the bear attack story, some kind of twisted desire to consume every last gruesome detail. We were drawn to the blood lust of bear attacks with a magnetic intensity. It was hard to look away from the onslaught of headlines, but then again, we were kids growing up in a culture obsessed with violence inflicted by predators of all kinds — from wrestlers bashing one another over the head with folding chairs to movies about serial killers and rapists. Bears were just another bad guy.

But when it comes to bears, a fatal, predatory attack is never personal. It’s not evil or malicious, or premeditated. It’s about the animal’s attempt to survive and evolve. The media’s obsession with bear attacks generates sales and dollars, but more often than not, it fails to bring us any closer to understanding them as a species.

The detail about the woman’s “almost naked body” reminded me of the opening scene in Spielberg’s cult classic Jaws, a movie we worshipped as kids, that opens with a young woman with long blond hair running along a beach, giggling and taking off her clothes. A drunken suitor follows behind, slurring, “What’s your name again?” “Chrissie!” she says. “Where are we going?” “Swimming!” she responds. As she pulls off her sweater, revealing her breasts, the man says with a laugh, “I’m definitely coming!” Chrissie swims elegantly out into the calm ocean waters as the guy drunkenly struggles out of his clothes and passes out on the beach. 

The point of view changes to that of the great white shark, lurking beneath Chrissie, rising up toward her. The camera zooms in on her naked body, a perfect Barbie replica, and the theme music, the two single notes produced by a tuba that Jaws would become world-famous for — duh duh, duh duh, duh duh — warns us that she’s about to get attacked. The Reader’s Digest story about the Liard River Hot Springs bear attack used similar stylistic tactics, only the rogue predator on a killing spree was a black bear instead of a shark. And the “almost naked” woman was an actual human victim. 

At the root of my discomfort about the sensationalized story was not only the conscious fear of being attacked by a wild predator, but an unconscious one too, which began to take up space in my body. The fear of what it meant to be a girl on the brink of adolescence in the North. 

Learning survival strategies for a different kind of threat

Growing up, I wore my brother Brendan’s hand-me-down clothes — grunge jeans that hung off my sapling frame and baggy Nirvana T-shirts — with pride. I cut my long blond hair into a mushroom cut, a popular hairstyle in the early 1990s, just like he did. We rocked out to the same music: the Offspring, Pennywise, NOFX. I remember sitting with my brother in the back seat of our parents’ Dodge van, drumming on the back of the driver’s and passenger’s seats, Green Day full blast on the stereo, gleefully bellowing the lyrics: WELCOME TO PAR–A–DISE!

On the weekends, he played in hockey tournaments and I religiously attended, even travelling with the team to away games. The ice was my brother’s preferred habitat, the place where he seemed the happiest, where he came alive. My mom said she used to take him to the arena where they lived at the time, in Brooks, Alta., when he was a baby, and his eyes would follow the game, watching the players zip back and forth. By the time Brendan could walk, he could skate.

For me, the hockey arena was a different kind of wilderness. The other players’ younger siblings and I would scurry up and down the side ramps, chasing rogue pucks that flew over the glass, and search beneath the bleachers for sticky quarters to buy scorching hot Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate and bags of hickory sticks from the vending machines. They called us “rink rats.” We were scavengers of sorts, allowed to freely roam the arena. But when my brother set foot on the ice, I would rush back to the bleachers where my parents sat and watch him like a hawk. I’d perch behind his team in the players’ box, cheering until my lungs were hoarse. As they played, the scent of the boys’ damp, sweat-saturated hockey gear — gloves, pads, socks, uniforms — filtered up toward us. I secretly loved that smell, even when, after games, my brother grabbed me and playfully threatened to zip me up in his equipment bag. 

Brendan’s dream — like many other boys’ dreams in Canadian towns and cities — was to play on a team for the National Hockey League. Somehow, when we were kids, it didn’t seem so far out of reach. We were of a generation force-fed those inspirational slogans printed on laminated posters tacked up on the walls: IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, YOU CAN ACHIEVE IT. Brendan was always one of the strongest players, and our family organized our lives around his great love and his dream of playing in the NHL. 

While I had begun to struggle with a growing sense of my body as an object of appraisal, never quite measuring up, my brother had to contend with his own perceived shortcomings: He was always one of the smallest guys in his class and on his hockey team. Over the years of playing minor hockey in Peace River, coaches often told him, “Too bad you aren’t bigger.” That he wasn’t an “alpha male” — a term that seemed to imply being physically big and dominant-spirited — weighed on him. 

Our coming of age in a resource town in northern Alberta would require different survival strategies. I would learn how to avoid getting unwanted attention from boys or men. I would learn how to fawn and please, but also how to physically fend off an attack and defuse threats — not only from bears, but from boys and men. Defensive tactics of a different kind. Even then I sensed that the cultural onus seemed to be on us, as girls, to protect ourselves from harm.

And so, at 13, I signed up for a self-defence course. I learned how to hit an attacker in the “vital areas,” jabbing the eyes, striking the nose, jaw or temple. How to carry car keys between my knuckles when walking to my vehicle at night. I didn’t even have my learner’s permit yet, but that was a trick I’d carry with me long into adulthood.

When he was 15, Brendan started getting “fucking smashed,” as he liked to say, with his hockey teammates on the weekends. He tried to hide it from my parents; alcoholism ran on both sides of our family, our mother always warned us. She spoke often of her childhood, growing up with an alcoholic father whose own father, a Ukrainian immigrant, had struggled with substance abuse. But booze flowed like the river in the North. The only way to drink was to drink hard. Get blackout drunk. “If you can’t remember what happened, you know it was a good night,” the saying went.

Brendan gifted me with a mickey of lemon gin, hidden in a small wooden chest he’d made in his Grade 11 industrial arts class, the summer I was 14 years old. My first sip of alcohol triggered cringe and disgust, followed by a warmth that rocked my body like ocean swell. I tasted relief in alcohol. I swam in the sea of disembodiment. The fear and anxiety that was gradually accumulating in my girl body found release. 

We drank religiously every weekend in the bleachers at Friday night hockey games, at bush parties, in gravel pits and next to the gravesite of Twelve Foot Davis, a legendary trapper who’d improbably struck it rich on a 12-foot-wide gold mining claim during the Klondike gold rush. We got high, standing atop a large cement pad where Twelve Foot’s remains were entombed, overlooking the Peace River Valley, the lights of town glittering down below. We gathered around stacks of burning pallets, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” blasting out of one of the hockey gods’ vehicles. Boys on shrooms and cocaine dared one another to jump over the dancing flames. Someone emptied a jerry can of fuel on the fire and it exploded. We waterfall-chugged and drank until we couldn’t walk. We drank until the red and blue lights flickered through the bush and the RCMP extinguished the flames and shut down the party and everyone drove home drunk.While we’d been trained to deter problem bears, and to protect ourselves against predatory wildlife attacks, there were quiet, embedded risks to growing up in northern Alberta. There were other predatory forces we wouldn’t see coming — and no soundtrack to indicate an incoming threat. 

It was my intoxicated classmate at the bush party, stumbling into the back seat of one of the hockey gods’ trucks. The next week at school, they wouldn’t call her a victim, they’d call her a slut. 

Don’t be a Chrissie — she had it coming.

“Bear spray is more effective than a gun,” my dad had informed my classmates and me in his presentation before our field trip to Swan Hills. “It’s faster and safer.”

How many of my female classmates were also thinking what I was thinking? 

Maybe it could work on guys, too.

As teenagers, we had a significantly greater chance of dying from alcohol poisoning and drug overdose, or operating vehicles or ATVs while drunk, than of being mauled by a bear. Yet, in some ways, we were better equipped to fend off predatory wildlife than we were to cope with social pressures and substance abuse. As my brother and I began to prioritize partying on the weekends, we inherently spent less time with our family on the land, camping, canoeing and hunting. We were just teens in a small northern town, doing what teens do. Experimenting beyond the boundaries of our family culture, moving toward independent social behaviour. But there were consequences to our actions; too many of our peers died — far too young.

We toasted our lost friends like fallen comrades, pressed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s to our lip, and taunted one another on, drink, drink, drink, drink.

On that Grade 10 field trip to Swan Hills, we didn’t encounter a single bear.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In early July, Yukon and Alaskan biologists were waiting on a small miracle: the right conditions to summon an apocalyptic storm of mosquitoes. The biting insects, in turn, would drive tens of thousands of caribou into a massive herd, essential to making them countable from the sky.

The phenomenon occurs every July, but photographing it from above to obtain a “photo census,” or population count, is a different story, Mike Suitor, a Whitehorse-based migratory caribou biologist with the Government of Yukon, says.

Suitor, who has been advising on Porcupine caribou herd management since 2012, says witnessing the migration from a bird’s-eye view is difficult to put into words.

“It’s like looking down at an anthill,” Suitor says.

The spectacle is hard to look away from, but biologists have little time for awe. Flying in fixed-wing planes outfitted with digital cameras, they must capture clear, high-resolution images of the herd. Computer software stitches the images together so biologists can manually categorize every individual with a single dot. The software then sums up the dots and determines the population count.

It is an undertaking that hasn’t succeeded since 2017, when researchers estimated the herd at 218,000 animals — the largest population recorded since monitoring began in the 1970s.

Since then, climate change has further complicated the task. Shifting winds scatter herds into the mountains, where they’re exceedingly difficult to photograph, while smoke from increasingly frequent wildfires obscures the horizon. Some years, biologists can’t even get off the ground, let alone get the shot.

This year, the urgency was especially high. After seven years without an accurate population estimate, the Porcupine herd — one of the world’s last healthy migratory caribou populations — needed to be counted.

The herd’s calving grounds in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are currently at the centre of a decades-long fight over oil and gas development. Gwich’in communities on both sides of the border have warned industrial activity in the refuge will destroy the caribou. Despite this, Alaska’s state development agency is preparing to conduct 3D seismic testing there for the first time.

“We know how critical [the photo census] is to communities right now,” Suitor says.

With that in mind, biologists doubled the frequency of GPS signals from more than 110 radio-collared caribou — the small sample of the herd researchers collar to study the larger herd — and the Alaska team began flying daily patrols. Their persistence paid off.

On July 10, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that, thanks to a heat wave which fuelled the right conditions for mosquitoes to swarm and drive the caribou together, they had successfully photographed the Porcupine herd.

Analyzing the images will take months, but Suitor says the achievement is a relief. Many signs suggest the herd is in decline — a disappointment, but not unexpected.

A recent study that analyzed DNA from caribou fossils dating back 21,000 years projected North American caribou populations could see average declines of 84 per cent by 2100, if the planet warms by two to three degrees Celsius. Should greenhouse gas emissions — created by the burning of fossil fuels — remain high, the Porcupine herd’s geographical range could shrink by 71 per cent.

It’s a trend communities on the frontlines of global warming have noticed. The Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation of Old Crow, Yukon, live as cyclically as the Porcupine caribou herd they depend on — and they are just as sensitive to the changing seasons, deputy chief Harold Frost Jr. says. Over the past 20 years, the Vuntut Gwitchin have been living with the daily consequences of what Frost Jr. calls “drastic changes” in the climate.

While most large migratory caribou herds in North America — including many in the Arctic — have declined due to pressures from roads and resource extraction, the Porcupine herd has remained relatively undisturbed by these threats. As a result, its numbers have stayed stable — and even grown. After falling to a low of 123,000 animals in 2001, the herd rebounded to a record high in 2017.

Recently, however, there have been troubling signs. Reproductive rates among three-year-old females are dropping — often an early indicator that a herd is under stress — and fewer calves are surviving. Even more concerning is data from the 110 radio-collared caribou, most of them females. When a collar stops moving, biologists know the animal has died. Over the past year, only about 80 per cent of adult cows survived.

“When you get below 86 per cent, you’re almost guaranteed you’re losing caribou within the herd,” Suitor says. “Climate change is a very significant factor. We hear it from the communities. We see it in the caribou and in their movements. And we’re seeing massive changes in some of these big migratory pathways.”

The question for the Porcupine caribou herd now is: how steep will declines be?

It’s not all bad news: Porcupine caribou herd represents a rare management success, biologist says

Every year, the Porcupine caribou herd makes the longest land migration on earth, traversing more than 4,000 kilometres across tundra, mountains and rivers in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Alaska to reach its calving grounds in Ivvavik National Park in northern Yukon and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ivvavik, in Inuvialuktun, translates to “a place for giving birth, a nursery,” while the Gwich’in people call the Arctic Refuge Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.

The Porcupine herd is unique for two reasons, Suitor explains. First, much of its range remains largely intact, spared from heavy development, with a few exceptions.

Second, the Porcupine herd was the first in North America to be formally managed through collaboration. The Porcupine Caribou Management Agreement was signed by the federal and territorial governments of Canada, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, and First Nations communities in 1985, followed by a 1987 treaty between Canada and the U.S. The herd is co-managed by Canada and the U.S., in collaboration with Indigenous communities.

In this way, the Porcupine caribou herd represents a rare success, uniquely positioned to withstand the challenges ahead.

“You need to have these strong partnerships to realize change, and I think the Porcupine caribou story has been a great narrative around that,” Suitor says, crediting decades of cross-border collaboration. 

Those partnerships are also facing threats as Indigenous and environmental organizations are gearing up for the next phase of the struggle against the U.S. administration’s agenda of drilling in the herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic Refuge.

Laurence Fox, campaigns coordinator at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Yukon chapter, based in Whitehorse, told The Narwhal the next phase of advocacy should be guided by Gwich’in communities, who’ve lived alongside the caribou for thousands of years.

Fox points out how the U.S. administration is employing the rhetoric of “a national energy emergency” to move resource extraction projects forward with greater speed, which, they added, is not dissimilar to Canada’s push to pass Bill C-5.

Both the U.S. and Canadian governments are attempting to speed up timelines on approving projects and moving major infrastructure and development plans forward.

While protecting the Arctic Refuge from oil and gas development has been a decades-long struggle, Fox says “the rules of the game” have changed, especially under the current U.S. administration’s leadership. But no matter the gravity of what Indigenous and environmental organizations are up against, Fox says, it’s critical to move forward slowly and methodically.

With this same principle in mind, Canada’s Porcupine Caribou Management Board has worked with Indigenous communities, governments, scientists and policymakers to safeguard the herd’s long-term health.

“We’re always thinking ahead,” says Joe Tetlichi, chair of the Porcupine Caribou Management Board and a member of the Tetlit Gwich’in who lives in Whitehorse. “And the reason we’re thinking ahead is because back in the early 2000s, we watched the George River herd, the Bathurst and the Bluenose East and West all decline.”

The disappearance of other barren-ground caribou herds in North America has been startling. For example, the Bathurst herd in the Northwest Territories plummeted from 470,000 in the mid-1980s to 6,240 today.

These sharp declines motivated Tetlichi and the board, in close collaboration with Indigenous communities, to create a harvest management plan that sets clear rules that would limit the number or sex of caribou individuals are allowed to hunt if the population falls below certain thresholds. The plan includes a chart indicating herd status and hunting requirements with levels ranging from green (no restrictions for Indigenous communities, and some for other licensed hunters) to yellow, orange and red (more limited hunting to no hunting at all).

“We know we have no control over climate change, but we know we have control over harvesting,” Tetlichi says.

Since the plan’s creation in 2010, the Porcupine caribou herd has consistently remained in the green zone. As a result, Tetlichi notes, the plan has never been put to the test.

“If the herd ever goes down to 45,000 it’s not going to be easy to put our management plan at the plate,” he says, referring to the food security hardships the community would face and the uncertainty of compliance. Despite having a management strategy in place for the situation, the results would not be ideal. “It’s going to be tough, really tough.”

Today, based on the photo census from 2017 and other indicators, the herd is considered stable. Licensed hunters can harvest up to two bulls, while Indigenous hunters face no limits. Still, Tetlichi stresses, the plan “covers bases” for the day when the population inevitably declines.

“We’re taking the bull by the horns and moving forward for the sake of the well-being of the caribou,” he says.

