CG - Jul/Aug 2016

CT MA I P RO C S PIN UT HIP G ES PIN G AR

CONSERVATION NSERVATION LESSONS FROM A KILLER WHALE

CANADA’S GREATEST

WOMEN

EXPLORERS MEET DIVER EXTRAORDINAIRE

JILL HEINERTH &

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OTHER AMAZING ADVENTURERS

MONTREAL as seen by BIKE COURIERS

GANDER

DISPLAY UNTIL SEPTEMBER 12, 2016

+

GPS ART, THE NEW NATIONAL MUSIC CENTRE, E-WASTE’S GOLDEN SOLUTION & MUCH MORE

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JULY/AUGUST 2016 $7.95

INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT at 80

SOMETIMES FEELING SMALL MEANS LOSING YOURSELF IN THE BIG PICTURE.

features CONTENTS

28

‘WE’RE CAPABLE OF FAR MORE THAN WE THINK WE ARE.’

COVER: MARK LONG/CAN GEO. THIS PAGE, TOP: CAS DOBBIN; BOTTOM: NED PRATT/CAN GEO

A profile of Jill Heinerth, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s newly minted Explorer-in-Residence, and 25 other top Canadian women explorers

By Russell Wangersky and Canadian Geographic staff

40 THE MESSENGERS

Red brake lights blooming. Sunshine glinting off a car’s side mirror. The blur of elaborate wrought-iron handrails. Welcome to Montreal as it’s seen by bike couriers.

By Eva Holland with photography

by Rodolphe Beaulieu-Poulin

46

THEY ALMOST CALLED IT AIRLANDIA It’s a city that was built on aviation, but after 80 years, what does the future hold for Gander and its famed airport?

By Stephen Smith with photography by Ned Pratt

53

WHAT KILLED RHAPSODY? When one of the few remaining females of reproductive age in the southern resident population of North Pacific killer whales was found dead near Comox, B.C., in late 2014, an investigation was launched. Are there lessons to be learned to help her endangered family?

By Christopher Pollen

ON THE COVER Diver Jill Heinerth explores the clear waters of Blue Springs Park near her home in High Springs, Florida.

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departments CONTENTS

20 8 10

BIG PICTURE Celebrating Canada’s grandeur

EXPOSURE Showcasing Can Geo’s photo club

12

IN A SNAP

25

POLAR BLOG

26

ON THE MAP

Sharing Can Geo via Instagram

Tiny creatures, big lessons

Exploring cartography

15

INTERVIEW Victoria’s Internet-famous GPS artist on his inspiration and technique

16

WILDLIFE Swimming polar bears, a kokanee comeback, crow attacks and more

18

HISTORY A map of a transatlantic marvel and the centenary of Beaumont-Hamel

20

PLACE Making memories at the new National Music Centre in Calgary

22

INFOGRAPHIC Extracting gold from electronic waste

58 YOUR SPACE COMMENT Your feedback TRENDING Hot buzz from Can Geo’s social media sites COVER VOTE Choosing our cover WHAT’S THIS? Recognize this mystery object?

WHERE’S THIS? Can you identify this landmark?

15 4

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J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 6

66 60 YOUR SOCIETY

News from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society

65

NEXT ISSUE

66

OUR COUNTRY

October 2016, Canadian Geographic honours aviation aces

Olympic gold medallist and reigning world champion trampoline gymnast Rosie MacLennan reflects on her childhood memories of Muskoka, Ont.

TOP: RENDERING BY MIR; BOTTOM: DEREK FORD/CAN GEO; ILLUSTRATION: SHELAGH ARMSTRONG/CAN GEO

DISCOVERY

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digital PREMIUM RUSH How did Eva Holland prepare herself for the rigours of being a bike messenger in Montreal?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt helped a bit.

TRAILBLAZING WOMEN Roberta Bondar and the other women explorers featured in this issue aren’t the only ones on the frontiers of their fields. Meet more amazing Canadian women here.

cangeo.ca/ja16/bike

cangeo.ca/women

DIGITAL ISSUE Take Canadian Geographic wherever you go, while also accessing bonus videos and photos with the digital issue for tablets.

cangeo.ca/digital CARTOGRAPHY ART From mermaids to dinosaurs, Stephen Lund uses GPS to draw fantastical creatures on the streets of Victoria. Read an extended interview with the cartographic artist and see more of his work.

cangeo.ca/ja16/gps

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CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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LEFT: RODOLPHE BEAULIEU-POULIN/CAN GEO; RIGHT: CARLYLE ROUTH; MAP: COURTESY STEPHEN LUND

CONTENTS

ON NEWSSTANDS

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

AND ONLINE NOW

Endless possibilities

I

Canadian geography quiz ever, with fascinating and fun facts about our land, people, wildlife, climate and history that are sure to challenge you.

To comment, please visit cangeo.ca or email editor@canadiangeographic.ca.

For inside details on the magazine and other news, follow editor Aaron Kylie on

CANGEO.CA/ULTQUIZ

Twitter (@aaronkylie).

COURTESY KATE HARRIS

The toughest

I KNOW A seven-year-old who loves science and math. She also loves princess dresses, makeup and art. Those passions might once have been considered contradictory, but thank goodness we live in a time when youngsters can have such diverse interests.

The girl is my daughter Savannah. And while she’s passionate about a wide range of subjects, she’s not particularly interested in the magazine her dad helps make — at least not yet. But when I bring this issue home, I’m going to share with her the story celebrating Canada’s top women explorers (page 28).

There’s an important point to make: that despite the fact that women haven’t generally been counted among history’s great explorers, that’s changing. I don’t want to tell Savannah that. I hope she’ll discover it herself when she sees these great explorers.

Perhaps she’ll take note that diver extraordinaire Jill Heinerth, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s newly minted first Explorer-in-Residence, was once a commercial artist, but abandoned that interest for her underwater passion.

Maybe the artist in Savannah will note the amazing photographs Heinerth captures during her current exploits — no doubt influenced by her earlier career.

I want Savannah to see a world of possibilities. Maybe she’ll develop an interest in the magazine itself and consider becoming its first female editor-in-chief. Who knows?

—Aaron Kylie

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER John G. Geiger CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AND PUBLISHER Gilles Gagnier CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER André Préfontaine EDITOR Aaron Kylie DIRECTOR, PRODUCTION Mike Elston NEW MEDIA MANAGER Paul Politis SENIOR EDITOR Harry Wilson MANAGING EDITOR Nick Walker ASSOCIATE EDITOR Michela Rosano NEW MEDIA EDITOR Sabrina Doyle SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Alexandra Pope SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR Thomas Hall ART DIRECTOR Javier Frutos PHOTO EDITOR Jessica Finn GRAPHIC DESIGNER Jenny Chew CONTRACT DESIGNER Alissa Dicaire PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Kendra Stieler

Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for exploration

CARTOGRAPHER Chris Brackley COPY EDITOR Stephanie Small PROOFREADER Judy Yelon COLOUR TECHNICIAN Glenn Campbell EDITORIAL INTERNS Amely Coulombe, Vanessa Hrvatin,

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CHRIS CULLEN/CAN GEO PHOTO CLUB

Date of issue: July/August 2016 Copyright ©2016. All rights reserved.

PHOTO BY JIM CUMMING A quintessential summer sight across much of the country, the common loon is an enduring Canadian symbol. Besides having graced the nation’s dollar coin since its introduction in 1987, the loon has been the official provincial bird of Ontario since 1994.

This picture appears on a coin in the Royal Canadian Mint’s Celebrating Canada’s 150th series. In collaboration with the Mint, Canadian Geographic sourced images for the 13-coin set. For more information, visit mint.ca/canadiangeographic.

big picture

JIM CUMMING/GETTY IMAGES

CELEBRATING CANADA’S GRANDEUR

Coin shown at actual size.

exposure SHOWCASING CAN GEO’S PHOTO CLUB

PHOTO BY WESLEY LIIKANE A concrete sculpture of a hand appears to reach toward the stars at the home of artist Peter Camani in Burk’s Falls, Ont. The hand is part of a series of sculptures Camani started creating in 1989 that includes 26 fivemetre-high faces, known as the Screaming Heads.

Join Canadian Geographic’s Photo Club for a chance to have your photography featured in this space.

Visit photoclub.cangeo.ca.

RC G S P O L A R E X PE D I T I O N S S E R I E S :: A N TA RC T I C A 2017

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in a snap

INSTAGRAM CHALLENGE: “GEOMETRY” This issue’s In a snap theme is “Exploration.”

October’s is “Geometry.” Get creative and tag your best shots with #ShareCanGeo for a chance to be featured!

SHARING CAN GEO VIA INSTAGRAM

@alexgdouglas Alex Douglas On the road in Prince Edward Island

@josephkoensgen Joseph Koensgen Stargazing, Sandilands Provincial Forest, Man.

@canadian.landscapes Scott Forsyth Abandoned house, Hebron, N.L.

@lacey_bear Lacey Hebert Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park, B.C.

@lisasidorsky Lisa Sidorsky Spirit bear, near Hartley Bay, B.C.

@jeremynsl Jeremy Janzen Canoeing, Missinipe, Sask.

@jillianabrownphotography Jillian Brown Assiniboine Park Zoo, Winnipeg

@casshatt Cassidy Hatt Paddys Island, near North Medford, N.S.

@alpine_nicolae Celina Wong Tangled roots, Elora, Ont.

Check out the Canadian Geographic Instagram page at instagram.com/cangeo or share your photos with us using the hashtag #ShareCanGeo. 12

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ADVENTURE EXPLORATION

HISTORY

The exclusive inside story and photos of the discovery of HMS Erebus.

Buy it today! rcgs.org/franklinbook

INTERVIEW

Stephen Lund Victoria’s Internet-famous GPS artist on his inspiration, technique and that 14-hour mermaid

L

Stephen Lund on his bike in Victoria, where he creates his GPS doodles — including his self-portrait (inset).

INTERVIEW BY THOMAS HALL

DEREK FORD/CAN GEO; MAP: COURTESY STEPHEN LUND

Lots of people cycle and lots of people doodle, but Stephen Lund is one of a handful in the world that pulls off both at the same time. Lund, a 50-year-old marketing consultant who has gained international recognition for his doodles, has turned his hometown of Victoria into a massive canvas, and his bike and a GPS tracker into his pen.

On where the doodle idea came from It came from a little red line on a map.

I bought a GPS device in 2014 to track my rides. When I first saw them on the map, I started seeing shapes and wondered, “Why isn’t anyone drawing with this?”

On how he plans the drawings In the best case, it’s the map that provides the inspiration, but I use two techniques.

One is to find routes that allow me to complete the entire picture uninterrupted. That feels a lot more creative to me than the other technique, which I call “connecting the dots.”

I discovered by accident that if I pause my GPS at point A and restart it at point B, those lines will be connected with a straight line.

On making mapping mistakes I don’t do it as much now because I know the obstacles pretty well. When I was creating a witch doodle, it looked like one road connected to the other, but there was a big wall of bedrock, and I was in cycling cleats and the rock was wet. I thought “Well, I can climb it, or just go a block down and skirt about it.”

or about four hours on the bike. I made a mermaid that took 14 hours. It was an ordeal. But she turned out in the end, and people are really quite taken by her.

On being called an artist I work with graphic designers all the time and have a pretty good visual design sense, but this is my first foray into the visual arts. But in terms of the broader notion of creativity, I find that even though words are my domain, this really recharges me. I feel totally reenergized after planning a route or going out and riding one. I don’t know if that’s a matter of working a different part of my right brain, but it’s been really good for me.

On how long it takes to create a doodle They average about 70 kilometres of riding,

https://vk.com/readinglecture

Read an extended interview with Stephen Lund at cangeo.ca/ja16/gps.

CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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WILDLIFE

A comment left on CrowTrax, an interactive map that tracks crow attacks in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. Rick Davidson and Jim O’Leary, GIS instructors at Vancouver’s Langara College, developed the map to pinpoint the location and severity of attacks, which usually occur during the crow’s nesting season (April to June).

KOKANEE COMEBACK What’s the big deal about 5,000 kokanee salmon being counted in the Kathleen Lake system of Yukon’s Kluane National Park in 2015? It’s that just seven years earlier there were only 20 of them. Carmen Wong, an ecologist at the park, told the CBC that the kokanee population seems to be experiencing the same crash and resurgence cycle happening with other sockeye salmon, which could be climate related.

‘I’m a bit ashamed now that they were stuck there all that time.’

Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, tells the CBC how he felt after discovering that the remains of charred twigs he found in a gypsum quarry near Windsor, N.S., and had been storing in England for five years turned out to be the world’s oldest known pine tree fossils. The 140-million-year-old fossils are the ancestors of the modern pine tree.

