Using night-vision goggles and thermal cameras, believers in Bigfoot traverse North American forests under the cover of darkness, as the large ape-like creature is believed to be nocturnal. Some Bigfoot trackers use plaster kits to make casts of suspected footprints; they record first-hand sightings and mysterious knocking sounds in detailed online databases, much like birders document observations on eBird.

On Oct. 10, about 50 of these believers — many avid outdoors-people who also spend their time camping, hunting and trapping — gathered at a church in North Bay, Ont., to discuss their experiences looking for Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch. It was a good turnout for a small northern city on Thanksgiving weekend. The energy was lively but focused and, at times, even emotional. 

Some were sharing their stories for the first time; this felt like a safe space to discuss their beliefs, one person said, as others agreed that they felt likely to be ridiculed elsewhere. Creating a welcoming environment was the goal of the conference’s organizer, Andrew MacKellar, who has searched for the creature for nearly 15 years, and is a well-known “sqautcher,” or Bigfoot investigator.

“Most humans do find things fascinating that they don’t fully understand,” MacKellar told The Narwhal after the event, the first of its kind in North Bay. “[Recently] there seemed to be, around the Great Lakes, a spike of sightings or encounters with people, even compared to usual. So I just wanted to draw that out for the North Bay area, and to see if that was the case.”

Research from University of British Columbia found that around 10 per cent of Canadians believe in Sasquatch. Some of those believers, like MacKellar, collect detailed data to support their theories, and thousands of reports have been uploaded to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

And their data, believe it or not, is being put to use by University of Montreal ecologist and data scientist Timothée Poisot. From the documented sightings of cryptids — creatures anecdotally sighted but lacking scientific proof — he is testing how accurately computer models are predicting the impacts of climate change on scientifically accepted plants and animals.

Part of the reason he chose Bigfoot is the abundance of data.

“We have, collectively, more information about Bigfoot sightings than we have about maybe 90 per cent of mammals in North America,” Poisot said.

Bigfoot’s contribution to science

Poisot studies how machine learning tools can help solve complicated ecological problems; he’s been working on improving computer models that predict where species might live in the changing climate. The models use data — like where a certain animal has been spotted, weather conditions of those places and how the climate might change there — to make these predictions for the future. 

The problem is these models aren’t always great at communicating how certain they are about a prediction. For example, if we don’t understand a particular climate well, the resulting model’s predictions for that area might be less accurate. This is an issue when policymakers or researchers use those predictions for things like early detection of invasive species or making expensive decisions to protect endangered animals.

To address this problem, Poisot looked to a statistical technique called conformal prediction, which helps scientists measure uncertainty in computer-generated biodiversity predictions. 

That’s where Bigfoot comes in. 

Poisot fed a computer model data from thousands of reported Bigfoot sightings, along with environmental data about the area where they occurred. The model learned patterns in these observations, predicting where Bigfoot might live as the surrounding environment changes. Then, Poisot applied conformal prediction, revealing where the model could confidently predict Bigfoot’s supposed presence or absence, and where it couldn’t. 

“I wanted to figure out a way to get a model to tell you ‘I don’t know’ when it’s about to make a prediction about whether species should be here or not,” Poisot said. “The models don’t know and don’t care whether the species that we’re working on actually exists or not. As soon as you feed them numbers, they’re going to give you numbers.”

The model is identifying relationships between the climate conditions and the reported sightings, not determining whether those sightings are real. 

“Assume Bigfoot exists,” Poisot said. “We’re going to talk about the models, the behaviour and the statistics and the predictions, and that gets easier to move the conversation to a place where you can make the methodology better by not thinking too much about the biology.”

This makes Bigfoot a useful test case for a technique that can later be applied to other species.

What Poisot found using data from Sasquatch enthusiasts surprised even him: the areas where the climate is expected to change the most were not necessarily areas where the model’s uncertainty increased. The models were most uncertain in harder-to-reach areas with fewer observations.

In the future, Poisot told The Narwhal, scientists will need more information in remote areas, far from cities and roads, to be able to make accurate predictions about the state of biodiversity in a changing climate.

“You go to the areas where you are writing a lot of question marks because you don’t really know what’s going to happen here,” Poisot said. “The model is not certain about its outcome, so that should be a priority for sampling.”

Bigfoot’s origin and modern day stories

The legend of Bigfoot has centuries of history rooted in Indigenous storytelling. The name Sasquatch is believed to come from the Halq’eméylem word Sasq’ets meaning “wild man” or “hairy man,” used by the Stó:lō people, a Coast Salish First Nation in what’s now called British Columbia.  

For Thomas Sewid, a Kwakwaka’wakw and Cree Sasquatch investigator who guides expeditions in British Columbia and Washington, the subject has been on his mind from his earliest memories. Especially D’sonoqua — Sasquatch’s female companion in Kwakwaka’wakw tradition — thanks to stories from his father.

“He said, ‘Tommy, you behave yourself. D’sonoqua is always watching you,’” Sewid said. Growing up on Vancouver Island, he was told if he didn’t behave, do his chores or listen to his Elders, “she can come at night and reach that big hairy arm into where you’re sleeping and grab you … she’s going to boil you up and eat you.” 

“That’s when I became interested in Sasquatch,” Sewid said. “The greatest teaching Sasquatch can share with us is about respect.”

Several of the attendees at the North Bay event from nearby Nipissing First Nation and other Indigenous communities, and agreed with Sewid that many distinct Indigenous cultures  across North America have their own beliefs and understandings about the creature.

When citizen scientists across Canada collect data, whether on Bigfoot or using more conventional apps like iNaturalist and eBird, Poisot said it can be used to help inform policy and conservation decisions, or the tracking of invasive species and zoonotic disease. So, despite a recurring theme of distrust toward “mainstream science” in speeches at the North Bay conference, the interests of “squatchers” and scientists may actually be complementary. 

“The effort of documenting biodiversity is something that is done primarily by amateur scientists and members of the public,” Poisot said. “It’s really important. Most of what we know about biodiversity was not collected by researchers … and so, the more people contribute observations, the more likely we are to detect trends at the location where they are important.”

While they’re certainly approaching their interest in Bigfoot from different angles, there is one thing MacKellar and Poisot agree on: the value of getting out to collect more environmental data.

“Go out and try and prove their existence, or … go out to disprove them. Either way, you go out for a hike outside in the wilderness. I mean, what side really loses, right?” MacKellar said.

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.

Hundreds of rats across the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, scurry into a dark, abandoned building in season three of the science fiction series, Stranger Things. When the horde reaches the basement, they stop and squeal as they burst into a writhing sludge of fur, bones and blood. It’s an omen of danger to come.

This scene sticks out to veterinary pathologist and epidemiologist Chelsea Himsworth. It’s an example of how rats have become entrenched as a symbol of evil. 

Rats have become the “fall guy,” Himsworth says: a species that’s taken the brunt and the blame for underlying issues. She took an interest in the long-tailed rodent back in 2010, when she learned there was little known about rat ecology or the risks they pose to city dwellers today. So she started the Vancouver Rat Project with the goal of understanding more.

The rat problem “is going to get worse,” Himsworth warns. “Our cities are enormous and rats rely on humans for resources. The more humans, the more resources, the more rats you will have.” 

In response, many cities have declared a “war on rats.” Alberta’s concerted campaign to control rats started in the 1950s, and today the province claims to be rat-free. (A dead rat was found in Alberta last month.) Common tactics include traps, poisons, gases or other technologies that promise to eradicate rats. Those might have worked when smaller populations were spread across large areas. But today, Himsworth says, this approach is a losing one. 

Himsworth is also a clinical associate professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and the B.C. regional director for the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative.

The Narwhal asked her to explain why we’re doomed to lose this war, what cities should be doing instead — and if we really need to be afraid of rats. (We also asked if rat kings are real. No spoilers!)

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

News stories report rankings of Canada’s rattiest cities, and I’ve read that warming temperatures will spur on even more rat population growth. Are rats about to take over?

There’s not really any empirical evidence to say how many rats there are or the degree to which the rat problem is increasing. No one’s been able to figure out a good way to count rats across the landscape. 

When you look at the impact of climate change, there have been some that have hypothesized that just strict warming will stimulate increases in rat populations because it will do things like prolong the breeding season or prevent freezing cycles that might reduce food sources for rats. I don’t think there has been great evidence to show that that’s the case. I mean, rats exist on every continent except Antarctica, and they exist in places that are bitterly cold.

Instead, I hypothesize that climate change will impact rat populations in terms of the societal chaos that it causes. Rats really capitalize on chaos. For example, natural disasters like floods that disrupt garbage collection and waste management and allow the accumulation of waste that will serve as resources for rats.  

You’ve been researching rats for over a decade with the Vancouver Rat Project. What are the key things that you’ve learned?

We were looking at how different cities approach rat management, with the belief that someone must have figured this out. But unfortunately, rather than finding the solution, we were able to identify a very entrenched problem, which was really a barrier to success, almost globally. 

I call the way we approach rats and rat management the ‘war on rats mentality.’ This is the idea that the way to deal with rats is to kill as many as you can wherever you find them, which has quite a few parallels to the war on drugs. The way we will deal with drugs is by taking as many drugs off the street, making drugs illegal. We’re just going to try and get rid of this entity or substance that we perceive as being harmful. And now we realize that ‘war on rats’ mentality wasn’t working for two key reasons. 

One, winning a war requires an inordinate amount of resources, both in terms of cash and labour. With all of the issues facing society today, no program is ever going to be funded sufficiently to win the war on rats or to really eliminate or substantially reduce rats across the landscape. 

The second is that the ‘war on rats’ mentality doesn’t take into account the complexity of the rat problem. We kind of have a good idea about how to get rid of rats on a property. A city is just a bunch of properties side by side. So if we just do the same thing many times, then we’ll be successful across the city. But it doesn’t take into account the complexity that comes with scaling. 

We need to take a more nuanced and systems-based view of rats in order to start addressing the problem. 

What makes it so complex?

The number of rats, or even the rats themselves, are not the main problem.

If I told you there were rats on the moon, you probably wouldn’t be as concerned as if I told you there were rats in your kitchen. So really, the harm occurs at this interface between rats and people. Sometimes it’s a mental health impact, sometimes it’s a physical health impact, sometimes it’s damage to your vehicle. 

You can look to the ‘war on drugs’ and how one of the different approaches was harm reduction. Rather than just getting rid of all the drugs, can we find ways to reduce the harms that drugs cause? And so we’re trying to borrow some of that thinking when it comes to rats. Rather than just indiscriminate removal of rats from the landscape, can we actually look at where harms are occurring and have more targeted interventions. That may include reducing the number of rats, but may be actually more focused on the harm.  

What does a ‘harm reduction’ approach look like when dealing with rats?

We did a study looking at the mental health impacts of rats on people living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This is a really, really marginalized community. We found that exposure to rats caused a variety of negative psychological impacts. If you had rats in your living space, then people were losing sleep. They were feeling anxious. 

There was also a more powerful undercurrent where rats were really symbolic of the lack of an individual’s control over their living environment. There’s a feeling of disempowerment and neglect by the municipal government and overall poor environmental health.

Just going into these single-room-occupancy hotels, killing all the rats and leaving them as they are is ultimately not going to solve the broader public health issue, which has to do with the living environment. 

In that case, it could look like working with the city and looking at alternative approaches like improving bylaws that enshrine the right of tenants to a healthy living environment. Improving the overall upkeep, hygiene and waste management. 

Those actions will have a byproduct of reducing the number of rats, but will create a healthier living space for these individuals beyond what would have been achieved by just killing the rats.

What are the underlying problems rats can help illuminate?  

When you see a rat problem, the first question to ask is: What are humans doing that is providing resources allowing rats to exist in that space? 

Maybe it’s having buildings that are made in a way that have opportunities for rats to invade, or the frequency of garbage collection, or the design of garbage bins, or how garbage is used or the way we design green spaces. 

Can we invest in responses that will address the rat problem, but also make the overall urban ecosystem healthier and more resilient? 

Could we provide homeowner grants that would both make homes more energy efficient and make them refractory to invasion by rodents? 

Another program I like is the Urban Gleaners. We have urban fruit trees and when that fruit falls, it serves as a food source for rats. But wasted fruit is also wasted food. Rather than putting rat traps around these fruit trees, could we actually take that same amount of money and get people to harvest the fruit? To me, those sorts of approaches are ultimately more fiscally responsible and sustainable than reverting to the ‘war on rats’ mentality.

How do you actually implement a rat strategy focused on harm reduction?

We’re working on creating new ways to measure the rat problem that combine the relative number of rats with the harms rats are causing in specific circumstances.  

Ultimately, what we’re hoping to do is create what we call a rat risk index. This new metric helps cities figure out where they should prioritize their resources and interventions. It also gives a more meaningful metric of success. 

Let’s say, we’ve invested a lot of money in making rat-proof garbage cans. Are there less rats after the garbage can intervention than before? It’s trying to figure out ways we can create rat estimates in a way that are meaningful for prioritizing intervention and evaluating success. 

A rat infestation in an abandoned house is probably not as harmful as a rat infestation in an airplane hangar, because the potential for harm of rats damaging aircraft is much greater than rats damaging an abandoned building.

If I have a limited number of resources, I want to address the rats in the airplane hangar first. You can apply that across a broad range of scenarios. 

What are the benefits of rats?

This is a tough question to answer as there has not been much research on the benefits of rats compared to the harms. It has been postulated that rats may serve as a food source for native predators, although this might actually be a harm if those rats have been exposed to rodenticides, which can then poison anything that eats them. They may also play a role in soil turnover, seed dispersal and removing waste from the landscape.

What’s your go-to, fun fact about rats? Maybe your icebreaker at a party?

Rats in the wild only live for a year. Why don’t we see dead rats everywhere?

We were looking at the livers of rats from Vancouver and we saw they all had this parasite called Capillaria hepatica. The only way for a rat to get infected is basically to eat another rat’s liver. So, rats, in the secrecy of their underground homes, are engaging in the practice of cannibalism. I guess a dead rat is another food source. You don’t want to have your dead friends and family accumulating in your house. It’s a way to sort of clean up. 

So they’re eating their dead.

That’s our suspicion. 

Okay. Wow. If this was your fun party fact, I would stay to keep talking to you. Can you make the case on behalf of the rat why we should not fear them this Halloween?

Rats have been our strange bedfellow since the dawn of civilization, and as such, we have a very complicated relationship with them. I understand the many ways in which we have been programmed to fear them. It makes sense, but ultimately that fear is hindering us having an effective and efficient response to our rat problems. 

So I would say engage in the cultural fear of rats for Halloween, but on Nov. 1, go back to recognizing they are species of wildlife that need to be managed and proceed as such.

My last question is: are rat kings real? 

That is a holy grail for a rat researcher. I think our best titled paper ever was called, “The Secret Life of the City Rats”, because it’s astonishing that although they exist beneath our feet, their goings on are still a mystery to us. Whether they all get stuck together by their tails is another mystery to add to the lore.

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.