Mosquitoes and warble flies make caribou ‘go nuts’

Climatic shifts in the Porcupine caribou herd’s range are complex and interconnected, Suitor says. Warmer year-round temperatures are driving more frequent wildfires and increased vegetation growth. Heavy late-winter snowfalls can delay the herd’s migration to its calving grounds. Altogether, the landscape is changing rapidly, forcing the Porcupine caribou to adapt.

“Deciduous vegetation [on the tundra] is growing taller and bushier, which isn’t ideal for migratory caribou that prefer lichen,” Suitor says. That has spinoff effects for attracting moose, which in turn increases wolf predation — and so on.

Biologists are also asking: could increasing temperatures lead to increased insect harassment of the herd? Suitor’s team has a paper under peer review showing mosquito populations are peaking earlier. If this trend overlaps with calving and post-calving in June — when calves are still small and vulnerable — it could lead to increased mortality.

And then there’s the worry about warble flies, bumblebee-sized insects that can travel hundreds of kilometres in search of caribou, buzzing and dive-bombing the herds. The flies lay their eggs in caribou’s fur on the animals’ legs and hindquarters. When the eggs hatch, the larvae crawl onto the caribou’s back, and burrow into their skin for the winter. In spring, they emerge as adult larvae, fall to the ground and the cycle begins again.

“One warble fly can show up in a big herd of caribou and the caribou go nuts,” Suitor says. “They hate them. They can expend a ton of energy and during some parts of the summer they will choose habitats without food to try and get away from them, which can affect things like calving rates the next year.”

Suitor and his team have been analyzing 70,000 video clips from collar-mounted cameras. The early results suggest warble fly populations, like mosquitoes, are also peaking earlier in the season — adding another layer of pressure.

In the Northwest Territories, Indigenous hide tanners have also noticed an increase in hides affected by warble flies, who leave pockmark holes.

Christine Creyke, a hide tanner and member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Tahltan First Nation who lives in Old Crow, told The Narwhal in May she’s worried about the growing impacts of climate change on the herd.

“When I’m working on my hides, I’m always thinking about the environmental changes happening to the caribou and how it’s affecting my work with traditional practice,” Creyke said.

Changes to caribou migration mean big changes for the people who depend on them

The Vuntut Gwitchin of Old Crow are already suffering the consequences of the collapse of another vital mainstay: Chinook salmon. Vuntut Gwitchin deputy chief Frost Jr. says the salmon have disappeared from the Porcupine River, a tributary of the Yukon River, forcing the community to adapt by relying more heavily on freshwater fish.

In 2024, Canada and Alaska signed an agreement to establish a seven-year moratorium on Chinook salmon fishing in the Yukon River system. 

The loss of salmon intensifies concerns about climate and human-related pressures on the Porcupine caribou herd. 

Over the past 12 to 15 years, Frost Jr. explains, the community has observed major shifts in the herd’s migratory routes to their traditional wintering grounds south of Old Crow — changes that directly affect the Vuntut Gwitchin’s ability to access and harvest caribou. Instead of remaining in the Porcupine basin for the winter, he says, the herd is travelling farther north or east of Old Crow. During the rut, or mating season, in October, they are returning later than they did previously and staying for shorter periods.

“[The caribou] are only here for two to three days and the men have to be ready to go hunt on the mountain,” Frost Jr. says. “Then [hunters] have to travel longer distances in the winter to wherever [the herd is] wintering at — that’s been a big change.”

The changes people are witnessing are widespread, including record-breaking summer temperatures that fuel wildfires. In August 2023, residents of Old Crow — a fly-in community — were evacuated due to wildfire threats, including one that burned only kilometres away.

The Porcupine River is freezing later in the fall and breaking up earlier in the spring, which disrupts the timing of the herd’s migration, Frost Jr. says. The community has also experienced more frequent rain-on-snow events in October and November, creating icy conditions.

“It causes grief for the caribou because it’s harder for them to dig up their food under the snow,” Frost Jr. says.

For the deputy chief there is no doubt: climate change is already inflicting grave consequences on the land, the animals and the community. The Vuntut Gwitchin continue to rely on traditional hunting and gathering practices — caribou, moose, muskrat, fish and berries — because store-bought food in their subarctic community is prohibitively expensive for many families. Their food security and survival depends on the longevity of vadzaih, the Gwich’in word for caribou.

“We’re living here where [climate change] is affecting us — and the caribou — in real time,” Frost Jr. says, “not only physically, but mentally and emotionally.”

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Succulent scents of caribou, moose, muskrat and beaver — boiled, roasted and fried — waft from the kitchen. Young children chase one another around the community centre, clutching bags of dried caribou, strings of meat stuck in their teeth. The stage is set with pink iridescent streamers and the band’s fiddles, guitars and drums, ready for a night of music and jigging. 

Adults and youth alike give their names to a coordinator with a notebook, signing up to join in the games, including caribou head skinning, log sawing and muskrat-calling. Outside, there’s still ice on the Porcupine River — break-up is late this year, locals say. There’s no caribou in sight, but people know they’re close by. The spring migration is underway.

Several hundred people from across the North have gathered here in Old Crow, Yukon, a subarctic community at the 67th parallel, to celebrate Vadzaih Choo Drin, or “Big Caribou Days.” It’s the 25th anniversary of the event celebrating the seasonal return of the Porcupine caribou herd, one of the largest barren-ground caribou populations in North America, as they migrate toward their summer calving grounds in Ivvavik National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The Gwich’in refer to the calving grounds as Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.

“My grandparents, they taught me about caribou. They take me out to the caribou when they’re coming, they show me the different age groups and tell me the names of these caribou,” Randall Tetlichi, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder, says at the opening ceremony in late May.

Before he was allowed to hunt, Tetlichi had to learn how to distinguish between the big bulls, young bulls, one- and two-year-olds, pregnant females and the “old females with dried-up udders” who grunted up the hill behind the others. The last group was the one to harvest, he says. This knowledge of caribou traditionally guided the way the Vuntut Gwitchin managed the herd that migrates across the Porcupine River every spring and fall.

“Our job is to teach the young people,” Tetlichi says, offering a song and prayer for vadzaih, Gwich’in for “caribou,” welcoming them back home to Old Crow.

“I wanted the kids to have that taste of what our grandparents worked so hard for in Crow Flats,” Teresa Frost, an event coordinator with the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN), says to the crowd, as volunteers hand out bags of caribou dry meat and bone grease.

Old Crow Flats, located north of Old Crow, is a traditional place where people camp, trap muskrat and hunt for what remains their most important food source — caribou.

The fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — considered one of North America’s last remaining healthy herds at an estimated 218,000 animals — is bound up with the fate of the Gwich’in people. The story of the Gwich’in people and caribou is a story about a multi-generational struggle to advocate for the permanent protection of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

But the fate of the caribou — and the Gwich’in way of life — is now intricately tangled up in U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent moves to expand oil and gas activity in the refuge. The refuge has long been an ideological battleground between those in favour of drilling and those against it, but with Trump at the helm, the stakes have never been higher, pitting the Gwich’in people against what they’re calling an unprecedented threat as they work together to protect the caribou they depend on.

Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ poses immediate threats to the Porcupine caribou herd

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a richly biodiverse ecosystem covering over 78,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Brunswick or South Carolina. It stretches from the Brooks Range mountains to the Arctic Ocean coastline, teeming with migratory birds, grizzly and polar bears, wolves and pregnant caribou who gather together to drop gangly calves onto the tundra. For the Gwich’in, it’s sacred territory. Here, there are stories told about the Gwich’in trading half of their heart with the heart of the caribou.

For decades, U.S. governments have been pushing for exploration and development within the refuge, including Ronald Reagan in 1987 and George W. Bush in the 2000s, with the goal to open up oil and gas development in an area known as “the 1002,” a 6,000-square-kilometre tract of land within the refuge. The United States Geological Survey estimates there could be somewhere between 4.3 to 11.8 billion barrels of oil in the area, but no one can say for sure — while a 2D seismic test was done in the 1980s, today’s more advanced technique of 3D seismic testing has never been done.

For decades, the Gwich’in have been organizing to prevent exploration — agreeing with Western science that finds drilling in the calving grounds would likely cause calf mortality and devastating declines in the herd’s size and resilience, which refers to its ability to cope with changes in the environment.

In 1988, Gwich’in Elders and leaders from communities in Alaska and Canada gathered in Arctic Village, Alaska, to found the Gwich’in Steering Committee with the goal of collectively lobbying U.S. policymakers for the permanent protection of the refuge. For the Gwich’in it was a pivotal moment, having been divided by the border as part of colonization, to unite and strengthen their nation’s collective voice.

For years, Gwich’in advocacy worked to keep oil and gas out, while lobbying for the permanent protection of the refuge. In 2015, President Barack Obama recommended Congress designate over 49,000 square kilometres of the refuge as “wilderness,” but it failed to pass. In 2017, the political pendulum swung back with President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which mandated two oil and gas lease sales in the refuge to offset corporate tax cuts. Despite being slapped with a lawsuit by the Gwich’in Steering Committee in 2020, Trump held the first lease sale on Jan. 6, 2021, offering 22 tracts of land, equal to five percent of the refuge. The Gwich’in people and their allies urged oil and gas companies and banks not to bid and the sale didn’t go as planned. Only three companies bid, generating US$14.4 million — a long shot from Trump’s estimated US$1.8 billion.

From 2021 to 2024, former president Joe Biden’s administration sought to undo what Trump had done in the refuge, including cancelling all of the leases, citing insufficient analysis under the national Environmental Policy Act. Despite this, Biden was still legally bound to the second lease sale laid out in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In December 2024, no companies bid. Shortly after, the state of Alaska sued the Biden administration over the cancelled leases — and in March, a judge ruled in its favour.

At Caribou Days in Old Crow in May, the games gave way to more sobering discussions about what Trump’s re-election in January — and his executive order to “drill, baby, drill” and reinstate the terminated leases — could mean for the future of the refuge.

“Over the next few years, more than ever, we’re going to need to come together,” Harold Frost Jr., deputy chief for the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told the crowd, warning the community about what would come to be signed into law on July 4 — Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

The new budget bill — which critics argue is an extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — doubles the number of lease sales in the refuge, stipulating that four additional sales, no less than 1,600 square kilometres per lease, must take place within the next 10 years. The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Yukon told the Narwhal that Trump could be attempting to create market stability for oil and gas companies over a longer duration of time. Even if a democratic government were elected, it could be exceedingly difficult to change the new bill, as Biden failed to do with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Today, the Alaska industrial development agency, holding the reinstated seven leases in the refuge, is on the brink of undertaking 3D seismic testing for the first time in history — one step closer to drilling in the calving grounds.

“We are no longer dealing with a familiar threat,” Frost Jr. told the Narwhal, after the signing of the new bill. “We are facing an administration willing to bypass reason, disregarding science and economic logic, to achieve its goal of drilling. We must organize. We must amplify our voices. We must protect this sacred place with everything we have.”

Gwich’in relationship with caribou begins ‘in our mother’s womb’

“The first time I tasted caribou was when I was born,” Tetlichi says over the sound of fiddle music and boots stomping along to the beat. He was born in Johnson Creek, 140 kilometres south of Old Crow, but moved north when he was eight years old.

When Tetlichi was 13 years old, he remembers camping in Old Crow Flats with his grandparents and witnessing the spring migration of the Porcupine caribou herd. He waited with a rifle and watched the caribou draw closer. He spotted an “older, dry cow that didn’t have a calf in her” and his grandfather gave him the okay. As Tetlichi skinned the caribou and cut the ribcage, his grandfather brought over a cup and filled it with the animal’s blood. He handed it to his grandson after he’d finished skinning the caribou. “Drink this,” his grandfather said.

“He said, ‘Now you can call yourself a hunter because you drank that blood and the caribou is part of you. The caribou is in your body and now you’re going to understand the movement of the caribou,’” Tetlichi says. “I felt happy and proud.”

The Gwich’in people have been intertwined with the Porcupine caribou herd for thousands of years. There is archeological evidence of their close bond at different sites across northern Yukon and Alaska, including Van Tat Gwich’in Teechik, a hunting camp located 60 kilometres east of Old Crow where archeologists discovered tools made from stone, caribou antler and bone, some estimated to be 3,000 years old.

When he was growing up, Tetlichi’s Elders told him stories about “caribou fences,” large structures built from spruce logs that measured kilometres wide at the mouth and funnelled caribou into a corral where they’d be snared and speared.

“The whole community was part of it,” Tetlichi says, referring to building the fences — carrying trees from places that were sometimes kilometres away — and also the hunt.

With the onset of colonization and introduction of firearms, people stopped using caribou fences. But there are 46 known caribou fence sites in Alaska and northern Yukon with seven located in Vuntut National Park to the north of Old Crow.

Oil exploration to the south and north of Old Crow began in the 1950s. In the late ‘60s and through the ‘70s, Tetlichi and other men from Old Crow travelled north to work at drilling sites in the Mackenzie Delta. “We didn’t question it,” he says. But after a decade, he recognized the negative impacts of oil and gas on the land and people.

“I seen it, I felt it,” he says. “They’re not good.”

When the Gwich’in Steering Committee formed in 1988 to lobby against oil and gas in the Porcupine herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Tetlichi was chosen to travel to Washington, D.C., on one of the first delegations. He remembers sleeping on a church basement floor and experiencing culture shock from the city’s traffic and noise. He was afraid, but Tetlichi knew he was there to talk to people about what caribou meant to the Gwich’in people and what would be lost if they opened up the refuge for oil and gas exploitation — so that’s what he did. He shared stories with politicians and citizens alike. Four decades later, he hasn’t stopped.

Lorraine Netro, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder who was born and raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, agrees about the importance of speaking out. “The Elders in our nation asked us to educate the outside world about why we need to protect that sacred place where life begins,” she says. Disturbance to the calving grounds will “destroy the caribou and destroy us as a people,” she adds.

Netro says the sacred connection with caribou begins “in our mother’s womb, when we taste caribou.” 

She remembers watching her mother hunt and skin caribou in Crow Flats, and the feeling of happiness, knowing they’d have food to eat and new moccasins and clothing to wear. No part of the animal was wasted. Her grandmother made sinew from the tendons.

In the late ‘90s, Netro joined the advocacy efforts to protect the Porcupine caribou herd. In 1999, she followed in Tetlichi and other Gwich’in leaders’ footsteps, participating in a lobby delegation to Washington. It opened her eyes to the power of storytelling — even when they had only “five, ten minutes” to speak with U.S. politicians — to change people’s minds and shape policy and decision-making. The Gwich’in have “touched many, many people”, she says.

“It’s part of our responsibility. It’s about our future generations — seven generations and beyond — so that our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren can be blessed to have that spiritual and sacred connection to the caribou.”

Gwich’in members and Elders have been travelling to the U.S. to advocate for caribou for decades

Kris Statnyk, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, remembers watching a video of his own grandmother, Dr. Reverend Ellen Bruce, speaking at the Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988, and family members travelling to Washington to lobby politicians. Even as a child, advocating for caribou felt like a kind of rite of passage.

Today, Statnyk is an Indigenous Rights lawyer based in Gitxsan Territory in northern B.C. and the co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, along with the head of delegation for the Arctic Council. He continues to work closely with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and a large part of that, Statnyk says, is continuing his ancestors’ legacy of advocacy for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Despite more than a hundred years of colonization, he says, caribou continues to be a mainstay of Gwich’in life, culture and food security. While the majority of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada are threatened — their habitat fragmented by industrial development — Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation has worked to protect the Porcupine herd in Canada by negotiating their land claim agreement in 1993 and creating Vuntut National Park in 1995, protecting key habitat in Yukon where no industrial development can occur.

But across the border, the calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and influence over U.S. politicians — has always remained something the Vuntut Gwitchin can’t directly control, Statnyk says, and now, perhaps, more than ever.

He travelled to Old Crow in May to speak at Caribou Days and take part in the festivities and discussions on the urgency of the times.

“Seismic activity could be happening in [the refuge] within a year — that’s just the reality,” Statnyk says. “We haven’t really come close to that before. We can try to slow down the regulatory process and dissuade companies and banks from supporting projects in that area, but it’s difficult to prevent this U.S. administration from greenlighting things they want.”

