Shane Black knows as a hunting guide that if he puts a foot wrong, if a client shoots an animal for which he does not have a permit, or if they fail to pack out all the meat of the game they take, he will be heavily penalized.
"I could get fined. I could lose my business," says Mr. Black, who through BC Safaris guides on a vast tract of wilderness near Dease Lake in northwest B.C. "I understand that. I accept that. But what I don't understand is why others aren't being strictly regulated too."
By "others," Mr. Black means not hunters, but jade miners searching for deposits in the game-rich valleys and on the high mountain slopes around Dease Lake. He returned recently from flying over the Turnagain River area, where he has guided for the past 14 years, and said he was shocked by what he saw. Flipping open his laptop, he runs through photos he took as he soared over the stunningly beautiful landscape. Gouged through willow thickets, marshes, across streams and up into alpine areas is a network of rough roads left by heavy earth-moving equipment.
One photo shows a backhoe, apparently abandoned in the middle of nowhere after it got bogged down in a swampy area. The rough-cut roads, like giant brown scars on the landscape, seem to have been cut randomly as miners moved their equipment from one claim stake to another. When they find a likely area, they dig trenches looking for jade boulders.
"They just go wherever they want," Mr. Black says. "Look at this one. It goes right through a stream. In this one, they drove a Cat up a stream bed for 400 metres. Want to go up in the alpine? Sure, let's drive right up this slope."
The area had mining exploration roads when Mr. Black first arrived more than a decade ago. But soaring jade prices, and an influx of Asian money, has spurred exploration, and new roads now branch off in every direction from the few existing routes.
"I am not against mining," Mr. Black says. "I'm a consumptive user of natural resources myself. But there seems to be no oversight. No regulatory control. It's certainly not getting the scrutiny my business is."
He is not the only one worried. Devlin and Bill Oestreich, who run BlueStone Guiding and Adventures Ltd., recently wrote to the inspector of mines in Smithers expressing similar concerns.
"We strongly oppose the current 'free rein' access to the backcountry in pursuit of mineral extraction without regard for the future aesthetic of the land or health of wildlife populations," the guides stated. "The creation of more roads into undisturbed wilderness is alarming in this day and age when we have other means of exploring without unrepairable damage to the ecosystems.
Reclamation efforts are not proven to be a solution to this destruction."
The guides included a map with their letter that showed a road cutting across a bull-trout spawning area.
Mr. Black says he has seen mining exploration roads punched through sensitive areas that hunters have long avoided because they are caribou calving grounds. Prime moose habitat has also been transected by the roads, which opens up access for hunters, and makes it easier for wolves to find their prey.
Hardolph Wasteneys, a geologist who frequently consults for mining companies, recently was hired by Mr. Black to examine the notice-of-work forms being filed by miners searching for jade in the Dease Lake area.
"I definitely see his concerns, and share them," Mr. Wasteneys says of the frenzy of road building. "They are doing stuff they really shouldn't be doing. There is an awful lot of disturbance." He describes the Dease Lake area as "a bit of a cowboy scene in a way," with miners driving heavy equipment across fragile landscapes without any thought to the long-term impact.
"It's like opening up a zipper," he says of the way a bulldozer will leave deep gouges when it is driven across a pristine landscape. "And it doesn't really heal."
Mr. Wasteneys says "regulatory gaps" allow mining operators to damage the land, and there is a lack of oversight of their activities in the remote region.
Out there in northwest B.C., some of the most beautiful landscapes in Canada are being permanently scarred, and right now nobody, except a handful of hunting guides, seems to care.
Mark Hume