Elijah Washington pushes through wet ferns and branches left by logging, crossing the mossy forest floor on Haida Gwaii. He kneels beside a massive western red cedar stump.

The cedar was felled decades ago during the industrial logging boom that cleared swaths of old-growth forest across the archipelago off British Columbia’s north coast, leaving a hollow, decaying stump.

Its top has since been trimmed with a chainsaw to fit a plywood sheet, capped with weather-resistant roofing material and covered with thick green moss collected from the surrounding woods. Near the base, an opening roughly the width of Washington’s safety helmet leads into a sheltered hollow lined with moss.

“You just want it to be small enough for a mother bear to move in,” Washington, a stewardship technician with the Haida Nation, said. “So it’s got to be just right, just like the Goldilocks, [the entrance] can’t be too big, can’t be too wide.”

The retrofitted stump is one of seven the Council of the Haida Nation had modified this summer to provide winter shelter for the coastal black bear, known in the Haida language as taan. Found nowhere else in the world, this subspecies of black bear is among the largest in North America. 

A bear’s winter den may bring to mind a rocky cave, but coastal black bears in B.C. rely heavily on large old-growth trees and the hollow logs and stumps they leave behind. Decades of logging have removed many of those shelters, however — and the younger trees growing in their place have yet to develop hollows large enough for bears, said Helen Davis, a wildlife biologist working with the Haida Nation to identify and restore bear dens.

Cubs are born weighing about a pound, with their eyes still closed. They need a dry, protected place where their mothers can nurse them through the winter, and they stay there for up to 100 days. “The only place where bears can have babies is in a den,” Davis said. “And so these dens are critical to population sustainability.”

The old trees bears need for shelter are also sought-after by the logging industry. B.C. has expanded protections and temporary logging pauses, but old-growth tree harvesting continues. In August, B.C.’s then-minister of forests Ravi Parmar said stopping it altogether would shut down the sector.

Davis has heard that argument for years. People repeatedly suggested making shelters from melted tires or culverts instead of leaving old-growth trees for bears.

“People would just sort of throw that out somewhat frequently and since nobody seems to want to conserve old growth for them, I was like, ‘Well, fine, then let’s see if we can build them,’ ” Davis said.

Now, the first-of-its-kind program could set a model for bear conservation worldwide. But in providing an alternative to simply protecting old-growth trees, some worry building dens gives an easy excuse for logging to continue without pause.

Lisa White, a councillor with the Old Massett Village Council, said the sight of plywood laid over old-growth stumps was difficult to bear. “I actually cried,” she said. The plywood roofs, she said, showed how deeply the land had been damaged: bears now needed people to help provide their shelter. 

White said Haida people had needed wood long before commercial logging. Thousands used it for homes, canoes, clothing and heat, yet the forests appeared virtually untouched to the first newcomers, she said. People selected individual trees, used them fully and left the surrounding forest standing, so animals could continue living there, including northern goshawks, which are at risk of disappearing from the islands. The Haida also were known to pull entire planks from trees without felling them, leaving the tree standing.

White worries about how well the second-growth forests surrounding the modified dens will hold up through winter. She has seen extensive blowdown in those stands and is concerned about placing shelters among trees vulnerable to the islands’ storms.

“It’s also the forest around them that needs to be strong,” she said.

Building bear dens

Sometimes, loggers discover a bear den only after cutting into it.

Davis, who has been studying coastal black bear dens since the early 1990s, recalled stories from loggers: “They cut into trees and a bear popped out — or worse, they cut into a bear.” 

Those accounts led to a three-year provincial government study with forestry company Canfor to investigate whether black bears needed large trees for dens.

Davis tracked radio-collared bears to roughly 65 dens; her field research confirmed that bears were almost entirely dependent on large, hollow old-growth trees and that second-growth forests left them with virtually no options.

At the time, despite the rate of loss of old-growth forest in the province, the research didn’t set off alarm bells. “I don’t think they thought they’d run out of old growth,” she said.

But building a den meant manually crafting what a living cedar takes centuries to create. As a cedar grows, fungi can slowly rot the wood at its centre, creating a hollow large enough for a bear while the tree remains alive. Forests managed for timber are often logged again before those chambers develop, so the new trees do not replace the dens lost when old-growth trees are cut.

Davis began working with Taan Forest, the Haida-owned forestry company in 2019, teaching staff to identify natural bear dens and convert suitable stumps into new ones. The company was already restoring streamside forests damaged by earlier logging and adding den restoration became a natural extension of that work, Jeff Mosher, its chief forester, said.

“Protecting bears is a priority, even if it means a lower dividend,” Mosher said. 

Taan Forest has since created six dens across the Mamin River, Survey Creek and Ghost Creek watersheds on Graham Island, in northern Haida Gwaii, Mosher said.

Mosher said bears usually took about a year to start using the shelters, though they checked out one new den almost immediately. Signs of use at other modified stumps encouraged Taan to build more. Bears used one of the dens through the winter and spring of 2023 and have returned annually since.

Those results also encouraged the nation to expand the effort, Washington said. His crew spent the summer searching previously logged forests for stumps with a hollow large enough for a bear and an entrance leading inside. Davis helped the council secure funding from the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation and spent a week in July teaching the crew to scout stumps, assess their suitability and turn them into dens using chainsaws, plywood and moss.

The crew is also trying to make the new shelters smell familiar. When the Haida crew comes across a bear that has died, they respectfully collect some of its hair to place in some of the modified dens, a trick Davis has tested elsewhere in the field with encouraging results.

By the end of October, the team plans to complete three more dens, bringing the total to 10 modified sites across Haida Gwaii ready for winter monitoring. The exact locations of the sites are being withheld to prevent exposing denning bears to hunters. 

Haida members remain concerned about black bears killed for their gallbladders, which contain bile sought for use in some traditional Asian medicines. B.C. bans possession of bear gallbladders or bile and prohibits their trade.

Washington said that while the nation’s presence on the land has helped protect bears from such hunting, the killings still occur. Haida members have reported seeing bears left dead on the side of the road with the paws cut off and gallbladder removed. 

What a stump cannot replace

Tracing his hand over a living western red cedar in a different part of the forest, Washington points to the distinct tool marks left by a traditional adze. Sometime in the early 1900s, he estimates, Haida ancestors cut into the tree to see if it could be used for a house pole. Finding rot at the core, they left it standing. Bears later widened the opening with their teeth and claws, turning the hollow into a natural den, its floor already lined with soft cedar bedding and green branches still growing above.

This den sits high in the tree, which is among the safest places for a female bear to raise cubs, Washington said. But his crew cannot recreate one at that height.

The modified dens also provide only temporary shelter. “They’re dead stumps and so they’re rotting and they won’t be there forever,” Davis said.

But shelter is only part of what a bear needs. Noel Bellis, an Old Massett member of the Haida Nation and a carver, grew up in a logging family and later worked in cedar forests. After visiting modified dens and attending workshops, he believes bears would move in but questions whether they would find enough food nearby. When bears come out in spring, they feed on green vegetation, including horsetail, fireweed shoots, salmonberry shoots and grasses.

But in the second-growth forests he has visited, deer have eaten much of the low-growing vegetation, leaving little for bears to forage. “It’s a moss lawn between trees,” he said.

Nearby salmon streams provide a seasonal source of food, but Bellis worries about what bears will find once those runs end each year. He wants den-building accompanied by efforts to restore food plants, using cages to protect young growth from deer until it grows beyond their reach.

“It will cost money, but that’s what the costs of clear-cutting are going to be,” he said.

Davis agrees bears need both shelter and feeding areas within their home ranges, where they generally remain to den. “They don’t just pick up and march off to some far-flung patch of remaining old growth and all den there together,” Davis said. 

Taan Forest is opening gaps in the canopy to encourage shrubs to grow, with at least two modified dens in or beside those restoration areas, Davis added. 

‘They’re our kin’

When Barney Edgars worked along Haida Gwaii’s creeks as a fisheries guardian, his crew carried air horns and flares but rarely needed them. The Elders who raised him had taught him to respect bears and speak to them when their paths crossed: “You go your way, I’ll go my way.”

“We were taught that everything we grew up with had a spirit,” said Edgars, a Haida Elder.

He recalled an older woman fishing for sockeye salmon when a bear and its cub approached her net. She threw the bear a fish and told it to leave the net alone. It never returned, he said.

Earlier generations ate bears and used the whole animal. His grandmother asked him to hunt one for her, though he never did. Travellers also followed bear trails through northern Haida Gwaii, finding routes between waterways on the journey from Massett toward Naden Harbour.

Neither Edgars nor his grandparents had heard of a bear attack on the islands, he said. But he worries that losing forests and feeding grounds will push bears into communities to rummage through garbage, increasing the possibility of conflict. 

Fears about conflict with bears are new to the Haida. “They used to sleep under the trees and there was never any fear of that. … I never learned any fear from my grandfather about bears,” White said.

Washington said Haida people want to know whether bears are healthy, have enough food and have places to live. Monitoring the new dens will help answer part of that question.

Cameras facing the den entrances will record activity year-round while their crew stay away from roughly October to April to avoid disturbing bears. After winter, the crew will review the footage to see which shelters bears explored and which they used as dens.

Hair naturally caught at den entrances can be tested for DNA to help show whether the same bears return year after year or others move in.

Even if bears take to the shelters, the crew does not plan to turn every suitable stump into a den. Once one is finished, workers move to another area, leaving space between shelters to limit competition for food and places to raise cubs.

“We don’t want to create a whole community out here,” he said. “We want to have like one bear that’s safe enough to come out here.”

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 Kaska territory, summer turns toward fall earlier than in much of British Columbia. Pressed up against the Yukon border, where the Alaska Highway cuts across the landscape, it’s a place where leaves start changing colour in August, and by September, snow already dusts the mountaintops. Seasonal change has always held meaning for Kaska, and this year autumn was supposed to mark something new: the final few steps in their effort to protect a massive swath of their territory, called Dene Kʼéh Kusān. 

But when BC NDP Leader David Eby called a snap election in late September, Kaska Nation leaders say it stalled that process. Now, they’re worried the election could derail, or at least slow, the entire multi-year planning process for the roughly three-million-hectare protected area. 

“We’re disappointed an election call has once again interrupted our discussions with the government as we had hoped to achieve a protection designation within the last political mandate,” Liard First Nation Chief Harlan Schilling said in an emailed statement.

Liard First Nation is one of four nations that make up the broader Kaska Nation, whose traditional territory stretches across northern British Columbia and southern Yukon. Two decades ago, the nation created the non-profit Dena Kayeh Institute to protect its language, culture and lands. In June 2019, the institute announced plans to create a massive Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area to protect one of the province’s largest intact wilderness areas. It is called Dene Kʼéh Kusān, which, translated from the Kaska language, means “always be there.”  

“Dene K’éh Kusān is a vision that includes all British Columbians. It will protect some of Canada’s most important wildlife habitat and create world-class opportunities for hunters, anglers, naturalists and backcountry recreationalists,” Schilling said.

In June 2024, the British Columbia government signed an agreement with the Kaska nations to undertake land-use planning in its territories. In the coming years, the ministry explained, the government, the nation and other stakeholders would sit down for a comprehensive land-use planning process that would formalize provincial protections for Dene Kʼéh Kusān. That process stalled a few months later when the province went to the polls in October 2024, but picked up again after the election. On July 2, 2026, the province issued a press release announcing public consultations on the new protected area. 

“This work shows what’s possible when we all come together to protect the places that matter most,” Tamara Davidson, then-minister of environment and parks, said at the time. 

That process was supposed to conclude this fall, with Schilling expecting to finalize protections for the area before the end of the year. Now, the election has stalled the process. He’s worried about the lasting impact the delay could have, especially since a temporary ban on mineral staking inside the area is set to expire in January.“The current pause on mineral staking in Dene K’éh Kusān is set to expire just three months after the election,” he said. 

Neither NDP nor Conservatives have pledged support for IPCAs during election

Since the election was called, polling shows the BC Conservatives with a narrow but consistent lead over the BC NDP. Projections from 338Canada point to a likely change in government, with the Conservatives currently expected to win the most seats. 

Tim Burkhart, director of landscape protection at the conservation group Yellowstone to Yukon, said in an emailed statement the next government will have “a generational opportunity” to protect the unique wilderness area, but added time is running out, given the scheduled expiry of the mineral tenure pause. “The window to act is closing,” he said. 

“The years of planning, broad stakeholder endorsement and public engagement are done, and there is consensus to secure this wild legacy forever,” Burkhart, whose group supports the Kaska project, said. 

“We want to ensure all parties know protecting this unique wilderness is important for British Columbians and Canadians,” Schilling said.

No major party directly addresses Dene Kʼéh Kusān in its platform, but the BC NDP has reaffirmed a commitment to meet the pledge to protect 30 per cent of B.C. lands and waters by 2030, known as 30-by-30, and “work with First Nations on this goal.” As of December 2025, 15.9 per cent of the province was protected areas, according to the federal government. Since Dene Kʼéh Kusān covers around four per cent of the province, it would go a long way toward closing the gap.

The BC Conservatives have made no specific promises or platform announcements on conservation in this election. They have promised to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which the previous government cited as part of the reason it entered land use planning with Kaska. And in May 2024, former BC Conservative leader John Rustad described the 30-by-30 conservation goal as “nonsense” and pledged to scrap it if he formed government. 

The Narwhal reached out to the BC Conservative and BC NDP candidates running in the riding of Bulkley-Stikine, where most of Dene Kʼéh Kusān would sit, but neither responded. The BC Green Party is not running a candidate in the riding. 

For now, Schilling and others working on protecting the region will have to wait until the votes are counted on Oct. 24 to figure out the path forward.“We’re hopeful the next government will see the importance of this initiative and bring it to completion,” Schilling said.

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.

Jessica Hutchinson, executive director of conservation group Redd Fish Restoration Society, remembers the long, restless night in December 2025 listening to the thrum of a rainstorm in Tofino, B.C. Lying in her bed, she hoped the culmination of years of planning, weeks of construction and eye-watering helicopter bills would hold. 

As Hutchinson lay awake, rain poured down from the steep hillsides surrounding Tranquil Creek like it normally did, sending a surge of water into the river below. But now the deluge had an obstruction: a tangled mass of around 50 trees, tufted like a giant bird’s nest and lodged into the riverbed, causing the flow to ricochet and swoop under and above. Pools and eddies had begun to form below the wooden mass of the river’s new intruder, also known as an engineered logjam, reflecting a years-long effort that is relatively uncommon in B.C.

Engineered logjams are large-scale interventions for places with large-scale problems. In Tranquil’s case, the watershed needed life support.

Redd Fish watershed restoration director Tom Balfour describes the approach as “open-heart surgery.” 

“You don’t do this to rivers that need a little help,” he says. “You do it when things are really desperate.”

Logged extensively between the 1960s and the 1990s, the valley soon became a funnel for sediment flowing down from the steep hills. The river weaving through it had become a highway of fast-moving water, and sand and gravel, threatening to bury or drag salmon eggs out to sea. By 2017, Chinook were on the verge of local extinction, while chum, coho and steelhead were in severe decline.