Oil and gas development in the sacred calving grounds in the refuge is “a clear violation” of the Gwich’in people’s rights to self-determination as expressed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Statnyk says. (While the U.S. has officially endorsed the declaration since 2010, it is not legally binding. Today, Indigenous groups are calling on Trump to operationalize the declaration.) In addition, the U.S. is failing to to implement its responsibility to consult with Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities in Canada, as stipulated in the Canada-United States agreement on Porcupine caribou conservation, a treaty signed in 1987.

“On the Canadian side, we’ve never, ever been invited directly [by the U.S. government] to participate in any of these regulatory processes,” Statnyk says. “It’s always been on our own initiative where we’re asserting and showing up.”

Despite the political situation they’re up against, Statnyk is heartened by the legacy of relationships that have been built over the past decades with people, politicians and communities in the Lower 48 and across Canada.

“We’re always told [by our Elders] to go out and make friends, to do this in a ‘good way,’ ” Statnyk says. “It means a lot of things for how we conduct ourselves, even when people are making decisions as if we don’t exist, or don’t matter.”

The long game has always been the permanent protection of the coastal plain, which requires congressional legislation, but it’s a goal the Gwich’in remain committed to.

‘I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas’

Christine Creyke, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Tahltan First Nation, carefully hangs her caribou and moose hides on a spruce beam outside her home in Old Crow, lovingly inspecting each one. Days, weeks, months of physical work went into processing these hides: fleshing, scraping, wringing, softening and smoking.

When she’s working on hides, Creyke feels a strong sense of identity and community.

“There are conversations that happen around hide work in terms of culture and what it means to be Indigenous,” Creyke says. “These relationships, both the ones made between people working on hides together and the ones made between people and caribou through the process of hide tanning are important for healthy communities.”

Every hide is unique, she explains, pointing to a cream-coloured caribou hide pricked with small holes. The holes look like stars scattered against the night sky. They’re scars from warble flies, parasitic flies that lay their eggs in the legs of caribou. The hatched larvae migrate onto the caribou’s back where they feed off the animal, causing major energy losses.

“I want to sew something special with this,” Creyke says, handling the scarred hide with affection. “I always try to think about the animal and honour what they endured.”

As a result of climate change and warming temperatures, warble flies may be developing earlier in the summer, which could harm caribou — particularly during the calving season. Creyke is worried how cumulative pressures from oil and gas, along with climate change, could impact herd resiliency.

In 2024, Creyke, who works as the lands manager with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, was appointed on behalf of Old Crow to serve on the Gwich’in Steering Committee and advocate for the Porcupine caribou herd. It’s been a huge learning curve to navigate U.S. politics and the environmental assessment process in Alaska, Creyke says, but it’s one she’s embracing. In addition, Creyke was recently appointed to the Gwich’in Council International.

“I feel immense responsibility,” she says, acknowledging the support and inspiration of her mentors, including Netro and Norma Kassi. Kassi, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation who was raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, served as an MLA for Old Crow from 1985 to 1992 and has travelled around the world advocating for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Creyke points out the disparities that exist between northern and southern communities, particularly when it comes to drilling for oil and gas in the sacred calving grounds on the Alaska side, as well as their wintering grounds in the Eagle Plains Basin, south of Old Crow, on the Canadian side.

Chance Oil and Gas, a Canadian-owned company, currently holds eight oil and gas leases in the Eagle Plains Basin on 4,000 square kilometres of the Porcupine herd’s wintering grounds.

“I see these huge mega oil and gas projects as part of a way to fuel a world that is so far removed from ours,” Creyke says. “There’s just so much energy consumption in the world. I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas. What I need is for my hides to be soft, and my caribou herds to be healthy, and my freezer to be full.”

She points to the startling declines of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada, including the Bathurst herd in the Northwest Territories, which plummeted from 470,000 in the mid-1980s to 6,240 today. There is no harvest of the Bathurst herd allowed in the Northwest Territories, while a limited hunt is permitted in Nunavut.

“I can’t imagine what that means for people who relied on their herd for everything — food, clothing, culture and way of being,” Creyke acknowledges. “When I think about my kids and them wanting to work on hides in the future, … I have to do this advocacy work now.”

‘Trump’s not going to stop’: Gwich’in people organize to fight back for the caribou

Across the U.S.-Canadian border in the Gwich’in community of Arctic Village, Alaska, Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, was devastated to receive the news of the “Big Beautiful Bill” mandating four new lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“Hearing it was four more lease [sales] has our people on edge. Trump’s not going to stop,” Moreland says. “But that’s just going to make us work even harder to advocate for our land. With everything going on in this world, we need to stand together more than ever to protect the Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.”

Recently, the steering committee announced an emergency Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village on Sept. 4 for Gwich’in communities to come together to explore options — raising awareness, lobbying companies and financial institutions or taking legal action — for how to move forward as a unified front. Moreland says that’s critical to hear from Elders.

“It’s going to be like our first Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988 when our Elders came together from Canada and Alaska, to come in solidarity for the opposition of oil and gas,” she says. “Our Elders need to guide us, right now more than ever, because they know what’s at stake.”

Gwich’in communities are already feeling the loss of another vital food source, Moreland points out. Much like caribou, salmon have sustained Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities for millennia. But the collapse of different salmon populations in the North has resulted in empty freezers and pantries. Many communities haven’t been able to fish for the past five years. In 2024, a transboundary seven-year moratorium on fishing salmon in the Yukon River was implemented.

Eighty percent of the Gwich’in diet comes from the land, Moreland says, with caribou being the most important source of meat. They can’t afford to lose another critical food source.

“The caribou are not just a species to us. They’re essential to our food security and our survival. It’s not a metaphor. It’s lived reality.”

According to the Big Beautiful Bill, the first oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must occur before July 4, 2026, with the others to follow over the next nine years.

Despite the gravity of what this means for the fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — and the Gwich’in people — Moreland says their resolve to continue fighting for the protection of the calving grounds is stronger.

“No amount of money can justify what is taking place, and we will continue to stand up to anyone who seeks to contribute to this destruction of our sacred lands,” Moreland says. “We have a lot of people on our side. We will not stop fighting. We’re Gwich’in Strong.”

Updated on Aug. 20, 2025, at 7:55 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct a statement suggesting seismic testing has never been done in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In fact, a 2D seismic test was done in the 1980s, but the more advanced technique of 3D seismic testing has not been done.

Updated on Aug. 25, 2025, at 6:06 a.m. PT: This article has been updated to correct the name of Arctic Village, Alaska.

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It’s 3:30 a.m. and a headlamp flickers like a firefly in the distance, growing in size. The voice of a volunteer cries out: “A team is coming!”

I can hear a chorus of dogs panting, of harness lines jangling. Then, from out of the darkness, a musher and team of twelve dogs emerge like ghostly figures. The musher steps on his sled’s drag mat, slowing the team, and stomps a “snow hook,” a fish-hook-like anchor that acts like a car brake, into the snow.

“Welcome to Quiet Lake!” a race official says, jotting down the team’s time of arrival into the remote checkpoint in southern Yukon.

I’m here in early February, bundled in a parka, snow pants and beaver-fur mitts, working as a race reporter for the Yukon Quest, an annual sled-dog race that has been running for 40 years. The race, a significant cultural event in the North, was created in 1984 to celebrate the history of sled dogs as a means of transportation in the Yukon and Alaska.

It’s so cold at Quiet Lake that you can hear it. As the musher tosses chunks of bacon to his dogs, the snow doesn’t crunch — it squeaks under the weight of his bulbous Arctic military boots, which are insulated with felt and thick rubber. Originally designed to be worn by American soldiers in the extreme cold, the boots are ubiquitous amongst mushers for their ability to keep your feet warm, even if you plunge into water. 

It’s -40 C, the kind of cold that can damage exposed skin in a matter of minutes. Even the dogs — Alaskan huskies, a mix of husky and hound, bred to pull — are wearing down-filled jackets.

The deep, biting cold has come as something of a relief to mushers, however. Only a week ago, temperatures in southern Yukon hovered above 0 C. Normal temperatures in January in Whitehorse are a high of -14 C and a low of -22 C.

Anne Tayler, board president of the Yukon Quest, worried it would be a repeat of last year when a week of warm weather — 5 to 10 C — forced organizers to reroute the race in two places. The decision came as meltwater led to unsafe conditions, including nearly two kilometres of open water around McCabe Creek on the Yukon River. Mushers are no strangers to navigating their teams through extreme conditions like glare ice, blizzards, whiteouts and overflow (water that pools up over ice that’s been pushed down by the weight of snow), Tayler says, but when it comes to open water, “it’s just not an option.” In 2024, officials shortened the race by 241 kilometres. 

For four decades, the historic Quest followed a 1,600-kilometre trail on the frozen Yukon River, a “deep, fast river,” Tayler says, that flows like a vein between Whitehorse, Yukon, and Fairbanks, Alaska. The cross-border race was considered one of the most gruelling sled dog races in the world for its technicality and the long distances between the checkpoints where mushers can rest and resupply. At its peak in the mid-2000s, the Quest once attracted a roster of 30 mushers and offered a prize of up to $35,000 to the winner. But a 1,600-kilometre race hasn’t happened since 2020. Disagreements between the Canadian and American organizers over mandatory rest times for dogs (the Canadians were in favour of increasing rest times) caused a fissure that resulted in both countries organizing separate, shorter races.

And now climate change is wreaking havoc, forcing long-distance sled dog races to “pivot,” Tayler says. In recent years, sudden warming events — dramatic swings in temperature in a matter of hours or days — are becoming far more frequent, creating major risks and uncertainty for mushers in the Yukon and across North America. 

Last year, organizers made the tough call to abandon the historic route on the Yukon River. They began working with First Nations communities in southern Yukon, including Teslin Tlingit Council and the Ross River Dena Council, to map out a new 720-kilometre trail through their traditional territories that would avoid rivers — and the risk of open water — altogether. The longterm goal, Tayler says, is to find an overland route from Teslin to Dawson City that limits water crossings to small river systems only.

In addition to climate-related challenges, other obstacles, including the rising costs of feeding dozens of dogs, are causing many mushers to drop out altogether. Sixteen teams signed up for the race this year, nearly 50 per cent fewer than in previous decades. But the mushers who’ve come are here for the love of the dogs and the thrill of travelling for four to five days through the Yukon wilderness in the winter. And they’re here despite the challenges — and the uncertain future — they’re up against.

‘Extremes are getting more frequent and harder’ for mushers

Ideal weather for a musher is very different than ideal weather for a dog, but “the dog is what counts,” Sebastian Schnuelle, a retired musher based in Whitehorse, says. Schnuelle won the Yukon Quest in 2009 and has placed second in the Iditarod, an annual 1,600-kilometre race that travels between Anchorage and Nome, Alaska.

“Physiologically, dogs do best at -20 C,” Schnuelle says. “That’s when they don’t overheat and they’re the happiest. It’s their optimum operating temperature.”

Temperature dictates many things in a musher’s world, including what kind of food they give their dogs, who get hydrating foods like fish on warm days and high-fat foods, like pork belly and lamb on cold days. It also determines trail conditions, which in turn helps them decide which type of interchangeable plastic runners they choose for their sleds. (Traditionally, sled runners were made of wood, but plastic versions were introduced in the 1980s.)

Mushers have learned to expect all forms of weather-related risks, Schnuelle says, especially over the course of long-distance races.

“Variable weather has always been a factor,” he says.

Schnuelle recalls hunkering down with his dogs to wait out monstrous storms, travelling through “ungodly overflow” at -55 C, or navigating “jumble ice” — rough ice that forms on the surface of a river due to warming temperatures and the force of the water flowing beneath.

Warming events have been occurring in the Yukon since the Quest’s inception in 1984, Schnuelle says. No one can forget the tragic loss of Bruce Johnson, a Yukon musher who was travelling with his team across Atlin Lake on Nov. 19, 1993, when they hit a weak spot on the ice and plunged to their deaths. It had been a late start to winter that year. Despite the ice being fifteen centimetres thick in most places on the lake, there were patches measuring four centimetres. The hole found by the recovery team measured 60 metres long.

“These super-warm states have always been there, but I do think that the extremes are getting more frequent and harder,” Schnuelle says. “It’s no longer the odd -2 C day, it warms up all of a sudden and you’re sitting at 8 C.”

In 2021, Schnuelle and three others were creating a trail near McCabe Creek on the Yukon River on snowmobiles for an upcoming sled dog race, when one of the machines fell through the ice. The driver survived, though the sled did not. For Schnuelle, it was a wake-up call as to the severity of change.

“I used to be one of those old rough and tough mushers, ‘Oh, I’m not taking an inReach, I can get my own ass out of the bush,’ ” he laughs, referring to the small satellite communication devices increasingly popular in the backcountry. “But heck yeah, I’m carrying one now. The chances are higher. The chances are definitely getting higher.”

Increasing freeze-thaw cycles are bad for races — and for the dogs

Nathaniel Hamlyn grew up being pulled by his family’s Siberian huskies on the ice road in Yellowknife, NWT. But it wasn’t until he heard the stories of adventure from a Yellowknife-based musher named Marcel Marin, who raced in the Quest in 2005, that Hamlyn became “hooked” on sled dog racing.

In 2014, Hamlyn moved to Whitehorse to study environmental sciences at Yukon University and never left. He set up a small dog kennel (a word used by mushers to describe a team of dogs) in the Grizzly Valley, north of Whitehorse, and began training for long-distance races. In 2018, he finished his first 1600-kilometre Quest. 

The following year, Hamlyn signed up again. But that winter was unseasonably warm and the ice on the Yukon River opened up as he was almost in Fairbanks. 

“There were moments when I was running on an island of ice with water flowing on either side of me,” Hamlyn says. After he crossed, the race officials shut down that section of the trail, rerouting mushers.

Today, Hamlyn lives in Mendenhall Landing, west of Whitehorse, with his partner, Louve Tweddell, also a musher. Their combined kennels total 30 dogs, and he trained his team for a 280-kilometre race in the Yukon Quest this year.

Hamlyn has noticed changes on the Yukon landscape in the last decade. He says it’s not so much warming as it is about variability that’s disruptive, particularly an increasing frequency of freeze-and-thaw cycles.

“They come out of nowhere, which makes it hard to be out on the land and enjoying the snow,” Hamlyn says.

When the snow rapidly melts, ice crystals become compacted, “almost like concrete and really hard on the dogs’ joints and paws,” Hamlyn explains. In a sudden melting event, mushers often need to choose between putting cloth booties on dogs’ feet to protect them from abrasion, and making sure they don’t overheat.

Mushers rely on temperature stability for the best conditions to train and race. 

“You need the layering, the many snow events to build up, and if it stays cold, you can build up that base — and the snow has give, which is better for the dogs’ joints,” Hamlyn says.

But regular snowfalls have become unreliable in Whitehorse, challenging mushers’ ability to even train their dogs for races.

Four years ago, Michael Burtnick and his partner Abby relocated their kennel from Teulon, a small town north of Winnipeg, Man., to Mendenhall Landing. They have 26 working dogs and run a tourism company, offering guided sled dog adventures on the land around their property. Burtnick’s passion, however, lies in racing. He and his team travelled on the historic Yukon Quest trail in 2023, competing in the 400-kilometre race. This year, they trained for the 720-kilometre race on the Quest’s new overland route from Teslin to Ross River and back.

“We’re going out training when it’s -40 C and then a week later we’re dealing with rain — that’s been new to us over the past five years,” Burtnick says, noting they began dealing with similar challenges in Manitoba, too. “It’s definitely not an isolated trend [in the Yukon]. You never know what you’re going to get, season to season.”

That unpredictability means mushers need to be constantly paying attention while travelling on the land, especially around water crossings, he says.

Benoit Turcotte, a senior researcher and hydrologist at Yukon University, encourages people travelling on the land to check for open water by looking at satellite imagery of lakes and rivers weeks before they depart.

“In a normal Yukon winter you’d take your dog, or snow machine or whatever mode of travel and cross a wetland or pond, and you’d have no problem,” Turcotte says. 

