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Letter: Protecting ‘The Bighorn’ is important

protecting the bighorn is important
13582025_web1_letter-to-editor-2

protecting the bighorn is important

Regarding the planned Bighorn Provincial Park in the West Country:

We may not perfectly agree with specific restrictions or opportunity sites, but overall the protection of this huge swath of land in “The Bighorn” is important.

Generating income from the clean air and water with a backdrop of majestic vistas is of ongoing long-term broad-based benefit, if done well.

It is important we protect this area as a provincial park, similar to Kananaskis Country, because in this world this sort of area is becoming rarer and harder to find.

In the ‘back-country’ I have proposed light on the land hut-to-hut hiking as is found in New Zealand, Nepal, Western Australia and Norway. These can be well designed, constructed and maintained ‘huts’, which can foster greater knowledge of the area to local and foreign tourists and open access to the distant reaches (like Job or Lost Guide Lakes) of the park.

Along the highway ‘front country’, in specific sites and with a highly sensitive approach, there can also be more accommodations such as hostels and lodges. The ideal thing here will be to use some or many of the current “random campsites” which dot the David Thompson Corridor. They evidently have an attraction, they are already impacted (borrow pits etc), and they have potential to be part of the give local ‘pay-off’ for this political ‘trade-off’ of postponed resource extraction.

I support the creation of a provincial park here with the acceptance of First Nation’s traditional uses with community hunting and trapping and even local timber licenses. It can be a park for people to recreate in and for long-term ecological management. Kananasakis already exists as a model. We can do it better, it is not impossible.

Cole Hendrigan, Red Deer