Ovillanta

The name of a Canadian-designed mosquito trap made from two pieces of old car tire that has been shown to successfully destroy the eggs of the Aedes genus of mosquito, which transmits the Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever viruses.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ROBERTA OLENICK/ALL CANADA PHOTOS; CDC/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY; DANIEL J. COX/NATURALEXPOSURES.COM; KURT WERBY/ALL CANADA PHOTOS

‘Hit 3 times in a row. The last time so hard on the back of my head, I stumbled and almost fell.’

400

The approximate distance in kilometres that a female polar bear swam in just nine days in 2009. It was the longest journey recorded in a recently published eight-year University of Alberta study that found receding ice levels in the Canadian Arctic are forcing polar bears to swim 50 kilometres or more to find food and shelter.

Read more about each of these stories at cangeo.ca/ja16/wildlife.

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SAIL THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

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DISCOVERY HISTORY

A most able cable Looking back 150 years at a watershed moment in global communication

MEMORIAL DAY

By Harry Wilson*

F

H

HERE’S A SNEAKY trivia question that will have your friends either scratching their heads or cursing you: by how many kilometres did the distance between Europe and North America shrink on July 27, 1866?

The answer? 3,429, or 1,852 nautical miles — the length of the first lasting transatlantic submarine telegraph cable, which stretched between Valentia Bay, Ireland, and Heart’s Content, N.L., as shown on this map.

When the cable was hauled ashore 150 years ago — as depicted in Robert Dudley’s painting Landing of the Atlantic Cable of 1866 at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland (above) — it marked a new era of intercontinental communication, one that would see electronic messages cross the ocean at a rate of six to eight words per minute instead of the several days it took letters to do so by ship.

The political, commercial and economic implications of the cable were huge, and orchestrating this 19th-century equivalent of being able to send an email was no small feat.

Beginning in 1857, multiple attempts had been made, each fruitless. A cable was successfully laid between Ireland and Newfoundland in 1858, but failed after about a month of subpar performance. It would be another eight years before the venture was to succeed.

The importance of the cable was such that the map was annotated with the messages exchanged between Queen Victoria and U.S. President Andrew Johnson shortly after the transatlantic link was established. The queen congratulated Johnson, saying that she hoped the cable would “serve as an additional bond of union between” the two nations, and Johnson reciprocated the sentiment. Had Newfoundland joined Confederation less than a year later, the answer might well have been penned by the leader of the newly minted nation where the eastern end of the cable actually ended: Sir John A. Macdonald. *with files from Isabelle Charron, early cartographic archivist, Library and Archives Canada

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For most Canadians, July 1 is a day to celebrate the birth of their country. For the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, however, it marks a sobering day in the province’s history — one that continues to be remembered a century later.

On July 1, 1916, nearly the entire Newfoundland Regiment was wiped out at Beaumont-Hamel during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in northern France. Of the 801 soldiers from the regiment who fought that day, only 68 were able to answer roll call after the battle.

It was a devastating blow, as Gerald Nicholson notes in The Fighting Newfoundlander: A History of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment: “The casualty lists from that battle reached into every community of the island Colony. From the city of St. John’s down to the smallest, most remote outport, there was scarcely a family that did not have the loss of some loved one to mourn.”

A memorial in France (above) commemorates the soldiers, but in Newfoundland and Labrador, they’re remembered on July 1, or Memorial Day. The centenary year of the battle is being marked in the province in a number of ways, including by the opening on July 1 of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Gallery at The Rooms, the provincial museum, art gallery and archives.

Among the items in the new permanent exhibition will be something that represents Newfoundlanders who died at BeaumontHamel finally coming home to rest — soil patriated from the battlefield itself.

—Vanessa Hrvatin

See a larger version of this map and Robert Dudley’s painting of

Learn more about artifacts in the regiment’s

the landing of the transatlantic cable at cangeo.ca/ja16/cable.

new gallery at cangeo.ca/ja16/regiment.

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CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

MONTH 2013

© ALUN JENKINS/ALAMY; PAINTING: LANDING OF THE ATLANTIC CABLE OF 1866 AT HEART’S CONTENT, NEWFOUNDLAND, WATERCOLOUR BY ROBERT CHARLES DUDLEY, 1866. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA, ACC. NO. R9266-175, PETER WINKWORTH COLLECTION OF CANADIANA, E000756702; MAP: NEW MAP SHEWING THE LINE OF THE ELECTRIC CABLE AND OTHER SHORT LINES OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE CONTINENTS OF EUROPE AND AMERICA, MONTREAL, ROBERTS & REINHOLD, 1866. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA, NMC 6906, E011154799

Honouring a lost generation 100 years after they fought and died at Beaumont-Hamel

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DISCOVERY PLACE

Hitting a high note A new national home for Canadian music opens in Calgary

By Aaron Kylie

O

ON A BRIGHT spring day in Calgary, three months before it officially opened its doors on July 1, Studio Bell, home of the new National Music Centre, hosted its first historic musical moment.

Flanked by fellow Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductees Tom Cochrane and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Burton Cummings mounted his own nameplate on the first physical exhibit of the hall’s members.

Such a moment had previously been impossible — no hall, no exhibit, after all — but music fans will soon be able to visit the glittering terracotta-tilecovered Studio Bell in Calgary’s downtown East Village and see not just the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, but also the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame Collection and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, all three of which now have a physical home in the new institution.

The building has more than 2,000 square metres of gallery space, or “stages,”

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created to reflect a music festival experience and featuring an open design that allows music to flow throughout five floors in the east building, drawing visitors from sound to sound. The halls of fame, for instance, are on the Celebrating Music floor, while the Making Music floor is dedicated to the science of instruments and Canadian music technology.

Other galleries include the Power of Music floor, where interactive exhibits explore musical inspirations, the Music Mosaic floor, which focuses on the people and cultures of Canadian music, and the Canada Music Square floor, which will regularly host live acts. Each floor has a live performance space, and larger shows will take place in the 300-seat Performance Hall.

The west building, meanwhile, reached via a fifth-floor bridge that spans 4th Street SE, largely comprises the renovated King Edward Hotel, a.k.a. the King Eddy. Once home to a legendary

blues bar, the building’s main floor will once again host live acts. “The Eddy is really one of the most important parts of our collection,” says Julijana Capone, the centre’s publicity coordinator.

That’s high praise, considering other highlights of the centre’s 2,000-plus piece collection include Randy Bachman’s 1959 Les Paul “American Woman” guitar, the piano Elton John played on his first five albums, and recording consoles used by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello and Barbra Streisand. The consoles will be housed in the King Eddy’s recording studio spaces and made available to national and international artists. “This combination has never been gathered before,” says Capone. “I can only imagine the collaborations we’ll see.”

Where are the best spots to find live music?

Can Geo editors list their favourite venues at cangeo.ca/ja16/music.

LEFT: RENDERING BY MIR; RIGHT: BRANDON WALLIS

Studio Bell, home of the new National Music Centre in Calgary, as depicted by an artist (left). The centre celebrates Canadian music at home, in the Made in Canada exhibit (above), and abroad.

CONSERVATION. TOGETHER. The waters offshore Nunavut support spectacular Arctic marine life such as these Black Guillemots. Shell’s gift of 860,000 hectares of offshore rights to the Nature Conservancy of Canada will protect an area larger than Banff National Park. Conservation of this area will protect an important piece of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage and could enable greater marine protection in the region.

www.shell.ca Proud supporter of:

DISCOVERY INFOGRAPHIC

Golden solution A new and simple way to extract gold from electronic waste

By Thomas Hall

Learn more about e-waste and how gold is extracted from it at cangeo.ca/ja16/ewaste.

E-WASTE W S BY THE NUMBERS* U S* • 41.8 million Estimated total amount in tonnes generated globally in 2014.

• US$52 billion Approximate worth of potentially usable resources represented by that total.

• 6.5 million Proportion of that total in tonnes that was “documented and recycled with the highest standards.”

• 12.8 million Proportion in tonnes of global total that was small equipment

(microwaves, toasters, electric shavers, etc.), which represented the largest amount of any type of e-waste.

• 1 million Proportion in tonnes of global total that was lamps, which represented the smallest amount of any type of e-waste.

• 725,000 Tonnes produced in Canada in 2014.

• 140,380 Tonnes diverted from landfill in Canada in 2014.

*Sources: Waste Crime – Waste Risks: Gaps in Meeting the Global Waste Challenge (UNEP); The Global E-waste Monitor 2014: Quantities, flows and resources (UNU).

BACKGROUND IMAGE: 4MAKSYM/ISTOCK/THINKSTOCK; ILLUSTRATIONS: JENNY CHEW/CAN GEO STAFF

Y

YOU KNOW those old cell phones rattling around at the back of your desk drawer? It turns out they’re not worthless after all. Like most electronic waste, they contain a small amount of gold, which conducts electricity well and doesn’t oxidize — properties that make it perfect for covering copper and nickel connections on circuit boards.

The problem is that extracting gold from e-waste hasn’t been cost-effective or environmentally friendly — until now.

University of Saskatchewan chemists have found that dipping e-waste in 99 per cent acetic acid — basically concentrated vinegar — and then adding zinc to the resulting solution yields gold that’s 90 per cent pure. Stephen Foley, who led the research, says only 100 litres of acetic acid, which costs about $70, is needed to dispose of five to six tonnes of e-waste and recover about one kilogram of gold, worth about $51,000. What’s more, the acid only needs to be neutralized before being poured down the drain. In North America and Europe, the main methods of recovering gold from e-waste are pyrometallurgy, where waste is crushed and burned and 60 per cent of the gold is retrieved, or hydrometallurgy, where waste is bathed in aqua regia, a toxic soup of hydrochloric and nitric acid, and anywhere between 60 and 99 per cent of the gold is retrieved. The biggest drawback of using acetic acid? The stink. “You know what vinegar smells like,” says Foley. “Imagine having 100 litres of the pure stuff.”

Still, he cautions that acetic acid isn’t a solution to the growing and global e-waste problem. “We’re stripping the gold off, but you still have the circuit board left,” he says, “so we’re just one step in a process.”

Science… is just science.

Until you make it improve the world.

3M and 3M Science. Applied to Life. are trademarks of 3M. Used under license in Canada.

Please recycle. Printed in Canada. © 2016, 3M. All rights reserved. 1606-05724-E

DIAN GEOGRAPH ANA ICA LC

ARCTIC ADVENTURE

ETY OCI LS

THE RO YA

RC G S P O L A R E X PE D I T I O N S S E R I E S :: A RC T I C 2 0 1 6

N O R T H W E S T PA S S A G E WILDLIFE ENCOUNTER 8 N I G H T S / 9 D AY S AU G U S T 1 2 – 2 0 , 2 0 1 6

JOIN OUR ANNUAL EXPEDITION INTO THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.

Evolving the historical discovery of the Arctic is a continuing process.

Following our inaugural Victoria Strait Expedition resulting in the find of HMS Erebus, we revisit this extraordinary region and focus on the abundant wildlife. We also visit a number of key historic sites all connected to the Franklin expedition.

BENEFITS OF THIS PACKAGE:

EXPEDITION CRUISE HIGHLIGHTS: ·

With 98 passengers, flexibility is our mandate. Zodiac excursions in groups of 8-10.

·

Open dining room seating for all passengers at the same time alongside OOE experts allows brilliant discussion and conversation.

·

Our staff to passenger ratio (typically 1:4) is our commitment to exceptional customer service.

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Following in the footsteps of Arctic explorers like Franklin, Amundsen and Larsen & experience the wildlife they saw in their time. Polar bear, seals (harp, bearded, ringed), muskox, whales (bowhead, beluga, narwhal).

• Package includes return charter flights from Edmonton to Resolute • Complimentary one night stay at the Fairmont MacDonald Hotel in Edmonton on 12 August, 2016 · Optional participation in our enhanced photography program with two professional photographers. Includes image • Cocktail reception in Edmonton with André Préfontaine — RCGS Ambassador optimization, one on one leadership, & photographic excursions.

• Transfers to/from Edmonton airport on embarkation/disembarkation • Arctic 2016 RCGS/One Ocean Expeditions series patch and expedition travel mug • An exclusive welcome package in your cabin • Annual Canadian Geographic gift subscription, compliments of OOE PRICES FROM • Travel alongside world renown Arctic experts in wildlife, history, culture, ornithology, marine biology, geology and polar photography

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“We are thrilled that you will be joining us on board the One Ocean Navigator for this incomparable One Ocean Expeditions and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society partnered seven-day wildlife-based cruise that will bring us into close proximity with polar bears, muskox whales, seals, walruses as well as the Arctic’s multitudinous birdlife. Don’t forget your photography equipment!”