But in a year like this one — where Whitehorse received heavy snowfall in mid-October, before the ground, or waterways could freeze solid — he says he’d steer clear of wetlands. Early snow, Turcotte says, insulates the ground, along with ponds and wetlands, preventing the formation of thick ice cover that’s safe enough for travel.

When Burtnick trains his team for races, some of their trails include crossing ice that has formed over running water. He admits close observation can only go so far, however. 

“Even if it’s cold on the surface, underneath the ice could be melting and thinning. There’s no visual indication on top. We find the ice that was good last week, is not good this week. We have to be especially careful.”

In 2024, a musher and their team fell through the ice at Taye Lake, which drains into the Mendenhall River. They survived, but had to be treated for severe frostbite.

This winter, Burtnick began wearing a Mustang survival suit, a one-piece snow suit with built-in flotation, when he crosses larger bodies of water. It was “a gift” he says, from a concerned family member. “When you let that sink in for a bit, it makes you question what’s going on around us,” Burtnick says. “Because it wasn’t like this 10 years ago.”

World’s most famous dog sled race route was altered this year because there is no snow at all in places

Much has changed over the last decade in mushing communities in the Yukon and across North America, too. Even the dogs, themselves, have changed. 

Fast disappearing from the scene are stocky, thick-coated huskies, as mushers opt to mix short-haired hounds and pointers that can better handle increasingly warm days into their kennel bloodlines.

“You can dress a dog up,” Hamlyn quips, “But you can’t dress a dog down.”

Another trend that’s impacting mushers in the Yukon, in part due to climate change and the increasing costs of food and gas, is that sled dog kennels’ are shrinking in size. Kennels of 50, 60 dogs are becoming a “thing of the past.”

Mushers are downsizing rapidly and it’s not a trend unique to the Yukon, Burtnick says.

Hamlyn agrees. He estimates it costs roughly $12,000 to feed his 13 dogs year round. One of his females is currently pregnant, but after raising her litter, he won’t breed again, he says. In 10 years, Hamlyn expects to phase out of the competitive racing game altogether.

As for the Yukon Quest, it’s not likely the historic 1,600-kilometre race that followed the Yukon River will ever make a comeback, Schnuelle says. Too much has drastically changed with weather being only one factor of many. People who once lived along the historic route have moved to larger centres. Fewer locals know how to read the intricacies of the land in localized places — and safely put in trails — than in decades past.

Even the world’s most famous race, the Iditarod, which takes place every March, is grappling with climate change. Over the past decade, mushers have faced increasing frequency of low-snowpack years and above-average temperatures. On Feb. 17, officials changed the start location from Willow to Fairbanks, Alaska, as a result of absolutely no snow — the ground is totally bare following an early melt — over 65 kilometres of trail between Rohn and Nikolai.

Iditarod officials called that section of trail impassable probably hoping to avoid a repeat of 2014, when mushers who passed that section under similar circumstances paid the price in broken sleds, and worse, broken bones. Four-time Quest winner Hans Gatt collided with a tree and endured a nasty wound to the head.

This is the third time in a decade that race officials have changed the start location due to no snow. 

“I am not too certain anymore if we will be able to talk about these long-distance races in 15 years,” Schnuelle says. “Things have changed drastically and the races need to adapt.”

The spirit of the North lives on, in a new form

In February, both Hamlyn and Burtnick ran teams on the inaugural trail of the new Yukon Quest. Despite criticisms of the new trail being “less technical” than the historic one, rolling hills coupled with extreme cold created challenging conditions for teams. 

Hamlyn sweated as he helped his team up and over the steep hills, running alongside the sled. At -40 C, the down insulating material in his parka froze. Meanwhile, Burtnick suffered frostbite to his nose and hands. 

“Your care comes second to the dogs, so you make sure those dogs are fed before you start taking care of your own hands,” he says.

They both had mixed sentiments about the new trail: a sense of loss for the historic route along the Yukon River, and a gain because there’s still a race to train for, Hamlyn says. 

Burtnick described the experience of travelling through the mountainous sections of the new trail, particularly between Quiet Lake and Ross River, as beautiful and humbling.

And for this new generation of mushers, despite the uncertain future of their sport, that’s what it’s all about. 

“I’m still out there with my dogs,” Burtnick says. “I’m still mushing and that’s the spirit of the North.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

On a cold day in November 1989, my father was flying low in a Cessna-185 fixed-wing airplane over the Caribou Mountains in northern Alberta, when he saw a vast number of otherworldly animals scattered across the surface of a frozen lake. He was astonished. He called them grey ghosts.

The Caribou Mountains — more wetlands than mountains — rest on a saucer-shaped plateau gently ascending above the surrounding lowlands of the Peace River valley, blanketed in sphagnum moss, bog cranberry, Labrador tea and lichen. It’s a vast tract of 13,405 square kilometres of subarctic boreal forest bordering the western boundary of Wood Buffalo National Park. The land is pockmarked with what are known as collapse scar bogs, depressions where thawing permafrost created slumped bogs pooling with water.

Few species can survive on such a harsh landscape, but it’s home to what my dad calls the grey ghosts: threatened boreal woodland caribou. Their wide hooves — “like snowshoes,” my father says — help buoy them above the snow, while acting like shovels to scoop and paw to forage through the winter. Caribou’s specialized digestive systems allow them to glean sugars and nutrients from 100-year-old lichens. They’re so hardwired to lichen they can scent it entombed beneath three to four feet of ice and heavy snow.

Woodland caribou diverged from barren ground caribou more than 350,000 years ago. While their strategy has always been to make themselves scarce — “to spread out on the landscape in low-density herds,” my father says — today they are in grave peril. Herds have disappeared. Although uncertain of their historic numbers, biologists have documented declines as early as the 1970s. Only 2,000 caribou remain in Alberta today.

My father — Dave Moyles, then a wildlife biologist with the government of Alberta — and his colleagues had craned their necks straight down, as the snow-covered landscape slid by, their eyes searching open stands of black spruce. That day, they were looking for moose, although my dad spent much of his career searching for caribou.

He was astounded, on that day, to count 80, 90 and then 100 woodland caribou. They couldn’t sum up an exact ratio of females to males to calves — a standard measurement — because “there were way too many animals,” my father recalls. It was likely what’s known as a post-rut aggregation, he tells me, a term to describe when woodland caribou come together in October to mingle and mate, the males knocking antlers in combat over small harems of females.

The size of the herd echoed the oral traditions told by the Little Red River Cree Nation who hunt and trap in the Caribou Mountains, my father says. Hunters had told him stories about seeing massive herds of woodland caribou on the west end of Margaret Lake, the source of the Pontoon River, located northwest of Fort Vermillion, Alta. 

“I’d never see anything like it again,” my dad says now. “What we saw [over the years] was mostly declines. You couldn’t find caribou in places where you used to find caribou.”

My father has now flown over the changing landscape in Alberta for 30 years. Cumulative pressures on woodland caribou have never been higher. The federal Species At Risk Act states 65 per cent undisturbed forest in a caribou range offers a 60 per cent chance of a herd maintaining a self-sustaining status, meaning it can survive without conservation efforts. But most of Alberta’s herds are already facing losses far below that threshold. There are no self-sustaining herds left in the province — remaining populations are maintained by controversial, government-funded wolf cull programs.

“You can visualize the health of a range by looking at the amount of area impacted by humans,” my father says. “Cut lines, well sites, roads, seismic lines, cutblocks — and also how much forest has been burned by wildfires in the last 40 years.”

Unprecedented and devastating wildfire seasons in recent years have undoubtedly factored into the equation, and the future of woodland caribou in Alberta has never been more uncertain. In 2023, a record-breaking 3.3 million hectares burned — nearly seven per cent of the province’s forests — disturbing more land than the 11 previous fire seasons combined. A recent report by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute found woodland caribou lost more than five per cent of critical habitat to wildfires in 2023, with northern herds facing the most severe losses, including nearly 13 per cent in Bistcho Lake range and nearly 14 per cent in the Caribou Mountains.

The 2024 season has only intensified the crisis for woodland caribou in Alberta. By mid-August, there were more than 100 wildfires burning in Alberta with the largest, the Semo Complex, burning 15 kilometres north of Fox Lake, right in the way of caribou habitat in the Caribou Mountains. At more than 100,00 hectares, it’s nearly twice the size of Edmonton. The Melvin River Complex, at roughly the same size, is burning on the northeast and southeast side of Bistcho Lake, which is home to the Bistcho caribou herd.

Wildfires are burning at a higher frequency and severity than decades past, experts say. The time interval between major fire events — what scientists call “stand-replacing” fires — is shrinking. What does that mean for a species adapted for survival in old-growth forest — forests at least 40 to 50 years old? Can the grey ghosts survive the intensifying wildfire crisis?

Woodland caribou are on the verge of disappearing from the Alberta landscape

I was only four years old when my family moved to Peace River, Alta., and my father began flying over the boreal forest in the northwest corner of the province, counting caribou. Every February, from 1989 to 2017, he listened to the pulse of caribou, the females outfitted with radio collars, documenting their diminishing herds. He counted the number of calves born and compared that number to the number of females lost, every year, to measure what was called the “recruitment survival index.”

Over the latter half of the last century, woodland caribou populations in Canada have suffered steady losses due to the encroachment of extractive industries. In 2002, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada designated woodland caribou as “threatened” and, in 2003, the federal Species At Risk Act followed with the same designation. Today, many of the 15 remaining herds in Alberta are on the verge of extirpation, or local extinction. Some herds have seen their population drop by close to 80 per cent. 

The causes of their plight have been well documented. Caribou are arguably one of the most studied wildlife species in Alberta. Human disturbance through the industrial development of oil, gas, timber and peat has resulted in loss and fragmentation of caribou habitat. Disturbance of old-growth forest encourages the growth of pioneer species, or the first species to colonize landscapes altered by industry, including grasses and leafy shrubs and trees. This attracts foraging deer and moose and, in turn, more predators. Linear features become highways for wolves and bears to more easily prey on caribou.

Historically, the fire cycle in the Western boreal forest burned every 100 to 150 years, so woodland caribou evolved to live closely with wildfire. Like caribou, fire belongs in the boreal forest. It has a role to play: releasing coniferous seeds, stimulating the growth of pioneer species and regenerating the cycle anew. Over tens of thousands of years, fire has shaped caribou.

My father recalls the summer of 1995 when a lightning-caused wildfire swept through the Caribou Mountains, candling in the black spruce and smouldering deep in the lichen-carpeted peat, growing to cover 129,000 hectares. 

Researchers estimated it was the first time the forest had burned in over 90 years. In 1998, another large-scale wildfire tore across the boggy plateau. Researchers at the University of Alberta calculated 76 per cent of the caribou’s home range was razed by the 90s fires.

“The 1990s saw some bad fire years in the Caribou Mountains,” my dad says. “There were these peat pockets along the Pontoon River. You could actually see the depth — 100 feet deep in some places — but the fires were so hot and extensive that a lot of that burnt right off.”

Wildfires threaten a delicate balance

Woodland caribou aren’t helpless in the face of fire. My father hypothesizes they’ve learned to avoid and flee from wildfires based on at least three adaptive traits. First, their acute sense of smell can likely pick up the scent of wildfire smoke, pushed by the winds. Second, their bodies are designed for long-distance travel. And third, like us, they possess an intricate memory of the landscape. They somehow know where to go.

“Caribou just keep moving, moving, moving,” my father says. “It wouldn’t be unheard of for them to travel 20, 30 kilometres in a day. And as long as some of the herd know of these pockets of [habitat] they’ll keep seeking them out.”

This is what my dad calls herd memory: knowledge passed down from female caribou to her offspring like an old, weathered map of the land — a family heirloom of sorts. It’s why the loss of even one female can be so detrimental to a small herd, he says.

The winter after the wildfire in 1995, my dad flew over the Caribou Mountains and saw caribou travelling through the residual remains of the burn, what firefighters call “the black.” Wildfires don’t typically raze the forest down to ashes in a uniform fashion. They often leave behind pockets of trees, understory and patches of lichen, somehow unscathed.

“A caribou is so sensitive they’ll pick up the unburned lichen through the snow,” my dad says. “You’d see them feeding in an area for, say, a year or two following a burn.”

But beyond that, he saw that caribou avoid the charred forest entirely. 

Wildfire isn’t inherently bad for caribou, but it amplifies challenges

Some wildfires are beneficial to wildlife species in the boreal forest, ushering in scores of insects to burrow in blackened trees. Fire beetles can sense the heat from kilometres away and scuttle toward the ashes to breed and lay eggs. Birds and bats descend on the swarms of insects. Black-backed woodpeckers prefer to hammer nests into charred trees — it’s believed their habitat will grow by nearly 13 per cent as a result of the 2023 wildfires. Pioneer plants and grasses rise from the nitrogen-rich soil and attract mule deer, white-tailed deer and moose, while predator species, including wolves and bears, stalk their footsteps.

Wildfire isn’t inherently bad for caribou. A recent study indicates that, after 20 years, lichens regenerated faster in areas disturbed by wildfire compared to areas that were clear cut for timber. The study’s author, Ian Best, a post-doctoral biologist at the University of Northern British Columbia, isn’t entirely sure why, but posits it could be because fire leaves pockets of unburnt lichen behind, or the result of charred deadfall and coarse woody debris suppressing the growth of leafy plants, which tend to outcompete lichen.

But indirectly, wildfires open up access to the landscape and caribou habitat. My father observed how, following the fires, wolves could “work an area” through the open burn. And it wasn’t only the wolves. Once, he responded to the collar on a female caribou that had gone into “mortality mode” — a rapid-firing radio frequency — in the Caribou Mountains. As they flew to retrieve the collar, my father looked down, startled to see a lynx hunkered down on top of the caribou.

“He glared up at us like, you know, ‘Bugger off — this is mine!’ ”

Research shows woodland caribou avoid areas burnt by wildfires due to a lack of lichen and the risk of running into wolves and predators. Stan Boutin, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, told me he and his colleagues were surprised to learn that, even in the face of large-scale wildfires, caribou weren’t displaced from their home ranges. They avoided the burned areas — especially during the winter and when the females calve in May and June — but stayed within their ranges. 

Similarly, a recent study from 2021, based on data from six woodland caribou ranges in Alberta, found exposure to wildfires didn’t directly lead to death. The paper argues burned habitat is unlikely to be the primary cause of caribou declines in Alberta — and that recovery efforts and conservation ought to focus more on human disturbance.

“In the past, when these big fires burned though there was probably a bump up in the predator numbers for a short period of time,” Boutin says. “But that quickly changes after 40 or 50 years, particularly in the peatland areas. They go back to forest that won’t support moose, so it becomes caribou habitat again.”

The problem isn’t that caribou are maladapted to wildfire, but rather that some ranges in Alberta are so badly fragmented by human disturbance — severed by seismic lines, oil and gas well sites and forestry cutblocks — that their strategy of avoidance is practically null. They’re left with hardly any alternatives of where to go.

My dad points to the Chinchaga caribou range, north of Peace River, that extends along the B.C. border where 81 per cent of the range has been disturbed by oil, gas and timber activities. In the 2000s, he advocated against the use of prescribed fire in the Chinchaga to manage the pine beetle infestation that swept through northern Alberta.

“I was pretty adamant against burning there. The Chinchaga range is hugely dissected by industrial activity and you layer fire on top of that. From a caribou perspective, I couldn’t agree to that,” he says. “And I was pretty unpopular for that.”

Today, despite wildfire being a natural process in the boreal forest, caribou are reaching a critical tipping point where they can’t tolerate losses from both people — and fire. And increasingly, their habitat is being recognized as worth protecting from flames.

Should caribou habitat be a wildfire-fighting priority?

Wildfire fighters simply cannot put out every fire that lights in the forest. There are too many, they are too remote or, in some cases, the landscape would be better off letting it burn. So in the jargon-filled vocabulary of wildfire-fighting, deciding which fires to fight or how many resources to put toward them depends on what are known as the “values at risk.” Homes, schools, businesses, power lines are all values. 

