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Wilderness outrage: joyriding turns ugly

A recent four-by-four ad demonstrated why most TV ads for tin toys for big boys — ATVs, snowmobiles, etc. — outrage me. The vehicle was shown driving through a trout stream while the audio intoned “the world is your oyster; get out there and crack it open.”There once was a far better time, when horses and their ersatz substitutes, four-by-fours and snowmobiles, were used to get you to where you started out hunting and fishing on foot.
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A recent four-by-four ad demonstrated why most TV ads for tin toys for big boys — ATVs, snowmobiles, etc. — outrage me.

The vehicle was shown driving through a trout stream while the audio intoned “the world is your oyster; get out there and crack it open.”

There once was a far better time, when horses and their ersatz substitutes, four-by-fours and snowmobiles, were used to get you to where you started out hunting and fishing on foot.

Somehow, just joyriding around out there, tearing up as much turf and mud as possible, has itself become the recreation for too many sedentary people who know nothing of the natural world, “their oyster,” and the harm they are doing to it.

Jugheads and I were never a good fit, and I barely survived one sheep and two elk hunts before I retired as a horseman.

One trip through avalanche country into the headwaters of the Flathead River was snowmobile enough for me for life.

Trips into the Muskeg River for big bull trout on flies, and into the upper Little Smoky River for arctic grayling were experiences I would not have missed, nor would I ever repeat the Kamikaze 500 ATV rides it took to get in there.

Then the increasing number of ever angrier complaints I am getting about jet boats on the Red Deer River started me thinking about that form of outdoors transport.

Around this time of year I have occasionally floated the Peace River in a jet boat while we glassed the high river breaks.

Whenever we spotted what looked like a legal bear (without cubs of the year) we’d beach and begin the gut busting climb where you seem to go uphill even to descend, and either way is through thorny jungle.

Late one day, John Horn got a reddish phase black bear that dropped off a cliff, and it was dark by the time we found and loaded it aboard.

Not being able to see either shore made the upstream jet boat slalom seem like floating in outer space, even while zigging-zagging to avoid derelict deadfalls and drifting ice floes. Separately and secretly we all prayed the bear really was dead, not just knocked cold.

Years ago my old friend, the late Elmer Kure, took me on my first jet boat voyage on the Red Deer River upstream from land of his to show me the several proposed dam sites.

Ironically, the trip was not really necessary, because the site selected, where the Dickson Dam was built, was immediately upstream of Elmer’s land.

Up until recently the complaints about jet boats on the Red Deer below the dam have been summer complaints of speeding boats, full of partiers, beer cans in hand, swamping tubers, canoeists, drift boaters and putting the fish “down” for anglers.

The river downstream of the dam is closed to angling from the end of February to near the end of May to allow for undisturbed spring walleye spawning.

At many points along the river, signs warn wading anglers to watch for and avoid disturbing redds, brown trout “nests” containing eggs spawned in October and November.

Because the river stays now stays open in winter for many kilometres downstream of the dam, snowmobiling on the river ice is out.

But now many anglers are concerned that winter jet boating has greatly increased when the water is so low that the huge jet pumps too easily displace and destroy brown trout eggs and also the eggs of rocky mountain whitefish which are also fall spawners.

Too many winter jet boaters ignore the No Boating signs just below the dam and run at speed over the buoy line and into water just below the dam, a winter sanctuary and haven for both walleye and brown trout.

“And the government wonders why the brown trout and rocky mountain whitefish numbers have crashed in the Red Deer,” one angry angler concludes his email.

The usual defence will be raised that it is only a small minority of jet boaters who do such things.

The summer stuff, perhaps, but at least half a dozen close river observers assert that the increasingly heavy winter traffic is mainly Central Alberta jet boat manufacturers testing their product, possibly not realizing the harm low water jet boating can cause to the fishery.

What can be done is a bigger problem than ever now that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have gutted the Fisheries Act and omitted most rivers in Canada, including the Red Deer, from the protection of the Navigable Waters Protection Act, renaming it the Navigation Protection Act, such a different thing, that wags now call it the Navigable Waters Unprotection Act.

Clearly the province must now act to protect the fish and the fishery: jet boats have to be kept off the Red Deer tailwater in winter, for at least as long as it is closed to fishing, and preferably longer, to include the fall spawning period.

Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.