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THE POL A R B L OG

Tiny creatures, big lessons WHAT INSECTS AND SPIDERS ARE TEACHING US ABOUT THE ARCTIC

Booth’s sulphur butterflies collected in Elyssa Cameron’s study of Arctic arthropods, which could help northern researchers anticipate effects of climate change.

BY JOHN BENNETT

T COURTESY ELYSSA CAMERON

THE NORTH’S MOST ICONIC wildlife, such as polar bears, caribou and snowy owls, could not survive without the smallest and least familiar of the region’s creatures.

They’re not well understood, but insects and spiders (arthropods) are hugely important, says Arctic entomologist Elyssa Cameron.

“They’re pollinators, carnivores, herbivores and decomposers,” she says. “They keep the ecosystem producing and recycling the nutrients that Arctic plants and animals depend on.” But even basic information — as simple as where and when to find specific species — is lacking.

Cameron, who recently completed her master’s at Montreal’s McGill University, is helping fill in those blanks and laying groundwork for long-term arthropod monitoring that will bring new understanding of the effects of climate change on the Arctic.

As part of a Polar Knowledge Canada study, Cameron collected arthropods in

Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Her traps were simple yellow bowls placed in the ground — innocent in appearance but a fatal attraction for flying insects.

“In one summer,” she says, “I got over 80,000 individuals: spiders, mites, springtails, flies, butterflies, moths, bees, wasps, beetles — pretty much everything you can find in the North.”

Cameron identified each one and its job in the ecosystem. This information is crucial, because regardless of geographical location, Arctic arthropods perform the same functions and tend to live in similar habitats, which can be as small as a few square metres. Habitat information can be extrapolated to build a picture of what is happening on the ground across the Arctic.

“Arthropods are very specific in terms of where they decide to live,” says Cameron.

“A wet habitat will have a higher proportion of decomposers than a dry habitat, and a

different food-web structure, even though they may be only 10 metres apart. Also, arthropods found at the beginning of the season have been replaced by other species by the end. For a true picture of the arthropod community, you have to keep sampling throughout the season.”

Cameron’s research is helping develop an accurate method for monitoring arthropods. This summer she is travelling back to Cambridge Bay to set up the season’s monitoring sites, and northern students working for Polar Knowledge Canada are looking after the sampling.

“In the Arctic, everything is linked,” says Cameron. “What we learn from arthropods will give us a better idea of how to address climate change and other environmental issues. We’ll be able to make better use of our resources and management practices, and ultimately better recommendations for conservation in the future.”

This is the latest in a blog series on polar issues and research (cangeo.ca/blog/polarblog) presented

by Canadian Geographic and Polar Knowledge Canada, a Government of Canada agency with a mandate to advance Canada’s knowledge of the Arctic and strengthen Canadian leadership in polar science and technology. Learn more at canada.ca/en/polar-knowledge.

CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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on the map EXPLORING CARTOGRAPHY

Ships rush in Mapping the future of Arctic shipping

BY HA R R Y W I LS ON

Beaufort

T

Sea

Banks Island Sachs Harbour

U CA .S.A NA .

DA

“There will be ships with Chinese flags sailing through this route in the future,” the Globe and Mail reported Liu Pengfei, a spokesperson for China’s Maritime Safety Administration, saying in April. The route in question? The Northwest Passage. The occasion of Liu’s comments? The publication of Arctic Navigation Guide (Northwest Passage), a 365-page Chineselanguage shipping guidebook for the famed — and increasingly more open — waterway.

Questions of sovereignty aside, the prospect of any container ships or supertankers transiting the route, which has seen a 166 per cent increase in vessel traffic since 2004, seems fraught with peril. That’s partly why the Pew Charitable Trusts, a U.S.-based public-policy NGO, is calling for “a comprehensive system of tiered shipping routes that will benefit Canada, the shipping industry, and northern communities” in its Integrated Arctic Corridors Framework report, published two weeks before China’s Arctic shipping guide. In addressing what it calls Canada’s lack of “a clear, cohesive vision for Arctic shipping policy,” one that could “account for the environmental and social complexity of Canada’s Arctic Ocean,” the report suggests classifying low-, mediumand high-risk shipping corridors.

This map shows the current proposed primary and secondary transportation corridors identified by the Canadian Coast Guard and depicts four key elements from the report that could help determine the location and size of new corridors: Inuit-identified areas of importance, ecologically and biologically significant areas, hydrographic survey status and ice cover.

The last two elements could pose serious challenges.

“Although a climate change-related decline in sea ice is improving ship access, it will also result in increasingly hazardous multiyear ice floes, extreme ocean conditions, and more unpredictable weather,” says the report, which later notes that only one per cent of Canada’s Arctic waters are adequately surveyed and that 10 per cent of nautical charts meet modern standards.

All these are factors that China — and the rest of the world — should consider before traversing waters that have long confounded the most able navigators.

Victoria Tuktoyaktuk Ulukhaktok Paulatuk

Island Kugluktuk

YUKON NORTHWEST

Arctic

Circle

TERRITORIES

Preliminary Canadian Coast Guard marine transportation corridors

Areas of natural and human significance

Primary

ologically and biologically Ecologically significant areas

Secondary

Inuit-identified areas of importance

Hydrographic survey status Meets modern standards (data collected through multi-beam sonar technology)

Historical H storical presence of year-round sea ice*

Cambridge Bay Gjoa Haven

Meets adequate standards (data collected through post-1970s technology, including single-beam sonar technology)

See more of the maps from the Pew Charitable Trusts report at cangeo.ca/ja16/corridor.

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*Sea ice present more than 33 per cent of the time on Sept. 17 (approximate date for minimum sea ice), from 1980 to 2010

Alert

Ellesmere

Island

Grise Fiord

Baffin

Resolute Nanisivik

Bay

Pond Inlet

Arctic Bay Clyde River

Baffin

Island Igloolik

Taloyoak

Pangnirtung

Hall Beach

Gjoa Haven

Davis

Kugaaruk

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Strait

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Repulse Bay

Iqaluit Cape Dorset

Kimmirut

Coral Harbour Kangiqsujuaq Ivujivik

Chesterfield Inlet

Salluit

Quaqtaq Kangirsuk

Rankin Inlet Akulivik

Whale Cove

Kangiqsualujjuaq

Aupaluk

Nain

Puvirnituq

Kuujjuaq

Arviat Inukjuak

Hudson Bay

Churchill

QUEBEC

Umiujaq Sanikiluaq Kuujjuarapik

MANITOBA

Fort Severn Peawanuck Wemindji

ONTARIO

Eastmain

Attawapiskat Kashechewan Moosonee

Waskaganish

MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO. MAP DATA: CANADIAN COAST GUARD, FISHERIES AND OCEANS CANADA, NUNAVUT PLANNING COMMISSION, INUVIALUIT SETTLEMENT REGION (ISR) COMMUNITY CONSERVATION PLAN, CANADIAN ICE SERVICE.

Cambridge Bay

Qikiqtarjuaq

‘

‘

WE’RE CAPABLE OF FAR MORE THAN WE THINK WE ARE. A profile of diver Jill Heinerth, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s newly minted Explorer-in-Residence, and 24 other top Canadian women explorers

BY RUSSELL WANGERSKY WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY JILL HEINERTH

TOP EXPLORERS

I

T’S THEIR LIGHTS you see first, yellowish-green brightening to a milky magnesium white as the divers rise through the silt-laden water. It’s fresh water, millions of litres of it, caught in the shafts of the former iron mines at Bell Island, N.L. The mines were abandoned in 1966, with artifacts left behind: shovels, electric wire, even huge pumps, everything discarded when the mine closed and the shafts were allowed to fill with water.

Jill Heinerth comes out of the water with an ungainly stagger, nearly 140 kilograms of gear weighing her down, water pouring from her. She takes off her pink fins. Her dive partner, Cas Dobbin, lurches up the steps behind her.

“Wooooo!” Heinerth shouts as soon as her mouth is clear of her rebreathing equipment, the sound echoing off the wedge of iron-rich hematite above her head. She’s still exhilarated, even though it’s just one more dive for her. In fact, it’s the latest of more than 7,000 dives, some of them the most technically difficult possible. She’s been inside underwater caves that twist and bind. Inside icebergs.

Winner of the 2013 Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and now named its first-ever Explorer-inResidence (see “Your Society,” page 60), Heinerth has swum more than 3,000 metres in a single dive, deep into Wakulla Springs, Fla., marking the longest known travel into a cave by any female diver.

Her gear may be 140 kilograms on land, but Heinerth says she’s “neutrally buoyant in paradise” once she’s in the water. In a lot of ways, she’s less like a grizzled dive veteran than she is an excited kid. Her face is creased with the curved line from the tight seal of her diving mask. The only other lines appear every time she smiles, which is often.

She’s 51, wet blond hair packed in tight under a black stocking cap.

Dobbin simply describes her as a “phenomenal diver,” adding that Heinerth’s planning and thoroughness put her in a class of her own. “I’ve been a student of

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hers, I’ve been a dive partner — I wouldn’t call it a peer. The level that she’s at … a lot of people would be intimidated or star-struck. It’s like getting on the ice with Sidney Crosby. And yet she’s so humble and encouraging. She makes it seem so easy.”

IT’S BEEN QUITE THE ADVENTURE for a girl from Etobicoke who grew up wanting to be an astronaut. “But there was no Canadian space program. There was certainly no girls’ Canadian space program,” Heinerth laughs. And while she might have traded outer space for the inner-space confines of deepwater caves, Heinerth, one of the world’s greatest underwater explorers, is still one of a few women in a field dominated by men.

How dominated? “It’s kind of exciting that there are three women on this project,” she says, “It’s the first time I haven’t been the only one diving.” In other circumstances, that has meant she’s had to learn to “ask for the gig” and develop new confidence — “to reach out and tell people that I was capable of a role or show them that I was able to lead,” she says.

Watching the divers getting ready, you can’t help but notice a curious detachment: they’re alert and conversational, but their hands move over their equipment with a strange independence, a deliberate and patterned order. There’s new and old: high-tech wrist-worn gauges, yet divers still spit in their masks and wash it around to keep them from fogging up.

The safety briefing in the mine says not to pick anything up, not to touch the walls in case you trigger a rock fall or collapse. You’re not to remove your hard hat. It’s orange in the mine; orange lights, orange walls, orange iron-stained water. A steady trickle, a shallow stream, travels the long shaft, gurgling downward at a steady decline of 10 degrees.

Heinerth has been photographing artifacts while Dobbin helps identify what they’re seeing — right down to pop bottles, lunch tins and even graffiti. “Nobody really left a list of what was left behind, and at the time they flooded it, things might not have

Heinerth in Florida’s Devil’s Eye Spring cave (this image), where she often dives in winter, and completing a “decompression hang” (below) after a dive of nearly 140 metres in Bermuda in 2011 — then the deepest made in the country. Heinerth’s image of the wreck of the Kittiwake, in Grand Cayman (previous pages).

24 MORE TOP WOMEN EXPLORERS Canada’s top women explorers talk about the people and events that inspired and shaped them, as well as the things that continue to drive them to strike out on expeditions, undertake difficult field research and chase new records.

LEANNE ALLISON

JULIE ANGUS The first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean; has cycled across and sailed between continents, and written three bestselling books about her travels.

I always find it challenging to leave behind the comfort and familiarity of whatever I’m doing to dive into a new project. When I decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean, I was leaving behind a steady job and paycheque for an expedition I wasn’t sure would be successful. But in the end, conquering these challenges is what gives me the confidence to take on the next adventure.

—As told to Vanessa Hrvatin

DIANA BERESFORD-KROEGER World-renowned tree scientist, environmentalist and author; blends modern medicine with ancient Celtic and aboriginal traditions.

My family was killed when I was 11 (in Killarney, Ireland).

Everybody was whipped out in a car crash, and I was taken and raised under the ancient Celtic Brehon laws. These are pre-Magna Carta, and under them, a child is everybody’s child. For three years, I was taught by elders all the laws of the trees, the laws of nature, the meaning of Celtic nature and medicines. My drive comes from that, from the learning I’ve done at many different universities and from my other research.

—As told to Thomas Hall

ROBERTA BONDAR The first Canadian woman in space, first neurologist in space and first non-American woman to fly on a U.S. space shuttle.

Camping with my parents on the north shore of Lake Superior and looking up at the night sky was my inspiration. It was a world that there were very few answers to at the time, and it was one that could stretch your imagination. Later, I avidly followed the space program and used to build plastic model rockets. My parents never told me that women couldn’t do this or couldn’t do that.

—As told to M.R. CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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PREVIOUS SPREAD, ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT CARTER/CAN GEO. THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM: KARSTEN HEUER; COURTESY ANGUS ADVENTURES; DODIE GRAHAM MCKAY; NASA

Conservation filmmaker whose documentaries, Being Caribou, Finding Farley and Bear 71, have won multiple awards.