My father and his colleagues fought within the Alberta government’s wildfire management division for woodland caribou habitat to be considered a “value at risk.” They succeeded in 2015.

Under Alberta Wildfire’s priorities for allocating firefighting resources, “critical wildlife habitat” is included in “natural resources,” to be prioritized after human life, communities, and watersheds and sensitive soils, Josée St-Onge, an information officer with Alberta Wildfire, confirmed with the Narwhal. 

“If firefighting resources are limited and the choice is between [fighting] a fire threatening a community or another fire threatening caribou habitat — the choice is obvious,” my dad says. “But at least we got caribou habitat defined as a discussion point.”

Protecting woodland caribou also protects a diversity of other fauna and flora species that favour older forests, including pine marten and boreal chickadees.

“It’s not just caribou, it’s the whole ecosystem,” Laura Finnegan says. She leads the caribou program at fRI Research, based in Hinton, Alta. Several large fires in 2023 swept through the caribou habitat where Finnegan and her colleagues conduct their research in the province. She tells me her team was alarmed by the “unexpected” size and intensity of the wildfires. Moving forward, she says it’s an important conversation to have as a society.

“It’s a question that could extend beyond caribou,” Finnegan says. “How do we account for climate change and these larger events, whether it’s wildfires, rain, snow or flooding, in management plans and conservation efforts?”

Government recovery efforts fail to adequately plan for wildfire — and caribou are running out of time

When it comes to planning for caribou recovery efforts in the province, environmental critics say the government of Alberta has failed to account for wildfire disturbance. In 2020, the provincial government signed an agreement with the federal government to create what are known as sub-regional land-use plans. These plans would enable the co-ordination of industrial activities with caribou habitat, along with restoration. So far, two of 11 eventual plans have been released, and none have been implemented.

“In the two caribou recovery plans that have been released, including the Cold Lake and Bistcho Lake sub-regional plans, there is no provision to respond to catastrophic natural disaster, or natural disturbances like wildfire,” Tara Russell, program director at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Northern Alberta chapter, says.

Without accounting for these disturbances, the plans likely overestimate how much habitat can be recovered for caribou within a 100-year time frame. It also poses a risk of over allowing industrial development, she says.

In the current Bistcho Lake plan, if the total area of natural disturbance within the caribou range exceeds one per cent, it would trigger a plan review. But the 2023 wildfires impacted eight per cent of the Bistcho Lake caribou herd’s habitat. That should necessitate a review, Russell says, even though the plan hasn’t yet been implemented. 

Critics argue Alberta’s recovery efforts have been delayed and bureaucratic; it’s time caribou simply do not have. The Alberta government is years behind on meeting its obligations to protect caribou, Russell says. 

“The agreement is up for renewal in 2025 and yet they’ve barely met the commitments laid out in 2021,” she adds.

In January, the Alberta government released its first report — three years late — on caribou recovery efforts. It found virtually no progress has been made to reduce human disturbance and habitat loss in caribou ranges. Human activity increased in 23 out of 28 caribou subranges from 2018 to 2021. Restoration efforts have barely scraped the surface. Of the 250,000 kilometres of seismic lines that carve up caribou ranges in Alberta, by the end of 2021 only 139 kilometres had been restored.

Boutin says Alberta has historically favoured predator control — culling wolves to reduce the pressure on caribou — over other means of caribou recovery, including the restoration of seismic lines, or investing in maternal penning programs. 

“The data is pretty darn strong,” he says. “If you want to keep caribou around and are willing to kill wolves to do it — you can, in fact, do it.”

He’s referring to a study published in April 2024 that found wolf control increased the abundance of southern mountain caribou by 52 per cent compared to a range without intervention. The authors argue that without wolf control, caribou subpopulations will continue to be extirpated before habitat conservation can become effective.

But the wolf cull has been hugely controversial across Canada. Other researchers, including Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria, have accused governments of using predator control instead of actually limiting, or halting industrial development — logging and oil and gas — in caribou habitat.

“It’s a very tough, tough decision that has to be made by society,” Boutin says. “If we want to conserve caribou, do we want to do it at the price of ongoing wolf control?”

Indigenous communities fear for the future of woodland caribou

If we lose caribou in Alberta, Indigenous communities — people who’ve lived closely with caribou, hunting them, subsisting off their meat, using their hides for clothing and weaving them into their identity and worldview — will have the most to lose.

“I’m told [by Elders] that if you hunted a caribou in the fall or early winter, their bones made the best hide scrapers because they were so firm,” Stephanie Leonard, environmental coordinator for the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation, says.

“There was a lot of use for the caribou.”

Members of the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation identify as Cree, Stoney, Iroquois, Beaver, Shuswap and Saulteaux and live in seven communities north and south of Grande Cache, Alberta. Their traditional lands encompass several caribou ranges, including the Little Smoky, a range that’s experienced habitat disturbance of 96 per cent, due to logging and oil and gas.

In 2012, the nation founded Caribou Patrol, an Indigenous-led stewardship program to promote caribou conservation within their traditional territory. In response to the high number of caribou killed by vehicle traffic along Highway 40 — considered one of the “deadliest highways” for caribou in Alberta — they patrol the roads during the caribou’s seasonal migration in spring and fall and record caribou sightings made by the public. 

Caribou sightings dropped in 2023, Leonard says, likely a result of the thick smoke that descended from large-scale wildfires burning in the vicinity, obscuring visibility.

“I think there were less people out and about because it was so smoky,” she says. “It was less the fires and more the smoke. It was hard for us to breathe. We could hide in our buildings with our filtered air, but wildlife can’t do that.”

She says people are concerned about the increasingly devastating impact of wildfires on communities. Elders aren’t able to be out on the land, practicing their traditional culture, due to health risks posed by wildfire smoke. She’s also worried about caribou habitat. 

“There’s so little good caribou habitat left, there’s a worry that if it burns, where are the caribou going to go? Is that going to be the end?”

The 2023 wildfires decimated 5.5 per cent of the Little Smoky caribou range. Environmental organizations, including the Alberta Wilderness Association, the Northern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Pembina Institute have continually called on the Alberta government to release the Berland and Upper Smoky sub regional plans, for herds located between Grande Prairie and Grande Cache. Both plans are overdue, but so far, it’s still “coming soon”, Russell says.

In the meantime, “to see caribou declining, it’s like losing a part of your world,” Leonard says.

The survival of woodland caribou in Alberta requires political will

In 2017, I joined my father on one of his final flights over the boreal forest as a biologist. We flew north of Peace River and listened for the signal of the radio collars worn by females. 

The plane soared over farmland, cutblocks, well sites, roads, cut lines and the misshapen scars of old burns. We were searching for the Deadwood caribou, a herd that is barely hanging on, my father tells me. The signal pulsed stronger — like a heart beat — and we discovered them hiding in the deep snow in a tightly knit stand of lodgepole pine. At the sound of the helicopter, the caribou fled onto a frozen body of water, grey ghosts not running, but flying across the lake.

Without intervention, most scientists agree the future looks bleak for many caribou subpopulations in Alberta. 

There may be hope left for caribou subpopulations in Alberta’s far north, my father says, including herds in the Bistcho Lake and Caribou Mountains ranges, but only with political will: limiting industrial development, restoring disturbances and building wildfire into the equation. 

“Their days are numbered,” my father solemnly tells me of the Deadwood herd. “It could take decades, but they’ll eventually blink out.”

My father’s words make me think of a star exploding in the night sky. We’ve reached a tipping point with caribou — one of the few animals to survive the Ice Age and the Holocene. They’ve been here so long and yet they could so suddenly — in a relative blink — disappear. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

As the mid-November waves crash against the rocky Hudson Bay shoreline, with only a thin line of ice visible on the far horizon, long-time polar bear guide Dennis Compayre voices a concern on the minds of many of his neighbours in recent weeks. 

“It’s looking like we’re going to have bears around until December,” Compayre says as the grey seawater thrashes and churns.

Compayre gazes out at the bay from behind the wheel of his truck, just outside of Churchill, the small, remote northern Manitoba town only accessible by air or rail.

Born and raised in the port town approximately 1,000 kilometres north of Winnipeg, Compayre has been working as a bear guide for 40 years and witnessed many changes in how people coexist with polar bears, the apex predator of the North.

Once regarded as “great white rats,” bears used to congregate in the dozens at the local open dump. Bears were regularly shot if they came into town, Compayre says, although that began to change with the introduction of Polar Bear Alert, a provincially managed polar bear control program, and the creation of a holding facility in the early 1980s — coined “polar bear jail” by locals — where the animals were held and later released. 

Then came the growth of the tourism industry in the 1990s, creating an economic incentive to develop a more tolerant attitude towards bears. The most recent data available shows the town of about 870 residents — dubbed ‘the polar bear capital of the world’ — generated nearly $40 million in tourism revenue in 2017.

“They’ve taught us how to coexist with them,” Compayre says of the bears. “There is hardly any aggression shown by a polar bear unless he’s compromised and usually it’s because the human screwed up.”

Despite decades of change in Churchill, one thing has stayed the same — when the Hudson Bay freezes over in the winter, the bears leave town to hunt on the ice.

“Seals are like opium to the bears,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what you do on land, when that ice forms — the bears are gone.”

Polar bears are hardwired for life on the ice, stalking the holes in the ice for ringed seals, their primary food source. The western Hudson Bay population, one of 19 global subpopulations, has evolved to living with the rhythms of seasonal ice on the bay. They swim ashore in late summer when the ice melts and depart when it freezes over. Locals know: every year varies slightly in terms of when the ice comes and when the bears leave.

But in a year of extreme heat, both locally and globally, there’s been heightened uncertainty of when Hudson Bay will freeze. The bears — and the people living closely with them — are still waiting for northwesterly winds to lock the ice to the shore, Compayre says. 

“When people ask me to define climate change, what comes to my mind is the disruption of wind patterns,” he says.

This year, locals have observed ice forming followed by sudden southerly wind shifts, which blows out the ice and prevents bears from getting out onto the bay.

“You see the ice out on the horizon … and some of the bears are out there on the ugly ice,” Compayre says of the thin sheet of ice faintly visible in the distance. “The others know they have to wait until the ice forms again and that cycle can last into December.”

Until then, there are more bears wandering into town and the risk of more encounters with humans. 

As climate change increasingly drives El Niños — making the warmer global weather pattern both more frequent and more severe — residents in Churchill, and communities across the Canadian Arctic, are preparing for a new reality: one in which the largest land predator in the world comes into contact with people more often.

‘Hot and heavy with bears’: 2023 a big year for bear sightings — and interactions

Record-breaking temperatures hit Hudson Bay in May, prompting an early break-up of the ice on the Churchill River and along the western shoreline. Days of extreme heat — reaching into the high 20 C and low 30 C range — persisted through the summer months, atypical for a community that sees averages in the low 20 C range.

“I remember maybe one or two hot days in the summer when I was a kid, but now extreme temperatures are lasting for four or five days at a time,” Nikki Clace, a member of northern Manitoba’s War Lake First Nation who grew up in Churchill, says. 

“This summer I bought an air conditioner, but what do you do when you’re a thousand-pound polar bear who hasn’t eaten for three months and it’s 30-above for five days in a row?” Clace says.

Those warm temperatures brought more bears on land sooner than usual. One of the first polar bears to swim ashore outside Churchill was spotted by tourism operators on June 8.

“In 2022, I didn’t see a bear until July 19,” Drew Hamilton, a bear guide and local tourism operator, says. This year, he saw more bears than he had in previous years. “All summer it was just hot and heavy with bears,” he says. “And they were putting on a show.”

Hamilton was intrigued to see many bears hunting geese, including a male bear that “took out a whole family.” Bears feasted on beluga carcasses down by the rocky shoreline. A mother and her 400-pound, two-year-old cub regularly wandered into town to covertly feed on cooking oil, dumped behind a restaurant, until they were darted and relocated by Polar Bear Alert.

Churchill isn’t alone in facing a changing climate. This year’s record-breaking hot summer was part of the larger global trend as climate change exacerbates the El Niño weather pattern that brings warmer ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific and, in turn, warmer temperatures.

“I think everyone’s holding their breath to see what happens with this El Niño shift over the next four or five years,” Geoff York, senior director of research and policy with Polar Bears International, says. The group, with offices in Bozeman, Montana and Winnipeg, is a non-profit organization dedicated to polar bear conservation across the Arctic.

This year at least, the warming trend has been visibly clear in Churchill; the bears have stuck closer to town as they wait for the ice.

It’s not the first time the ice has been delayed. Compayre and others recall the 2015 and 2016 seasons when above-average temperatures persisted, the bay refused to freeze and the bears hung around until December. 

But the trend of late-forming ice is more than just anecdotal.

A 2022 study determined the Arctic has been warming four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979.

A 2016 study found that between 1979 and 2014, the length of the ice-free period in western Hudson Bay increased by nine days per decade. Lengthening time on shore can have detrimental impacts on polar bear’s reproductive capacity, leading to smaller litters and fewer cubs making it to adulthood. It can also be fatal: a 2022 study found adult polar bears can fast for up to 180 days — after that, their survival is at risk, particularly among adult males. Previous generations of polar bears in the western Hudson Bay population fasted on land for only a few months, coming ashore in early August and departing by November. 

In his 2014 book, Arctic Icons, author Edward Struzik describes 1983 as “the worst year ever.” That year, a southerly chinook wind arrived mid-November and prevented polar bears from getting out onto the ice. There were many close calls between people and bears, observations of skinny bears and a fatal mauling of a man (who’d been carrying food in his coat pockets) on Nov. 29, 1983. Ten days after his death, ice floes locked on the bay and the bears left town.

Polar bear attacks are rare. Fatal ones, even more so. The last attack in Churchill was 10 years ago. No one has died since the 1983 incident. Even outside Churchill, bears in the western Hudson Bay population rarely attack. The first fatal attack in Nunavut in nearly 25 years was in 2018, when a man was mauled to death 10 kilometres outside Arviat, a small hamlet along Hudson Bay.

But rare fatalities don’t mean there aren’t risks to polar bears spending more time in town, living side by side with residents.

Churchill’s 24/7 polar bear hotline takes more calls than previous years

It has already been an above-average year in Churchill for ‘bear occurrences’ — the term Polar Bear Alert uses for calls from the public about polar bears. 

By late August, Polar Bear Alert had already received 76 bear-related calls, about four times more than the same date last year. By Nov. 22, the total reached 253.

When a person dials 675-BEAR, a 24/7 polar bear hotline in Churchill, Chantal Cadger Maclean, a conservation officer with Polar Bear Alert, and her colleagues are ready to respond within minutes.

“It doesn’t matter if that bear is trying to get through a window or walking down the street,” Maclean says. “You go from being sound asleep in bed to driving down the road with one hand and shooting off a bear banger with the other to escort that bear out of town,” she says, referring to the noisemaking deterrent that sounds like a gunshot, but won’t physically harm a bear.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary about a polar bear strolling down the street in Churchill. The town, after all, was built directly in their migratory pathway. Many bears are “funnelled through town” right past the Complex, a building that houses the town’s school, hospital and recreation centre, Maclean says, as they attempt to reach the Churchill River, located north of town, which freezes before the bay.

On the morning of Oct. 30, as the school bus was picking up students, one of Maclean’s colleagues spotted a 500-pound bear ambling down Hendry Street, a street lined with homes.

“Right away parents heard the bangers and horn of the Polar Bear Alert truck. Locals know what those sounds mean — they grabbed their kids and brought them back inside,” Maclean says.

A team of conservation officers moved the bear out of town without incident.

Maclean is quick to credit locals as “coexistence experts.” People in Churchill don’t live in constant fear of bears, she says, rather they know what it means to live in a place where you could step foot outside your front door and encounter a bear on any day of the year.

Locals keep their vehicle doors unlocked so if someone who meets a bear in the street needs a fast escape they can shelter inside. Others put down “Churchill welcome mats” outside their cabin windows: wooden boards with nails sticking sharp-side up. The first person to see a bear in town typically reports it on the town’s community Facebook page within minutes to alert others. In his group chat, Hamilton recently suggested cyclists carry hand-held marine flares as bear deterrents — which are safe, easy to deploy and effective at deterring bears.

