The area is roughly the size of Oregon and consists of virgin forests, white-water rivers, sparkling tributaries and hundreds of glaciers. It hosts plentiful wildlife, including stone sheep, bears, wolves, caribou, moose, elk and eagles. In a miraculous accident of nature, three of the most important salmon rivers in the world have their headwaters there, literally within walking distance of each other.
Best-selling author and nature journalist Wade Davis, along with renowned nature photographer Carr Clifton and a handful of others, hopes that the book they are now creating about this place, The Sacred Headwaters, won’t be an analogous story to that of Glen Canyon—a beautiful natural stone monument carved by the Colorado River, home to thousands of ancient artifacts and hieroglyphics, that was filled in as a reservoir in the early 1960s and is now known as Lake Powell. Fortunately, before that happened, a photographer named Eliot Porter documented Glen Canyon in a book entitled The Place No One Knew; but now that place is gone.
In the case of the Sacred Headwaters region, it has been approved by the Canadian government for drilling and mining of gold, copper, natural gas and oil. Exploration has already begun. If the companies aiming to strip the resources out of the area succeed, it will in fact be lost to all future generations.
Describing the Sacred Headwaters
“I think for an American audience it’s useful to put the whole place in perspective,” Wade Davis told Organic Connections. “In the lower 48, the farthest you can get away from a maintained road is 20 miles. In the northwest quadrant of British Columbia, which is an area the size of Oregon, there’s literally one road. Your biggest canyon, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, hosts five million visitors a year, and 27,000 explore it by raft. The flow of the river is controlled by technicians at any one of the 11 dam sites, and by the time the river reaches the sea it’s not a river at all; it’s completely just a shadow in the sand.
“In contrast, our biggest canyon in Canada is that of the Stikine River, one of the three rivers that drain from the Sacred Headwaters. This river has never in history been successfully rafted by anyone. Less than 100 people have ever gotten through parts of it, and it’s known as a K2* of white-water challenges.
“Yosemite National Park is visited every year by the equivalent population of Los Angeles. Criminal events have been reported in that small seven-square-mile valley bottom. Every night at the peak of summer, as many as 15,000 people camp out in this tiny little area, and there are 600 car accidents a year.
“People often say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to know the Grand Canyon or Yosemite as they were first experienced by human beings, or certainly by non-native human beings? What was it like when John Muir went to Yosemite? Wouldn’t it be great to know it like that?’ Well, the answer is you can. In 1879, John Muir came up to the Stikine River and was astonished. He went up just a lower third of the river and counted 100 glaciers in its shores; and then when he climbed a mountain at a place named Glenora, he counted 100 more. He called the whole place ‘a Yosemite 150 miles long.’ He named his dog after the river.
“If anything, there’s less traffic on that river today than there was in 1879. These three rivers—the Stikine, the Skeena and the Nass—by a kind of remarkable accident or miracle of geography, if you will, are born within extraordinarily close proximity to each other in this place known to the First Nations as the Sacred Headwaters.”
The First Nations peoples who live here—the Tlingit, the Tahltan, the Gitxsan, the Wet’suwet’en, the Dakelh and the Nisga’a—have been hunting and revering this land since before the advent of the white man.
Davis knows of only one other place on Earth where three iconic rivers are born so close together. In Tibet, at the base of Mount Kailas, begin three of the great rivers of Asia: the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, which bring life to more than a billion people downstream. The region is considered so sacred by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain alike that no one is allowed to walk on its slopes, let alone violate it with industrial development.
In a very odd twist of fate, the threat to the Sacred Headwaters is not an issue that Wade Davis heard about and came running to document; he has been calling this area home for some 30 years. “I’ve been living up there seasonally since the mid-seventies,” he said. “I was the first Park Ranger in what is British Columbia’s biggest roadless wilderness park, called the Spatsizi Wilderness. Later, about 25 years ago, I bought a lodge, which is the closest private holding to the Sacred Headwaters. So I’ve been deeply involved with the Tahltan community and the country in general for a very long time. It’s really my home.”
The Prayer for the Future
Where Wade and his family used to experience silence except for the wind, the elements and the sounds of nature, they now can hear, from the lodge, the sound of exploration drilling day and night.
The proposed technologies to be employed to retrieve gas, oil and minerals from the region are, in a gross understatement, intrusive. To extract natural gas, a procedure called hydraulic fracturing will be used—a method that releases poisonous chemicals into the ground, causing them to rise to the surface and pollute groundwater and wildlife. The open-pit method of mining for copper and gold will lay waste to broad stretches of this precious land—and fill rivers, streams and lakes with mining and chemical waste.
It is only hoped that Wade and his cadre of friends—including the First Nations peoples who call this land home—can reach the eyes and ears of the politicians and businesspeople responsible with these images and with wisdom that could turn the tide.
