2 weeks Ago By Michele Jarvie
As you drive west on Highway 3 past Lundbreck Falls, you’ll see the Burmis Tree, the skeletal remains of an ancient limber pine thought to be Canada’s most photographed tree. A stone’s throw farther west, you’ll motor through the 1903 Frank Slide and look up to see the arresting sight of Turtle Mountain’s fractured eastern face. Throughout this scenic mini-drive, you’re traversing the southern end of Alberta’s Livingstone Range.
Striking in profile, the serrated, cutting-edge crest of the Livingstone Range is visible from much of southern Alberta. The Livingstone is cloaked in endangered limber and whitebark pines. Beneath, the archaeological treasure includes a 5,000-year-old chert quarry and countless vision quest sites.
Bighorn sheep grace the high country, grizzlies command the valleys and native cutthroat trout cling to a small remnant of their former range in a handful of streams, such as Rock Creek. Our home overlooks Rock Creek on the eastern flanks of the Livingstone Range but, tragically, the once-abundant cutthroats seem to have vanished overnight. For 10,000 years, they swam, bred and prospered here.
They lived through every wild extreme the natural world threw at them. Then, the earth moved. In early August 2023, bulldozers and backhoes were brought in to build a pipeline.
Two weeks later, the cutthroats disappeared from our view in the creek at our doorstep. They vanished in mid-August during a protracted drought, gone in a surge of muddy water (sediment release) during pipeline construction. The pipeline, excavated through the upper headwaters of Rock Creek, crosses the Livingstone Range and descends into the headwaters of Gold Creek (downstream from Grassy Mountain).
It slices through the cutthroats’ critical habitat on Rock Creek and does this on land formally and federally “protected” by overseeing regulators at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canada Energy Regulator. In other words, the pipeline was constructed as workers, politicians and regulators received financial compensation for a job well done. But what happened to Rock Creek’s “protected” cutthroats? Albertans express grave concerns with proposed coal mining on Grassy Mountain and elsewhere within Alberta’s Eastern Slopes.
They’re aware of coal mining’s documented detriment to human health, its impact on all living things and its obvious threats to agricultural prosperity on downwind and downstream lands. The concerns are met with verbal assurances. “Don’t worry.
Alberta and Canada have the best regulatory standards in the world.”.
