From Yellowstone to Yukon

For the past 1,200 miles, he's walked along knife-edge ridges, skied over mountains, and hiked through canyons. And he still has 1,000 miles to go. Karsten Heuer is a man on a mission to save one of the world's last mountain ecosystems.

by Michael Finkel

Early on the morning of June 6, 1998, near the mineral-rich waters of Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone National Park, a Canadian wildlife biologist named Karsten Heuer began hiking north. For the next five months, he hiked 1,200 miles, following the spine of the Rocky Mountains through Montana and into Canada. He completed the equivalent of 15 ascents of Mount Everest and faced more than a dozen encounters with bears. He paused for the winter in Alberta. By the end of this summer he plans to cover another 1,000 miles, reaching the edge of the Yukon Territory.

Heuer is 30 years old. He has sandy-blond hair, a boxy physique, and the energy level of a Rolling Stones concert. Before dedicating himself to this trek, Heuer worked summers as a ranger in Canada's Banff National Park and winters as a contract wildlife biologist. Both are professions that can mold a person into something of a hiking automaton. Heuer, though, is not merely hiking. "I'm delivering a message," he says, sounding very much like a touring evangelist. Which, in a way, he is. At nearly every town he passes, Heuer emerges from the wilderness and is picked up by a support vehicle. He changes from his shorts and grubby T-shirt into clean pants and an oxford shirt. Then, at a school auditorium or a community center, he sets up a slide projector and stages his version of a tent revival: He introduces the audience to the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

Y2Y, as the initiative is often called, is probably the most ambitious conservation project ever attempted. It is North America's environmental equivalent of the Great Wall of China. The plan--supported and propelled by a network of more than 200 conservation groups, wildlife scientists, and resource economists--is to connect a series of large protected areas that extends for more than 2,000 miles, from Yellowstone's hot springs to the Yukon's Mackenzie Mountains. This is the region Heuer--usually accompanied by his Border collie, Webster--is hiking and lecturing his way through.

I caught up with Heuer last March, the evening before he was set to head north into the wilderness of Jasper National Park, in Alberta. Catching up with Heuer, as is probably apparent, is no small accomplishment. It's like catching up with a hummingbird. Winter was still very much in evidence, and Heuer was continuing his trip on cross-country skis. Webster had to stay behind. Instead, two friends would accompany Heuer for several weeks. I joined the group for three days.

The next morning at the trailhead, we were all bent beneath hefty packs. It took only a few minutes to leave civilization behind. We gained altitude, working our way up a frozen riverbed and skiing through aspens, then lodgepoles, then spruce and pine. The peaks of the Canadian Rockies encircled us, ridgelines sharp against the sky. A moose lumbered through the trees. The snow was stitched with marten tracks.

"One of my fundamental beliefs is the importance of preserving wildlife, and the Yellowstone to Yukon initiative is what we need to keep wildlife in the Rockies," says Heuer, who has a degree in ecology from the University of Calgary. He first learned of Y2Y in 1995, when he attended a symposium about it. A year later he worked in South Africa on a project that was part of a last-ditch effort to save isolated provincial parks whose populations of lions, cheetahs, and wild dogs had been devastated by disease and inbreeding. The project was mostly unsuccessful. In Africa Heuer saw a foreshadowing of what could happen in North America. The Y2Y initiative seemed a way to avoid that fate. "I wanted to come up with a method of bringing the Y2Y idea to as many people as possible, in a way that would inspire them and motivate them, and also in a way that would satisfy my own spirit of adventure," says Heuer. "So I decided to hike."

Heuer received a two-year leave of absence from Banff National Park and funded his trip mostly by selling T-shirts and soliciting donations. He purchased a support vehicle, a used minivan, and cajoled his sister, Erica, into driving it. "This is as grassroots as it gets," he says.

At the end of the first day of skiing, by the time I reached camp, Heuer had already set up the tent, dug a snow pit six feet deep, and started a fire. "I'm more optimistic now than when I started this whole hike," he said, warming his feet over the fire and watching the alpenglow creep up the mountaintops. From the forest came the chuckling call of a boreal owl. "I expected to see the land more impacted than it was. Almost everywhere I've hiked I've seen signs of bear. And I keep getting the sense that Y2Y is merely articulating what many people are already feeling."