“Ultimately, these initiatives are all for the sake of a handful of private individuals,” Davis concluded. “What’s fascinating about that is we take as a given this overall kind of economic model because it is the way that we, a resource-driven economy, rationalize the industrialization of the wild. Since we take it as a given, we assume it’s the norm; but most assuredly it is not the normal way in which people interact with the natural world, as my travels have certainly shown and as I’ve written about many times.
“What I find curious is there’s not a single metric in the calculus that rationalizes the industrialization of the wild that places any value whatsoever on the land left alone—what it is worth to us in a pristine state. The whole thing should be considered criminal activity—even to contemplate it—let alone to have such a move actually occur with the blessing of the government.”
Click any image above to see a larger version.
The Photos of Carr Clifton
“I’m a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), and we got an e-mail saying that they needed a landscape photographer for this spot in the Sacred Headwaters,” Carr Clifton told Organic Connections. “This was on very short notice and was being urged by Wade Davis. I kind of hemmed and hawed and found out who else was involved. They hardly had anybody because it was such short notice, so I had to at least go see. I figured I could always leave if it wasn’t really what I was into doing.
“I was only scheduled to be there three weeks, and stayed four. I did have to fly home because I had a previous commitment; so I flew home, took care of that commitment and within seven days I was driving back up in my truck with a camper on it. I stayed another five weeks. Knowing landscape, they should have had us shooting during fall, because it would have been much more beautiful when snow started flying on the peaks and all the aspens and cottonwoods were changing color. So I simply took it upon myself, because I knew they didn’t have enough material for this book project. I just decided to stay and shoot until the snow began flying. It really paid off; it was phenomenal.”
Part of the technology brought in by mining companies for exploration turned out to be greatly to Clifton’s benefit. “Because they are exploring all this mining, there are quite a few helicopter companies in the region to take geologists out there,” Clifton said. “So we had about five or six different helicopter companies that we could pick from and basically fight fire with fire—you’re burning petrochemicals at an alarming rate in a helicopter, but you’ve got to get out to those places to photograph them. It’s kind of like Jacques Cousteau, who couldn’t have just gone to sea in a kayak to try to inform the public of what was out there. It was quite exciting and paid off hugely with the photographs, especially of all the areas that were inaccessible. These areas didn’t even have trails. You could get in by river and you could get in by air and that was it.
“Shooting was fantastic from the helicopters,” Clifton recalled. “I would watch the weather and pick a day. It’s very expensive— $800 to $1,000 an hour—to fly in these things; so you really can’t just go, ‘Hey, let’s go take a look.’ You have to pick exactly. You figure out where you want to go; you wait for the right weather; you wait for the right clouds; you let that sun get a little bit low—then you go shoot. I would wait until there were only about three hours left of light in the afternoon, with the perfect clouds for the extra magic. I just wanted that magic: I wanted mist; I wanted a little bit of storminess sometimes. We even hit rain on a couple of occasions. But the great thing about a helicopter was that we could divert around the heavy storms and find somewhere else. That was extra special, to see this land from the air and to be able to see it in the perfect light and at the perfect time of year. It was incredible.
“One of the more critical areas is around Red Chris Mine, where they’re proposing what we think is strip mining,” Clifton continued. “There’s a lake there called Black Lake, and earlier we had been out and had photographed it in kind of a bad light. We got pictures, but they weren’t very good.
“So on a separate flight later on in the fall, another photographer, Paul Colangelo, and I were shooting from the helicopter and we were a fair distance south of that region. When we got done shooting where we were, we had just a little bit more light and it was quite stormy. The sun was starting to almost go over the horizon, so we decided to head toward Black Lake because we needed more pictures of it. By the time we got there, we had God’s rays coming into that valley and it was peak fall color and it had just rained. It was phenomenal, and we just cleaned up. We were ecstatic. That flight went over the normal limit; we were running on fumes. The pilot was even a little bit anxious. We were trying to shoot this one last scene, and he said, ‘You’ve got one chance on this. We’re going to fly by and you’re going to shoot it and that’s it.’ But it was one of those things—we hadn’t planned on it, we hadn’t timed it, and we’d almost forgotten that we hadn’t taken pictures of that area yet; and it was probably the most essential area to get. The results were gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.
“The Sacred Headwaters is a really important region. In all the traveling I’ve done, this is one of the most prime locations I’ve ever seen. It needs to be protected. It’s the wrong place for us to go in and extract resources from.”
Follow issues in the region by visiting www.skeenawatershed.com.
*K2: A mountain in northern Kashmir, in the Karakoram Range, on the border between China and Pakistan. At 28,250 ft, it is the second highest peak in the world, known for its difficulty of ascent and the high fatality rate of those who climb it.
All photos in this feature © Carr Clifton Photography.
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