It wasn’t until I did the 3,400-kilometre Yellowstone to Yukon hike in 1998-99 with my husband, Karsten Heuer, that I changed my perception of nature from a playground to a lifelong passion. It took months of being out there on the game trails just watching and waiting for wildlife. I remember we spent an hour glassing these seemingly empty slopes that later came alive with a herd of elk. We wouldn’t have seen them if we hadn’t just sat down and watched.

—As told to Michela Rosano

TOP EXPLORERS

seemed important,” Heinerth explains. “A lunch pail might not seem significant in the moment, but it’s an artifact now.”

Other divers on the expedition are stretching out new guide ropes to prepare the mine for future dives and preparing to take biological samples, and all of them are taking part in lung condition and decompression studies. Every dive ends with two hours of medical work, from ultrasound scans to lung function tests.

In the miners museum built above the No. 2 mine, Heinerth strips down to her black thermal underwear and lies on the floor for her ultrasound. It shows her heart beating on the computer screen.

She talks about the toll on her lungs of diving with rebreathing gear, and how a February dive in Newfoundland isn’t easy.

“These are cold dives, and there’s almost no visibility for the first stretch. It’s linear, which is so much easier than other caves, but these are tough on the human body,” she says, citing the combination of low temperature, long length and great depths involved. “These are what they would term extreme dive profiles.”

HEINERTH DIDN’T START cave diving until 1991. Before that, she was a Russell Wangersky (russellwangersky.com) is a columnist for The Telegram in St. John’s, as well as a novelist and short-story writer.

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commercial artist with a fine arts degree and a small Toronto advertising firm. Her first scuba experience was in a local Mississauga pool in 1981, when she was 16 and used one of the facility’s scuba gear sets to help inspect some broken tiles. Later, getting certified in Lake Huron, near Tobermory, Ont., she was hooked.

“I was diving as much as I could, and I became an instructor pretty early in my diving career, and every Friday night I was racing as fast as I could to get up to Tobermory,” says Heinerth. “I very quickly realized that two things were troubling me: one was sitting inside, and the other was commuting. And I realized that my life was upside-down in the sense that what I really, really loved was the diving — so why couldn’t I find a way to dive and be creative?” She decided to give everything up, sold her interest in the advertising business and moved to the Cayman Islands.

By then, all that mattered was diving.

For three years, she lived in the islands, working as an instructor/dive master and lots of other things besides. “I became an accidental chef, I painted the lodge twice, which was fun,” Heinerth says. “I loved that. I loved being part of a team and doing whatever needed to be done to be successful. But again, I knew there was something more ahead, and I started going to Florida to get formal training in cave diving.”

She’d already found her way into groundwater on Grand Cayman — by following cows to a freshwater source.

“They had beaten the edges down to a muddy mess … The mosquitoes were so thick that I wore my scuba mask on land to protect my face.” Once in the water, she was in her first cave discovery.

“When I ducked down beneath the tepid surface, I felt a coolness upwelling from below. The water was clearer and colder, and that was a sign that I had my doorway into the island’s groundwater.”

She hadn’t known enough then to even be afraid. “My formative cave dives were more enthralling than frightening.

Sometimes when you start a new activity, you don’t know what you don’t

KATHLEEN CONLAN Clockwise from left: Heinerth and Neal Pollock, research director for the Divers Alert Network, hold the RCGS expedition flag at Cape Spear, N.L., during the 2016 Bell Island expedition; Heinerth meets local children in western Egypt during the 2012 search for spring caves in the region; testing new “rebreathing” (oxygen recycling) technology in 1998.

Marine biologist at Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of Nature; has scuba dived on more than 20 field expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctic.

I would have to say John Oliver, research professor at California’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, has inspired me the most.

Shortly after we met, he invited me to go to Antarctica with him, and that trip is what really got me into this area of research. I later got into scuba diving, which was challenging because I had actually burst both my eardrums as a child — something my father had failed to mention to me my entire life!

—As told to V.H.

MANDY-RAE CRUICKSHANK Multi-time national- and world-champion free diver and free-diving instructor; has set several Canadian and world records.

One of the biggest hurdles in free diving is your own mind. Training hard physically is one thing, but conquering the mental side of it is much harder. I absolutely love being underwater, but there are still those “evil monkeys” that chatter at you and tell you that you won’t be able to do something — “turn around on this dive,” or “You won’t be able to go this deep,” and so on. My biggest breakthrough was figuring out how to overcome myself, to let myself succeed.

—As told to Nick Walker

KATE HARRIS

know. Several hundred cave dives later, I was probably more scared than in the early days. I realized that I had been very fortunate.”

By the late 1990s, she had come under the mentorship of diver and renowned underwater photographer Wes Skiles, who during an expedition in North Florida asked Heinerth to do some deep camera work for a National Geographic TV project he was directing. His encouragement gave her the confidence to start her own production company in 2000, “but even more importantly,” says Heinerth, “he helped me embrace the greater mission of using our exploration experiences to help connect people to their water resources.”

Adventurer, writer, photographer and conservationist; her 2015 Borderski expedition through central Asia’s Pamir Mountains encouraged thinking “beyond borders.”

“Live” is a verb: focus on exploring, not on being an explorer. Get out there, get lost, go to places that fascinate you, and don’t feel like you have to follow the beaten track once you get there. That’s certainly how I began. I just wandered to the places that most interested me. It’s a truly conscious choice to choose a wealth of experience over any other form of wealth. Recognize riches other than money because it’s not a lucrative path.

—As told to Jessica Finn

EVA KOPPELHUS Paleobotanist and palynologist (an expert on pollen and other microfossils) who has travelled the world studying prehistoric flora.

Geology and paleontology have historically been very male-dominated fields, but I’ve never found that discouraging. I say to many of my young female students, don’t feel like you can’t do something just because you’re a woman. You can do it; you just have to put your mind to it. The first time I went to Antarctica, I felt I was getting in over my head, but I did it, and I’m very happy I did because this is a wonderful profession.

—As told to Alexandra Pope CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOHN OLIVERO; DR. JACQUELINE WINDH; NICK CALOYIANIS, COURTESY OF CIS-LUNAR DEVELOPMENT LABS; SIDEBAR, TOP TO BOTTOM: COURTESY KATHLEEN CONLAN; COURTNEY PLATT; COURTESY SUSAN EATON; COURTESY KATE HARRIS; COURTESY EVA KOPPELHUS

SUSAN R. EATON Geoscientist and conservationist; leader of the all-woman 2014-2017 Sedna Epic Expedition, which is aiming to snorkel the entire Northwest Passage.

My plan was originally to become a marine biologist, like my mother.

She wasn’t a diver, but a marine mammal expert with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Her specialty was fatty acids and lipids, and in the 1970s she worked at developing a synthetic alternative to whale oil. My sisters and I took turns going on field trips with her, so I was lucky enough to spend time with her spotting whales from military aircraft over the Nova Scotia coast, or on expeditions where DFO teams were shooting adult seals to study their organs. She was a working mother and a scientist, and unique in her generation.

—As told to N.W.

HEINERTH IS REMARKABLY FRANK. Ask her a question over lunch and she barely hesitates before answering. Does she mind diving in this mine, where a colleague died while underwater in 2007? “Joe Steffen had tumours in his lungs, he didn’t know he had cancer. He embolized.”

Has she ever lost a dive partner? “I don’t know how I would have continued doing this if I had. I’ve done more eulogies and funerals than anyone my age should ever have to do, but I’ve never lost a colleague on a dive that I was on. That, I just can’t imagine.”

That doesn’t mean she hasn’t come close. Water-filled caves are not a forgiving environment, even for experts.

Heinerth remembers one particular dive to collect samples of bacterial colonies in a small cave in North Florida in 2011. “It’s small enough that your chest is on the floor and your head’s scraping the ceiling.”

Her partner got caught up and wedged in place in a narrow passage, with Heinerth deeper in the cave. “So she’s 34

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the cork in the bottle containing my life.

And if I can’t help her solve the problem, then we’re both going to die,” she says.

“I’m holding onto the guideline, and she’s struggling to free herself. I feel the guideline getting tighter and tighter and then it breaks.”

Heinerth had to untangle her lessexperienced partner and fix the “ball of spaghetti” that was the guideline — and by then, her partner had disappeared.

Heinerth back-tracked all the way to their point of maximum penetration and started slowly working her way out of the cave, searching for her partner because she wasn’t going to leave her behind.

By that point, Heinerth was low on air.

To conserve what was left in her tank, she turned it off, then back on for every breath. By then, her partner had surfaced and called for help.

“There’s a phone tree of friends who live in the cave-rich areas and are trained in recovery diving, because we don’t generally rescue people, we recover their bodies,” says Heinerth. “It took me an extra

TA LOEFFLER Mountain climber, educator and author; has reached the highest points of Nepal, North Africa, Greenland and Antarctica.

My oma, Frida Loeffler, was an explorer in her own right. She was an immigrant, mountain foods forager and orphan who started life over and over again, becoming a farmer, then a nurse’s aide and so on. My father, Heinz, was also a great inspiration — he taught me to use tools, to be independent and to develop explorer skills such as boating, tree climbing and outdoor and hunting skills.

He believed I was capable and treated me so.

—As told to T.H.

MEAGAN MCGRATH First Canadian to ski solo to the South Pole; only Canadian woman to climb two versions of the Seven Summits.

No one person inspired me. Rather, I was drawn to the world of adventures and expeditions through books, magazines and films. I wanted to be part of this world. It was just a matter of committing to an idea and making it happen. During expeditions, I always remember that I searched out this discomfort, this challenge — and I thrive on it.

—As told to Sabrina Doyle

MATTY MCNAIR Arctic adventurer and founder of NorthWinds, a Canadian polar expeditions company; led the first all-woman expedition to the geographic North Pole.

It was normal to me, growing up, to take naps in the canoe, to struggle to turn my wood skis before plopping into the creek. My dad was an engineer, and encouraged me to embrace creative problem solving (an essential skill in polar expeditions), and my mom gave me confidence to compete in a men’s world of outdoor sports. Don’t be afraid to let go of a traditional, stable way of life for the road less travelled. If one wishes to follow my lead, I recommend that you learn to lead yourself, not follow others. Start by taking a slightly bigger step than you are comfortable with, followed by another.

—As told to S.D.

SARAH MCNAIR-LANDRY Polar adventurer and guide; youngest person to ski to the South Pole and to reach both poles.

When I was a kid growing up in Iqaluit, I wanted to go out on an overnight camping trip on Baffin Island — just me and my brother.

Our parents [adventurers Matty McNair and Paul Landry] agreed, but first we had to prove we were ready — use a stove, set up a tent and overnight on the back porch, communicate over the radio. Only when we’d shown we could do those things did they let us go. Now, when people ask me how to prepare for an expedition, I tell them that’s kind of the way you work up to it.

—As told to N.W.

JEAN MCNEIL Novelist and short-story writer with four books on her polar travel, including Ice Diaries: An Antarctic Memoir (2016), about her months as writer-in-residence for the British Antarctic Survey.

When you embark on an exploration, go for the purpose of answering questions rather than just for the sake of travelling, and stay true to the spirit of these questions throughout your journey. I’ve found that if you go out into the world on an investigative mission rather than just floating around for no particular reason, everything is so much more meaningful.

—As told to V.H.

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THIS SPREAD, TOP RIGHT: RICK STANLEY/OCEAN QUEST; SIDEBAR, TOP TO BOTTOM: COURTESY TA LOEFFLER; COURTESY MEAGAN MCGRATH; LEE NARRAWAY; ERIK BOOMER; COURTESY JEAN MCNEIL

Clockwise from left: A cave selfie in the Devil’s Eye Spring, where Heinerth often starts her day when in Florida; Shooting an iceberg off the Newfoundland coast; the wreck of the Charcot, a whaling vessel, in Conception Harbour, N.L., where Heinerth and her team tested equipment before diving the flooded Bell Island mines.

TOP EXPLORERS

73 minutes to get out because of the search, beyond when my partner had gotten out of the cave, so there was that 73 minutes of time when my friends thought they were coming to recover my body.

“I got to the entrance of the cave, and there she was, a mask full of tears, and I shed a few tears too.”

DIVING, CAVE PHOTOGRAPHY, exploration work and documentary-making are now Heinerth’s daily fare. She created the first 3D map of an underwater cave, and her writing and photography range from showing people the remains of Bell Island’s mines to a dive through an Antarctic iceberg’s caves. During that expedition, part of the berg broke off while she and her partners were underwater, leaving their support team believing they’d been trapped or killed. The divers climbed out through another gap in the iceberg, fighting a falling vortex of meltwater.