Furthermore, many locals understand bear behaviour, Maclean says. They can differentiate between the behaviour of a hungry, or agitated bear and a bear that’s just ambling through town.

But that doesn’t mean people don’t sometimes get complacent and make mistakes.

In mid-October, Maclean received a call that an off-leash dog had been grabbed by a bear on the rocks near Cape Merry, a Parks Canada-run national historic site on the northernmost edge of town. The incident turned out to be a defensive attack by a mother bear protecting her two young cubs, Maclean says. Her team responded and, fortunately, the mother retreated with her cubs and the dog survived.

The following week an 880-pound male bear broke through the wall of an indoor dump locals call L5. Conservation officers sedated the bear inside the facility and transferred him to the polar bear holding facility — the only such place in the world — where the animals are held for 30 days before being relocated north by helicopter. 

Three additional bears were placed at the holding facility the same week. Researchers have found “conflict bears” held for at least 20 days are less likely to re-enter a community.  

By Nov. 22, they’d handled 23 bears, released 15, with eight remaining in the holding facility.

“The bear activity is still pretty crazy right now,” Kenny Shields, a bear guide and tourism operator, says. 

One morning in November, he saw at least seven bears — including several family groups — congregating outside the exterior of the indoor dump. Odours from the building regularly attract bears, but seeing as many as seven at once was unusual. Shields watched Polar Bear Alert haze off a big male with firecrackers and later dart a mother bear and her young cub for transfer to the holding facility. 

Ideally, Maclean says, Polar Bear Alert releases bears back out onto the ice, which is cheaper than relocating them by helicopter. In 2022, Polar Bear Alert released the first bear onto the frozen bay on Nov. 10. 

This year, on the same day, there was no ice in sight.

Less ice might not mean ‘starving’ polar bears, but it does spell challenges for human encounters

Even though the quality and duration of ice pose serious long-term challenges for the survival of polar bears, there’s no definitive explanation on what it all means for population numbers.

At first glance, a 2021 aerial survey of the western Hudson Bay area, which includes Churchill,  indicated the population declined by 224 bears between 2016 and 2021. But it’s unclear whether that marked decline is due to reduced survival, hunting — or emigration of bears into neighbouring areas.

That’s where things can get muddy. A subsequent aerial survey in 2021 of the southern Hudson Bay polar bear population — which also roam in Hudson Bay, but typically farther south and down into James Bay — found an increase in the same number of bears: 224. The authors suggest there’s some genetic cross-over between the two groups, raising the possibility bears move between populations. 

The idea that some bears may be emigrating — not simply dying off because of the lack of ice — is a point of contention among locals.

Compayre is frustrated with the overly simplistic story of melting sea ice and hunger making polar bears more dangerous, which he feels overlooks the complexity of the situation.

The bears he’s observed this season have been in good shape. According to local father-and-son guide team Morris and James Spence, two sets of mothers with three cubs were observed emerging from maternity dens in Wapusk National Park in March 2022. Having three cubs is now considered rare, although it “still happens,” according to Morris, who’s been observing mothers and cubs for the past 40 years.

“People come here with a lump in their throat because they’re looking at a ‘doomed species starving to death’ because that’s what they were told,” Compayre says. “And it’s far from the truth.”

Compayre doesn’t deny the effects of climate change and thinning sea ice will have a negative impact on polar bears, but he also points to their adaptive abilities to survive.

“There’s going to be a huge learning curve,” he says. “But they’re certainly not all going to die.”

Over the last century, sea ice loss and population decline hasn’t been a linear-event, says York, the senior director with Polar Bears International. There have been periods of what’s not necessarily recovery, but stability. 

“We’ve had a recent period of eight-to-10 years of stability,” he says.

Long-term climate projections and the increase in frequency of days with extremely warm conditions, however, indicate longer ice-free periods may result in bears searching for supplemental food on land — and inadvertently coming into conflict with people. 

This could pose serious challenges for coexistence across the Canadian North, York says, with new risks in places where polar bears and people haven’t historically overlapped, including communities located along the southern Hudson Bay — and enhanced risk in places where they have coexisted for thousands of years.

This summer, for example, a 70-year-old man and his son and daughter survived a polar bear attack in their tent, 140 kilometres northeast of Kangiqsualujjuaq, an Inuit community in Nunavik, Que.

“In the case of Indigenous communities in Canada’s North, polar bears are just another potential impact of a changing climate that people had nothing to do with,” York says. “But they’re left with the consequences.”

‘Not every interaction is a conflict’: researcher

Douglas Clark, a human-polar bear conflict specialist at the University of Saskatchewan, cautions against oversimplifying the narrative of sea ice loss and increased conflict. 

“Not every interaction is a conflict,” Clark says, noting there are often interactions where people and bears are aware of one another, but are not high-risk situations.

Clark studies the relationship between the number of days bears spend on land, frequency of visitation and body condition. He relies on non-invasive methods, such as camera-traps at research facilities in Churchill and Wapusk National Park, to the southeast.

“The dominant narrative of bears and people interacting in the context of climate change is that the hungrier bears are, the more likely they are to come around,” Clark explains. 

Contrary to that narrative, his research has found there’s no greater probability of skinny or food-stressed bears visiting human infrastructure more frequently. The greater the number of days on shore, however, the more likely it was for all bears, regardless of age, sex or body condition, to visit the facilities where his cameras are stationed. 

That said, Clark points to research showing nutritionally stressed, underweight male bears are disproportionately involved in predatory attacks. 

Nevertheless, he’s concerned there’s a lack of understanding of the complexity at play.

“There has been a tremendous simplification of the discourse around polar bears over the years,” Clark says. “I think we’ve radically underestimated the effect of local conditions, including the role of attractants and habituation on the distribution of bears.”

He points to the history of big changes in Churchill and around the Hudson Bay, including the closure of the open landfill in 2005, which used to attract large aggregations of food-habituated bears. The town transformed a former military building into an indoor facility for storing waste.

Since the closure of the dump, the number of bears annually euthanized by Polar Bear Alert to protect public safety has decreased from more than 10 to less than one. 

Odours from the indoor waste facility still attract bears — such as when community members recently observed seven bears patrolling the perimeter of the building.

Today, communities around the Hudson Bay, including the Inuit community of Arviat, are experiencing an increase in human-polar bear encounters, potentially related to waste management, Clark says. An open dump on the edge of Arviat, a growing community of 3,000 people in Nunavut, is considered a hot spot for polar bear activity.

“We may not be able to do much to keep polar bears and people from encountering one another,” Clark says, “But when we do encounter one another, we have control over how we prevent escalation and I think this gives us something we can focus on that’s pragmatic.” 

York agrees. He’s seeing an uptick in interest from communities and governments, alike, to better prepare for increased human-polar bear interactions and potential conflict. 

“What can we do to make sure communities have the tools they need to be safe on the landscape?” 

Community group working to make Churchill safer for people — and bears

In 2022, Churchill residents formed a Bear Smart Working Group, with support from Polar Bears International, to collectively voice their concerns related to the management of polar bears.

Clace serves on the working group. She grew up in Churchill listening to the stories of her grandmother and mother, who always reminded her: “This is polar bear country and you just live in it.”

Clace joined the group to raise her concerns from a pedestrian perspective in Churchill.

“I don’t drive — I walk a lot,” Clace says. “People without access to vehicles, or rides to work, this is a largely overlooked population. We need to make sure that people have access to get to work, or school or get home safely because it’s often people who are walking that run into polar bears.”

Hamilton, a bear guide and another member of the working group, says there’s room for community improvement when it comes to living with bears, namely reducing food attractants in town.

“In the summer they say, ‘Don’t walk on the beach behind the Complex [because of bears]’, but if you go down behind there at 7:30 a.m. every morning, it smells like bacon,” Hamilton says. “The cafeteria is venting out bacon over the bay — and we wonder why these bears are turning up there.”

Bear-proof garbage bins aren’t yet mandatory, or accessible to everyone in Churchill, he adds. 

“The children’s park is a perfect example of the Churchill conundrum,” he says. “There’s an open trash can right in front of the park.”

On Nov. 23, the ice began to lock to the shoreline of Hudson Bay and some bears ventured out to hunt for seals. Polar Bear Alert released the last of the bears at the holding facility back onto the ice on Nov. 25, but several days later, strong currents opened up the bay again. Ice coverage on Hudson Bay was at around six per cent. Forty years ago, the average coverage by this same date was 39 per cent. Locals say there are still bears remaining on shore.

The challenges of living with polar bears ambling down residential streets is only poised to become more complex in the face of an increasingly warming climate. Living in a polar bear migratory pathway means people could encounter a bear on any day of the year. But locals are hopeful managing food attractants, waste and human behaviours can help reduce the risks to people — and to bears. 

Hamilton says coexisting with polar bears is going to require a conscious decision on the part of people to make the necessary changes to allow bears to exist on the landscape.

“We’ve already shown the ability to wipe out whole populations elsewhere, so we need to make a decision.”

There isn’t a magic bullet for coexisting with polar bears, he says.

“It’s going to be a lot of incremental improvements, but I think we’re trending towards the good.”

Either way, the challenges continue. On Dec. 4, the ice was again pushed off the shoreline by southerly winds — leaving the bay wide open once again. 

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Note: This story discusses mental health and suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, there’s 24/7 phone support available with Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566, or text 45645 for help between 4 p.m. and midnight ET. Additional mental health services can be found here. 

In June, as the winds howled through the largest wildfire in British Columbia’s history, 50-foot-tall spruce trees, burnt and blackened from the flames, came crashing down within metres of Rose Velisek.

Velisek, a third-year wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, was told by a superior to “keep her head up … but keep working, keep hosing down the fire,” so she swallowed her fear and did as she was instructed.

“There’s this sense of pressure and anxiety towards getting the job done,” Velisek says. “It doesn’t matter if your safety is going to be compromised, you still gotta be out there doing it.”

The day left her uneasy — a feeling that would grow over the next two months, as her crew worked 16-hour days on back-to-back deployments on three major wildfires in northern B.C.

It would soon be described as Canada’s worst wildfire season in recent years, a new trend as climate change drives wildfires to be more intense and more frequent. But Western Canada’s wildland firefighters say they’re struggling to cope with another out-of-control inferno: a crisis of burnout and post-traumatic stress syndrome, driven by extreme working conditions, low pay, high turnover and — in Alberta — government cutbacks.

The BC Wildfire Service says it’s working hard to improve the culture of wildfire fighting, to ensure safety is a priority. Meanwhile, firefighters in Alberta say they’re being pushed to new extremes, both by the intensity of the work and the length of their shifts.

The Narwhal spoke with 18 current and former wildland firefighters, who in total have more than 160 seasons of frontline wildfire experience. Many asked to keep their names confidential because they were not authorized to speak to media and feared losing their jobs or contracts. All spoke of the extreme physical and mental toll of the job.

That toll is largely not quantified, according to Nicola Cherry, an occupational epidemiologist and professor in the department of medicine at the University of Alberta. 

“We know very little indeed about what happens to wildland firefighters over many years of working on fires — what effect that has on their long-term health,” she says. “There’s really no data in Canada about the effects.”

An early fire season left governments scrambling, with serious consequences 

The physical and mental challenges of the job first inspired Velisek to take to the line of duty as a wildland firefighter in 2021. The daughter of a logger who used horses instead of heavy machinery, she grew up on her family’s farm in Slocan Valley, B.C., and is “no stranger to hard labour.”

Wildland firefighters often carry more than half their body weight in gear — hose packs, water pumps, chainsaws and Pulaskis — through muskeg and forests and up mountain slopes, where they face intense heat and “eat smoke” to extinguish wildfires.

“You’re pushed to your limits,” Velisek says. But born from the experience, there’s also a “deep sense of camaraderie, almost like a family relationship” that develops among crew members, she adds, which is what pulls many back to the fire line year after year.

Yet when fires exploded in Western Canada this May, B.C. and Alberta wildfire services scrambled to find enough firefighters, equipment and gear. 

Alberta Wildfire said it “exhausted all resources” before importing 4,000 firefighters from seven countries, including the U.S., Mexico, South Africa and New Zealand, to aid in the efforts.

BC Wildfire needed more than 3,000 firefighters from around the world, almost twice its usual workforce.

“They were ill-prepared,” Velisek says. “A lot of us felt that way. They should have that awareness by now that seasons are going to be incredibly busy, longer and things are going to get worse.”

Given these challenges, Velisek and many others felt an impending sense of dread.

“I felt so unprepared because the fire season usually starts in June — the fire season hadn’t even peaked yet,” she says.

Velisek’s crew was working on the Stoddart Creek fire northwest of Fort St. John, B.C., when it got the call about being relocated farther north to the Donnie Creek Fire, which would become the largest fire ever recorded in the province. The crew implemented a back-burn that evening on the Stoddart — a technique that creates a belt fire has difficulty crossing — and raced to get ready to depart the following morning. “I think most of us got only four hours of sleep,” she recalls. “Everyone was a bit delirious.” 

En route to the fire camp, thick, smoke-infused fog rolled across the highway and the crew, convoying in separate vehicles, crashed in a three-truck pile up. Velisek was airlifted to Fort St. John where doctors told her she had a concussion and whiplash. She was given two weeks off to rest, but decided to rush back, she says, anxious to help her crew.

The injury wore on Velisek and the fires didn’t let up. By early July, the crew was pulling 16-hour shifts and arriving back at camp at midnight.

“It felt like we’re treated like machines instead of human beings,” she says. 

Then, in July, Velisek received the devastating news that Devyn Gale, a 19-year-old firefighter from Revelstoke, B.C., had been killed by a falling tree. The news hammered home the risks she’d seen firsthand, including when those burned spruce trees had fallen so close to her just weeks before.

Days later, 25-year-old Adam Yeadon, a wildland firefighter from the Northwest Territories, was fatally struck by a tree near his community of Fort Liard. Then came word that 41-year old Ryan Gould, a helicopter pilot, crashed while fighting a fire in northwestern Alberta. In late July, 25-year-old Zak Muise, a firefighter from Ontario, was killed when his all-terrain vehicle rolled off a steep drop near the Donnie Creek fire. 

Four of Velisek’s peers had died within the span of two weeks. “I remembered thinking, if this isn’t a wake up call to BC Wildfire, I don’t know what is,” she says.

On Sept. 20, tragedy struck again, when four contract firefighters were killed in a head-on collision with a transport truck on their way home from a deployment near Vanderhoof, B.C. In a statement, RCMP said investigators believe the collision occurred near Cache Creek at about 2 a.m., after a Ford F-350 failed to navigate a bend in the road and crossed the centre line.

B.C. Premier David Eby and Bruce Ralston, minister of forests, released a joint statement the morning after the deaths.

“Our hearts are broken by news of the death of four wildfire fighters who were travelling home after a tour of duty,” the statement read. “This is devastating news in what has been an immensely difficult wildfire season. We stand with wildfire fighters and all BC Wildfire Service personnel as they mourn the death of colleagues and co-workers yet again.”

‘They’re kids’: high turnover leads to inexperienced wildfire fighters on the frontlines

In September, the union representing B.C. wildland firefighters published an open letter calling on the provincial government to address the “crisis” causing significant safety risks on the fireline. “[Wildland firefighters] are putting their lives on the line to protect our communities from devastating fires,” the letter reads. “But they are doing it for the low wage of around $26 to $29 per hour.”

Wildland firefighters whom The Narwhal spoke with said it time and time again: high turnover contributes to a lack of experience, pushing crews into increasingly dangerous situations. This ratchets up the risk: veteran firefighters say less-experienced crews require closer supervision, which in turn drives fatigue and burnout, increasing the risks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among both veteran and rookie firefighters. 

BC Wildfire says it had 1,350 crew-level firefighters this year, roughly 25 per cent of which were new hires. The service says an average of 217 people have chosen not to come back to their jobs each year for the past seven years (which includes the four worst fire seasons on record). This year there were 339 new firefighters hired from a pool of 836 applicants. In recent years, annual applications have hovered around 1,000, the service says, a decline from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In December 2022, firefighter recruitment, training and turnover landed on BC Forestry Minister Bruce Ralston’s desk, with his mandate letter from Premier David Eby highlighting the issue as a priority for improvement.