The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, whose territory encompasses Hiłsyaqƛis (the Nuu-chuh-nulth name for Tranquil Creek), identified the region as an urgent priority, and Redd Fish subsequently launched their multi-year quest to figure out how to help it heal.

“Tranquil’s got a special place in my heart,” Tatt Charlie, lead guardian for Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, says. Tla-o-qui-aht guardians are working with Redd Fish to restore the watershed. “It’s one of those amazing ecosystems where we could get almost all of our salmon spawning in that again and rejuvenate it for our people.”

The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation worked in partnership with Redd Fish to develop a long-term plan for Tranquil. It required learning about what went wrong, and then gradually bringing the missing pieces back. It wasn’t cheap or easy, but ten years into their journey, Hutchinson says it’s been worth it.

Tranquil Creek’s trajectory

“The dock is very slippery,” calls out Frank Witter as he steers the silver skiff up to the small wooden landing just outside the mouth of the Tranquil Creek inlet. Witter, Charlie and fellow Tla-o-qui-aht guardian Nathaniel Currie get ready to disembark.

The dock is remnant infrastructure from the watershed’s heavy logging days. So is the dusty sorting yard to our left, replete with metal loading skids angling into the ocean, as if the valley’s forests were still full of big trees to take away.

Hutchinson has come back from working on the riverbed to meet us, and we pile into one of Redd Fish’s company trucks. From the window, other signs of change soon follow: we pass a pile of pipes and metal planks near a recently decommissioned forest service road.

Witter, Redd Fish’s project manager, stops the truck as we reach a high point on the road, and we climb out to take a look. From here, the watershed’s history opens like a storybook. 

What appear to be white, fuzzy scars carved into the mountainside are actually landslides, Hutchinson tells me. These are the places where disturbance-loving alder trees have lodged themselves onto the scree slopes, their foliage still bare from the winter. 

After they lost the big conifer trees whose roots were anchors, the fine-grained sediment, gravel and jagged rocks that comprise the region’s hillsides started to fall. Logging roads made things worse, cutting holes in the hillside like a dispenser below a gumball machine. When Clayoquot Sound’s famous rainstorms bear down on the valley, they tend to pull the already-loose sand and rocks down with them. 

The valley bottom, too, had lost its defences. Once fortified by big, steadying trees like cedars and spruce, the flat-lying ground is now peppered with daintily rooted species like alder. Over time, the river got wider and flatter.

For salmon, this layered onslaught of sediment spells trouble. 

All five species of North American Pacific salmon have historically spawned in the Tranquil watershed, and for salmon, spawning is a miraculous event. It requires adult salmon to survive in the open ocean, replete with fishing nets, predators and pathogens, sometimes for up to around decade. If the salmon is fortunate enough to reach its elder years, it tracks the earth’s magnetic field and then draws on its keen sense of smell to return, sometimes over thousands of kilometres, to the same stream channel where it was born.

Under the right conditions, the salmon digs a nest beneath the gravel just deep enough for its eggs to stay covered during the river’s most turbulent months. If things go wrong, baby salmon can asphyxiate beneath a buildup of sand, or if the water moves too fast, they get washed out to sea. 

It wasn’t always like this, Charlie says, as he gestures to the mouth of the estuary below us. It was once the bustling village of Hiłsyaqƛis, one of many village sites in the territory, where members of the Tla-o-qui-aht came to fish and camp each year.

Back then, surrounded by an intact forest, the now-rushing Tranquil Creek consisted of meandering paths of water braiding together. For millennia, the Tla-o-qui-aht people helped keep it that way, using various techniques to keep the populations in balance: cultivating strong-rooted crabapple trees that helped mitigate erosion in the estuary, for example, and building rock weirs to count and manage how much salmon swam up to spawn.

“You would allow the strongest of the river to go up, enough fish to make sure every square inch of gravel is spawned,” Saya Masso, Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation’s natural resources manager, says. Once enough salmon had travelled up the river to support the forest and its animals, Masso says the community would then begin their own harvest. 

That stewardship was suppressed as Canada dispossessed the nation of its territory. 

Over a century later, the Tla-o-qui-aht partnered with Redd Fish to conduct a years-long investigation to determine the damage caused in the interim, piecing together Tranquil’s history of disturbance through historic photos and terrain assessments. Their research determined logging strongly contributed to the watershed’s downhill slide. They also discovered that the watershed was unlikely to heal on its own in time for salmon to benefit.

“It’s not on a healing trajectory,” Hutchinson says. “It’s actually unravelling and becoming worse through the years.”

Witter’s team worked to stabilize the landslides, creating terraces and staking willow trees, known for their hearty roots, to prevent further movement. Throughout the lower watershed, Redd Fish planted 120,000 trees and restored 100 hectares of young, replanted forests by thinning out trees to create light to help big ones grow. 

They also turned their attention to the river. 

“Rivers take annual presence to become productive,” Masso says. “Our plan is to get to a system of abundance.”

How logjams help salmon

Western science was slow to realize that wood and salmon need each other. 

Since at least the last Ice Age, salmon’s decomposing bodies have fed and plumped the big trees of the Pacific Northwest. Those trees, in turn, feed the river, depositing big logs that create the smorgasbord of habitat types and pools salmon require to survive. Logs and logjams act like sorting hats for gravel, distributing patches of coarse and fine gravel that suit different species’ needs.

“It quickly became apparent to me in studying the rivers of this region that wood was as important as sediment and water,” geomorphologist David Montgomery says. He was one of the early contributors to a growing scientific recognition of the relationship between wood and salmon in the 1990s. 

By then, much of the damage to these ancient Pacific rivers was done. Logging companies had clear-cut many watersheds, as they did in the Tranquil. Some fish biologists even encouraged wood removal from streams and rivers, thinking it would help fish travel upstream.

This antipathy to river debris had deep roots. Large-scale “log drives” in the late 1800s and early 1900s culled wood from the vast rivers, including in the Cowichan Valley, where people used explosives to clear off wood and other impediments. 

In B.C. and throughout the Pacific Northwest, government-funded restoration crews gradually began bringing wood back in the 1990s. Early interventions were often targeted to smaller streams where a single log or two could make a meaningful impact. But big rivers like Tranquil Creek’s mainstem require something sturdier.

A short walk downriver, one of Redd Fish’s many engineered logjams comes into view, knotted and gnarled with trees piled atop one another, holding firm like a fortress as water passes dutifully around its edges.

“Frank, have you seen it?” Hutchinson says, getting Witter’s attention. River debris is accumulating in the logjam, a natural addition to the engineered effort. “That’s not even us, that’s just wood piled up.”

This is the promise of a well-built logjam: it takes up a life of its own, collecting wood the river throws at it. Ideally, it becomes self-sustaining, forming forested islands in the river that contribute their own source of wood.

To match the ferocity of the Tranquil’s rainy season flows, Redd Fish had to craft logjams with around 50 trees piled atop and between each other, lasagna-style, staked in place with tall logs piled deep into the riverbed. 

“It basically is trying to mimic what an old growth tree would do if it rolled into the river with its giant root plate,” Hutchinson says. 

“It would maintain the force of the river.”

These human-made jams are not cheap, requiring heavy equipment to temporarily isolate a spot along the riverbed with pumps and sandbags, and helicopters to haul wood and logs up to 15 metres tall. They also require teams of engineers working closely with traditional knowledge holders, geomorphologists and other scientists to ensure the investment and design will hold up.

“It’s a team effort,” Montgomery says.

“All those gears have to sing. But when they do, I’ve seen really good results.”

‘They’ve done all their homework’

A shock of cold hits my legs as I venture forward into Tranquil Creek, in a channel that’s surprisingly deep and aquamarine blue. 

Last year’s work is already visible, marked by the first crop of young willow trees clawing their roots into the gravel, one of many impediments Redd Fish and Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Park Guardians have installed to slow the water down. 

Redd Fish staff are here, hammering the new generation of stakes into the dry riverbed. For a moment, conversation lulls, and there’s just the sound of running water and syncopated tapping, then the conversation starts up again.

So far the outcomes of their efforts appear hopeful, though Hutchinson avoids drawing early conclusions. On snorkel surveys through the river, one of the organization’s efforts to monitor the completed work, Redd Fish has found salmon taking refuge in the pools created by the logjams, including during heat waves. In the last two years, those pools have gotten deeper.

Though costly and time-consuming, Redd Fish’s monitoring efforts and years spent studying the watershed are critical, Jason Hwang says.

“It’s an excellent example of a project in the current day that is doing all the right things,” Hwang, who is the chief program officer and vice president of salmon at the Pacific Salmon Foundation, says. “They’ve done all their homework.”

But the Tranquil faces pressures old and new.

Climate change is heating Tranquil’s waters, and fish farms nearby pose additional risks for the Tranquil river’s returns, potentially spreading pathogens that can infect migrating wild salmon as they move past. At the same time, restoration efforts across the province face constant funding challenges as government priorities shift. 

This February, the mining company Imperial Metals received a permit to conduct extensive exploration work in the Tranquil watershed’s headwaters, in hopes of eventually opening a gold mine there. The Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation and representatives from the broader Tofino business community have voiced their opposition to the mine.

Many of Tranquil’s challenges remain, but for now, Hutchinson is glad to watch the river evolve on its own terms now that it’s had some help. She hopes it might be a model for what’s to come. 

“We haven’t restored a single entire watershed, top to bottom,” she says. 

“I was always hoping that Tranquil would be that watershed.”

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.

A few days before I visited Devil’s Glen, a resident who lives near the Ontario provincial park got into a yelling match with a rock climber. It allegedly ended with the climber’s hands around the neighbour’s neck, and a call to the police. Over the years, there have also been allegations of litter stuffed into caverns used by at-risk bats, of centenary cedar trees sawed off, of cars egged and climbing routes sabotaged along this stretch of Niagara Escarpment in Clearview, Ont.

For that neighbour, Adam Pearce, concerns started shortly after he moved into his home nearly two decades ago. He began noticing rock-climbing routes on the escarpment abutting his property — hundreds of bolts on bald stretches of cliff face are a giveaway. After a climber fell eight metres and had to be rescued by fire crews and paramedics, Pearce redoubled his efforts to understand how the sport was being monitored and regulated by Ontario Parks. 

He learned it largely wasn’t. For years, rock climbing was just an illicit pastime he and parks ecologists worried about. Then, the Government of Ontario officially sanctioned it. 

I met Adam and his wife, Holly, at their house in late August. Flower beds and bird houses decorated the property, along with dozens of animal skulls the couple has found. We entered a trail out the back of their yard, where they’ve erected “No Trespassing” signs. Within minutes, we were in the park, beginning our descent along a thin slice of trail overlooking a steep drop into the forest below. I couldn’t help but think about these contested grounds, and what would happen if the Pearces came across a climber.

I knew the possibility for tension was high. For months before visiting, I’d been speaking with sources — including climbers themselves, residents and scientists — while reading more than 1,200 pages of documents detailing conflicts between rock climbers, neighbours, environmental organizations and government agencies about this slice of escarpment. 

Several document packages made accessible through freedom of information legislation and either obtained by or shared with The Narwhal show a paper trail of a conflict that goes far beyond squabbles between neighbours and climbers. It shows how the actions — or inactions — of Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks have allowed the situation to deteriorate so dramatically.

The most recent chapter of this story dates back to May 2023, when Ontario Parks, which falls under the provincial Environment Ministry, put up signs closing several climbing routes in particularly ecologically sensitive areas in Devil’s Glen. That summer, climbers spoke with news outlets, posted on social media, wrote blogs to criticize the “unprecedented” decision and, according to one of the document packages, emailed Ontario Parks staff to say the move was taken in “bad faith.”

By August that year, the documents show, the office of then-environment minister David Piccini had ordered all the remaining signs be removed — even though at least one government biologist argued removing the signs had “no scientific rationale.” Climbing has continued indiscriminately in the park since. Ontario Parks did not respond to a request for comment or specific questions for this story.

Creating a rock-climbing route is a fairly invasive procedure. Climbers use folding saws, garden shears and crowbars to pry off loose and wiggly rocks. In a detailed guide to “Route Building 101,” the Association of West Kootenay Rock Climbers in B.C. reminds climbers: “Bushes and small trees that stick out of cracks need to have the roots removed to avoid future growth. Hacking away at small stumps with a hatchet might be necessary.” Other advice is to use an “old ice axe” to remove roots from the cracks. Climbers use battery-powered hammer drills to affix bolts to the cliff face to clip on to — permanent anchors to catch them if they fall. 

The Narwhal spoke with Mike Penney, volunteer president of the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, about these concerns. He’s been targeted for disputing Ontario Parks’ efforts to close some areas off to climbing, and shared photos of posters in which his likeness is shown arguing about the scientific evidence behind those closures. The posters were shared on social media and, he said, left on the vehicles of climbers. “I’m not denying that there is an impact to our natural environment through climbing,” he says. “But I would argue that climbing has the least amount of impact out of any recreational sport that you could think of.”

The Pearces don’t agree with that assessment. They say they’ve seen sensitive plants ripped from the cliff face, tree limbs sawed off and a path built with gravel chipped off the side of the cliffs to allow for easier access. With more than 140 rock-climbing routes across the approximately 700 metres of escarpment within the park, they became increasingly worried about the ecosystem — the hundreds of bats that pour from caves and cracks in the fall and cedars that sprout from cliff faces in ways that seem to defy nature.

It made them de facto vigilantes. “We watched them start vandalizing the cliff and we reported it numerous times to Ontario Parks,” Pearce said, as we looked up at a route. Climbers are fond of quirky monikers, giving routes names such as Mystery of a Lost History, Hyperion and Sympathy for the Devil.

“Holly and I would come across them and say, ‘What are you doing? What’s going on? You’re not allowed to do that.’ And they tell us to mind our own business,” Pearce said. 

In turn, the Pearces have been accused by climbers of destroying routes, stealing equipment and egging cars — all of which they deny.

“We never thought that it would affect us on a level that it has,” Pearce said, saying the couple has received calls in the middle of the night with people threatening to burn their house down. “[The Ontario Provincial Police] told me I should always have a body cam walking in the park.”

The Ontario Provincial Police said it was unable to comment on detailed questions from The Narwhal about the number of calls for service, investigative actions or whether charges have been laid.

Over the years, the Pearces have sent more than 100 emails and made dozens of phone calls to Ontario Parks. In response, in 2026, the provincial agency issued them a cease and desist letter for excessive emails, phone calls and social media posts, which the ministry said are “inappropriate and serve no constructive purpose.” The consequences of breaking the cease and desist order were not specified, but the Pearces have continued emailing park staff.

To the Pearces, the letter is another roadblock in understanding how recreation and conservation are being balanced in the park — if they are at all.

“We’re not trying to say there shouldn’t be rock climbing,” Pearce said. “All we are asking for is that Ontario Parks does their job.”

A month after the Pearces were told to cease and desist, the Parks department issued a new management plan explicitly permitting climbing in Devil’s Glen. The plan, issued under current Environment Minister Todd McCarthy, states climbing “will be secondary to the protection of the cliff’s important geological, biological and cultural heritage,” and that a “leave no trace ethic” will act as the guiding principle. 