It was a similar perception, by a Calgary-based lawyer named Harvey Locke, that led to the creation of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Locke recently left his law firm, at age 39, to pursue conservation full-time. His Y2Y idea came together during a 1993 camping trip in northern British Columbia. "I was thinking about conservation on a big scale," says Locke, "and I took out a topo map and began writing notes on Yellowstone to Yukon."

Locke's family has lived in the Rockies for five generations. "I'm a legitimate local," he says. His environmental credentials are impeccable: current vice president for conservation of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, president of the Wildlands Project, and board member of the Montana Nature Conservancy. In December 1993 he helped organize the first meeting of scientists and activists to discuss the feasibility of the Yellowstone to Yukon idea.

"I see the Y2Y as a great societal challenge," says Locke. "Can we shift our mindset from thinking that this is just another place where we'll fritter away our natural legacy, to a vision in which nature thrives and flourishes and enriches us as people? There's no template, no model--it's an original idea. We're advancing a vision that asks us to orient our society in a way that maintains everything that makes this area world-famous and wonderful."

One of Y2Y's first goals is to accomplish exactly what Heuer has set out to do--to convince the public and legislators to think beyond the artificial boundaries of Canadian and US national parks, which are too small to accommodate the natural behaviors of most large carnivores. "Wilderness ghettos" is how Paul Paquet, a biologist who specializes in wolf and bear studies for the World Wildlife Fund Canada, describes national parks. Rather than focusing on protecting small parcels of land or individual species, the Y2Y ideal is to preserve entire ecological processes, such as migration, by linking large tracts of wilderness.

The reason the northern Rockies were selected is simple: Most of the pieces for such a grand linkage are already in place. "What we have in the Rocky Mountains is rare--an almost complete representation of all the native large mammals that were here before Europeans arrived," says Paquet. "From the perspective of the great mountain ecosystems of the world, it's the last of the last."

Included within the Y2Y area--the area from which the actual chain of reserves and corridors will be established--are 460,000 square miles of prime wildlife habitat. "It is a natural Eden," says Michael Soulé, a conservation biologist who helped found the Wildlands Project, a group that seeks to expand the wilderness-connection concept throughout North America.

By the time Heuer reaches the Yukon Territory, he will have hiked past the headwaters of 10 major rivers--the Snake, the Missouri, the Columbia, and the Peace, among others. He will have walked beside waters alive with 118 species of fish, including the rare westslope cutthroat trout and Arctic grayling, and passed through the breeding grounds of more than 275 species of birds.

Halfway through his trip he had already seen signs of every large carnivore whose home turf falls within the Y2Y region: cougar, lynx, bobcat, wolf, wolverine, grizzly, and black bear. Heuer has witnessed some of the 6,000 golden eagles that migrate nearly the entire distance of the Y2Y each spring and fall. He has watched herds of elk tromp through the underbrush, seen wolves bounding after prey, and come face to face with a grizzly bear. "Not being at the top of the food chain is what gives a wild edge to a place," he says. Heuer and his friends traveled through southern British Columbia for almost three weeks without seeing evidence of human presence.

Heuer has experienced a wilderness in which humans are merely part of the natural community rather than dominators of it--the type of landscape envisioned by Aldo Leopold when he helped found the Wilderness Society, in 1935. "Coming out of Yellowstone last summer," says Heuer, "I was hiking along the crest of the Gallatin Mountains, which was the only place where the wind had cleared away the late-season snow, and I saw the tracks of hundreds of animals. Wolverine and elk and grizzly and me--we had all chosen the same route. It was literally an animal highway."

The Y2Y initiative was born of several notions. Foremost is the increasingly clear evidence that, despite the prevalence of national parks in the region--the Y2Y area encompasses 10 of them--not one is nearly large enough to sustain and protect viable populations of large animals, notably grizzly bears. (See "Bear Necessities," page 54.) Grizzlies have become the symbol of the Y2Y movement: Protect grizzlies, and you have protected the wilderness they require to live, as well as the other species that share the wilderness, the rivers that run through it, and the birds that nest in it. "If you do right by bears," says Louisa Willcox, the project coordinator for the Sierra Club's Grizzly Bear Ecosystems Project, "you've pretty much done right by the whole enchilada."