Michael Schmidt, chair of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s 36

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expeditions committee, explains that the breadth of what Heinerth has done is just one of the qualities that made her the Society’s pick for Explorer-inResidence: “We took one look at her and said, ‘Wow.’ Jill is an amazing role model for young Canadians — she’s approachable and she’s a listener. A dynamic, unique and engaging individual.”

Schmidt says Heinerth’s ability to engage with her audience is key — and it’s something that’s always been vital to her work. Inside her diving gear is a sticker with a hand and the slogan “We are water” — the symbol of a Heinerth project that highlights the risks facing the world’s freshwater supplies. She has projects on the go constantly, from testing new rebreathers and dive equipment to photographic and video expeditions, and she’s always pushing forward; just talking to her makes you want to do more. In February, she took training in free diving (deep diving without scuba gear). “I think maybe my life’s been defined by breaking

BAIBA MORROW Mountaineer, photojournalist and filmmaker; works as a team with her husband, fellow mountaineer Pat Morrow.

I find the “peace through culture” philosophy of Russian artist Nicholas Roerich quite profound. He used vibrant paintings to reflect on his exploratory trips looking for Shambhala in the Himalayan region, where Pat and I feel a strong connection with the people’s lives, resilience and spirituality. Photography, writing and film are tools that put us into neat situations and places. My interests are an intersection between our environment and experiences, and interpreting them through song or dance or art.

—As told to J.F.

JEN OLSON Mountain guide and climber; numerous first ascents of rock and ice in Canada and around the world; demonstrated ice climbing at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

One of my professors in the University of Calgary outdoor pursuits program was Bruce Hendricks, an excellent athlete and ice climber. He was a great educator and the one person who really inspired me to follow this path. But wilderness is my number-one inspiration. I love being in nature and big beautiful places. I love looking at a line in the mountains and then trying to put it all together. I love the physical movement of rock climbing, the adventure of the challenge.

—As told to M.R.

PASCALE OTIS Biologist, polar adventurer and videographer; shares her adventures in the hope of improving global understanding and appreciation of polar regions.

It was during my master’s at Laval University that I became interested in adventuring to places few people had gone before. I would have to say it was my supervisor there, biologist Jacques Larochelle, who inspired me the most by always encouraging me to try new things. And that’s the message I try to pass on to young people — to not be afraid of taking an unconventional path despite its challenges, because in the end it’s very rewarding.

—As told to V.H.

NATALIE PANEK Mechanical and aerospace engineer currently working on the European Space Agency’s 2018 ExoMars rover program.

I was lucky enough to be mentored for a year by Maryse Carmichael, the first woman to fly with and command the Snowbirds Aerobatic Team. She taught me to embrace challenges and pursue opportunities beyond my main field of study, because you never know where they might lead you. I spend as much time as possible outdoors, exploring places that are remote and challenging. Exploration on Earth is similar to exploration in space — it’s all about pushing our capabilities and the search for the unknown.

—As told to A.P.

MYLÈNE PAQUETTE First North American woman to row solo west-to-east across the North Atlantic; St. Lawrence River Ambassador for the David Suzuki Foundation.

It may seem odd, but I hate to swim. I’m really scared to be immersed in water. But when you’re rowing long distances, you need to jump in the water to wash the hull of the boat. I wanted to face my fears, to be independent on the open ocean. When I was alone out there, I just kept trying to imagine how I would feel after I successfully made the crossing.

—As told to S.D.

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TOP TO BOTTOM: PAT MORROW; TIM MCALLISTER; COURTESY PASCALE OTIS; COURTESY NATALIE PANEK; LAURENCE LABAT

Clockwise from left: Heinerth’s team explores Dans Cave, Bahamas, a valuable resource for climate change scientists; Heinerth’s photo of dive partner Brian Kakuk recovering a skull for paleontologists at the National Museum of the Bahamas; diving through the tannic water of the Santa Fe River, where it mixes with turquoise spring water from the Floridan Aquifer.

through barriers,” Heinerth says, “because we’re capable of far more than we think we are.”

She says she pinches herself every day. “I get to do and learn new things all the time when I work on different documentaries, films or expeditions. Like, here I am, diving into this incredible cultural history of Newfoundland. My dad wanted me to be a scientist and, oh 38

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my God, this is so much better because I get into everybody’s craft.”

She recognizes the toll it takes to push boundaries, but she does it anyway.

“Each day, I’m swimming through the graves of my friends,” she says bluntly.

“I went back through my diving history and I thought about all of the people that I’ve known or the close colleagues that I’ve lost, and the list was horrifically long.

But each one of those was a lesson. It’s no longer, ‘Wes died,’ it’s ‘Wes did this, and I need to watch out for that.’

[Heinerth’s mentor, Wes Skiles, died in a diving accident in 2010.] Because good people make bad decisions, and I cannot isolate myself from the ability to make a bad decision, too.”

And what if she does make that fateful bad decision?

JULIE PAYETTE The first Canadian astronaut to visit the International Space Station, where she operated the Canadarm.

Watching the Americans go to the moon when I was a kid, I thought, “Even though I don’t understand a word of it [because they spoke English and she didn’t], even though they are American and I am Canadian, even though they are guys and I am a girl, and they are all pilots and nobody in my family has ever been anywhere close to an airplane, it doesn’t matter.”

I wanted to be an astronaut.

—As told to T.H.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI Canadian Museum of Nature paleobiologist who found evidence that camels once lived in the High Arctic; discovered Puijila darwini, a prehistoric relative of the seal.

In 1994, when I was still an undergrad, paleobiologist Richard Harington invited me to go on an expedition to the High Arctic, and that truly changed everything for me. I’ve also worked in Bolivia, Egypt and the badlands of Alberta, but those places just reinforced in my mind the importance of the Arctic.

Fieldwork there is all about dealing with the unexpected: the animals that wander into camp, the gear that blows away, the journal that gets lost. Psychologically it can be very hard, but it gets into your blood.

—As told to A.P. In 2000, Heinerth became the first person to explore the caves in Antarctica’s B-15, the world’s largest iceberg (above). Back in Florida, Heinerth’s shot of diver Helen Farr in Ichetucknee Springs State Park (left).

What you have to understand about Jill Heinerth is that she doesn’t give up.

“There are people who, when things go sideways, give up, or there are people who waste the time to pull out a slate and write a note to their loved ones,” Heinerth says. Not her.

“You should be found in this position,” she says, stretching one arm out in front of herself, crouched, an unlikely runner in her wrists-to-ankles black thermal underwear.

“You should be sprinting for the finish.”

Read more about Jill Heinerth’s recent expedition to explore the flooded Bell

WENDY SLOBODA Fossil hunter and photographer; discoveries include Wendiceratops pinhornensis (2010) and Barrosopus slobodai (2003).

You have to prove yourself, so don’t be afraid to volunteer. I don’t know any paleontologist that didn’t. I volunteer and have gone to Mongolia, France, Argentina and Greenland to look for dinosaurs. I’ve been lucky and I’ve earned my stripes. Prospecting and looking for fossils is what I do because it’s what I love. When you find a fossil, no matter how insignificant, you’re the first person to ever see or touch it — and that’s pretty rewarding.

—As told to J.F.

SHARON WOOD The first North American woman to summit Mount Everest and the first woman to do so by a new route (the west ridge).

I think intrinsic motivation is the main reason people choose to explore or take an unconventional path. It’s so powerful, but I worry that it’s dying. Nowadays people just pull a book off a shelf and say “OK, I want to be a doctor,” and that just drives me crazy! So if you find yourself with the intrinsic motivation to explore, do it.

—As told to V.H.

Island iron mines at cangeo.ca/ja16/bell.

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TOP TO BOTTOM: NASA/FLICKR (CC BY-NC 2.0); COURTESY PETER MUNK CARDIAC CENTRE; MARTIN LIPMAN; COURTESY WENDY SLOBODA; COURTESY SHARON WOOD (MIKAEL KJELLSTRÖM PHOTO)

HEATHER ROSS Mountaineer, polar trekker and head of the cardiac transplant program at Toronto’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre; her expeditions raise awareness for heart health and research.

I watch patients facing death in ways that we otherwise never think about — and facing it with hope and strength. There is no greater strength in life than that, and as a physician I’m overwhelmed by the experience. It’s really what’s driven me to push myself to new heights. When I started, my expeditions were about raising awareness for health, because I would like to have fewer patients, but I’ve also always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie. It’s a way to marry what I love personally with what I do professionally.

—As told to V.H.

Bike courier Gabe Ng pedals up a Montreal street.

Red brake lights blooming.

Sunshine glinting off a car’s side mirror. The blur of elaborate wrought-iron handrails. Welcome to Montreal as it’s seen by bike couriers.

BY EVA HOLLAND WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY RODOLPHE BEAULIEU-POULIN

DELI VE

where they pedalled and see the city through their eyes. But as I gasped for air, I figured I could sacrifice a bit of authenticity in the name of survival.

When Ng re-emerged, we launched ourselves down the hill at full speed, the wind roaring in our ears and the streetlights flashing by. This was Montreal like I’d never seen it before.

I GREW UP IN OTTAWA, just two hours away, but I never got to know Montreal very well. I’d visited the Biodome, seen the Forum before it was torn down, toured the clubs of Crescent Street and visited friends a handful of times, but I had only a rough sense of the city’s geography: the

mainland outskirts, the island and the titular mountain, Mont Royal, forming lopsided concentric circles.

But in two days on a bike, trailing the Chasseurs crew, I got a better sense of the city — its landscapes, its people and its pulse — than I had in all those previous visits combined. I experienced it not as a panorama, but in flashes and small moments, like an Instagram feed unfurling in front of me: Red brake lights blooming. Sunshine glinting off a car’s side mirror. Elaborate wrought-iron handrails on the steps leading up to a tony red-brick townhouse door. The smell of cooking chicken at the iconic Romados.

The way the lights of a restaurant spill out onto the sidewalk at night.

The core Chasseurs delivery zone is a rough diamond, covering 100 square

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Approximate foreground scale Scale varies across the map

MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO; MAP DATA: GOOGLE, LANDSAT

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ABE NG WAS NEARLY invisible in the street ahead of me: a shadow on a shadowy bike, lost somewhere in the clash between the evening’s darkness and the headlights of passing cars. I geared down and pedalled harder, grinding uphill, just trying to keep him in sight.

He’d gone easy on me earlier in the day, pedalling at the cyclist’s equivalent of a mosey and stopping for red lights instead of gunning it through. But now the dinner orders were piling up, and he couldn’t afford to baby me anymore. In the past couple of hours, we’d made eight deliveries, racing uphill and down, along busy thoroughfares and quiet side streets, burritos and rotisserie chicken and pizzas steaming up the specially designed, insulated cargo bag strapped to Ng’s back. It was a Monday night in Montreal, and the bike messengers of Chasseurs Courrier were making sure the city got fed.

A flicker in the distance let me know that Ng had turned left, across traffic and up to the entrance of a tall condo building near the top of the hill. By the time I reached him, panting, he was off his bike and ready to go inside with the customer’s pizza. Until now I’d been tagging along with him right up to each customer’s doorstep, but this time I opted to wait outside and catch my breath. I was in Montreal to follow its bike messengers and experience their world: to pedal

THE MESSENGERS

kilometres, stretching from Rue JeanTalon, on the northwest edge, to Boulevard Pie-IX on the northeast. Boulevard Décarie defines the southwest boundary, and the Lachine Canal completes the border on the southeast. It takes in the mountain, the leafy streets of Outremont and the Plateau, and the denser blocks of downtown and the Vieux Port.

The zone is emblematic of a city that poses serious geographical challenges for the riders of Chasseurs and the rest of Montreal’s tight-knit fleet of a few dozen messengers. There are North American cities with more and bigger hills than Montreal: Seattle, San Francisco. And there are cities with winters that are at least as ugly as Montreal’s: Edmonton, Minneapolis, New York City on a bad day.

But no other city on the continent combines steep hills, freezing rain, black ice,

IN TWO DAYS ON A BIKE, I GOT A BETTER SENSE OF MONTREAL — ITS LANDSCAPES, ITS PEOPLE AND ITS PULSE — THAN I HAD IN ALL MY PREVIOUS VISITS COMBINED.

whiteouts and months of winter cold and dark like the one on the St. Lawrence.

That makes an already dangerous job even more hazardous. Bike couriers are renowned — or infamous, depending on your perspective — as risk-takers. In pop culture, they’re often depicted as tattooed, long-haired rebels, blowing red lights and playing a high-speed game of chicken with the much larger vehicles around them. But “it’s not as dangerous as people assume it is,” says Kelly Pennington, Chasseurs’ lone female member and the winner of the women’s division at the 2015 North American Cycle Courier Championship. “You can make it as dangerous or as safe as you want.”