The plan sets out broad protections for the park, but doesn’t include details on how they’ll be enforced. As a “non-operating” park, there is no permanent office or on-site superintendent at Devil’s Glen. The plan does say park authorities can put up fencing and signs to keep climbers off particularly sensitive areas — again.

Derek Morningstar said he first visited Devil’s Glen in 2024, after being invited by an Ontario Parks specialist to research bats in the area. “We could tell right away that that was a pretty important place for bats,” the ecologist and founder of the bat research company Myotistar said in an interview. “There’s a huge amount of bats flying along there during the swarming season, and there are crevices and caves we think that haven’t been explored. Certainly they’re swarming there and probably hibernating there as well — several endangered species.”

Six of the province’s eight bat species have been found in the area, many of which are currently listed as endangered thanks to widespread fungal disease and habitat loss. This includes the eastern small-footed myotis and little brown bats, whose numbers have declined significantly in recent years.

In an April 2025 email contained in one of the document packages, Morningstar wrote to Ron Gould, an ecologist and protected areas specialist at Ontario Parks also studying the Devil Glen’s ecosystem. He shared his observations with the Parks staffer saying the location was one of the most significant swarming sites he had ever worked at: “It seems like during the swarming season, bats are just about everywhere in that area.”

His findings supported what Ontario Parks scientists had found, and sought to protect back in 2023 when the agency erected signs prohibiting climbing at 23 of the park’s existing routes. The signs went up in three sensitive areas that housed rare ferns, roosting bats and cliff-nesting birds across a 100-metre length of the escarpment in the park, a fraction of the climbable cliff face.

Gould said he was unable to give comment for this story due to fear of reprisal, but the documents contain an email he sent to his boss, Greg Wilson, the southwest zone manager for Ontario Parks, in May 2023. “These protection areas still leave a significant climbing opportunity,” wrote Gould, who has worked with species at risk and habitat protection at provincial agencies for more than two decades. 

For the Pearces, the signs were a win. But, the move was unpopular with climbers. In May 2023, Penney, with the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, wrote an email to Ontario Parks staff saying, “We are extremely disturbed by this development.” 

“If this is official signage, this is a statement by Ontario Parks that there is no longer any interest in ongoing communication, or a consultative relationship with the climbing community.”

Parks manager Wilson also declined to be interviewed for this story. But emails show his reply to Penney: “The signage was installed by Ontario Parks to protect the most sensitive ecological values in Devil’s Glen Provincial Park. … The intention of the signage is to notify park visitors that these areas should not be disturbed. We are still very much interested in an open and collaborative relationship with the [alliance].”

Things didn’t quite play out that way. 

“We realized that we actually needed to mobilize the climbing community,” Penney told The Narwhal. In an attempt to get the environment minister’s attention, the group solicited nearly 4,000 letters, he said, to reopen climbing in all areas of the park.

In his interview with The Narwhal, Penney said Ontario Parks had closed “the entirety of Devil’s Glen to rock climbing” in 2023. When The Narwhal asked about the discrepancy between that statement and Ontario Parks records showing only 23 routes of 140 routes had been closed, he replied: “I don’t really see why that matters,” adding the route count was incorrect, and that substantially more than 23 routes were closed. 

Penney said he used to spend 30 to 50 days each year climbing at Devil’s Glen. He loves the blue-ish grey limestone and the challenging routes. “One of the privileges in walking through these places is also learning about the environment and learning about some of the species that you’re now walking in amongst,” Penney said over the phone while driving home from his day job as a business development manager for a soup company.

He said he visits the area less now, given escalated tensions. He told The Narwhal that climbers have described being threatened, called racial slurs, filmed while relieving themselves in the woods and having the bolts they use to fasten themselves to the cliffs cut off.

He told The Narwhal about an email he received in his role at the alliance, sent from Adam Pearce to the climbers and other stakeholders in September 2025: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted.” But Pearce told The Narwhal this was taken out of context and was only part of the picture. The Narwhal reviewed the email, which read in full: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted without full transparency and accountability. The community will not tolerate policy built on silence and spin.” 

After the “No Climbing” signs went up in spring 2023, some of them were vandalized, according to an email from Wilson contained in a freedom of information package. Meanwhile, climbers’ protest letters flooded in and, in May 2023, Ministry of Environment staff had a meeting with representatives from the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. There, according to the minutes, Penney raised concerns about the “continued involvement” of unnamed Ontario Parks staff members and proposed bringing in third-party biologists to validate the agency’s science.

When asked about this by The Narwhal, Penney criticized the research done by Ontario Parks’ ecologists. He said he could not be more specific about the methodology or scope, as the alliance hadn’t actually seen the ministry’s research informing the closure decision, but said the route count Ontario Parks used when planning the closures was incorrect.

Within a few months, internal emails show, then-environment minister Piccini’s office specifically directed Ontario Parks to remove the signs. Soon after that, Gould raised concerns.

Weeks after the signs came down, Gould wrote to Wilson and other colleagues that he had received reports of climbers developing new routes in Devil’s Glen and “installing new bolts directly within our previously posted protection areas.”

In October, Gould wrote: “There has been no scientific rationale involved in the removal of the signed protection areas so hopefully we can get those back in place soon. These ongoing climbing activities within the sensitive areas are likely to cause further user conflicts and impacts to park values, both of which should be avoided in our protected areas.”

About a year later, records show Gould was told by his manager, Wilson, to postpone work at the park. “As a reminder, it is my expectation you will consult with me and receive approval from me prior to performing any work related to Devil’s Glen,” Wilson wrote in a September 2024 response to an email from Gould with subject line, “Trip safety plan for Devil’s Glen and [redacted].” Wilson continued that he “would like to hold on this work for the time being,” and added he was working to get an update on the proposed amendment to the park management plan.

Wilson did not respond to questions about why signs were removed, or whether Parks biologists were asked to hold off on work at Devil’s Glen.

Ontario Parks did not confirm whether Gould still worked on the Devil’s Glen file at the time of writing, and The Narwhal has since learned he was dismissed from his work at the agency altogether. An email sent to him on Oct. 6, bounced back, saying his account was not found on the Ontario government’s email service. He was the only protected areas specialist listed for Devil’s Glen and the larger southwest parks zone on Ontario Parks’ website.

Around the time Gould was directed to hold off of work at the park, in fall 2024, a member of the alliance’s Facebook page posted that they’d heard of a climber being “approached aggressively close and made to feel uncomfortable by a man and a woman” saying climbing was not allowed on a route in Devil’s Glen. 

Penney responded, encouraging climbers to use all portions of the park and adjacent Crown land, saying: “Climbing is permitted at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park, on the entirety of the cliff.” He wrote that climbing was allowed and encouraged by Ontario Parks and the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. “Please please please continue to climb at [Devil’s Glen], enjoy yourself.”

Penney wrote to The Narwhal in an Oct. 7, email saying, “We recognize that there are legitimate conservation concerns and strongly support responsible environmental stewardship. The concern is that the conflict has, in our view, escalated beyond a normal policy disagreement.”

The Niagara Escarpment curves up from western New York, through southern Ontario and runs along Georgian Bay and the Bruce Peninsula before heading back south to parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. Devil’s Glen sits along its eastern portion in Ontario, a part of the important, delicate ecosystem that researchers and Ontario Parks officials have understood the importance of protecting for decades.

Among those experts is Doug Larson, a retired researcher and University of Guelph professor, who began studying North America’s escarpments in the 1980s.

“We found trees that were almost 10 times older than anything found elsewhere in Ontario,” Larson said of the Niagara Escarpment, over the phone from his home in Guelph. “It really is the last undisturbed stand of forests in eastern North America because of the fact people can’t get to it.”

That is, unless they climb.

In his 2004 book about the ancient cliff face forests in the Niagara Escarpment, The Last Stand, Larson wrote about European immigrants who introduced rock climbing to the Niagara Escarpment after the Second World War. “Trees hundreds of years old came in direct contact with humans for the first time,” he wrote. 

Then, at the turn of the millenium, the advent of indoor climbing gyms and advances in climbing equipment made rock climbing more accessible and popular than ever. It spread across the escarpment. “Sawn stumps and branches are visual reminders that the climbers have not simply chosen rock with fewer trees,” Larson wrote.

The twisted trees, mostly cedars, cling to the face of the escarpment. Standing only one to three metres tall, with trunks as wide as a person’s leg, they may look stunted compared to the towering stereotype of old-growth forests, particularly in B.C. But, Larson said, they represent the oldest undisturbed forest ecosystem this side of the Rocky Mountains. And they’re a biodiversity hot spot, important for nesting birds and endangered mammals. A 2008 study by an Ontario Parks ecologist found Devil’s Glen has an “outstanding total of nine provincially rare” plants including male fern, smooth cliff-brake and green spleenwort.

Through the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, Larson’s research found climbed areas supported substantially fewer plants due to trampling, purposeful removal and soil compaction. He and his teams recommended new climbing routes be banned in protected areas. 

Not everyone was a fan. Ontario Rock Climbing, a website that sells climbing gear, published a post on the history of climbing in the province that references a 1991 study by Larson and colleagues. 

“This study had a very negative impact on the climbing community,” it read, calling this period the “Dark Ages” for outdoor climbing. “Although the results from the study were inconsistent, it led to … a number of other cliffs being closed to climbing. Public opinion became that climbing was not compatible with the Niagara Escarpment.”

Larson argued “there was nothing inconsistent” about his results: “We published that 30 years ago, and we got immediately despised by the climbing community because they didn’t like our story.”

“Climbers need to realize that some restrictions may be required to preserve the cliff face forest in perpetuity,” he wrote in 2004. “One of the main problems is that climbers have had free rein of the escarpment cliffs for over 50 years … it is extremely difficult to modify behaviour that has been entrenched for such a long period of time.”

Alerted by the Pearces, the conservation organization Ontario Nature has also taken an interest in Devil’s Glen. Conservation director Tony Morris said his organization isn’t debating whether climbing and nature can coexist, but whether efforts are actually being made to strike that balance.

“It’s about managing that activity in a way that doesn’t harm those sensitive ecological features,” Morris said. “It means not having just climbing routes appear all over the place, and ensuring climbers aren’t going into areas that bats are hibernating in and aren’t tying ropes off of cedars, 100-year-old cedar trees.”

Having also viewed one of the document packages before sharing it with The Narwhal, Morris said seeing expert staff seemingly being held back from monitoring ecosystems “raises some serious questions about the mandate of Ontario Parks” and about the management of other parks and beyond.

“If park ecologists, whose job it is to monitor ecological health of parks, aren’t allowed to visit the parks, that seems strange,” Morris said. He said he has struggled to get information from the Environment Ministry about internal scientific studies done at Devil’s Glen.

“This is just such a strange situation that it’s gone this far,” Morris said. “When you combine it with what else we’re seeing across the province in terms of attacks on natural heritage. It’s part of a bigger picture, in the sense that, even the areas that are supposed to be managed primarily for ecological integrity, it raises serious questions if that’s the case anymore.”

In 2025, two years after the ‘no climbing’ signs were put up and quickly removed, the Ministry of Environment posted a notice to amend the Devil’s Glen Provincial Park management plan on the provincial environmental registry, and opened it up for public comment. The amendment included listing rock climbing as a permitted use in the park. 

More than 600 comments were submitted. Over 90 per cent supported the proposal, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and managing rock climbing within the park. A minority expressed concerns about environmental impacts on cliff habitats and species such as ancient cedar trees and bats.

In April 2026, climbing became a permitted use in the park.

“Ecological integrity remains the top priority, and Ontario Parks will manage ecologically sustainable recreational uses and rock climbing at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park with ecological integrity in mind,” the decision reads.

The Ontario Alliance of Climbers credits this to their campaigning. One of its websites describes this regulation change as “the first such plan for an Ontario Provincial Park,” adding, “We are optimistic that this will be the first of many such plans. We need you, the climbing community, to write submissions supporting this plan … we are so close to clipping the chains.”

“I have a great relationship with Greg Wilson,” Penney told The Narwhal in mid-September about the alliance’s “productive conversations” with the Environment Ministry. “And they agreed that this was something that was long overdue, and put their support behind some resources to help Ontario Parks and help our partners there do what was necessary internally.” 

Penney told The Narwhal that “climbers are great stewards and advocates of our lands and of our climbing areas.”

When The Narwhal visited Devil’s Glen in August, shiny metal bolts were visible across the cliff face. There were no signs telling climbers which sensitive areas to avoid, even though Ontario Parks’ plan sanctioning climbing references a study that “recommended restricting climbing and access routes to the most disturbed areas where continued use is not likely to worsen existing impacts.”

The plan gives Ontario Parks the right to close routes deemed sensitive to climbing activity, and to prevent new routes from being established given that cliff area is “highly saturated … and the need or capacity to create new route opportunities is generally low.”

As we walked, the Pearces picked up garbage from the trail, stashing it in their backpack to throw out later. “You better wash your hands after,” Holly told her husband as he bent toward a personal hygiene product.

After about half hour of hiking, we came across two climbers, readying their gear and resting between routes. They were the only other people using the trail on the quiet Monday morning, and my stomach dropped, anticipating conflict. Holly, too, had readied her phone camera to capture the interaction. The climbers and Pearces exchanged polite, short greetings — remarking on the beautiful, mild weather.

Holly put her phone away. The climbers, now with full permission from Ontario Parks, surveyed their next climb.

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.

Since 2020, the last seven caribou of the Val-d’Or herd have lived in a 14-hectare forested enclosure, just south of the town of Abitibi-Témiscamingue in northwest Quebec. There were nine individuals alive when they were first captured six years ago — down from about 40 in the 1990s — but two have died since then, and the herd saw no new births this year. 

“It’s like a zoo, they are in a cage at this time. … A caribou is always on the move. If they’re not moving, there’s something wrong,” Lucien Wabanonik, Chief of the Lac Simon Anishnabe Nation, says of the famously roaming ungulates who need undisturbed old-growth forests to elude predators.

In July, Lac Simon filed a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that it has failed to protect the caribou, and in doing so failed to protect its constitutional right to hunt. In the 1980s, while Wabanonik was returning home from Montreal, a herd of 20 or so caribou crossed the road in front of him. Back then, he didn’t realize how quickly the population was declining, as forestry and mining projects — the foundation of the region’s economy for the last century — transformed the landscape. “There’s nothing much left in our area of Abitibi-Témiscamingue in terms of mature areas where forest is untouched,” the chief says of his region, home to the province’s third largest forestry sector.

In 2003, the boreal caribou were listed as threatened under the federal Species At Risk Act. In 2024, then-Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, recommended cabinet make an emergency order to save the boreal caribou in Quebec from imminent threat of extinction. Since then, according to the nation’s legal filings, the federal government has conducted multiple rounds of consultation with Lac Simon, but despite the urgency of the situation, nothing has changed for the caribou and the herd continues to dwindle.