Doing right by bears will not be an easy task. A 1992 study in the Northwest Environmental Journal reported that about 50,000 square miles of habitat are necessary to sustain 2,000 grizzly bears.That's the number required to avoid inbreeding and to recover from disturbances such as food shortages and disease. The largest national park in the Y2Y area, Jasper, is less than one-tenth the size needed for a healthy population of grizzlies. As it stands now, the chances of bears crossing from one park to another are about nil. According to Christopher Servheen, a bear biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, not one of the 460 grizzly bears radio-tracked in the United States in the past quarter-century has crossed from one ecosystem to another when the distance between the territories was greater than 40 miles. Since 1922 the United States has lost about 30 grizzly bear populations. Only five exist now.

Another impetus for the Y2Y initiative is to counteract the impact of human activities. The amount of pristine wilderness left in the Rockies, especially in the southern half of the Y2Y region, is swiftly shrinking. Two million people live within the Y2Y area; that number is expected to double over the next three decades. Each year, more than 150,000 acres of forest are cut. There are now 51,000 oil and natural gas wells in the area, and 420,000 miles of roads. These numbers will likely triple in the next 15 years. Of the 320 watersheds, only 28 remain roadless. "The worst view I had," recalls Heuer, "was just north of Crowsnest Pass, in Alberta. I stood on a ridge and looked around, and I counted 44 clearcuts. Not one showed any level of regeneration. There were logs and holes and craggy root masses all over. Everything was dry. It was like walking out of a forest and into a desert."

Y2Y aims to connect the national parks and preserves with wildlife corridors. A wildlife corridor, at its most basic level, is a hallway for animals. The hallway, however, must be wide enough to allow large animals to travel and plants to propagate, so that genetic interchange can take place. To accommodate grizzlies, some biologists believe corridors need to be in the range of 30 miles wide. There are already places in the Y2Y region--the Bow Valley of Alberta, the Gallatin Valley of Montana--that do not have room for such corridors. In these areas, significant habitat restoration will have to take place.

Y2Y's time frame for accomplishing its goals is imprecise, and much work needs to be done. Over the next few years, the groups and individuals involved with the initiative will attempt to map the best locations for the reserve network and its wildlife corridors. The network will include, as often as feasible, areas that are already protected. All the work will be filtered through the Y2Y home office, which is literally a home office--a staff of two toiling out of the second floor of a small house in Canmore, Alberta.

Once the maps have been developed, discussions will begin with landowners-- governments, corporations, and individuals. There must be land purchases and exchanges, and conservation easements. Municipal-growth plans that establish and protect wildlife corridors will have to be passed. These efforts will be coordinated, for the most part, by the conservation groups that have the greatest expertise in each specific region. Nothing will happen, however, until there is widespread public support for the idea. That's where Karsten Heuer comes in.

The ski trip was actually the second time I had met Heuer. The first time was several months before in a town called Dunster, in eastern British Columbia, where Heuer was giving his Y2Y presentation. Dunster is not a large place. The streets are unpaved. There is one shop in town--Hill's General Store, where a sign on the front door reads customers wanted: no experience necessary. In a drive past Dunster's homes, I saw more locals on horseback (two) than in cars (none).

That evening, 28 people gathered in the barnlike Dunster Community Hall. The attendees spanned a wide range of the political spectrum and an equally wide range of professions. I sat between a timber-company executive and a man who makes French horns.

For someone who claims not to enjoy public speaking, Heuer is adept at it--poised, engaging, and knowledgeable, with a relaxed manner. He actually uses the word heck. He talked about the national park dilemma and the grizzlies' need for space and the idea of wildlife corridors. But instead of emphasizing the gloom and doom, his presentation was profoundly inspiring. People nodded their heads and murmured "Aah" and "Hmm" at appropriate moments.

