Mile 445: Barb Zimmer Part 1: Jackman Flats
This week, my riding took a minor hit from dealing with my second COVID-19 shot. Luckily, this coming weekend is a very long ride (provided that I’m recuperated enough), the Seattle Randonneurs Spring 400K, which translates to 248 miles all by itself. It’ll still be a race to the finish next week as I try to rack up the final 250 miles during the week!
At a similar mile marker as I am now during the 2015 pilgrimage, we found ourselves near Valemount, BC. If we hadn’t felt like we were in the Rockies before, we certainly did now. The ride from Blue River (where the Tiny House Warriors are themselves camped) to Valemount was a never-ending day of blue skies, shimmering rivers, and white capped peaks. We were also feeling good: people who hadn’t been into distance riding at the beginning were rounding into form, and on this day, the riders tried to race Serendipity (the biofuel powered rolling home base of ours) to Jackman Flats Provincial Park and an interview with local botanist Barb Zimmer.
Jackman Flats is a park just south of the bend in the Fraser River where it turns out of the Jasper area, and it lies in a large gradually carved glacial valley. It’s notable because it’s mostly sand dunes that were left over from drift from an ancient lake that dried up, and holding those dunes in place are one of the rarest and most diverse collections of lichens in BC. As we walked around the park, she pointed out trees that had died to pine beetle infestations (which because of climate change now have two reproductive cycles per year instead of one). Some trees had fought the beetles off. At the base of many trees were a slow-growing rainbow of lichens. Some looked like flowers, others like tiny leaves; some hung from the trees. Several species are found here, and only here.
Zimmer was a cornerstone force in turning the land into a park, but in 2015, she had a new fight on her hands: The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project wanted to go through the park. This would have been a disaster to the life and gardens there, and the delicate balance holding the dunes in place. Dunes that might inundate homes and roads and the town of Valemount, if uncovered.
On the pilgrimage we saw many things, and visited many places, but of all of them, I had been curious about the current state of the park. It seems that she and other motivated folks managed to get the pipeline routed along the road, and not through the park. This came as a great relief! Still, a diluted bitumen spill would not do the lichens any good, as lichens are a canary-in-the-coal-mine, vanishing immediately in the face of pollution.
The video below is the first of two videos with Barb Zimmer. Look forward to the second video, which is one of the most insightful conversations of the trip on what exactly flows through the Trans Mountain Pipeline every day.
I’d like to finish by saying that in the process of getting this campaign up and running, Barb has been a great source of encouragement and news. It’s a wonderful thing to renew connections with people from the road, and I’ve certainly been grateful for this opportunity.
