4 - Friday, January 16, 1987 - North:Shore News

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MY WIFE and I and some friends went cross-country skiing up in the Chilcotin to celebrate the new year, and although we didn’t spot any wildlife along the trail, we did uncover a vexing British Columbia conundrum.

We stayed at the brand-new Tyax Lodge, a $3-million com- plex that is supposed to be the largest log structure on the West Coast, a place that is working a small cconomic miracle amid the

| gathering Dark Age of new and old ghost towns and dwindling population that characterizes so much of the B.C. hinterland.

More on that when we get to the sad part.

The morning we set out, snow was falling gently through the universe, as James Joyce once put it. There was little of the magnificent Chifcotin Range to

| be seen at first — just a four- wheel-drive trail winding through Ponderosa pines and Douglas fir along the rim of Tyaughton Lake, some 3,200 feet above sea level.

Later the sun broke through

7 and the mountain peaks gleamed like axe-splintered shields in the clear high light. Under their burdens of snow, the trees on the other side of the lake were com- pressed like scores of ornate silver crucifixes.

I don’t want to overwrite this scene, but you have to unders-

# tand that I was ecstatic. As you are gliding between these abso- lutely titanic pyramids of granite, lapped by great swells of forest, the oppressive sense of the age you are in lifts from your

psychological shoulders, and you zoom giddily back to prehistory, half-certain a mammoth might appear any moment.

In the process of getting a handle on my skis and ski poles, [ took a few tumbles, but the flask didn’t break and neither did my bones, so what's a little lost dignity between friends?

My wife easily won the Most Spectacular Spill Award. As she was coming down a small but definite slope, her skis began to inch steadily apart, with her feet attached, until she was doing the splits, and only brought herself to a halt by the brilliant strata- gem of flopping forward on her face, using her nose and chin as a brake.

Fabulous! I think we'll do that again. Nature hasn’t lost its mesmerizing beauty. | just hadn't been out in it for a while. And you do forget.

Getting back to the lodge in great spirits, we were brought back down to earth by the discovery that there’s a shadow on the high horizon, wouldn’t you know it?

General manager and part- owner Gus Abel, an_ intrepid fellow who has put a lot of money on the line to build his place, waxed enthusiastic about the number of jobs he is pro- viding in the region — 17 now

and up to 50 if all goes well — but ended glumbly having to admit that he could get no assurances that logging wouldn't be allowed arouad him at virtual- iy any time.

“Tourism is an industry that provides employment on a long- term basis," he said. ‘‘In the long run, logging brings in less money. But once the loggers go through an area, it is finished for tourism for the next 30 years. If you destroy one industry to sup- port another, what's the point?

Abel recalls with a trace of bit- terness that when he sought per- mission to graze his horses near- by, the forestry department bureaucrats in Lillooet refused ‘because of the sensitivity of the environment,’’ as they piously put it. Regular eco-freaks!

Yet shortly thereafter, a logg- ing contractor was allowed into the very same area. He clear-cut the whole damn thing.

The problem is that the forest- ry planners are all geared to the old-style B.C. way of looking at the possible uses of nature. Min- ing, logging and building dams is all they know or care about.

Tourism? At best, it gets lip service, even though the rationale for Expo was that it would jump-start B.C.’s future as a tourism mecca. Isn’t tourism supposed to be our biggest in- dustry by the turn of the century?

It sure won't be if everything has been logged. Who wants to look at stumps?

Gus Abel is a gutsy en- trepreneur with a great notion that could keep a score of people up in the Chilcotin working for generations — unless the forest industry, in its Samson-like death convulsion, pulls everything down around it.

Could happen, too. A rotten shame if it did. There I was, just rediscovering nature —- only to rediscover how threatened it is everywhere you turn.

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Accused murderer found unfit for trail

THE NORTH Vancouver man charged with second- degree. murder in the death of Eleanor Jacobsen was ruled unfit to stand trial in a preliminary hearing Tuesday.

Judge Wildred Klinger committed Johnathan Wild, 50, for treatment at the Forensic Psychiatric Institute in Coquitlam.

Jacobsen, 48; was found wrapped in a blanket in Wild’s car Dec. 15 on a dirt road south of Keremeos.

Wild was charged at Pentiction Hospital, where he was recovering from a stab wound to the stomach, with the strangulation death of the Vancouver woman. ;

The judge agreed to put a ban on publication of evidence heard before the court Tuesday. ;

Crown counsel said the murder charge will remain before the court until Wild is found fit to defend himself.

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