Amir Attaran, lawyer for the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council, believes the consultations were a stalling tactic. “Anyone who works in Aboriginal law will have the experience of, when government wants to get something done, they don’t consult, or they consult within a month. When government wants to delay, they’ll consult for years.” 

In an email, Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal it cannot comment on a matter that is before the courts. It added, “As stated in the Agreement for the Recovery and Protection of Caribou in Quebec, the Government of Canada reaffirms its commitment to working with and consulting Indigenous organizations and peoples in Quebec.”

First Nation objects to funding agreement with province, calls for moratorium on logging permits

Instead of developing an emergency order to protect the caribou’s natural habitat in Val d’Or and two other regions in Quebec, as per Guilbeault’s recommendation, or meeting with Lac Simon exclusively about the issue, on June 29, 2026, the federal government met with the entire Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador. Former environment minister Pascale Déry’s presence at a federal meeting was a first hint that something unusual was afoot.

At the meeting, federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Julie Dabrusin announced, without prior consultation with the First Nations, that they were moving forward with a funding agreement with Quebec to help protect the caribou. Canada is set to pay up to $25 million over five years to the provincial government, in an agreement that does not mention limits on forestry projects or construction of service roads. In 2016, the Quebec government committed to creating a plan for protecting the Val d’Or caribou, which was to be presented to Lac Simon within five years — another promise that never materialized.

When The Narwhal asked the provincial government to comment on this funding agreement, it responded, “The financial agreement with the federal government will support the implementation of additional measures to conserve and restore the caribou’s habitat. The Quebec environment ministry is currently assessing potential measures, and these could include measures devoted to the Val-d’Or woodland caribou population.” The conditional “could” in its response echoes another of Attaran’s points: that the funding agreement with the federal government doesn’t specify that the money must be used for the caribou, but rather that it may be used for the species. “There’s no assurance of it doing anything here,” he says.

The Quebec environment ministry responded to The Narwhal’s request for comment about this commitment, writing in French, “The proposed plan for the Val d’Or woodland caribou population was not submitted in accordance with the original schedule. Knowledge about the state of the population has since evolved, and the government is continuing its work to establish measures adapted to this particular situation. The Ministry recognizes the Lac Simon Anishnabe Nation’s preoccupations regarding this delay.” 

The ministry also outlines that it has instated a moratorium on logging in the habitat, has completed some restoration of the habitat and keeps the caribou in captivity as a precaution. It also highlights that the agreement with the federal government doesn’t replace the work done with the Val d’Or population or collaboration with the area’s Indigenous communities. In 2018, the Quebec government instituted a temporary moratorium on logging in some sections of the caribou habitat, covering 2,160 square kilometres. However, the habitat has received no official protection, and Lac Simon has called for an immediate moratorium on the issuing of logging permits over a 5,000 square-kilometre area, which hasn’t happened. 

The Lac Simon maintains that the funding to be allocated to Quebec doesn’t promote the conservation of the caribou and is no substitute for an emergency order. And though the federal government has also committed $15 million for First Nations-led caribou conservation in Quebec, Wabanonik said they’re not interested in that money. “If we do take those monies, it means accepting their ways of doing things. … And we don’t accept that,” he says.

Constitutional right to hunt relies on continuation of culturally significant caribou, lawyer argues

The nation’s case also leans heavily on wording within the Species At Risk Act. “What we’re arguing is the act may be written as ‘cabinet may,’ but in reality it’s ‘must.’ And the reason it’s ‘must’ is very simple: you have here an Aboriginal right to hunt, constitutionally protected under Section 35,” Attaran explains.

Allowing such a culturally significant species to disappear is no different than extinguishing the right itself. Without the emergency order, the caribou is at a very high risk of extinction, which would violate the First Nation’s constitutional right to hunt it. According to Attaran, this argument has never been tried in a Canadian court, and he is confident the nation will receive a declaration stating that the constitutional right has been violated. 

Failure to protect the herd also infringes on the Species At Risk Act, which makes the protection of their habitat partially the responsibility of the federal government. The caribou, along with other endangered species like British Columbia’s southern resident killer whales and the northern spotted owl, continue to face dire threats to their habitats.

If Lac Simon wins, the case could set a precedent in a crucial time. Since being elected prime minister in 2025, Mark Carney has pressed ahead with extraction and development projects, providing his government with tools to side-step environmental assessments and protections via Bill C-5 and the creation of the Major Projects Office. Then, in September, Carney introduced Bill C-39, which, among other blows to the environment, aims to make Bill C-5’s sweeping powers permanent. 

As it stands, it may be too late for the Val d’Or herd. There are no plans to rewild them and, as Attaran points out, there would be no point in doing so since they would be released into a degraded landscape. For these animals to be able to survive in the wild, a recovery strategy from Environment and Climate Change Canada determined the Val d’Or population would need at least 65 per cent of their habitat to be undisturbed. However, only 33 per cent of their habitat remained intact as of 2024. And with no limitations on forestry activities in the new caribou conservation funding agreement with Quebec, their habitat will likely continue to degrade. 

Though the Val d’Or herd faces imminent extinction, the federal government has not responded swiftly to the lawsuit, waiting over two months to file its evidence. But Attaran is steadfast about what he believes must come next to give the caribou a shot at survival. “I want to try the case, I want to get to court fast. The government was trying to squeeze us and draw us into that fight, and we’re not taking the bait.” 

As for Lac Simon, they’re ready to face the federal government head-on, as the extinction of the caribou would mean the extinguishment of its members’ rights. “We’re going to have a battle, that’s for sure, I can guarantee that,” Wabanonik says. But he believes that the majority of people will share his nation’s belief that the survival of the caribou is worth fighting for. “I think there are more First Nations, there are more good citizens out there, Canadians who understand the long-term vision.” 

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.

“Look at the size of that logjam,” Richard Bussanich exclaims with excitement as we fly low over one of the upper reaches of the Skagit River just north of the U.S.-Canada border. Bussanich, a senior biologist for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, and two of his colleagues are surveying the upper Skagit River and its main tributaries north of the border. They want to understand if salmon could survive here — after more than a century of absence. 

The Skagit originates in the B.C. Cascades, following the mountain range south into Washington state before flowing west to the Puget Sound. But ever since the 1920’s construction of the Gorge Dam in Washington state, the Canadian waters of the Skagit have been devoid of salmon. It was the first of three dams built on the river south of the border by Seattle City Light, Seattle’s public electricity provider, which today supply about 20 per cent of the utility’s power. None of these dams’ construction included fish passage. But that might finally be about to change.

After decades of pressure from tribes and conservation groups, the publicly owned utility is now committing to design and implement a plan to allow salmon to once again reach the upper river.

A landmark multilateral legal settlement between Seattle City Light, several tribes and non-governmental organizations, as well as various federal, state and county governments, was reached in March 2026. It commits the utility to funding nearly US$1 billion over the next 24 years to restore salmon runs and create fish passage. The agreement by the utility represents a reversal of its long-held claim that salmon never reached the upper Skagit before the dams — a position contradicted by historical records, archaeological evidence and Indigenous Knowledge.

The agreement is prompting First Nations in British Columbia to consider what the return of salmon could mean on their side of the border. Bussanich is excited by the chance to witness and support the return of salmon on this stretch of river. “If you provide them the opportunity, the fish will find a way,” he says.

Assessing salmon habitat from the sky

Every 30 to 50 years, the three dams on the Skagit have required an updated permit from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to legally continue operations.

The project’s recent permit expired in 2025. Since then, the dams have been operating on annual licenses as negotiations for the terms of the new permit are settled. As part of the relicencing process, the public utility is required to carry out numerous studies to look at how the dams affect a variety of environmental, economic and social considerations and how to mitigate harmful impacts. This created the window for action by U.S. tribes to push the utility to deal with their role in depressing salmon runs across the entire Skagit River system.

The March legal settlement dictating the terms of the future management of these dams followed an ambitious lobbying campaign and legal action spearheaded by the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe in Washington state, along with pressure from the neighbouring Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe, conservation organizations and the public spurred by regional and national investigative journalism.

At the signing ceremony for the legal agreement in May 2026, Scott Schuyler, a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe and its cultural and policy representative for natural resources, shared some hope and history. 

“Today is a day of reflection for the Upper Skagit People,” he said. “We do appreciate everything that has occurred over the last eight years [of negotiations] but this journey actually began 124 years ago for the Upper Skagit when we were not allowed a voice or a choice.”

The day after the settlement was signed, an engineering firm was hired to start work on designing fish passage, Schuyler later told The Narwhal. With the public utility committing to create a pathway for salmon to access areas above each of its three dams, and thereby potentially unlocking spawning habitat in Canada, the Okanagan Nation Alliance is interested in how this effort will interface with the lands and waters it is part of stewarding north of the international border. 

 “Our mandate is ‘kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓, ’causing to bring back’ water and salmon,” Bussanich says during the field trip to the Skagit. “Salmon reintroduction … and restoring habitat and protecting it is the core of everything, that the Okanagan and its members in the nation adhere to and guide us.”

The goal of the upper watershed’s aerial survey Bussanich and his team are doing is to better understand conditions on the ground for returning salmon. According to Bussanich, the flight is part of ongoing work being carried out collaboratively by the Okanagan Nation Alliance (representing the Upper Similkameen Indian Band), Stó:lō Nation, Parks Canada, the Washington-based organization Conservation Northwest and a consulting company called Biodiversity Pathways. Their collective goal is to protect the area and its sensitive species through Indigenous-led conservation efforts.

We touch down briefly on a sandbar on the river on the Canadian side of the border to survey conditions more closely at the location. Bussanich carefully photographs and notes the structure of another impressive logjam and the side channel it helped create.

“Coho will spawn in side channels like this,” he says. In the Okanagan River east of here, the Okanagan Nation Alliance and its partners have been creating artificial logjams to restore streams where the wood was removed and the streambed was straightened for flood control and agriculture. Here, on the upper reaches of the Skagit, the braided channel and natural woody structure provide a template for what they aim to create elsewhere for salmon habitat. Through Bussanich’s eyes, this part of the river appears in excellent condition for the return of anadromous (fish that are born in freshwater, migrate to the sea and return to freshwater to spawn) salmon. Now they just need a path to reach it.

As we cross the border into the U.S., we fly over the massive reservoir backed up behind the Ross Dam, the northernmost of the three Skagit dams. Around us, the high peaks of North Cascades National Park rise up from the reservoir shores. Bussanich is impressed with the quality of the spawning habitat in several of the tributaries entering the reservoir we fly over. Some locations look better for sockeye, others for Chinook and coho, according to Bussanich’s keen eye.

Then we see the Ross Dam. At 160 metres tall, it is the largest of the three hydroelectric dams on the river. The height of the dam itself is still a formidable challenge for engineers to figure out how to get migratory fish around. In the first half of the 20th century, it was considered insurmountable.

The long road to salmon recovery

From the Ross Dam, we fly downstream over the Diablo and then the Gorge dams. Immediately below the Gorge lies a stretch of the river that is completely dewatered by Seattle City Light, with the entire river’s flow diverted into a tunnel leading to a power-generating station about three miles downstream in the town of Newhalem, Washington, a former village site of the Upper Skagit Tribe. After passing through the power station’s turbines, the water is returned to the Skagit, which continues unimpeded the rest of the way to the sea, meeting the completely undammed Sauk River, its largest tributary, along the way. 

Below the dams, the Skagit River is home to runs of Chinook, coho, pink, sockeye and chum salmon, as well as steelhead trout. The Chinook and steelhead populations are both listed as threatened under the United States Endangered Species Act and noted as a species of greatest conservation need in Washington state. In the U.S., the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe and the Swinomish Tribe all retained their right to fish these runs— a right that has been deeply impacted by the steep declines in fish returns in the river. These declines also affect other species that depend on salmon such as the endangered population of resident orcas in the Salish Sea.

The construction of the Gorge Dam cut off about 40 per cent of the watershed from anadromous fish, while also depriving the river downstream of sediments critical for refreshing fish habitat and the estuary downstream. The subsequent construction of Diablo and Ross dams upstream went forward also without fish passage. 

In the legal settlement agreed to in March, Seattle City Light committed to returning water to the reach of the river downstream of the Gorge Dam, a culturally significant stretch of the river for the Upper Skagit Tribe, and a vital step toward connecting the lower and upper rivers for anadromous fish. The utility also committed to funding studies of the technology needed to move fish back and forth over each of its three dams and to work on this collaboratively with the other stakeholders in the settlement, including the U.S. tribes whose territory includes the Skagit River.

The utility lists 38 different participants in the licensing agreement for the three dams, including conservation organizations and county, state and U.S. federal agencies, as well as 10 U.S. tribes and two First Nations in Canada, the Nlaka’pamux Nation and the Stó:lō Nation.

Tribes that signed the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855 explicitly retained their right to harvest salmon in their usual and accustomed locations. This right was upheld in court in 1974. This fact provides a large portion of the legal leverage that tribes are using to pressure Seattle City Light to do more to protect and restore salmon, including creating access above the dams.

On May 12, the Mayor of Seattle formally signed the settlement agreement for the Skagit River dams. At the signing ceremony, Scott Schuyler, who led the Upper Skagit Tribe’s efforts, reflected on the moment. “We were not allowed a voice or a choice when the first dam was built,” he shared. “We see redemption today by signing this agreement. We do have that voice from now on.”

However, he also noted the signing of the agreement is not the same as real action on the ground. “Today is not the day to celebrate for the Upper Skagit. The celebration will come in the future. When we see the river return to its banks, the Upper Skagit people will rejoice and celebrate. When we see the first salmon pass over the dams and the dams start contributing to these depressed runs, then the Upper Skagit will celebrate.”Schuyler tells The Narwhal that while design work for fish passage above the dams has already begun, it could be years before we see water flowing again in the bypass reach of the river, or salmon moving back and forth over the dams, due to permitting and engineering. “I would like to see it done in my lifetime, but you never know.”

Editor’s note: David Moskowitz is involved in long-term documentary work of the Okanagan Nation Alliance and grizzly bears.

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.

Norm Lamothe soiled his undies twice. The second time, he was much happier with the result. 

Soiled them — in a manner of speaking that is. After two months, buried in the ground, the cotton fabric of a once-pristine set of white men’s briefs had largely disappeared, and mostly just the elastic waistband remained. It was a sign changes in farming techniques were paying off. 

Lamothe runs the family-owned Woodleigh Farms outside Peterborough, Ont. Far from the realm of bodily functions, the brief burial experiment — dubbed a “Soil Your Undies” test — is popular in farm country. It’s a simple, albeit cheekily named, way of measuring just how active the tiny organisms like bacteria and fungi are in soil — and by extension, how healthy the soil is. Just bury a plain cotton undergarment, wait a couple months and dig it back up. The organisms chew up the natural cotton fabric, so more microbial activity means a more degraded undergarment. Dig up a fully intact set of tighty-whiteys, and you know the soil in that area needs some TLC. 

Lamothe first diagnosed his poor soil by doing a Soil Your Undies test in 2015.

