Editorial

Machines vs. Nature

For ATV users, northern Alberta is one big playground. Miles of bush and miles of trails to tear around on.
For others, ATVs are nothing but a nuisance. Noisy, smelly and destructive.
Around Slave Lake, it’s probably fair to say that the ATV lovers outnumber those who don’t like them. There’s lots of space to ramble out there, and lots of opportunities to enjoy the great outdoors one way or the other.
In other parts of the province, battle lines are being drawn. Government has to get involved as referee and it comes down to designating some areas as ‘ATV-free zones.’
It would be good if it never came to that in this neck of the woods. It doesn’t need to, but to avoid it, the different users need to respect each others’ right to enjoy the outdoors in a safe, legal manner, with or without machinery.
If it was just local residents involved, the issues would be limited and more easily manageable. But when you throw quad-toting visitors into the mix, it becomes more complicated. On one hand, we welcome tourists, with or without quads, dirt bikes and snowmobiles. On the other, out-of-town users sometimes don’t have the same respect for the land and its users as locals do.
As it happens, the folks at Big Lake Country Tourism are talking about making quad trail maps, precisely for the visitors that come to the area to use the back country trails. They are coming anyway, says George Wright of BLCT, so why not have some trail areas mapped so as to direct them there?
The question that could then be asked is if such a service would attract even more, and how much of a good thing is too much.
Some bushwhackers, of course, don’t want any advice on where to go. The whole point is to get away from other people. But others do, and Wright reasons that to provide maps of quad trails in specific areas might help to concentrate ATV use in certain areas, leaving others less affected. If so, that would be good for the users of the bush who don’t particularly like quad traffic all over the place.
It’s worth a try.
First impressions
It’s interesting and a bit funny and also kind of sad to read about what a group of Rocky Mountain House residents expected to find when visiting Slave Lake for the first time (see story on P. 16). A dusty, dirty, rundown, dilapitated northern logging town with very little in the way of services.
Where did they get an idea like that? From the movies? One wonders if such misconceptions are common among southerners. Do they, for example, think the same about Peace River? Fort McMurray? Or is it just Slave Lake that brings up images of a one-horse town stuck in the 1950s?
Very strange.