Trailing behind Ng and Pennington each time they went out on a call, I could see what she meant. I felt in control of my choices, despite the kaleidoscope of obstacles moving and shifting around me. I whizzed between a line of parked cars on my right and gridlock on my left.

I held my breath and followed my guides through the long, narrow gap between a transport truck and a city bus, my handlebars nearly brushing the walls of the metal canyon that surrounded me. I put on a burst of speed and narrowly avoided a collision with a carriage horse in Old Montreal; carriages, it turns out, lack left-hand turn signals.

With practice, Ng told me, “you get a sense of your surroundings and you really read the trajectory of moving

Clockwise from opposite top: Gabe Ng on a quiet stretch of Saint-Laurent Boulevard; Kelly Pennington poses with her bike; Ng waits at a stoplight; Kyle Kingsmill heads out for a delivery.

Eva Holland writes for The Walrus, AFAR, Grantland and more. Rodolphe BeaulieuPoulin’s photography has appeared in several Quebec magazines, including Urbania.

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objects around you. You understand the natural path of objects.” Still, that takes a rider only so far, and the sheer number of road hours a messenger logs increases the odds of an accident. “Things just come out — like a door, or a child darting

I PUT ON A BURST OF SPEED AND NARROWLY AVOIDED A COLLISION WITH A CARRIAGE HORSE IN OLD MONTREAL; CARRIAGES, IT TURNS OUT, LACK LEFT-HAND TURN SIGNALS. 44

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out. Those are surprises that can happen.

It’s hard to avoid.”

So why do it? Why take on a lowpaying, high-risk job in an industry in flux (see “An industry in flux,” right) that sometimes requires you to ride a bicycle through a blizzard? “There are so many amazing things about it,” says Ng. “You get to be outside, you’re exercising, you get to be on a bike all day.”

Completing a delivery as efficiently as possible offers a concrete sense of accomplishment. There’s a freedom to it too — freedom from dress codes, from active supervision, from being stuck sitting at a desk.

And then there’s the intimacy. And not just the kind that comes from being inside buildings — people’s homes, corporate spaces, fancy hotels — you wouldn’t otherwise see. “You get

Clockwise from bottom left: A bike sits idle at the Chasseurs Courrier office; Mackenzie Kirby repairs a tire; Colin Soper loads his bike with boxes. opposite page: Gabe Thomsen hits the streets to deliver ingredients from a cook-at-home meal service.

glimpses,” Pennington says, “into people’s lives.” Conversations about office gossip and job anxiety are overheard in elevators. Sometimes, clouds of marijuana smoke are seen escaping when customers open their apartment door for the nachos or pizza or poutine they ordered. Pennington once transported a bra left behind in a hotel room to a UPS office so it could be returned to its owner.

Another Chasseurs rider, Mackenzie Kirby, has delivered breast milk. Ng has had a customer open the door in her bathrobe, accept her delivery, and then

THE MESSENGERS

walk out of sight to get him some change.

When she returned, she had, as he puts it delicately, “unrobed herself.”

TWO DAYS WENT BY in a blur. Between deliveries — $42 worth of hip vegetarian diner fare to a pair of young undergrads here, a daily order of nachos to a man in a blue dress shirt and flannel pajama pants there — I lounged in the Chasseurs office, watching the riders tweak their bikes and debate the merits of various brands of messenger bag.

I hadn’t necessarily expected to enjoy my time among the couriers. I had expected suffering — aching muscles and a sore butt — and my friends and family had gloomily predicted even worse. (“You know you might actually die, right?” one friend asked me.) But despite the hills, despite the traffic, I felt myself getting hooked on the experience. I felt connected to the city in a visceral way; I liked the simultaneous feeling of total freedom mixed with a sense of real connection to the larger urban machine.

‘IT’S NOT AS DANGEROUS AS PEOPLE ASSUME IT IS,’ SAYS COURIER KELLY PENNINGTON. ‘YOU CAN MAKE IT AS DANGEROUS OR AS SAFE AS YOU WANT.’

After that first night’s hectic dinner rush, Ng and I paused for calories: orange juice and fresh-baked Montreal bagels.

We ate them on a sidewalk bench, our bikes leaning against a nearby pole, letting the city pass us by for a few precious minutes instead of hurling ourselves through it: cars, buses, bicycles, people walking their dogs and shouting into their cell phones. Then we stood up, brushed sesame seeds off our clothes, and pushed off into traffic again.

Read Eva Holland’s story about training for this assignment at cangeo.ca/ja16/bike.

AN INDUSTRY IN FLUX WHEN SIX VETERAN Montreal bike messengers — Gabe Ng, Eric Lebeau, Mackenzie Kirby, Kelly Pennington, T.J. Stevenson and Colin Soper — founded Chasseurs Courrier, a rider-owned, rider-operated collective, in 2014, it was out of a want to do something more.

All had worked for the big downtown messenger companies (there are more than 30 in Montreal, but only about a dozen use bike messengers) and eventually become discouraged.

“The Montreal courier industry is kind of built on everyone undercutting each other,” Pennington says. “It’s basically this giant race to the bottom for prices, and with less and less work, you’re working harder and harder for less money. There’s nowhere to go. You’re stuck.”

Ng says that most of the bigger and older companies operate on commission, which generally sees the rider get 50 to 60 per cent of the price of the delivery. An average daily wage for an eight-hour shift, he says, is $75 to $80, “if you’re lucky.”

Since much of the traditional messenger work — delivery of envelopes and papers from office to office — was already spoken for,

Chasseurs looked elsewhere: to food delivery, mainly, as well as to packages and larger items. (The company has two surprisingly versatile cargo bikes in their fleet; Pennington once transported a fullsize couch on one of them.) Chasseurs contracts with local restaurants to provide delivery services for takeout, in lieu of those businesses keeping their own driver on staff. Delivery by bike is often quicker in heavy traffic, and the restaurants can claim to offer carbonneutral takeout, too.

The focus on food and physical objects bodes well for the future of Chasseurs, since the rise of email, PDFs and online signature apps has reduced the amount of paper being moved around the city. But the business is still vulnerable.

“I just hope for stability,” says Pennington. “I just want to get to a point where we’re all working, and we can kind of set a standard for what a living wage as a messenger is.”

“We’re not making millions at Chasseurs,” Ng adds, “but at least it’s a fair, transparent and fun working environment.”

they almost called it

Airlandia Air landia It’s a city that was built on aviation, but after 80 years, what does the future hold for Gander and its famed airport?

BY STEPHEN SMITH WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY NED PRATT

Y

OU SHOULD FLY, if you’re going to Gander, in keep- Alcock and Arthur Brown, took off from St. John’s in 1919. In the ing with the town’s rich aviation history and maybe 1920s, local newspapers teemed with news of pilots overhead in out of respect for its famous airport, which turns 80 contraptions often preceded with the less-than-reassuring adjectithis year. I drove. My reasons were (a) scheduling and val formulation heavier-than-air. In 1932, Amelia Earhart launched (b) ancestral, which is to say that (a) I couldn’t find a flight to her historic solo flight across the Atlantic at Harbour Grace. A year fit my week and (b) I felt a duty to follow my great-uncle’s trail. later, Charles Lindbergh stopped by, scouting for likely airfields on Today, it’s a town of 11,000 and Newfoundland’s seventh- behalf of Pan American World Airways.

As the 1930s progressed and aircraft technology developed, largest municipality, but there was no Gander when Maurice Banks came to pre-Confederation Newfoundland in August questions of influence and strategic advantage moved to the fore.

1935, for the good reason that he was one of the British aviation Britain had commercial designs of its own, and the government officials sent to summon it up out of the weather and wilderness. was soon partnering with the private Imperial Airways to establish Four years later, it was home to the world’s largest airfield. a worldwide aviation network. Newfoundland was at this time its own sovereign dominion and Another decade had almost there are those who’ve argued passed before there was a Linked to the world beyond that when Britain took back ecotown. From the start, this nomic control the year of was a place like no other in like no other place in Newfoundland, Lindbergh’s visit, air routes and Newfoundland. “The rest of landing fields played a large part the province was essentially in their calculations. Passenger founded on fish,” says Reg service was a piece of the eventual Wright, the Gander-born plan, but more immediately there CEO and president of the was mail to deliver, and cargo. The fact that officials weren’t talking airport. “But we were founded on the air.”

Historian Frank Tibbo may know more than anyone about openly about future military uses doesn’t mean that they weren’t Gander. He still marvels at the unlikelihood of the place top of mind, too.

This is where my grandfather, Donald Banks, enters the that’s been his home for 60 years. “People were just amazed to come upon this place called Gander,” he says of the town’s frame. In the First World War, he survived the trenches of the Somme. In the Second, he was the man in charge of lighting earliest days. “Where the hell did it come from?” the English Channel on fire if the Germans tried to invade.

START WITH MATHEMATICS. You don’t need to know words That was a plan, post-Dunkirk: flood the coastline with oil and like orthodromic or geodesics on an ellipsoid to understand how gasoline and spark it up.

Between the wars, he headed Britain’s Post Office. It was Gander fits into what’s known as the Great Circle Route.

Moored out where it is in the Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland in this capacity that he got involved with the Empire Air Mail is 1,500 kilometres closer to Europe than Montreal or New York is, which made it the most convenient place to land and refuel Stephen Smith is the author of Puckstruck: Distracted, Delighted for transatlantic flights. and Distressed by Canada’s Hockey Obsession. Ned Pratt’s portThat’s why Newfoundland’s skies started filling up soon after folio includes photojournalism and portraiture work. the First World War. The first men to fly non-stop to Ireland, John

Gander had a different spirit to go with its outlook.

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GANDER

Scheme. “A three-cent Empire air mail is the ultimate aim of the British Government,” he told reporters on a visit to Ottawa in 1935. Within the year, he’d move over to run the Air Ministry as its senior civil servant.

While he was fighting in France, his younger brother, Maurice, became a pilot in the First World War. When the war ended, Maurice stayed aloft, flying commercially across Canada in the 1920s before joining Donald at the Air Ministry in 1935.

As an operations officer, Maurice was a kind of roving airport prospector, tasked with putting bureaucratic plans into practice across Britain’s far-flung realm. Newfoundland was his first stop. “We gathered it to be a land of ‘Fogs, Ponds, Bogs and Dogs,’ ” he wrote later in an account of his explorations there, “and this proved to be the case.”

The airport’s international lounge may be renowned for its vintage

LIKE MAURICE, I would have taken the train to Gander, but style (opposite and above), but inside and out (previous pages), Newfoundland abandoned its railway in 1988. Highway fog tun- the terminal is no longer the hive of activity it once was. nelled ahead as I drove the three hours west from St. John’s on the Trans-Canada. Completed in 1965, it helped put the train out more of a communal effort, with a Newfoundland surveyor, Allan of business. Past the turn for Heart’s Desire, past St. Jones Vatcher, doing much of the decisive work of plotting elevations Within. Ferocious is a word you sometimes see associated with and clearances after the others had moved on.

Vatcher’s measurements went into a report Hall submitted to the fog here, but this was more of a gauzy smother. It began to disperse as I reached Clarenville, restoring trees and tuckamore the Newfoundland government, along with some preliminary costing, including wages for the men who’d be arriving in the to view, along with gleaming bight and bare landwash.

There’s a spirit in Newfoundland legend, the fog man, who’s spring of 1936 to clear and excavate the site. A labourer might supposed to orchestrate island weather. I’m not certain that he has expect to earn 30 cents an hour, a blaster 34. A teamster could any real folkloric standing other than with tourists, but Maurice pocket as much 45 cents, though 20 of that was earmarked for his horse. In January 1938, does write about an actual livDouglas Fraser’s Fox Moth ing local that he and an Air ‘The rest of the province was the first aircraft to land at Ministry companion were told Gander. By November, they needed to talk to about was essentially founded on fish,’ Newfoundland Airport was where best to site an airport, a says the airport’s CEO. open for business. savant of the atmosphere known as Fog-Free Thomson.

TODAY, IT’S NOT HARD to They never did track him drive right by Gander — the down. The Newfoundlander who did guide them was the engineer T.A. Hall. Lacking strip of hotels and Irvings and Ultramars fronting the highdetailed maps, and without reliable long-term meteorological way is brief — but if you turn in, you’re soon in the thriving centre of town. Not far from the Fraser Mall, the drive-thru at data, they set out.