“That’s really what started my journey down the soil health path,” Lamothe says, standing in front of one full pair of Hanes and the tattered remains of another, lovingly displayed on his office wall. “Much to our chagrin, they were completely intact.”

It was a self-described “wake-up call” to improve his farm’s practices for the climate, biodiversity and his own business resilience. 

The environmental impact of farming is an extraordinarily complicated subject, and the footprint agriculture leaves is suitably quite varied. In terms of emissions, agriculture accounts for about eight per cent of our national total, or 10 per cent if you include emissions from energy use on farms. The culprits are many: nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, can escape to the atmosphere from soil. Cattle, sheep and other ruminant livestock create methane — another greenhouse gas — through their digestive processes and release it into the atmosphere, mostly by way of belching. And carbon dioxide is released by decaying plant matter.

Another major source of emissions is fossil fuels. Diesel, made from crude oil, is the main fuel source for the vast majority of tractors and other farm equipment, and fossil fuels — used on and off farms — are the single greatest contributor to climate change globally.

On the flip side, some farming methods can also be a real boon for ecology. Grazing cattle on native grasslands or in pastures with a diverse array of plants (called forage crops in farming circles) can benefit soil health and bird communities, while sequestering enormous amounts of carbon. On the other hand, regular ploughing and excessive fertilizer use can be harmful to soil and waterways. When it comes to environmental impact, the reality on the ground often necessitates doing things that are both better and worse for the environment.

Lamothe isn’t unique in his drive to find climate solutions on his farm. He joined peer groups like the Ontario Soil Network and Farmers for Climate Solutions for guidance, and to support others looking to make positive change. There are farmers and ranchers across Canada — and across the globe — doing this work. I’ve had the good fortune to meet many of them, as a farmer myself, as well as a journalist. They are doing their best to produce the food and commodities we all rely on, in a way that leaves the land in a better place. Some are motivated by water quality and biodiversity, others by profitability and resiliency in the face of extreme weather conditions like heat waves, floods and drought. Some have their eye on trade disruptions and other business challenges forcing them to rethink the status quo. 

Each has a compelling story. And not every one involves undies.

Energy

Lamothe’s farmyard sits at the end of a meandering tree-flanked driveway, eventually opening to buildings set partway up a gentle slope. The landscape here is a mix of rolling pasture, cropland and woodland — all things a flat-lander like myself can appreciate; from the centre of the county where my family farms in southwestern Ontario, it’s so flat you can see the skyscrapers of metropolitan Detroit, about 33 kilometres away as the crow flies, on a clear day. From Lamothe’s driveway, I can’t even see the extent of his property.

Photographer Bryan Dickie and I arrive to find Lamothe in the greenhouse near a cluster of outbuildings and then a pasture where a flock of sheep graze at the far end. Past the outbuildings, we can see the beginnings of his crop fields.

As is typical on farms, there is a little bit of everything everywhere at Woodleigh. Not messy, but clearly busy.

Lamothe is rinsing a pile of plastic flower pots used in the greenhouse —  a structure he calls a “passive solar” facility. It’s built with a sloped roof to capture ambient heat at the peak. That heat gets pulled down into the ground where it’s stored in ducts during the hottest parts of the day. That heat can then be recovered in the cooler months, and at night when the temperature drops, keeping the greenhouse above freezing, even when it is -25 C outside. No additional heating is needed.

Reducing fossil fuel use, as it turns out, is just one of Lamothe’s many proclivities. Norm assures me he “absolutely loves” his fully electric pickup truck, not least because it saves him about $6,500 a year in fuel. 

Another is soil health, ever since that fateful and telling first untarnished pair of Hanes.

Soil

The two most common field crops in Ontario are seed corn — the kind used for animal feed, ethanol and myriad other purposes — and soybeans, both for human and livestock consumption. Winter wheat, which is planted in autumn, typically into recently harvested soybean fields, takes third place. A typical yearly crop rotation for farmers in much of Ontario will involve at least a couple of these. What farmers plant ultimately comes down to economics. Corn and soybeans tend to pay better than winter grains, meaning the latter can sometimes fall out of favour.

Soil health, however, thrives on diversity. 

Keeping different crops in the rotation adds different root structures, helping to break up hard soil to create better water retention and provide a more biodiverse environment that, in turn, supports a wider (read: healthier) variety of soil organisms. Long-term research trials from the University of Guelph have shown more diversity helps build soil health, as well as crop yields. 

Lamothe’s crop rotation was once dominated by corn and soybeans. Adding wheat and oats was one of the first things he did after failing that undies test. When I visit in July, Lamothe’s fields are flush with corn, soybeans and oats. He’ll sow winter wheat on some of his soybean acres later in the year. On areas of the farm that have historically been less productive, he planted trees and native grasses. Cover crops — planted to improve soil, rather than for harvest and sale — will go on his winter wheat fields after they’re harvested.

He also started growing hay on areas prone to erosion, so there would always be roots present to anchor the soil. 

Then came the sheep. 

In 2022, Lamothe brought in the flock to graze the hay. The manure from the sheep flock also reintroduces nutrients to the fields — alongside compost Lamothe makes from wood chips, crop residue and other organic waste. 

Ten years after burying his first pair of britches, Lamothe tried soiling his undies again. The results were much better.

“Whether the change came from our practices or differing weather conditions is up for debate, but certainly we saw we had microbial activity,” he says, adding the physical remains, framed in his office, “make a nice conversation piece with people in here wondering why there is underwear on the wall.”

Carbon

A common challenge for farmers — myself included — is ensuring crops get the nutrients they need at the right time. Sometimes there might not be enough of a given nutrient in the soil, like phosphorus or boron. In other cases, the amount is fine, but they timing is off. 

Fertilizers help, which brings us to another outbuilding on Lamothe’s farm. This one is rich with the smell of barbecue smoke. 

It was the main farm workshop in a past life, a large steel shed that’s more steampunk than down-in-the-country. Conveyor belts and hay bale elevators connect two large trailers with steel sifters, feeding into a cylindrical dryer the size of a bus. It’s all part of Lamothe’s latest venture: a biochar production system.

Biochar is a black, charcoal-like substance created by heating organic material, like wood, in an oxygen-free environment (known as pyrolysis, if you’re technically inclined). The process starts with wood chips from the farm’s forestry business — as I said, there’s a little bit of everything here — which are loaded from old trailers, previously used for hauling potatoes, onto the conveyors and sifters, where they’re sorted by size. Chips that are too big or small are removed for composting, while what remains is put through the dryer, then into a burner.

“Ecologically speaking, this plant is very efficient because we’re using the energy it’s creating to run the whole system,” Lamothe says. And even the acidic byproduct of this process, known as “wood vinegar” — a product similar to the liquid smoke you might use in barbecue sauce — has valuable properties for soil. It helps with plant growth and acts as a natural pesticide.

Biochar is full of carbon, which when added to soil, becomes soil organic carbon — an indicator of good soil health. It helps to regulate nutrients in the soil, microbial activity and moisture. Combined with compost and manure, that can translate to more nutrients slowly released to crops over a long period.

“We’re taking all that carbon that would otherwise go up in the atmosphere and sequestering it in these particles that are going into the soil forever,” Lamothe says. On an annual basis, running at full capacity, the system will sequester 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, making approximately 500 tonnes of biochar. 

“That’s net — after all the trucking, the forestry activities, moving of materials,” Lamothe says. “That’s pretty remarkable, and it says something about what could be done at scale for the environment in this country.”

Biodiversity

On the other side of the urban hive that is the Greater Toronto Area, and closer to my own family’s farm, I find myself looking at a beautiful herd of Hereford cattle. They’re grazing, rather lazily, in what to the untrained eye might look like a pasture overrun by weeds.

It’s actually a 19-acre tallgrass prairie, established by farmer Blake Vince in 2018. Here, outside Chatham, Ont., we’re in what’s known as the Carolinian forest zone that covers the southernmost part of Ontario, and peters out just north of Toronto. Vince is cultivating grasses like big bluestem, flowers like black-eyed Susan, prairie dock and much more. My favourite might be the compass plant, with its weird leathery leaves that look almost tropical. The prairie has become Vince’s self-described “happy place,” and is the result of years spent trying to improve his farm’s ecology.

Vince planted the tallgrass prairie as part of a federal government initiative to bring at-risk species back to agricultural lands. Insects, birds — and the birders that come with them — have arrived from near and far. One memorable birding visitor, Boris from Bulgaria, encouraged Vince to sell coffee at the roadside. “He said ‘Charge $10 a cup. People will pay. You’ll make money,’ ” Vince says with a chuckle. As of this writing, he’s opted to not pursue that particular revenue stream.

Most recently, the cattle brought the prairie pasture to another level. 

Despite their reputation as a source of methane — a potent greenhouse gas that breaks down into carbon dioxide over about a decade — Vince says livestock can complete the proverbial circle on farms. Among rows of crops and cover crops, or on pastures, cattle add nutrients to the soil (via manure) and encourage nutrient cycling as they eat the plants, which regrow, pulling more carbon into the soil. He introduced the small herd of Herefords to his fields, where they graze in different areas on a rotating basis, including the prairie.

The side benefit was yet more insects — including dung beetles, highly valued for their ability to transfer nutrients from manure into the soil — and more birds to eat those insects. 

He encourages me to “just listen” as I go by the prairie. The chirping, buzzing and other sounds of life are distinctly loud compared to the adjacent corn and soybean fields, and get louder the closer you get.

“I wanted to do something for nature,” Vince says. “And realized the only person stopping me was the guy looking back in the mirror.”

Water

Like myself, Vince farms a landscape that is very flat, relatively void of trees and intersected everywhere by roads and drainage infrastructure like culverts. In 2011, when nearby Lake Erie endured a particularly severe summer of algae blooms and attention focused on the farms sprawling across that flat land, Vince started thinking more about the impact his own farm had on the surrounding environment. 

Generally speaking, algae are organisms found in water that can rapidly expand into large blooms if they encounter excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus — two elements used extensively on farms. In turn, large algae blooms can create toxins and low-oxygen “dead zones” in the water. Lake Erie is particularly prone to algae blooms because of its warm, shallow waters that encourage growth.

Excess nutrients come from many sources, including municipal and industrial wastewater. On the farm, nutrient runoff can spike when fields are hit with heavy rain shortly after fertilizer is applied. Because nutrients bind to soil particles, soil loss from wind or water erosion can also contribute to algae blooms. The nutrient losses from individual farms might be small, but because agriculture dominates the landscape here, repeated small losses add up. 

While he can’t control municipal water systems or the weather, Vince recognized he could exert more control over how much water and nutrients his soil was capable of holding. In 2013, he enrolled in an agricultural scholarship program — the same one I completed earlier this year in biodiversity and climate solutions — to investigate methods of keeping soil, and soil nutrients, in the field where they belong.

By the end of the two-year program, Vince had adopted a new mantra: “roots, not iron.” It means using plant roots to manage the soil, rather than metal tillage equipment. As Lamothe saw, living roots improve the soil’s ability to hold water like a sponge, whereas a hard surface lets it run off. All of it helps keep soil and soil nutrients in the field, and out of local waterways.

And these days, with up to 18 different cover crops potentially growing in his fields during parts of the year, there is almost never bare soil left to potentially wash or blow away.

As the soil holds the water better, it helps insulate crops from drier conditions. That’s key, as more severe swings in weather conditions are being seen by farmers as the climate changes. With so many nutrients inherent and available in his soils, Vince’s fertilizer bill is also substantially lower. He estimates saving “a minimum of 10 per cent” each year for nitrogen fertilizer, which “is a huge cost savings” for nitrogen-hungry crops like corn and wheat. Nutrients can still leave his fields after a heavy rain, but data he collected in partnership with his local conservation authority indicate he’s losing less overall. 

And remember that Soil Your Undies test that kicked off Lamothe’s journey into underground health? Vince is one of the originators. He buried his first pair of briefs in 2015, and helped kick off a trend that, just this year, won an Ig Nobel Prize — a parody of the prestigious awards — for soil science.

“Soil is a collection of living, breathing organisms,” Vince says. “We need to learn to appreciate and respect them.”

Economics and the environment

Across Canada, farms operate on slim margins. Land and equipment are horrendously expensive, and for most, the price they earn for their crops and livestock is beyond their control.

I like to say farming, just the biology of farming, is inherently complex. Then add to that the complexity of weather — with climate change bringing on even more variability, and the occasional introduction of new crop and livestock diseases — along with economics, politics, family and social dynamics, even what it takes to keep machinery running. Most of the time, farmers and ranchers want to do whatever they can to reduce the number and size of variables they face. Trying something new more often adds uncertainty, rather than reducing it. 

I know this firsthand. On our farm, for example, we have been trying to introduce more cover crops after we harvest soybeans. The first year, our cover crop of oats hardly grew because we planted it too late. Another year, the spring was so wet we couldn’t drive machinery into the field to knock back the cereal rye cover crop, meaning it was chest-high and a pain to deal with come spring planting. 

Still, we want to try new things. A lot of farmers do.

There’s the Bernard family, from Prince Edward Island, who are rebuilding their soils and local biodiversity by incorporating cattle into their organic cereal crop business. In Manitoba, the Nerbas family have adopted a grazing system that maximizes the time their pastures have to regrow, supporting their farm’s biodiversity and carbon sequestration potential. Sean Smith, another Manitoban, has partnered with local conservation groups to turn a low-lying and unprofitable part of his family’s farm into a naturalized wetland. 

I could go on.

Lamothe and Vince are the first to tell you they don’t have everything figured out — and likely never will. Investing in ecology on the farm can be complicated, frustrating and require constant troubleshooting. It took time for them to get where they are, and whatever they try next will necessitate the same learning process. But it can be fun, and rewarding as well.

Back in July, as we walked through one of Vince’s fields, some parts waist- or knee-high with a cover crop of crimson clover and cereal rye, I nearly stepped on a wild turkey hen. She was minding her clutch of eggs and I could barely make out her brown-feathered form among the greenery. It’s a sign that I should watch where I’m walking, but also that Vince’s efforts have done a lot for above-ground ecology. White-tailed deer also like to bed down in the thick green cover.

Just the day before, Vince had planted corn directly into that cover crop. In a little more than four months, he’ll harvest it. In spring, the cycle will start again.

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.

Twilight hangs over the Inlet Raider’s empty deck as it charges up the river. Its voyage has a single, cargo-free purpose: its crew was hired to find out whether the journey up the Taku River from Southeast Alaska past the B.C. border is possible.

If they succeed, this could be one of dozens of trips carrying construction supplies and infrastructure to the proposed New Polaris gold mine along the river, currently under review by the B.C. government and among its list of priority projects for expedited review.

The boat picks up speed, blasting up a passage nicknamed “the narrows” in honour of its thin, flute-shaped banks, which can host fierce, swirling currents. Its other concern lies underneath in braided river channels that can move at least annually to a new configuration, a common trait of glacial-fed rivers like this one. 

As the motor churns, the crew’s stream of banter is replaced by a tense silence punctuated by calls of encouragement as their barge follows a sonar-equipped motorboat guiding its journey up ahead.

