I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling…
So wrote the poet Lord Byron decades ago.
It is a feeling that persists today in the hearts and minds of many of us, one that must have been sharpened among those who attended Wildsight’s slide presentation by Patrick Morrow and his wife Baiba Auders here on May 1.
For we who live in this part of British Columbia — indeed, in almost any southern part of the province — it may be a feeling that we take for granted most of the time. High mountains are a part of who we are. They are always there. They surround us.
They are not unlike the walls of our houses. They hold these particular parts of our globe together, while at the same time dividing them into separate liveable areas.
Yet, as Byron says, high mountains have more than just practical value. For some First Nations people, parts of them, at least, are of spiritual — that is, religious — importance. For many of the rest of us, they are of spiritual value in another sense: they uplift us, conferring at once a sense of security and an opportunity to enjoy their particular, many faceted, kind of beauty.
It is in this context, I suggest, that we should consider the proposal to develop the Jumbo glacier area as a ski resort.
Certainly there are many practical objections to this development. It will jeopardize the survival of the grizzly bears and other wildlife that inhabit the area. The roads needed for access to the resort will scar the mountainside. It will benefit mainly a relatively small number of very rich people, many of them from abroad, while presenting unwanted competition for existing ski resorts nearby. A majority of those living in the municipal district have voiced opposition to the project. And the list goes on.
But those — human and otherwise — who live in the vicinity are not the only ones with a stake in this matter. To misquote an even earlier poet, John Donne, no mountain is an island. Jumbo is a part of all who inhabit a vast area surrounding it, even if most of them never see it, let alone climb it.
It is a symbol of that feeling Byron felt. And for that reason, above all, it must be preserved in its pristine state.
We cannot go on hacking away at our precious mountains. We must take a stand somewhere, insisting that enough is enough. And Jumbo, because of its uniqueness, because of its special beauty and because of the crass shallowness of the case for desecrating it, is an ideal place to take that stand.
Until recently, the political powers that be have implicitly recognized that there is no justification for allowing development on Jumbo. Now they have changed their position for reasons that we can only guess — but certainly for none that reflect credit on them.
They need to be reminded, forcefully, that Jumbo is special in its own right and, symbolically, that is an intrinsic example of our feeling for our mountains. So, even if we do not live below or close to Jumbo’s slopes, let us flood the politicians who would tarnish this gem with letters expressing our disappointment with and disapproval of the “unfeeling” course they have chosen.
Peter Hepher is a retired journalist living in Creston.