Most of them, that is. During the question period after the talk, a few audience members pressed Heuer for more details. Where exactly were the corridors going to be established? What was the Y2Y stance on public-lands grazing? Who was going to pay for all this? Heuer was unable to provide solid answers. The Y2Y project, he explained, was still in the mapping stages. "It's hard to be definite," he said, "about an indefinite proposal."

This vagueness has allowed those who oppose the initiative to trumpet alarming claims. "Y2Y would be devastating to the timber business," says Jack Munro, the chairman of the Forest Alliance of British Columbia. "It'll destroy the industries that built this continent." The Forest Alliance has issued a lengthy report claiming that if the Y2Y initiative is fully implemented, as many as 80,000 jobs could be threatened in British Columbia alone. A widely distributed letter from a coal-mining firm protested Y2Y's "potential deindustri-alization and depopulation of the Rocky Mountains." The cover of a recent issue of the conservative newsmagazine British Columbia Report stated that the initiative was "a bid to eradicate humanity from much of BC." Government support for Y2Y, in both Canada and the United States, has been tepid.

Although much of what Y2Y's opponents say is clearly overreaction, a project of this magnitude is not accomplished without sacrifice. The notion of restoration, of scaling back human activity--and even, in certain spots, of eliminating human presence altogether--does not sit well with everyone. "There's a fairly harsh bottom-line truth in all this," says the Sierra Club's Willcox. "We have to realize that we live in a world of limits. This is anathema to our whole culture, but ultimately, if we want to save what we have, hard choices are going to have to be made."

Some of these choices have already been made. Wolves have been reintroduced to Yellowstone. An airstrip was closed in Banff National Park in 1997 to allow for more natural migration of predators. Recently, 2.5 million acres of public land were preserved in northern British Columbia, surrounded by another 7.5 million acres of limited-use zones. Of course, this is scarcely the beginning. Roads will have to be closed; degraded habitat will have to be revitalized. This will not be accomplished quickly. "One of the difficulties we face in articulating this program is that we're thinking in much longer terms than people are used to," says Paquet. "We're speaking of 500-year protection plans, 1,000-year plans. People have trouble conceiving of those terms, especially politicians."

And it is the politicians, in many cases, who will determine the fate of the initiative. Y2Y is a political briar patch: It is subject to the jurisdiction of two nations, five states, two provinces, two territories, several international treaties, the governments of numerous native peoples, an untold number of multinational corporations, and hundreds of municipalities. Paquet has tracked wolves that have journeyed through 30 different jurisdictions in three days.

"The politics are complex," says the Wildlands Project's Soulé, "but the science is not. Impossible things happen when people are inspired. Y2Y might be idealistic, utopian, and romantic, but the beauty is that it can be completed."

At least one person is willing to demonstrate the depth of his beliefs. "Some people go on hunger strikes," says Heuer. "I'm thinking about going on a walking strike--I'm going to walk until the project is done."

Montana-based writer Michael Finkel lives within the Y2Y region and has hiked much of its southern section. He wrote about the coyote's comeback in the May-June issue of Audubon.

OTHER CORRIDORS

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (403-609-2666; www.rockies.ca/y2y) is one of several projects seeking to link parks and reserves by wildlife-migration corridors. Here are a few others.

Florida: In 1990 the Florida State Legislature passed the Preservation 2000 Act, which earmarked $3 billion in public funds to acquire land in endangered habitats, particularly that of the panther, as part of a plan to incorporate almost half the state into a system of reserves and corridors. (352-466-4136; conwayconsrv@igc.apc.org)

Southwest United States and Mexico: The Sky Island Alliance has advanced a plan to connect isolated protected areas throughout the mesa and desert region of New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico. (505-243-5319; skisland@swcp.com)

Eastern United States and Canada: A consortium of environmental groups are attempting to build a reserve network, known as A2A, that will connect Algonquin Park in Ontario to Adirondack Park in New York. (802-864-4850; glwildland@sprynet.com)

Southern Rockies: In 1998 the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project released a plan to connect the reserves of southern Wyoming, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. (303-258-0433; srep@indra.com)