“Three hours of boredom punctuated by 30 seconds of sheer terror,” says a joking voice off-screen, in a video posted to the captain’s Facebook page.

A few minutes later, the Inlet Raider makes it through.

New Polaris’s owner, Canagold Resources Ltd., acknowledges the transport challenges ahead. “We never said it’s easy,” Canagold’s chief executive officer, Catalin Kilofliski, tells The Narwhal in an interview. 

“But it’s doable.”

To avoid these precarious barge trips during operations, Canagold plans to transport its gold concentrate on cargo planes. It anticipates up to 15 flights a day, carrying a total of around 27,000 tonnes per year.

The goal is to capitalize on record-breaking gold prices by reopening New Polaris, a long-shuttered mine site on the Tulsequah River.

The project is among a select group featured in a federal prospectus document delivered to attendees of Canada’s recent investment summit in Toronto. This year, New Polaris was included in the federal government’s map of critical minerals projects, thanks to its potential to produce antimony — a heavy metal deemed “critical” by Canada for its use in a variety of applications from bullets to batteries. But Canagold’s feasibility study did not establish New Polaris’s antimony reserves and it does not include antimony in its projected revenues.

Meanwhile, B.C. has included New Polaris among its 35 priority major projects slated for expedited review.

In an emailed statement, the Environmental Assessment Office said New Polaris is on the list because of its “potential to make meaningful contributions to B.C.’s long-term economic growth” along with the other projects chosen.

“No project will be expedited at the expense of protecting the environment and communities or meeting our consultation obligations, which remain at the core of the [Environmental Assessment Office]’s mandate,” it added.

The company intends to create hundreds of direct jobs annually and provide around $500 million in federal and provincial tax revenue during its operations.

But some observers remain concerned that the mine’s potential risks, from water contamination to habitat loss, aren’t worth the financial benefits.

Environmental concerns with New Polaris

The Taku River watershed is one of the largest intact river systems on the Pacific Coast of North America, and one of the few remaining places where Pacific salmon populations are booming, meaning New Polaris’s riverside mine and tailings ponds naturally come with high stakes.

The mine sits around the riverbend from the also-dormant Tulsequah Chief mine site, which was owned by another company, where contamination has been seeping into the watershed for over 50 years.

Canagold has worked to distinguish New Polaris from the tarnished legacy of its next-door neighbour. The company has signed a collaborative engagement consent agreement with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose territory extends across the mine site and surrounding regions on the Canadian side of the border. According to the nation, the agreement means it will have the final say on whether the project goes ahead. The nation did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

The company has altered its plans in response to concerns raised in its engagement with the public and with the Taku River Tlinigit. It no longer plans to process gold on site using cyanide, which, if spilled, can poison fish and watersheds. It’s also planning to dry out its tailings to reduce the risk of impacts and limit barge trips mostly to the construction phase. The barge trips will only happen in the high-water months, spring and summer, to reduce the risks of running aground — a change that means more flights and higher costs.

With gold prices above US$2,500 per ounce — a price reached for the first time in 2024 — the “projected cash flow and economics are outstanding,” according to a quote from Kilofliski on Canagold’s website.

But the company’s application hints at potential challenges ahead: the historic underground mine is leaching some levels of arsenic and antimony into the surrounding watershed, and rocks in the company’s largest targeted gold deposit appear capable of leaching more of the same. According to a report prepared for the company and included in its application, the mine’s proposed tailings facilities appear to be located within the flood zone of the Tulsequah glacier, which sends a massive deluge of water and sediment into the river below at least yearly. However, Kilofliski said in an email to The Narwhal that its facilities are “in a location that is naturally protected from the floods.”

According to a map in Canagold’s application, it appears New Polaris plans to put an airstrip atop part of a wetland and salmon spawning ground known as Flannigan Slough, although Kilofliski says it is located beside it.

These and many other issues worry Jill Weitz, intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

“It’s this incredible, critical habitat for spawning and rearing of salmon,” she says, adding that the council questions if the mine is feasible given its transport challenges, and worries that, if it goes ahead, the project could “create irreparable damage to the watershed.” 

“We’re just not willing to risk it,” she says. 

Located just 13 kilometres upstream from the U.S. border, New Polaris’s barges will spend most of their travel time in U.S. waters. And any water contamination from the mine could also make its way south, including across the traditional territory of the Douglas Indian Association, which extends across the reaches of the Taku River. In a submission to the environmental assessment process, the association said it “strongly opposes” the mine “due to fears that a mining accident and subsequent mining pollution could devastate our salmon stocks.”

This year, B.C. made a legal amendment functionally removing its requirements to consult U.S. tribes on transboundary projects by stripping their previous status in environmental assessment processes. 

In an email, the Environmental Assessment Office noted that it will still “fulfill its constitutional obligations to consult with U.S. Tribes when there is a credible assertion of Indigenous Rights in Canada, and the potential for these rights to be impacted by a proposed project undergoing assessment.”

It added that the ministry has “considered and incorporated” feedback submitted by some U.S. Tribes to New Polaris’s application process.

Still, for many southeast Alaskans who have submitted letters of opposition to the company’s environmental assessment process, New Polaris presents an untenable threat.

Kilofliski says New Polaris’s environmental assessment application proves otherwise. 

 “The conclusion is that there are no material negative effects on the environment,” he says, adding the company has proven it will not require water treatment post-closure.

These comments seem to be contradicted by some parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application, including one section that notes: “The primary negative residual effect of groundwater quality will occur during post-closure.” 

“This is experts talking about scientific stuff,” he says when asked why the application appeared to have included a different analysis than his own. When asked again about incongruities between his comments and the application in a follow-up email, Kilofliski wrote that the application does identify a risk of metal leaching. “If anything I said informally differs from the application, please treat the application as correct.”

The Taku River watershed

From space, the Taku and its tributary, the Tulsequah, look like winding ribbons coloured steely grey and cotton-candy-blue — a product of the steady stream of silt and minerals delivered by the churn of glaciers over the mountaintops above. 

Their combined watershed forms a mecca for Pacific salmon that return to its waters each year. “I don’t know if there’s any place like it in western North America in terms of being a salmon stronghold and being so intact,” Jonathan Moore, an aquatic ecologist and lead at Simon Fraser University’s Salmon Watersheds Lab, says. Though the majority of B.C.’s salmon stocks are declining, the fate of salmon in the Taku watershed is looking up. Moore and his colleagues have mapped out salmon’s likely escape route as watersheds warm down south, and they predict they’ll seek refuge in the Taku’s glacial waters. 

But despite its remoteness, the region is no stranger to industry. First staked in the early 1900s, what’s now the New Polaris site was mined for gold between 1937 and 1951. It shut down after a departing barge sank in the midst of a storm. That year, the Tulsequah Chief mine opened up across the river, building a temporary bridge to carry its ore to New Polaris’s mills. After Tulsequah shut down just six years later, the New Polaris site sat dormant for decades.

Canagold’s predecessor, Canarc Resources Corp., acquired the property in 1988, and the company slowly dabbled in exploration work until 2022. That’s when its former founder and chair was ousted in a a vote led by a Swiss-based investment company, Sun Valley Investments, which is now the company’s largest shareholder. Kilofliski, Canagold’s CEO between 2014 and 2018, was reappointed and soon announced the company’s intentions in a press release.

“The time has come to take New Polaris across the finish line,” he said, adding that with the company’s “refocused ownership,” its board would expedite the project “to reward our company’s shareholders.”

A history of water concerns

Next door to New Polaris, the Tulsequah Chief mine continues to leach orange-crush-tinged effluent into the river downstream. Its decades-long pollution has galvanized a bipartisan uprising of Southeast Alaskans concerned B.C.’s government could allow another Tulsequah Chief to occur. 

In a January interview with the Alaska Beacon, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said B.C.’s efforts to clean up pollution at Tulsequah Chief had been “a complete failure.”

“They know that for projects going forward, they’re kind of stained by the operation there,” she added. 

Kilofliski says such conflations are misguided. “They associate our project with the other project, the Tulsequah Chief,” he says. “In our rocks, we do not have the potential for acid drainage like you see on the other side.”

Despite their close proximity, New Polaris and the Tulsequah Chief come from distinct types of ore deposits — Tulsequah Chief’s ocean-formed sulphide rocks are more readily associated with acid mine drainage, whereas New Polaris’s rocks are generally not.

That may have exceptions: a recent report commissioned by the company has noted some rocks contain potentially acid-generating properties, potentially including some of the historic waste carried over from the Tulsequah Chief mine, though some tests are still ongoing.

And even without the ingredients to leach acid, some rocks contain metals that can escape into waterbodies anyway. Heavy metals arsenic and antimony are frequent culprits of this kind of non-acidic leaching, and New Polaris’s targeted rocks have lots of both.

According to a previous report commissioned by the company and cited in its environmental assessment application, 15 samples from the mineral vein New Polaris plans to target had “high potential” to leach metals, particularly arsenic and antimony, due to the types of rocks present.

Non-acidic leaching has caused damage in B.C. before: New Polaris’s deposits are similar to those of the Bralorne gold mine near Lillooet, where seepage from the flooded mine includes levels of arsenic that far exceed Canadian effluent regulations.

In an email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said: “I do not know the particulars of the Bralorne gold mine seepage issues but it is probable, based on the nature of these kinds of geological deposits, that the concerns would be analogous.” He elaborated, adding New Polaris is “a modern mine” which will leverage new science and technology for water management and ecological health.

“At Canagold we are focused on learning from the lessons of the past and building a modern mining project that provides demonstrable benefits to the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, the region and Canada’s economy,” he added. 

To help avoid the risk of metal leaching, the company plans to export a partially processed product called gold concentrate, which can include impurities like arsenic and antimony that would get smelted out elsewhere. 

“We take the antimony, we take the sulphur, we take the arsenic,” he told The Narwhal. “We recover 90-plus per cent of those metals into the concentrate.”

The remaining ten-or-so per cent of the metals and other materials leftover would be thickened and deposited into a tailings pond with an impermeable covering on top, Kilofliski says, helping to keep it isolated from the environment. During the operational phase, the mine plans to run a water treatment system, but Kilofliski tells The Narwhal he is confident the mine’s concentrate-extraction approach will avoid the need for long-term water treatment.

“We have demonstrated in the environmental assessment that no water treatment is required post-closure,” he says.

In a follow-up email, Kilofliski added the application “assesses a range of scenarios, including conservative cases where water treatment after closure could be needed.” If it is, “Canagold would be responsible for providing it until we are able to demonstrate that passive treatment (that is without active/chemical water treatment technologies) is able to manage the long-term water quality requirements,” he added.

New Polaris’s environmental assessment application suggests metal leaching may not be easily contained: historic contamination has already travelled below the site in a large plume of metals that is projected to grow if New Polaris proceeds. Leaching can also escape from the mine shaft, as it has from the historic mine portal at New Polaris. Groundwater seeping from the existing mine site contains arsenic and antimony above B.C.’s water quality guidelines, and is flowing directly into the salmon-bearing Whitewater Creek, according to the application, which added seepage may grow post-closure. Recent samples from the mine’s targeted deposits and waste rock reflected an extremely high concentration of arsenic and antimony — achieving the highest possible level on a 6-point scale for mineral concentration. 

This leaching risk is cited in parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application as a reason that water treatment may be required post-closure. 

In his email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said “water was tested as part of mine dewatering programs for effects to fish, and the water was not determined to be acutely toxic, despite high levels of arsenic.”

What’s next for New Polaris?

September marks a major milestone in Canagold’s decades-long pursuit to mine New Polaris. By the end of the month, the company will receive its final guidance from the province’s environmental assessment office on how it could strengthen a revised application, which, once submitted, will be final. In meeting notes discussing the company’s application, B.C.’s environmental assessment office noted “significant gaps” in the company’s application, including “a notable lack of groundwater information,” a lack of analysis about the potential impacts of glacial floods and missing information about the site’s potential to leach metals. The Ministry of Environment noted the company’s hydrological information appeared to reflect “draft documents rather than final product.”

The office has informed Canagold that submitting another application “where significant issues remain unresolved” would “lead to a high level of uncertainty on the potential effects of the project.” 

Kilofliski suggests these kinds of issues are standard for projects like this. “They are very normal,” he says, adding that Canagold plans to fill any remaining gaps before it submits its final application, adding in a later email that the company has “continued to collect samples since the submission of the application, and we are updating our water modelling.”

But some uncertainties could remain during the assessment process by design: under B.C.’s mining laws, key aspects of New Polaris’s plans, including how it plans to manage leaching on site, how it will treat water and how it plans to deal with contaminants post-closure, would be determined in the permitting stage after the company receives its environmental assessment. 

Through the assessment and later permitting stages, Kilofliski remains confident that Canagold will establish its case. “We have to demonstrate,” he says, “because our word doesn’t mean anything.” 

“We have to prove, we have to show, and we have to test. … This is how it’s done.”

Updated on Sept. 18, 2026, at 8:52 a.m. PT: This story has been updated with Jill Weitz’s current professional title of intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, as it has changed since the story was written.

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.

It was 6 a.m. when Qutxulenuhw Tim Kulchyski got the call.

On the phone was Elder Siilh’na’mut Ken Elliott, a fellow member of Cowichan Tribes. Elliott had been working in a place known as Fish Gut Alley, named after the abundant salmon that spawned and then decayed there. It’s a naturalized wetland spread out over nearly four hectares of Duncan, B.C., within Rotary and McAdam Parks, just north of the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island. It was June 2007, and he was restoring the natural habitat around the city’s sewage lagoons — essentially, large pond-like areas that local wastewater flows into.

That morning, Elliott, a Quw’utsun Knowledge Keeper and expert on native plants, had been taking inventory along Fish Gut Alley. As he moved downstream, a strange cacophony grew louder and louder.

“Crows, ravens, kingfishers — just an incredibly large amount of bird activity. Everyone was squawking and making a lot of noise,” he said.

Following the sounds, Elliott came across a scene that was “a blow to the gut,” he said. 

From bank to bank the river was filled with thousands of juvenile coho salmon on their sides, swimming in circles, mouths wide, gasping at the surface. Birds had descended on the area to feast on the dead and dying fish.

Elliott called Kulchyski, a biologist, and told him to get down to the river quickly.

Once he arrived, the two men began looking for the cause of the mass casualty event. “We ran up and down the stream looking for something that may have poisoned them, but we couldn’t find any gasoline or anything like that,” Elliott said.

Before leaving to meet Elliott, Kulchyski had phoned Willi Aquino, a local fishery officer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who soon joined them at the river.

“You could see where the fish had died,” recalled Aquino. “It was very close to this storm drain. So, it’s like, ‘OK, something’s coming out of there.’ ”

There had recently been significant rainfall in the area, Elliott recalled. At first, he thought maybe one of the local businesses had dumped something toxic into the storm drain system, which the rain could have washed into the river. Later that day he drove around to ask at dry cleaners, car washes and gas stations, but he found no leads.