“Over the remaining period of this mandate I expect you to prioritize making progress on … options to improve training, retention and recruitment in BC Wildfire Service,” Eby wrote.

The service is dealing with the impact of a tight labour market, David Greer, director of strategic engagement with BC Wildfire, says. Layer on the impacts of longer, more extreme fire seasons, and the job becomes one that fewer and fewer people want to do, he adds.

While sources say Alberta is facing a similar recruitment crisis, Melissa Story, community relations co-ordinator with Alberta Wildfire, told The Narwhal the annual retention rate for firefighters in Alberta is “roughly 70 per cent” and the average firefighter has 3.5 years of experience on the frontlines. 

“Obviously, we would like to see that number be higher, but it’s pretty sufficient for what we see here in the province,” Story says.

However, veteran firefighters The Narwhal spoke with throughout the summer describe turnover on some frontline crews in both Alberta and B.C. approaching 50 per cent or higher. 

“I’m dealing with an army of rookies,” a crew leader who’s worked eight seasons with BC Wildfire told The Narwhal. “They’re kids. They’re not ready for this.”

Lack of supports leads to burnout and high turnover

As wildfire crews face unprecedented pressures, a larger crisis looms: climate change is making fires more frequent and more intense, and the nature of the work itself harder. 

“Wildland firefighting is a grind,” Harold Larson, a former wildland firefighter who fought more than 300 wildfires in his 20-year career in Alberta, B.C. and Australia, tells The Narwhal. “You’re wearing yourself down physically, but also mentally because you’re trying to fight this giant opponent that doesn’t seem to stop.”

In 2016, the year a wildfire destroyed a large portion of Fort McMurray, Alta., Larson and his crew worked 16-hour days for 52 days out of 57. At the end of one 15-day shift in that stretch, his supervisor told him they’d been extended to work another nine days, without a break. Larson refused, citing crew exhaustion, which poses serious risks. 

“Pushing a crew that’s already run down is only going to lead to disaster,” he says.

Larson has witnessed huge losses over his career as a wildland firefighter. In 2009, he was in Australia on the frontlines of the deadly Black Saturday bushfires that killed 173 people and burned more than 2,000 homes.

“It was a very scary and life-altering moment for me,” he says. “I wish at that time there was a debriefing system in place, but it was just, ‘go home, get eight hours of sleep and get back to work the next day.’ No one really talked about it, so it was something I had to push away for years.”

Like many wildland firefighters, Larson left BC Wildfire in 2019 to work for a municipal fire department that offered better pay, a more robust pension, a stable work schedule and better health benefits, in particular, mental health support. 

Through counselling services offered by his new job, Larson began to unpack the accumulated trauma from 20 years as a wildland firefighter. He realized that he couldn’t spend time hiking or camping without his mind immediately searching for escape routes or wondering “what is this going to look like when it burns?”

Mental health services for wildland firefighters should be a priority, not only to address specific traumatic incidents, but also to address cumulative fatigue and trauma, he says. So should ensuring people get adequate rest between shifts.

“What would have kept me, to make it a career, is benefits, a pension and sick days,” Larson says. “I didn’t leave wildfire because I didn’t like it. I left it because I wanted a different life.”

Mental health toll ranges from PTSD to suicide 

Over his 20-year career, Larson has lost four colleagues related to wildfire. While one of those deaths occurred directly on the fireline, two were a result of suicide and another was related to substance abuse.

Preliminary research in the U.S. found wildland firefighters face higher rates of substance use and suicide than the general population.

There’s no data on the link between wildland firefighters and suicide in Canada, but veteran wildland firefighters have seen firsthand the link between the stress of the job and suicide.

Joe Gilchrist, an Indigenous fire specialist, started his firefighting career when he was 15 and worked for 17 years with BC Wildfire. He points to the prevalence of accumulated fatigue syndrome. On the line, crews must be hyper vigilant of weather, fire behaviour, dangerous trees and exit routes. Even when they’re not working, crews are on standby, constantly checking their devices and waiting to get called back out.

“That alert level is really hard, after many days and nights of fighting fires,” Gilchrist says. “It gets to you over a long time, especially if you don’t get the proper rest for the winter — and it continues as the years go on.”

When the fire season wraps up, it can be difficult for wildland firefighters — working seasonal contracts of four-to-eight months — to transition back into society, Larson says.

“Being in an environment that is dangerous, it kind of becomes your new normal,” he says. “When you get into your off season, there’s nothing out there that’s giving you that sense of adrenaline like it is on the fireline. It can be a very hard thing to adjust when you get back into the real world.”

Quantitative research emerging from the U.S. found the prevalence of probable post-traumatic stress disorder for wildland firefighters is 14 per cent, four times greater than for the general population. The same research found less than 50 per cent of those experiencing symptoms had actually been diagnosed — suggesting post-traumatic stress disorder remains under-detected among wildland firefighters.

Tiffany Traverse, who worked eight seasons with BC Wildfire, describes the yearly fire cycle as a “meat grinder.” She resigned after the 2022 season — burnt out, exhausted and grappling with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Even now, I see a storm system coming in, or smoke, and instantly it all comes rushing back,” she says. “I think it’s going to take years for that to disappear.”

BC Wildfire acknowledges challenges, Alberta continues to push firefighters

Greer, of BC Wildfire, says a cultural shift is needed to ensure firefighters are comfortable pointing out dangerous situations and are better supported in finding solutions.

“When I hear that someone feels unsafe in a zone, I need them to speak up at that time, and I need someone to listen to them when they speak up,” Greer says.

He says the service expanded the size of unit crews from 20 to 22, and initial attack crews from three to four, in part to allow more flexibility when people need to take time off.

The BC Wildfire Service is also working to become a year-round “all-hazards” response service, meaning more than 700 jobs are now year-round, with permanent benefits and pensions. 

Greer says he’s clear-eyed about the road ahead and is working on developing new systems to ensure firefighters see a safe future. 

“Yes, there’s challenges, but we’re not driving blind here.”

Greer says starting this fall, seasonal BC Wildfire staff will have year-round access to the same employee and family assistance programs as full-time employees, which includes emergency support, a mental health crisis phone line, counselling services, family support services and financial and legal advice.

Several firefighters The Narwhal spoke with referenced other work the BC Wildfire Service has done to address challenges, including providing some health benefits, shorter shifts, sick days, a mental health awareness training program called ‘Resilient Minds’ and recall rights, meaning seniority for seasonal firefighters when crews are chosen for future seasons. Many said BC Wildfire — while far from perfect — provides more support than Alberta Wildfire.

In Alberta, crews were pushed to work 24-day shifts this year. 

“Ideally, we would love to see our deployments only be 18-day stretches,” Story, from Alberta Wildfire, says. “Unfortunately, sometimes they have to go on a touch longer.”

Firefighters in Alberta also lack recall rights, health benefits and sick days. And they face shorter contracts due to budget cuts. 

“We recognize that this has been a very unprecedented season and wildland firefighters can face issues ranging from trauma, isolation, lack of social support as well as physical and emotional exhaustion,” Story says. 

Alberta Wildfire provides firefighters with mental health debriefing support for specific traumatic events as well as counselling services through a family assistance program, but these services are not available after their contracts are terminated at the end of every fire season.

“Anytime we have unprecedented fire seasons, we go through a seasonal review,” Story says. “We’re always looking to learn and grow and make enhancements to the welfare management program.”

‘Dealing with hell’: as wildfires intensify, firefighters want reforms 

Many of the firefighters The Narwhal spoke with say their concerns often go unheeded, despite efforts to provide constructive feedback to management. 

Some described a perceived disconnect between expectations from management and the realities of fighting fires on the ground, particularly in the face of climate change.

Many superiors cut their teeth at a time when fires were less intense, an eighth-year BC Wildfire firefighter says. “They’ll say ‘Oh, I fought fire for 40 years.’ But if you haven’t fought fire on the ground since 2017, you don’t know what we’re dealing with,” they added.

“We’re dealing with hell.”

Greer disputes the assertion that BC Wildfire leadership isn’t listening to its firefighters.

“We are listening to our crews. We have been out on the line talking to them,” Greer said in an email, adding that many of the concerns highlighted by The Narwhal are not reflective of what he hears when he talks to crews on the ground.

But as climate change continues to fuel bigger, hotter, more dangerous wildfires on the landscape, firefighters like Traverse wonder what it will take to implement real changes to better support those on the frontlines of the crisis.

“It just constantly feels like it’s the crews and employees who are basically picking up the slack of poor practices, planning and old policy that people haven’t looked at in 20 years,” Traverse, who has also worked as an operations officer, says. “What’s the point in doing an after-action report if no one’s going to do anything with that information?”

“Do we have to have more people die by suicide or by getting burnt over? I don’t know what it’s going to take,” Traverse says.

She hopes speaking out will bring awareness to the lack of support for voicing mental health concerns: often, she says, the cultural response is “toughen up” or “be a man.”

A similar sentiment — “stay hard, do the job” — prompted Velisek to take a step back.

“It got on my nerves because you can’t stay hard,” she says. “You have to break down every once in a while because something is too hard.”

By July, Velisek was physically and mentally exhausted, so she did what many others have contemplated: she quit.

“Maybe it was the trauma from the incidents, but I no longer felt safe being out there,” she says.

Updated Sept. 20, 2023, at 3:00 p.m. PT: This story was updated when The Narwhal learned four firefighters died in a collision on their way home from a deployment near Vanderhoof, B.C.Updated Sept. 20, 2023, at 5:02 p.m. PT: This piece has been updated to correct a reference to qualitative research that was in fact quantitative. A previous version of this article reported that research out of the U.S. found 14 per cent of wildland firefighters experience post-traumatic stress disorder, four times greater than the general population. But in fact the research found the prevalence of probable post-traumatic stress disorder for wildland firefighters is 14 per cent, four times greater than for the general population.

Updated Sept, 26, 2023, at 2:56 p.m. PT: A previous photo caption described B.C. crews working 16-day shifts all summer. While we heard from firefighters who say their crews were pushed to work some 16-day stretches, a standard deployment for B.C. wildfire workers is 14 days. The caption has therefore been updated.

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Raymond Hill has been traversing the wilderness on Grande Mountain near Grande Cache, Alta., on horseback for more than 40 years. He regularly encounters elk, moose and grizzly bears out on the trails. In the summer, he casts lines into the Smoky River for trout and walleye. “It’s a nice place to enjoy, or to sit by a fire and get some peace and quiet,” Hill says.

But a new coal mine on the eastern slopes of the Rockies means that peace on Grande Mountain may soon be threatened. 

An underground coal mining project named Summit Mine 14 has been quietly resurrected by Valory Resources, an Australian mining company, leaving many residents with questions about how the project got the green light, and whether it will truly benefit the community.

Grande Cache was a town purpose-built for coal in the 1960s. But as the community’s fortunes rose — and fell — with coal’s boom-and-bust cycles over the years, many residents are leery of once again betting their futures on coal. And despite the company’s promises of economic benefits, local business owners suggest a burgeoning local ecotourism industry may be at odds with more coal development, and are raising questions about the mine’s environmental impacts. 

“It’s going to be like putting a coal mine on the ridge overlooking Jasper,” Hill, the president of the Grande Cache Saddle Club, says. “But it’s ‘Jasper, without the rules.’ ” 

Jules Desrochers’ leased ranch is located downstream of the proposed mine. He’s worried about the risks of contamination and runoff into the stream, which flows into Grande Cache Lake. Desrochers, a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, runs Elk Ridge Quarter Horses, where, along with his wife, they offer camping and horseback-riding. 

“There are so many potential impacts on air quality, water quality, wildlife, grizzly bears, goats, sheep — everything is living on that mountain,” Desrochers says.

“I just don’t see this as something that is publicly and environmentally safe at all. I am not anti-industry. I work in the oil and gas industry. But I think it’s important that people be able to be heard about why we don’t want this in our backyard.”

Grande Cache community members say they’ve been left in the dark about coal mine plans

The site of the proposed coal mine, not far from the headwaters of the Smoky River, is dense with conifers and serves as habitat for big horned sheep and elk. This wilderness is part of the eastern slopes ecosystem that was at the centre of intense outcry when the provincial government moved to open much of it to coal mining in 2020.

The Summit Coal Mine 14 project will be located four kilometres northeast of Grande Cache on Grande Mountain, a forested peak popular with hikers, horseback riders and snowmobilers. Mine 14 would create a footprint of 53.5 hectares on the mountain and would puncture the surface with 91 drill holes, ultimately creating an underground footprint of 512 hectares. The company aims to produce 3,562 tonnes of coal per day for nine years, transporting it in trucks to a coal processing plant at the nearby HR Milner Generating Station, where it will then be shipped by rail for export to Asia and used in steelmaking. 

Though the Alberta government ultimately reversed its decision to open the eastern slopes to coal mining in response to public backlash, Mine 14 slipped through the cracks, according to conservation advocates. Mining the eastern slopes remains an issue in the Alberta election, with the NDP promising to put an end to it outright. What an NDP win and all-out ban could mean for Mine 14 is not yet clear.

“Last spring, Alberta had a very robust, detailed conversation about the future of coal mining in the eastern slopes and our headwaters. Albertans very clearly articulated that they did not want new coal development,” Tara Russell, the Northern Alberta program director at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Northern Alberta, says. “It feels like that was ignored.” 

According to Russell, Mine 14 “came out of nowhere.”

The underground mine plan has been around for years, with little fanfare. It was first proposed in 2008 by Milner Power and received approvals a few years later. For over a decade, Mine 14 has remained undeveloped — many forgot about it entirely.

Then in March 2022, Mine 14 was listed by the Government of Alberta as one of the four “advanced” projects allowed to proceed despite a moratorium on coal development in Alberta’s eastern slopes. Two of those projects, Grassy Mountain and Tent Mountain, have since been halted. A proposed expansion to the Vista coal mine near Hinton has been stalled by a federal review.

Mine 14, however, forged ahead. The same day the Alberta government announced the exemption, Valory Resources met with town councillors of the Municipal District of Greenview to pitch a business proposal for Mine 14. (Tyler Olsen, the reeve for the Municipal District of Greenview, declined an interview about Mine 14 and Valory Resources did not respond to requests for an interview.) The company’s initial plan had mining operations beginning by October of last year.

Hill, along with the members of the Saddle Club board, only learned the project was moving forward last June. That month, the group received a letter from Valory Resources subsidiary Summit Coal Inc., informing them that they’d be building a 6.5-kilometre access road through a corner of their lease. Alarmed, the group wrote back to Summit Coal stating they did not consent to Mine 14, and requesting a stakeholder consultation meeting by late August. 

They never heard back.

Earlier this year, the saddle club received a second letter stating, “Summit Coal has now decided to proceed with this project.” Shocked, Hill phoned the company and told them about the letter the Saddle Club had sent months earlier. According to Hill, after initially saying they “couldn’t find it,” a representative found the letter and assured Hill it would get “to the right department.”

“That’s the last I heard of that,” Hill says. 

Local Indigenous groups requested federal review of proposed coal mine

The perceived lack of information around Mine 14 has Hill and other members of the Saddle Club worried. Tina Tippe is one of them. Tippe, a retired X-ray technologist and Grande Cache resident since 1977, says the project will be visible from town, and trucks carrying coal will likely spread coal dust through the region.

Hill shares that concern. He knows well how big an impact the dust can have. He used to work at another local coal mine, the Grande Cache mine, currently owned by CST Coal Inc., which has experienced enormous instability since it opened in 1969. “All of our trucks we brought in back and forth were full of dust and coal falling off of them,” Hill says. “I don’t know how they’re going to control that.”

The Aseniwuche Winewak Nation is also concerned about coal dust, which has been linked to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), including bronchitis and emphysema, among other issues. Last summer, the Nation filed a petition for review of Mine 14 under the federal Impact Assessment Act, citing health concerns of coal dust, water contamination, potential effects on fish and species at risk and disruption of land-based, traditional practices of Indigenous Peoples. 