A seaplane base was a priority: flying boats were the more the Tim Hortons abuts the Bank of Montreal, across from the reliable long-range aircraft at the time. Lindbergh had been to Canadian Tire. Hockey nets lie next to pickup trucks in the the Bay of Exploits, and the British scouts went there too. After driveways of the houses that line the streets named after studying the harbourmaster’s logs to learn the historical patterns famous international aviators. One of Gander’s prominent of winter ice, they selected Botwood. For the main aerodrome, nicknames is Crossroads of the World, but at actual intersecthey divined about 100 kilometres to the east, near Gander Lake, tions in Gander — where Lindbergh meets Bishop, say — you bushwhacking in at a place known as Hattie’s Camp, Milepost could be anywhere in Canada.

It was a different story in the early days. The war that broke 213 on the railway line, cutting trails through spruce, pine, birch and bakeapple as they tried to discern whether the plateau out a year after the airport opened transformed the remote, new facility. By 1942, Gander was a hive of military activity, beneath the forest was suitable for runways.

Eventually a famous Newfoundland pilot, Captain Douglas with as many as 10,000 personnel — Canadian, British, Fraser, flew them over the site. He later told Frank Tibbo that he American — stationed there, along with fleets of bombers and was the one to pick the site, but the selection seems to have been transports, convoy escorts and U-boat hunters.

‘But Gander was founded on the air.’

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Historian Frank Tibbo (left) in front of a Second World War-era bomber in Gander. Maurice Banks (above) helped create the airport.

There was still no town when Frank Tibbo first passed interest in living on the ocean and eking a living from the fishery. through here in 1950: everybody who worked at the airport Most of our parents would have viewed such a move as defeat.” lived there, in barracks. The new town site was just starting to fill out in 1956, the year he came back to stay. That also hap- THE AIRPORT BUSINESS isn’t what it once was. It was in pened to be the busiest year in the airport’s history, as Tibbo 1958, Frank Tibbo points out, that commercial jets began to points out: even as Gander proper was ramping up to its dominate the skies. They didn’t need to refuel, and they weren’t diverting to Gander for the scenery. “The amount of heyday, the airport that put it there was already on the wane.

Tibbo was the one who showed me on the map how the origi- landing traffic gradually decreased until there was practically nal town plan traces the outline of a goose’s head — no one none,” Tibbo says. “They were all flying over.” Pegging knows exactly whose idea that was — and it’s from his compre- Gander’s existential worries that far back may be a little hensive local history that I know what they almost named gloomy, but it does put its more recent struggles in perspective. In 2006, for instance, facing the burdens of a new federal Gander before they didn’t: Beaverwood, Airlandia.

It’s easy to immerse yourself in the rich lore of Gander’s mile- airport act, the then-airport CEO mused about closing the stones. First air crash: December 1940. First wedding: November whole show down. “If it has no worth to anyone,” he said, “then why are we beating a 1941. First bomb scare: dead horse? Let it go.”

August 1957. Trespassers to Maurice Banks was The Canadian government have strayed into airport pregot out of running airports in cincts: moose, a cat newly told he needed to talk to a local the 1990s, which means that landed from Iraq, a polar bear. about where best to site an airport, Gander is community-manNot so easy to distil is a sense aged, on Ottawa’s behalf, of what it’s like to live in under a long-term lease.

Gander. Jamie Fitzpatrick is a “We’re essentially sink-orSt. John’s writer and broadswim,” Reg Wright says. “So if caster who grew up there through the 1970s and into the ’80s. “It was understood that the we don’t make money at year-end, then we have to take remedial airport’s golden age had passed, but it still defined the town and action to address that.” Airports are capital-intensive: an upgrade its purpose,” he says. “It wasn’t quite a one-industry town, but of one of Gander’s two runways can run to $10 million.

Commercial carriers still serve Newfoundland and Maritime close to it.”

Linked to the world beyond like no other place in destinations, and there are winter charters aiming for the sun in Newfoundland, the town had a different spirit to go with its the south. Gander is home to a Canadian Forces Base, as well as outlook. “Gander prided itself on being sophisticated and to air ambulances and a fleet of water bombers. It remains a vital young, full of young families living large on the snazzy new centre for air traffic. “Gander’s long been known as the lifeboat of industry of air travel,” Fitzpatrick says. “The town is older now, the North Atlantic,” Wright says. “A quarter-of-a-million flights of course. But I think the idea that it’s a modern, youthful place every year will red-circle Gander as their emergency alternate, in the event something develops.” still lingers.”

Meanwhile, the town has diversified. Claude Elliott, Gander’s Part of this, Fitzpatrick says, involved a certain separation from the mainstream of Newfoundland history. “Someone’s granddad mayor since 1996, says it still depends on aviation, but that’s might take him out cod jigging when the family went out around just one sector of an economy in which the regional healthcare the bay for a summer visit. But I never heard anyone express an centre is now the biggest employer in town. “The challenges

a savant of the atmosphere known as Fog-Free Thomson.

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GANDER WWII THE EVOLUTION OF GANDER AND ITS AIRPORT

Canadian Army

U.S. Air Force

Royal Air Force

GANDER St. John’s

Reg Wright, the airport’s Gander-born CEO and president, stands on the tarmac outside the terminal (above).

TOP, MIDDLE: COURTESY STEPHEN SMITH; MAPS: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO

will be different than in the past,” he says. “It’ll be a challenge to keep the airport going. It’ll be a challenge to maintain our military base. To maintain your health-care facility. Your education. But right now? Gander is growing in leaps and bounds.

Right now, we have the biggest elementary school east of Montreal: 1,000 kids.”

I’d had to wait to hear this. On his way to meet me, Elliott had found himself stuck in Friday-afternoon traffic. He wasn’t complaining. “We’re a service centre for 80,000 people,” he explained as we shook hands.

THE FOG MAN had settled a storm over Gander the day I last talked to Reg Wright. We were discussing the plan, first announced in 2014, to replace the airport’s large terminal building with a new “right-sized” facility. “The challenge in Gander is that we’ve inherited a building and a footprint that was built for a totally bygone era,” he said. “It’s almost like, you want to start a hot dog stand, and instead of buying a little cart, you’re operating out the back of a transport truck.”

Wright doesn’t deny that details have to be worked out, not to mention money raised. But he remains focused on making it happen. “A new terminal building guarantees Gander Airport’s future for as long as airplanes need airports,” he was telling me when he was interrupted.

He was back after a moment: his director of operations had just handed him a note to say that an Emirates flight, New Yorkbound, was heading in with dual medical and mechanical issues.

He sounded as eager as you’re allowed to in a serious situation: this would be the first Airbus A380 ever to visit Gander.

Wright quickly found his focus again: this new terminal is the key to Gander’s ongoing viability. “If we can get this thing taken care of,” he said, “I think we can start writing that next chapter.”

1966

GANDER

Gander Lake

2016

G A N D E R

Gander Lake

Gander isn’t the only airport with an intriguing story. Discover littleknown facts about other Canadian airports at cangeo.ca/ja16/airport.

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WHAT KILLED RHAPSODY? When one of the few remaining females of reproductive age in the southern resident population of North Pacific killer whales was found dead near Comox, B.C., in late 2014, an investigation was launched. Are there lessons to be learned to help her endangered family?

BY CHRISTOPHER POLLON

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ON

A STORMY MORNING in December 2014, George Bates watched a changing tide play tug-of-war with a huge log just offshore from his Vancouver Island fishing lodge near Comox, B.C.

By early afternoon, the phone rang with the news that the dark object was not a tree. A retired government fisheries technician, Bates agreed to take one of his fishing boats out to investigate. “I could see right away it was a killer whale,” he says. What had appeared in the distance as a sickle-shaped branch was a dorsal fin. No signs of trauma were visible, but it was clear that the 4,700-kilogram whale was dead. Bates tightened a rope behind a pectoral fin and slowly towed the body to the shore.

News of the find travelled fast around the close-knit community, and by dusk there were 300 people, some visibly emotional, gathered around the body.

A friend of Bates took photographs of the so-called saddle patches around the dorsal fin, which are as unique to killer whales as fingerprints are to humans.

Within hours, researchers in Washington state and at Fisheries and Oceans

Sound. She was one of about 12 remaining females of reproductive age in the southern resident population of North Pacific killer whales, which today numbers about 84. While other North Pacific killer whale populations have been thriving in recent decades, the southern residents have been on the wane since the mid-1990s. Declining numbers and a litany of ongoing human-induced threats have forced both Canada and the United States to list them as endangered.

Rhapsody’s demise was a double blow to this beleaguered population: in the last known photograph of her, taken near Washington’s Spieden Island in Nov ember 2014, she was pregnant with a near-term calf.

With the positive identification of the body, the wheels of a government-led investigation began to turn. The first step would be a necropsy, which would not only isolate a cause of death but probe for disease, contaminants and other contributing factors in the death of the mother and fetus, which the remains indicated had died and remained inside Rhapsody.

Out of this tragedy came the promise that the investigation would provide new

RHAPSODY’S DEMISE WAS A DOUBLE BLOW TO THIS BELEAGUERED POPULATION: in the last known photograph of her, she was pregnant with a near-term calf.

Canada’s Nanaimo, B.C., office confirmed the body was that of J32, an 18-year-old female member of J pod, one of the three pods that make up the southern resident killer whale population of the North Pacific Ocean. She was better known to her many fans as Rhapsody.

Rhapsody’s death was met with alarm by the vast network of researchers, coastal residents and whale-watching businesses that share information about whale movements throughout British Columbia’s Strait of Georgia and Washington’s Puget 54

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insight into why this extended family of endangered whales continues to struggle for survival.

BY THE TIME veterinarian pathologist Stephen Raverty walked onto the beach near Comox, Rhapsody had been dead for at least three days. Now the race had begun to complete a necropsy before important clues were lost to decomposition.

Raverty is to whales what a coroner is to humans. He’s also the closest thing his profession has to a celebrity

in the Pacific Northwest. A former pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, Raverty works for British Columbia’s Ministry of Agriculture, where he has conducted thousands of necropsies, mostly on livestock and poultry but also on exotic pets and marine mammals. The latter have mostly comprised stranded harbour seals and porpoises, but beginning in the late 1990s, Raverty began seeing a disturbing number of southern resident killer whales. That included the necropsy he performed in 2000 on Rhapsody’s uncle, J18, who died of a common but massive bacterial super-infection.

Concerned about the decline, Raverty developed a special protocol for doing post-mortem examinations on killer whales, a structure to provide what he calls “a baseline for the demographics of mortality.” Such a baseline provides a way to collect and analyze the kinds of “anthropogenic insults” — marine pollution, ship noise, etc. — preventing southern resident orcas from thriving.

A local Cowichan First Nation man staying at Bates’ resort performed an impromptu blessing of the whale before the necropsy began. Supported by a team of technicians and biologists from across the Pacific Northwest, including Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Raverty made a long cut from the level of the anus extending along the entire length of the body. Using a large kitchen knife, he peeled the skin and blubber away, exposing the underlying musculature and organs. The thinness and poor quality of the blubber layer and an unusually inflamed abdominal cavity indicated Rhapsody was on the verge of starvation.

The team explored organ by organ, collecting tissue samples and looking for any abnormalities such as evidence of inflammation or infection. Raverty was particularly interested in cetacean morbillivirus, a disease closely related to human measles that scientists believe has caused approximately 1,800 bottlenose dolphins to become stranded along the United States’ Atlantic coast since 2013.

PREVIOUS PAGE AND THIS SPREAD: KEN BALCOMB (PHOTOS TAKEN UNDER FEDERAL PERMIT: NMFS PERMIT 15569/DFO SARA 288)

RHAPSODY

The ears were to be sent for imaging studies to test for fracture or bleeding, to determine if there was damage from intense underwater noise, such as sonar or military activities from two nearby naval bases. But to do so, Raverty first had to sever the whale’s head, still using just a kitchen knife. Using certain “external landmarks” as a guide, he visualized the location of a critical joint accessible from the back of the head. “It’s really just a simple matter of cutting through that joint and the spinal cord,” he says. “Then the head comes off easily.” As a crowd of locals looked on, the head was scooped up by a front-end loader and rolled into the bed of a pickup truck.

The skeleton was sent to Saltspring Island to be cleaned of its flesh by the elements before being shipped to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria for display. Life on the beach near Comox, meanwhile, returned to normal.

JUST AS A DETECTIVE might probe a personal history to shed light on a suspicious death, a scan of Rhapsody’s formative years reveals how dire the plight of southern resident killer whales has become. Rhapsody’s mother, J20, died an untimely death in 1998, leaving Christopher Pollon is a Vancouver-based journalist whose work has appeared in The Walrus, Reader’s Digest and the Globe and Mail. His first book, The Peace in Peril: The Real Cost of the Site C Dam, will be published in October 2016.

two-year-old Rhapsody an orphan. Her grandmother took over her care, but died mysteriously the next year, aged 37. By 2000, her 23-year-old uncle was gone as well. All of these whales died well below the average lifespan of 50-plus years for females and 29 for males.