Around the same time that Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino were scratching their heads over the dead coho on Vancouver Island, marine researchers and streamkeepers in Washington state were investigating a similar phenomenon in their own neck of the woods: for decades, they had noticed dramatic die-offs of coho salmon in urban areas, close to roadways, but couldn’t figure out the cause. It wasn’t until 2020 that the Washington researchers hit on a major discovery — one that not only connected the dots for Kulchyski but solved an environmental mystery that had been puzzling scientists for decades.

The culprit: a highly toxic chemical compound called 6PPD-quinone. It comes from the breakdown of a compound called 6PPD, a preservative added to car tires to prevent the rubber from cracking as a result of ozone in the air.

Anti-ozonants like 6PPD came into widespread use in the 1960s so the rubber of car tires wouldn’t crack and wear down so fast. These days, each time a car is driven, its tires shed tiny amounts of 6PPD-infused rubber onto the roads. When it rains, the particles wash into nearby fish habitat, where UV exposure causes it to break down into 6PPD-Q, which can be lethal even in tiny amounts.

Kulchyski had started to hear “murmurs” in the scientific community about a compound that was killing coho salmon just as COVID-19 restrictions began to spread across the world.

Now, after years of research and testing in the area, he has no doubt this was what killed the salmon in Fish Gut Alley. And he’s on a mission to help the world understand the colossal problem 6PPD-Q presents, and how First Nations are on the front lines of dealing with it.

The salmon mystery solved

To understand how 6PPD-Q was discovered, one needs to travel back to the central California coast during the 1990s, when a host of different challenges meant coho salmon were driven nearly to extinction. By 2005, they had been classified as an endangered species in the United States. 

This led to an influx of resources aimed at habitat restoration in urban streams throughout the Pacific Northwest. And more boots on the ground meant more scrutiny, according to aquatic toxicologist Jenifer McIntyre. She’s an associate professor at Washington State University and researches Seattle-area streams in the Puget Sound. 

As researchers tromped around in streams, squinting into turbid waters watching, waiting, McIntyre and others began to notice something odd: large numbers of dead coho piled up along the sides of creeks that were still filled with eggs. This meant they had died before getting a chance to spawn.

“If you’re used to salmon and salmon fisheries, then you’re not surprised by dead fish in the fall, but the fact that they haven’t spawned is like … ‘Oh,’ ” McIntyre said.

Across seven years of field studies, a pattern emerged. The dead salmon were primarily coho, in the most urbanized areas of the Puget Sound. The deaths typically happened during or just after heavy rains, and as they died the fish exhibited a strange, specific behaviour: swimming in circles at the surface of the water, mouths gaping, spiralling and gasping. And the phenomenon was widespread: about 40 per cent of the Puget Sound area was affected and between 40 to 90 per cent of those salmon were dying before they spawned, within hours of being exposed. 

The weight of the evidence at this time suggested their deaths were somehow being caused by stormwater runoff, McIntyre said.

At first, researchers faced a long list of potential causes. Was it pesticides from a nearby golf course, or low oxygen? Could it be parasites? As they dug in and began to eliminate each of these factors, they slowly narrowed in on a possible cause. 

Cars. 

But there were so many chemicals associated with cars. The first year they began running tests on salmon, in 2016, McIntyre figured they only had the capacity to run tests on two things, and decided to look into car tires and exhaust particles. But it eventually proved to be too much to do two things, so they decided to focus on car tires.

When her team passed water through a mulch of worn tire particles to make a solution, it killed all of the coho salmon tested in their lab. That’s when they knew they were onto something, she said, though at first they didn’t know exactly what.

“Something about stormwater — okay. Something about roadway runoff — all right. Something about tires,” McIntyre recalled. “That’s when Ed joined the picture.”

Ed Kolodziej, a water and ecosystem health researcher and professor at the University of Washington, brought in critical chemistry expertise and a dream team of biologists and chemists. Assembled from government departments and universities from across the Pacific Northwest, they set to work trying to figure out what it was in the tires that was killing the fish.

“Out of the hundreds to thousands of chemicals that we were detecting in these samples, there were 57 chemicals that were always present when the coho salmon died, so we started to identify them,” Kolodziej said.

Over time, the list of chemicals got smaller and smaller until they managed to identify the composition of what they thought was the culprit, but there was one problem: it didn’t correspond to any known tire ingredients, McIntyre said.

An environmental chemist on the team named Zhenyu Tian noticed that the carbon and nitrogen in the molecule of their mystery chemical matched some of those on the tire list, though it differed in other ways.

Then Tian had a lightbulb moment: what if they were searching for a chemical that transformed into something else once it entered into the environment and broke down?

In the mountains of research materials, Tian found an old industrial rubber paper from 1983 that talked about a chemical added to tires called 6PPD. When it was ozonated — exposed to air and sunlight — the paper stated that it changed into the exact chemical formula they were searching for: 6PPD-quinone.

To confirm their theory, the scientists bought some 6PPD and tested it on the salmon in their lab. They died, showing the same characteristic twisting and gasping behaviours that had been seen in wild salmon.

The group’s evidence was compiled into a groundbreaking paper published in the journal Science at the end of 2020. It was a sensation in the scientific community, in part because it finally offered an explanation for a phenomenon that wasn’t new, and in part because it sounded an alarm over how toxic and widespread 6PPD-Q is.

One of its most remarkable — and alarming — features is just how little it takes to kill coho salmon. As one researcher put it, the equivalent of a grain of rice in an Olympic-sized swimming pool is enough to make the water lethal.

And it’s not just fish that have been exposed. A recent study out of China shows that 6PPD-Q has been detected in human urine and breast milk, though it’s not yet clear what effect, if any, it has on humans or other mammals. Researchers are also finding it not just in water but in air, dust and snow — basically everywhere there are tires.

“It is among the most toxic chemicals that we know of for aquatic life,” McIntyre said. “We reasoned that you would expect to find this chemical anywhere where tire particles were getting into the water.”

But the researchers still had questions to answer. Why were certain fish species, such as coho and coastal cutthroat trout, so uniquely sensitive to 6PPD-Q? How does it kill them? And, perhaps most important, how can its risks be contained? 

Finding 6PPD-Q hotspots

In February 2026, about 165 people attended the third and final Protecting Salmon From Tire Wear Toxicants workshop in downtown Nanaimo. 

Workshop presentations ranged from practical to dizzyingly technical, and represented an unusual cross-collaboration across disciplines, all focused on solving the same problem.

“If everyone’s a silo, we’re all probably trying to look for the same answers to the same questions, and you’ll get it from many different places, but it’ll happen a lot faster if you’re talking to people,” said Angelina Jaeger, a researcher with Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Health & Environmental Mass Spectrometry (CHEMS), one of the groups that organized the workshop series. “That’s what science should be.”

Like many researchers at the workshop, Jaeger is focused on finding solutions. One problem her team decided to focus on was implementing widespread 6PPD-Q testing in local streams and creeks.

It all started with that seminal 2020 Science paper, said Erik Krogh, a chemistry professor and co-director of Vancouver Island University’s CHEMS lab. Though he read it with a sense of dread, Krogh immediately saw a use for the technology his team had been working on for more than a decade, which would make it “faster, better and cheaper” to test water samples.

Already developed as a way to test for carcinogens in oilsands process water, the test dips a membrane into a water sample and, using a repurposed 3D printer to mix it around, it pulls out the chemical and sends it to be measured. Within a few months, they had repurposed this technology to mass-test for 6PPD-Q. 

Soon, researchers were able to process up to 100 samples a day and get results within minutes.

With hundreds of volunteers taking samples in waterways across Vancouver Island, over the last three years their lab has gathered what Krogh believes is the single largest dataset of 6PPD-Q samples in the world.

When Kulchyski heard about the team’s goal of finding 6PPD-Q “hotspots” on Vancouver Island, he put Fish Gut Alley onto their radar.

Kulchyski and the researchers wanted to understand what was going on in the area, past and present. Since their bleak early-morning discovery in June 2007, Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino had witnessed other, similar fish kills in the area. At times, researchers say they can recognize urban stormwater that likely contains 6PPD-Q, visible as a cloudy sediment or sometimes an oily sheen. 

“To us it’s like a horror film, because you just see this big dark cloud, and then six or seven or eight thousand fish are dead,” said Kulchyski. 

Initially, everyone involved in the original Fish Gut Alley incident thought low oxygen levels must have been the culprit, and Elliott said he is still convinced that’s the case.

In this case, stormwater sits in a reservoir before being pumped out into the environment and bacteria end up growing in there and consuming the oxygen, and then when it is released it can kill the juvenile salmon, Elliott said.

But Aquino ran on-site tests at the time, and though oxygen levels were low, she said in her estimation they weren’t low enough to kill the fish. She also took a gasping, dying fish out to the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo to run tests, but nothing came of it.

“We could never really figure it out,” she said. “There was no real smoking gun.”

But in March of 2024, the researchers at Vancouver Island University finally found a clue that connected everything. 

After several days of rain, a stormwater sample taken in the morning at Fish Gut Alley measured levels of 6PPD-Q at hundreds of nanograms per litre, far beyond the concentration that had killed coho in the lab.

“That concentration is certainly higher than most,” Jaeger said. And it’s not the only sample in the area that has tested well above what is safe. As a result, the team designated Fish Gut Alley a priority site and installed an automated collector there last summer to take samples every hour during rain events.

“It’s a great example where we’ve identified a hotspot, and so now we can work to solve it,” Krogh said. Urban streams can have dozens of storm drain outfalls, which means measuring stormwater for 6PPD-Q levels can be a huge task, he said. “Where do you start? Can we fix them all? I mean, that’s overwhelming. Let’s find which ones are problematic, and let’s address them.”

Can it be stopped?

Because 6PPD-Q is hydrophobic, like oil, it tends to stick not only to the test membranes used by the university researchers, but also to soil. And it turns out this is an important part of how the chemical might be mitigated.

Tests being run by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver show an approximate 90 per cent removal of 6PPD-Q from stormwater when they run it through “rain gardens.” These are green areas near roads that filter runoff through soil and plant roots before re-entering the environment. Krogh is currently working with his research partners on three rain gardens planned for various locations around Vancouver Island, and a fourth is already under construction in Langford, just outside of Victoria.

Promising results have also come from using filters made from coconut husks and biochar — a carbon-rich, charcoal-like substance made from dried plant waste.

At Washington State University, when roadway runoff went through a bioretention system made from 18 inches of sand and compost, it prevented salmon deaths for the entire 13 years the study ran, McIntyre said.

The upside of the whole thing is that researchers already know so much more about the problem now than they did even two or three years ago, Krogh said. For example, their team recently found that even when fresh water is repeatedly run through collected tire sediment samples, it doesn’t seem to dilute the concentration of 6PPD-Q. This means that when tire particles are sitting at the side of a creek, they remain a long-term contamination source despite repeated rains.

“It’s not just one and done. So we really have to deal with the particles and make sure that we handle those carefully, so that we’re not putting them somewhere else in the ecosystem or in the watershed and then they become a source somewhere else.”  

Krogh maintains a cautious sense of optimism that the problem is “solvable.” However, hurdles still exist. Regulating the high volume of 6PPD-Q in the environment is difficult, and finding an alternative chemical with the same properties, but less harmful, is also tricky.

The Canadian government included 6PPD and 6PPD-Q on a priority list for assessment starting in the winter of 2025. This is a step towards the chemical’s possible regulation, under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

However, the Tire and Rubber Association of Canada (TRAC) tried to delay a potential assessment in 2024 to see what regulation happened in the U.S. first, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request.   

Governments should not prematurely restrict the use of 6PPD as it could “have enormous public safety and economic consequences,” wrote association president Carol Hochu to then-environment and climate change minister Steven Guilbeault, in an April 1, 2024 letter.

The association believes a deferral of regulation is still the best approach, given the “extensive regulatory activity” underway in the U.S., which includes a search for safe alternatives to 6PPD, communications manager Michal Majernik told The Narwhal by email.

Potential alternatives to 6PPD are being explored by the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, which releases a yearly analysis on its findings.

In response to the hurdles, researchers also published a paper in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters in the summer of 2025, outlining what an international regulatory framework for 6PPD-Q might look like. It also highlighted some of the broader political issues at play.

For example, vehicle pollution disproportionately impacts “under-resourced and underserved communities, who tend to live closer to traffic.” The paper notes it also affects food sources for Indigenous Peoples, and describes this higher level of tire chemical exposure as an act of “environmental injustice.”

A warning for salmon

Kulchyski caught his first fish at eight years old — a coho salmon, with a spear he made himself. He gave it to his Elders, because that’s what you do when you catch your first fish, he said. It’s a cultural practice and a full-circle philosophy of generational caretaking.

“If you look after your family, when you become an Elder, then your family will look after you,” he said. “If we don’t look after them, it’s a sign that we’re not looking after ourselves. And so if we look after salmon, not only are they healthy and happy, they return and nourish us. It’s a pretty simple system.” 

He caught the coho in Fish Gut Alley, when historical runs of salmon were once so abundant the area was named after the mounds of decaying salmon that died there after spawning. That’s how it was when he was a kid, Kulchyski remembers. But in the decades since, things have changed.

In the broader Cowichan River system, coho numbers have shown a steady decline of more than 90 per cent since the 1970s, though they’ve rebounded somewhat in the last five years. 

“How we’ve treated the landscape, how we’ve treated the land, the dyking and all these other issues, have really pushed almost every pressure that there is that you can exert on fish and fish habitat on this one little stretch,” he said.

A verdant gem hidden in plain sight, Fish Gut Alley is nestled into a suburban neighbourhood in Duncan, and most of the dog walkers and joggers that use its wide gravel trails nearby are likely unaware they’re only steps away from crucial juvenile salmon rearing and spawning habitat.

Though unremarkable to the untrained eye, the area’s shallow protected pools, fallen logs and slow-moving streams are ideal for juvenile coho to hang out in and get strong before heading out to the ocean, Kulchyski said.

It’s hard to get around the negative mindset that things are hopeless, that everything could crash and salmon could just stop existing, Kulchyski said. But for him, giving up is simply not an option.

“That doesn’t exist in our mental scenario of the world. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re gonna lose one of your children,’ ” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Though 6PPD-Q is not the only problem facing salmon in the area, he views it as something that could  change the way people think about environmental protections, “sort of a stepping stone to introducing us into a new thought process and a new methodology that allows us to do things differently, treat these systems differently, think of fish differently,” he said.

At present, Kulchyski is working with university researchers and the City of Duncan to look at mitigating 6PPD-Q at source, by targeting the stormwater gathered from nearby streets that is held in reservoirs before flowing into salmon habitat.

“We are treating our water so poorly, and not looking after all the issues we bring forward. On all of the bridges and all of the highways, there’s 6PPD-Q coming in everywhere,” he said.

“I certainly don’t know all of the solutions, but I know if we actually start incorporating these concerns and these issues in building new bridges and building new treatment systems, it will immediately make a huge difference.”

On-the-ground reporting for this story was made possible with support from Carleton University’s Leonard Shifrin and Louise Dulude Canadian Social Policy Emerging Reporter Fund. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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.