A month later, four more nations — the Emineskin Cree Nation, Cadotte Lake Métis Nation, Duncan’s First Nation and Whitefish Lake First Nation #128 — followed suit, each requesting a federal review.

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault denied the requests for the review of Mine 14 late last year, saying consultation with Indigenous Peoples would be taken care of through other channels, like provincial legislation and other federal approvals.

For its part, the company behind Mine 14 says it intends to engage and consult Indigenous communities “for mutual benefit including jobs, contracts and direct ownership through investment.”

Aseniwuche Winewak Nation isn’t convinced the mine is to its benefit.

“Do we want mining as a community? Do we want to see this mine developed the way it’s proposed? My answer is no,” David MacPhee, president of the Nation, says. “Our experience with mines … has been very harsh to our community.”

‘We’d prefer to see no coal mines operating’: Aseniwuche Winewak Nation

Members of the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation identify as Cree, Stoney, Iroquois, Beaver, Shuswap and Saulteaux. “We are not Treaty,” MacPhee says. “When Treaty 8 was signed to the north of us in 1899, we were never included.” In 1907, the Aseniwuche Winewak were evicted from Jasper National Park and relocated to the territory to the north. Without Treaty Rights, the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation has historically lacked access to services and consultation processes with government and industry.

When the town of Grande Cache was built in the 1960s, life changed drastically for the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation. Initially, MacPhee says, they weren’t consulted on development projects and sacred burial sites were lost. “Our community was not acknowledged as a community,” MacPhee says. 

The Aseniwuche Winewak Nation was first formally consulted on Mine 14 in 2009 by Maxim Power. While the Nation supported the project at the time, MacPhee says those consultations are now 14 years old and the project has since changed ownership.

“In our heart of hearts, we’ve always said, ‘we’d prefer to see no coal mines operating,’ ” he says, adding coal mining has long disrupted traditional ways of life for Indigenous people. 

He points to the cost of cumulative effects of resource development on their traditional territories due to logging, oil and gas, and coal mining.

“People trap and hunt. People gather medicines. People go there for mental health. People go there to teach to pass on their traditions. People go there to pray,” MacPhee says. 

“In terms of disruption, yes, there is a definite disruption,” he says. “Some of the mining projects we have seen to date, that are potentially 50 years old, have never been reclaimed yet.” 

New Grande Cache coal mine located in area important for at-risk caribou, fish and grizzly bears

Mine 14’s lease is home to diverse species, including Canada lynx, wolverine, mountain goats and sheep, and at-risk fish and grizzly bears. Adjacent to the proposed mine is caribou habitat, a threatened species in Alberta, and protected under the federal Species At Risk Act.

“This is an area of steep slopes, sensitive and rich wildlife populations that already have been feeling the effects of all the industrial impacts in the area,” Carolyn Campbell, conservation director of the Alberta Wilderness Association, says. “It’s very concerning that there’s momentum for yet another coal mine.”

Mine 14 also straddles the boundary of two caribou management subregions in Alberta: the Upper Smoky and the Berland. The Alberta government committed to releasing plans for these areas to manage and limit the cumulative impacts on caribou, and other species, including grizzlies and at-risk fish, but one of these plans is now months overdue.

“This was one of the mines that was allowed to proceed when it seems like this should have been paused while those important overarching cumulative effects decisions were made,” Campbell says.

The company behind Mine 14 says the project will have a limited impact on the environment, citing its use of existing infrastructure like a coal processing plant and railways, its underground operations and its intention to recycle water and materials “where practical.”

She’s also concerned about the implications of coal wastewater given two recent incidents from CST Coal’s mine site near Grande Cache. In late 2022, approximately 107,000 litres of coal washwater was released from its containment area, followed by a second release in early March of 1.1 million litres into the Smoky River. Selenium affluent is highly toxic and has the potential to cause deformities and reproductive failures in fish. 

Valory Resources says the Mine 14 project doesn’t pose any risk for selenium leaching, as it’s an underground mine as opposed to an open-pit or surface mine, and “mine water will not be released into the natural drainage courses.”

A spokesperson for the Alberta Energy Regulator told The Narwhal they were unable to provide further details as to the cause of the spills, but added the regulator will “continue to ensure the company is meeting all public safety and environmental requirements to respond to the incidents.”

But environmental groups and concerned citizens, including Desrochers and the Saddle Club, are not convinced.

“We don’t know enough about what caused those releases,” Campbell says. “The Alberta Energy Regulator investigation is still going on. But these accidents and spills keep happening, and there’s not enough transparency about [the regulator’s] inspection and audit results.”

Grande Cache ‘pushing for long-term sustainable tourism industry’

Like any new mine, there is the potential for economic benefits. And the proponents of Mine 14 say the project has other benefits, too. Since the mine will produce metallurgical coal for steelmaking, the company bills it as “necessary to achieve Canada’s goals of making the clean energy transition and developing a new, green economy,” noting steel is necessary for clean energy infrastructure like wind turbines. 

But the future of coal in steelmaking is up for debate and local benefits of the mine remain unclear. The company has said the mine will bring 600 direct and indirect jobs to the community and provide money through royalty payments, taxes and other avenues.

The Grande Cache Chamber of Commerce couldn’t comment on the potential economic benefits of Mine 14. “The Chamber itself doesn’t really have much information about the mine,” Rick Bambrick, president of the Chamber of Commerce, says. 

“If and when they start up, they’re going to have a facility for 400 people to do the construction. We’re sort of waiting for the [municipal district] to announce that they’ve picked a place for these construction workers to operate from,” Bambrick says.

The idea of a worker’s camp has some residents, including Hall and Tippe of the Saddle Club, concerned. “There’s a possibility that they’re going to bring in transient workers from out of town, out of country, who will do their seven-day shifts, then go home,” Tippe says. In its submission to the federal government, the company behind Mine 14 says it will ensure “local suppliers, contractors and job-seekers are supported and prioritized,” but not everyone is convinced.

“With Mine 14, the [company] has no intention of bringing in long-term residents, or people that are going to buy homes,” Desrochers says. “Hotel owners will maybe see a little increased business at the beginning. But in the long term? No, it’s not going to be there.” 

He’s tired of the long-standing narrative of Grande Cache being a one-resource town that depends solely on coal production. “We have other industry here. We have a thriving forest. We have oil and gas. The community has been pushing for a long-term sustainable tourism industry,” Desrochers says. 

“Every time the mine north of us is closed, everybody thinks that the lights are going to turn off in Grande Cache. But people still live here, whether that mine is running or not.”

Updated on May 25, 2023, at 7:15 p.m. MT: This article was updated to remove a previous statment that Mine 14 has changed owners three times.

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Editor’s note: Fires burning in national parks are under the jurisdiction of Parks Canada, an agency of the federal government. Parks Canada employs its own fire crews to fight fires in national parks. This article applies to fires burning on land under provincial jurisdiction. (Added on July 25, 2024)

On May 4, Alberta’s boreal forest and prairie grasslands were bone-dry: a match box waiting to be struck. Temperatures soared into the high 20s, well above seasonal averages. The relative humidity plunged below 15 per cent, creating what wildfire scientists call “cross-over conditions” and the potential for extreme fire behaviour. 

Over the next three days, more than 100 wildfires ignited throughout Alberta, including 31 wildfires categorized as “out of control,” and forced the evacuation of nearly 30,000 people.

One lookout observer in Alberta’s boreal forest watched a storm system developing in the distance from their fire tower. Lookouts are the first line of defence in detecting wildfires in Alberta, responsible for reporting fires, ideally at the size of 0.01 hectares, or one-tenth of a football field. Like others who spoke with The Narwhal for this story, this individual asked not to be named, or have their gender identified, as they are not authorized to speak publicly.

They spotted the narrow smoke column in skies already thick with smoke from other fires, reported the wildfire over the two-way radio and watched over the next several hours as winds, gusting to 50 kilometres an hour, fuelled the small fire into a raging wall of flames. 

“It was the most terrifying day of my life,” they say. The wildfire burned for several hours before it was investigated and battled because firefighting crews were forced to triage on a number of fires that had started simultaneously. In that time, they could do nothing but watch as the fire took off, unable to prevent the devastating spread of yet another out-of-control wildfire — many of which have threatened homes and communities this past week.

Their experience was not unique. The teams tasked with preventing and fighting wildfires across Alberta have been overwhelmingly unprepared for this year’s wildfires, a direct result of the United Conservative Party’s (UCP) efforts to dismantle and defund Alberta Wildfire, the province’s wildfire prevention and firefighting response unit. 

Since 2019, the UCP government has gutted Albertan firefighters and response teams — and their ability to efficiently respond to and manage wildfires in the province.

“Maybe we couldn’t have prevented the starts and rate of spread, but we’re running at a 50 per cent capacity to contain these wildfires,” says a firefighting crew leader who’s currently working on the frontlines of one of the wildfires burning out of control. “We don’t have enough resources, period.”

He says his crew requested air tankers and structural protection crews, but received no support. Across the province, districts were scrambling to designate shoestring resources to multi-fire events. Alberta Wildfire was forced to triage and some wildfires went unmanaged, he says.

“You have to be proactive in order to be prepared,” the crew leader says, “And [the government] hasn’t been proactive for the past four years.”

‘We all knew this was going to happen’

This is not an unprecedented disaster in Alberta’s recent history.

For over a decade, nearly identical spring conditions have fuelled catastrophic wildfires, including the Flat Top complex which burnt over part of Slave Lake in 2011, the Horse River wildfire which prompted the evacuation of the city of Fort McMurray in 2016 and the Chuckegg and McMillan wildfires which threatened multiple communities in northern Alberta in 2019.

What is unprecedented is the way the government has cut back the department tasked with dealing with exactly these sorts of disasters.

The UCP government has “whittled away a world-class firefighting response program,” says another veteran lookout observer with over a decade of experience under their belt. “Alberta Wildfire used to be looked to by other provinces for our exceptional [wildfire] program.”

Shortly after being elected to office in 2019, the UCP government shut down 26 active fire towers across Alberta, more than one-fifth of detection coverage in the province. Lookouts are responsible for a 40-kilometre radius of forest. Early detection and investigation of wildfires enables firefighters to put suppression plans in place before wildfires escalate into large-scale catastrophes.

In an emailed response to questions, Leanne Niblock, a spokesperson for Alberta Forestry, Parks and Tourism, said the government is “committed to doing everything we can to fight these fires, and keep Albertans and their property and homes safe” and added Alberta’s 2023 budget included approximately $100 million in base funding for wildfire management and another $1.5 billion in a contingency fund for emergencies and natural disasters.

But closures of fire towers has resulted in vast areas of forest and grassland being unmonitored by lookouts. “There are huge gaps in the forest,” says another lookout observer with nearly twenty years experience working on towers. “Our areas of responsibility have doubled. The problem isn’t the people working to manage the wildfires. It’s politics,” she says.

Aerial patrols to detect wildfires burning out of control are also less frequent, according to one lookout. “[Last week] there was dry lightning where towers are closed and there were hardly any helicopter patrols,” they say. “We all knew this was going to happen.” 

Cuts to Alberta wildfire fighting include rappel attack program, pay and staff

In November 2019, the UCP cut funding for the Rappel Attack Program (RAP), a firefighting program in Alberta that ran for nearly forty years, training crews to rappel from helicopters into inaccessible locations to fight fires. 

“The decision to eliminate Alberta Wildfire’s rappel program was made after careful consideration of the specific advantages provided by the rappel crews, the types of wildfires Alberta has experienced in the past and those we expect to experience in the future,” Niblock, the government spokesperson, said in an email. She added the crews were used for initial attack on less than two per cent of Alberta’s wildfires.

In 2021, further cuts to Alberta Wildfire forced managers to lay off permanent staff at the district level, including wildfire rangers and information officers, who were responsible for educating and informing regional communities about the risks and threats of wildfires. 

“To date, some regions remain without a ranger to manage firefighters,” says a firefighter based in the boreal forest. Wildfire rangers are now burdened with the task of managing multiple portfolios beyond their own.

Even more alarming in 2022, says a wildfire ranger and former firefighter with more than fifteen years of cumulative experience working in Alberta, was a 10 per cent cut to the seasons of wildfire personnel, resulting in later contractual start dates and earlier end dates. These cuts have meant firefighters, radio dispatchers, lookout observers, support logistics staff and other critical personnel are still in training when Alberta is vulnerable to experiencing the largest, most catastrophic wildfires.

“The fire hazard has increased to be earlier in the spring and later in the fall, and that is precisely when they have cut tower seasons,” says a veteran lookout observer, adding that in twenty seasons, she’s never experienced a year like this one. 

“They got away with it in previous seasons because the weather was cooler and wetter. But the conditions have changed drastically. We are a skeleton crew out here.”

Harold Larson worked as a wildland firefighter and crew leader in Alberta for fourteen years, and has twenty years of experience working on more than 300 wildfires in his career in Alberta, British Columbia and Australia.

He recalls working on a wildfire in the vicinity of the Flat Top wildfire in May 2011, which burnt through one third of the town of Slave Lake, destroying over 370 properties. The fire was considered one of the most damaging and costly wildfires in Alberta’s history. 

Larson points to the Flat Top Wildfire Complex Review, a document produced by Alberta Wildfire in 2012, which recommended the government hire additional firefighters, wildfire rangers and personnel to be best prepared to manage large-scale wildfires. “Those ranger positions created by the Flat Top review were cut last year,” he says. He became one of the first unit crew leaders in the province, following these recommendations, managing a team of 20 firefighters specialized in sustained action on large-scale wildfires. 

But Larson left Alberta Wildfire after the 2018 season. “I saw that ship was sinking,” he says. Firefighter retention has been a huge issue in Alberta’s ability to effectively manage wildfires, he says, particularly since the UCP government has cut back overtime pay and seasonal contracts.

Firefighters in Alberta lack access to full-time, year-round employment, benefits, pensions and even sick days. “The key to staying long term in Alberta as a firefighter is sacrifice,” Larson says. “Sacrificing relationships, income, benefits and even the body.”

High Alberta wildfire fighter turnover can mean dangerously inexperienced crews

Riley Moskaluk worked with Alberta Wildfire as a firefighter on a unit crew from 2016 to 2021. “For seasonal firefighters, we need to make [our income] in five to six months,” Moskaluk says. The cuts by the UCP government have resulted in an exodus of experienced firefighters leaving Alberta to pursue careers in B.C. or with Parks Canada, he says. 

“In my 2016 year, our crew only had four rookies out of 20 people,” Moskaluk says. “By the time I left after 2021, the majority of the crew members only had about three seasons of experience. Turnover was rampant across the province.”

Experience is critically important on the fire line, Larson says. “It can be dangerous having an inexperienced crew — and ineffective in terms of fire management.”

“The government demonstrated zero interest in fixing their crew-retention issues,” Moskaluk says. “We often brought this up during fire debriefs and year-end reviews, with leaders bringing up what people wanted to make the job sustainable for the long-term and nothing happened.”

A wildfire ranger, currently employed with Alberta Wildfire, agrees. 

“Some districts have seen as high as 60 percent turnover of firefighters in 2023,” he says. “We can’t recruit because we don’t have any job openings. Seasonal firefighters who are hoping to turn permanent can’t get a job — and leave.”

As a result of cuts and poor retention of firefighters, many of this season’s crew leaders are struggling with inexperience on the frontlines of large-scale wildfires. “Our program has lost a lot of experience,” says a leader who is running a crew with more first-years than experienced returnees. 

For many wildfire personnel, the past week has been nothing short of devastating, witnessing wildfires take off and threaten communities, knowing there are fewer resources than in previous seasons to call on for support.

“The firefighters, dispatchers, rangers and all of the frontline workers are doing amazing work,” says the lookout observer who watched the fire ignite with no support for hours on end, who continues to stay vigilant in their tower, scanning the horizon for new ignitions. 

“The blame for the present situation should be put on the politicians who made the policy decisions to make cuts to the program.”

Updated on May 10, 2023, at 4:44 p.m. MT to include statements from the Government of Alberta received shortly after publication time. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.