Care of the young J32 was then taken over by her aunt, J22, and J32 survived infancy to reach reproductive age by 13.

She became known as an unusually vivacious member of the pod, adored by whale-watchers for her dramatic breaches. By May 2011, biologist and whale researcher Ken Balcomb at the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Wash., noted that Rhapsody appeared to be pregnant. She lost this fetus, but by June 2014, she was clearly pregnant again.

Perhaps no one in the Pacific Northwest knows Rhapsody’s extended family better than Balcomb. His five-decade career began as a government biologist at a commercial whaling station in San Francisco. In the mid-1970s, he established the centre, which is dedicated to the study and conservation of southern resident killer whales.

Our society’s love for all things orca is a recent development, he says. While killer whales largely escaped the commercial whaling that extirpated blue and right whales from local waters, they were routinely shot by commercial fishermen, who feared their voracious appetites for salmon. In 1960, sportfishing lodges on Vancouver Island convinced the federal government to

A trio of onlookers pause near the remains of J32, the killer whale known as Rhapsody, shortly after its body was pulled ashore near Comox, B.C., in 2014. The orca was known for its dramatic breaches (previous pages).

mount a 0.50-mm machine gun overlooking Seymour Narrows, north of Campbell River, to cull their numbers.

No whales appeared that summer, and the gun was dismantled.

Attitudes about killer whales had changed by the late 1960s, around the time a wave of live orca captures began to populate theme parks across North America. Balcomb says that in the early years, a vast majority of these “kidnapped” whales were all from the Salish Sea, the inland waters shared by British Columbia and Washington; at least one of these whales, named Lolita, remains in captivity today in Miami. Virtually all of the killer whales on display in theme parks today are from around Iceland.

Wild orca numbers began to drop in the mid-1990s, mirroring the decline of chinook salmon, their prey of choice.

According to John Ford, the head of Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Cetacean Research Program and Canada’s foremost authority on killer whales, there is a direct relationship between the abundance of this single salmon species and mortality rates in resident killer whales across all ages.

“They become very effective predators of certain kinds of prey, and that’s a viable strategy as long as the prey resource continues,” says Ford of the southern residents. “But if there’s a sudden shortfall in CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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RHAPSODY

abundance, then they might become nutritionally stressed and suffer higher mortality. That’s the working hypothesis.”

Ford says the imperative to hunt and eat this single prey, at the cost of ignoring other possible food sources, is a cultural phenomenon as unique to southern residents as the whale call “dialects” they memorize and use to communicate exclusively within their extended families.

Numerous solutions have been put forward to ensure more chinook survive at sea, including the simple but controversial idea that people have to share more fish with other top predators.

Another idea is to restrict commercial fishing to “terminal areas” closer to chinook natal streams, which would leave more fish alive in the ocean where killer whales hunt. This approach also prevents the overfishing of the many weaker chinook stocks that get caught indiscriminately as they mix with stronger stocks while swimming en masse at sea. Then there is the issue of dams. “If you took out four useless dams on the Snake River, you could have a million salmon a year added to the equation in a short time,” says Balcomb.

biphenyls (or PCBs), flame retardants and dioxins — is stored in the blubber, where it is slow to break down. A hungry whale like Rhapsody would be forced to metabolize this tainted blubber, releasing stored contaminants into her bloodstream. “So with a pregnant female that is having a food shortage, that would be a problem in two ways for the fetus,” says Ross. “One, it would increase the delivery of contaminants through the placenta, and two, the nutrition would not be there for the fetus.”

In the spring of 2015, the World Wildlife Fund said Rhapsody’s fetus “likely died from PCB poisoning,” a conclusion that Ross rejects. “Contaminants are not going to kill an individual,” he says. “What contaminants are going to do are make it more vulnerable.” This includes weakening the immune system and making any illness or disease more difficult to fend off.

THE 65-KILOMETRE whale-watchingboat journey from Vancouver to where Rhapsody’s family chase summer-run chinook salmon around the south arm of the Fraser River illustrates the gauntlet southern residents must run in order to feed.

THE NECROPSY REVEALED THE THINNESS AND POOR QUALITY of the blubber layer and an unusually inflamed abdominal cavity, indicating Rhapsody was on the verge of starvation.

A lack of food is just the most pressing of cumulative threats that conspire against a female killer whale with a gestational calf. Back in 2000, Peter Ross, a global authority on marine mammal toxicology who today directs the Vancouver Aquarium’s ocean pollution research program, determined that southern resident killer whales were among the most contaminated marine mammals on Earth. This contaminant load — including a toxic cocktail of polychlorinated 56

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Big trawlers and sport-fishing boats of all sizes are out in force. Adding to the underwater cacophony are dozens of ocean tankers serving Port Metro Vancouver, which is planning to double its container capacity in the next 15 years.

Multiple plans are also afoot to expand the number of tankers, including the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline that would see an estimated 440 supertankers a year plying British Columbia’s waters to move bitumen to Asia. The route also

crosses the muddy plumes of the Fraser River’s north and south arms, which drain into the Pacific, carrying the detritus of industry and at least 35 wastewater treatment plant outfalls.

When J41 appears with her new calf off the starboard side, the two dive and rise in unison, their only break occurring when the calf jumps fully out of the water three times in quick succession. In the 17 months after Rhapsody died, 11 southern resident killer whale calves were born; five are known to have survived and three have been confirmed dead; the fate of the other three, according to Balcomb, is unknown. J41’s calf was born less than a month after Rhapsody’s body was found near Comox.

The births bode well for the next generation, says Mike Campbell, the boat’s naturalist, before adding that only about 40 per cent of calves born today will survive. “We don’t give the little ones names until they’re at least a year old.”

SHORTLY AFTER the necropsy was performed in 2014, a short press release appeared on the Fisheries and Oceans Canada website. Based on Raverty’s examination, Rhapsody died from “in utero fetal loss with secondary bacterial involvement, and eventually maternal septicemia.” In other words, the fetus died in the womb and could not be expelled, causing an infection that became systemic, ultimately killing Rhapsody.

The press release left many questions unanswered. It shed no light on what might have caused Rhapsody’s unborn calf to die so late in term. A greater understanding of why Rhapsody and her offspring died would have to wait for the official necropsy results, which more than a year and a half after the examination took place, have failed to materialize. Like the many possible explanations for the wider decline of southern residents, the circumstances that caused Rhapsody to die remain, as of this writing, a mystery.

Meet the rest of J pod, including the oldest known living orca, at cangeo.ca/ja16/orca.

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COVER VOTE How we chose this issue’s cover

O

One way or another, cave diver Jill Heinerth was destined to win the cover vote for this issue. After all, as one of Canada’s top women explorers, she was a natural choice. In an atypical approach for this issue’s survey, we presented voters with just two options, both variations of an underwater portrait of Heinerth. While there are many great images of the diver in her element, these two in particular stood out. It was a close tally, but option two, the wider shot of Heinerth near her home in High Springs, Florida, won with 53 per cent. Voters generally commented that they preferred seeing more of the underwater environment and diving equipment, which gave a greater sense of what Heinerth does. Who are we to argue?

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letter to get in on the action.

THIS PAGE, TOP RIGHT: KERRY TENNANT/CAN GEO PHOTO CLUB; JUL/AUG 2016 COVER IMAGES, TOP: JILL HEINERTH; BOTTOM: MARK LONG/CAN GEO. OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT: © SECMASTER/DREAMSTIME; © MICHEL ÉLIE, CENTRE DE CONSERVATION DU QUÉBEC, 2013 (OBJECT FROM THE RÉSERVE DES COLLECTIONS ARCHÉOLOGIQUES, CITY OF MONTRÉAL); GREY ROOTS MUSEUM & ARCHIVES; MAP: CHRIS BRACKLEY/CAN GEO

To celebrate International Museum Day on May 18, Canadian Geographic asked its followers for their favourite Canadian museums.

Here are some of their responses.

W H A T’S T H I S ?

Recognize this mystery object and how it relates to Canadian geography and history?

LAST ISSUE’S OBJECT: Aboriginal canoe replica Models like this dyed, quill-worked canoe were once popular collectibles and a way for aboriginal people to supplement their incomes. This canoe, which likely dates to the early 20th century, is a replica of the type built by aboriginal people during the fur trade era and favoured by European explorers and traders.

Lightweight and well suited to river navigation, these canoes were easily repaired with natural materials and varied in size and design.

Visit cangeo.ca/whatsthis for a hint, to enter your guess and for a chance to win a one-year subscription to Canadian Geographic.* Follow us on (@CanGeo) for more hints.

The deadline is September 7, 2016.

The correct answer will appear in the October 2016 issue.

With files from the Grey Roots Museum & Archives. Learn more about this artifact and others by visiting greyroots.com.

*One winner will be randomly selected from all correct responses.

Explore more stories from Canada’s

Canadian Geographic and the Canadian Heritage Information Network have partnered to showcase important artifacts from Canadian history and geography.

Each object comes from one of the museums in CHIN’s national network.

past through cangeo.ca/whatsthis.

W H E R E’S T H I S ?

Identify this landmark using the following three hints

1. German U-boats raided this small island in 1942.

2.

3.

Need a clue? Visit cangeo.ca/wheresthis for another hint, then enter your guess for a chance to win a copy of Franklin’s Lost Ship by John Geiger and Alanna Mitchell.* The deadline is September 7, 2016.

Want more help? Follow us on (@CanGeo) and (facebook.com/cangeo) and watch for the hashtag #hint. * One winner will be randomly selected from all correct responses.

CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

59

YOUR SOCIETY NEWS FROM THE ROYAL CANADIAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

Jill Heinerth’s diving expeditions are part of her mission to increase water literacy in Canada.

F

or the first time in its history, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society has appointed an Explorer-inResidence. Cave diver Jill Heinerth is one of Canada’s greatest explorers and a world-leading technical diver.

“For me this fulfills a life dream — one of a woman who chose the road less travelled,” says Heinerth, who for her first act as Explorer-inResidence spoke at the World Oceans Day event at the Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada in Toronto on June 8. “I travel the world for much of my work, but I am a proud Canadian who recognizes that our fate and fortune of geography offer offers us a unique place in this world.”

Heinerth — who was awarded the he inaugural Sir Christopher Onda Ondaatje Medal for Exploration by the RCG RCGS in 2013 — has discovered and ma d mapped aquifer caves, was the first to di h dive the water-filled tunnels that snake throu h the h through world’s largest Antarctic iceberg aand d h has explored historic shipwrecks. She has travelled farther into deep underwater caves (more than 3,000 metres in one dive) than any other woman and is renowned for her photography, documentary videography and speaking skills. Through her We Are Water Project, she strives to increase the public’s water literacy. Water, she says, is the defining issue of her generation and those to come.

“Much of my work takes place in the hidden geography of the planet,” she says. “And through these adventures, I hope to 60

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connect people to their water resources and make this hidden geography a little less abstract.”

The new Explorer-in-Residence program aims to provide Canadians with visible modern-day role models for exploration, scientific scientific discoveries and adventure travel in Canada, and H h will continue to develop programs and carry out Heinerth fieldwork supported by the Society. Her ongoing expedition to explore Newfoundland’s flooded Bell Island iron mines and shipwrecks, to take biological samples and prepare the mine shafts for future divers, was already named RCGS Expedition of the Year for 2016.

“Jill was an easy choice to be our first explorer,” says Michael Schmidt, co-chair of the RCGS Expeditions Committee. “She has had a unique and extensive career as an explorer, and has a real ability to engage with her audience.”

“Exploration is in the DNA of the RCGS,” says John Geiger, the Society’s CEO. “We are so delighted to have Jill in this new role. It is hard to imagine anyone who better embodies the courage and commitment of exploration.”

—Nick Walker Why is Port Hardy, B.C., Jill Heinerth’s favourite place in Canada? Find out at cangeo.ca/ja16/heinerth.

THIS PAGE, ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT CARTER/CAN GEO; RIGHT: MARK LONG/CAN GEO. OPPOSITE, LEFT: PMO/ADAM SCOTTI; RIGHT: DAVID TRATTLES/CAN GEO

JILL HEINERTH NAMED FIRST EXPLORER-IN-RESIDENCE

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EDUCATION

CALGARY TEEN CROWNED CAN GEO CHALLENGE CHAMPION

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ack Cheng couldn’t have known it then, but after the Grade 10 student had beaten 19 other finalists to win the 2016 Canadian Geographic Challenge on June 5, his trip to Ottawa was far from over.

During a VIP tour of Parliament the next day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan met Cheng, as well as Royal Canadian Geographical Society CEO John Geiger and director of education Ellen Curtis.

The prime minister congratulated Cheng on his Challenge success, and told him to never stop exploring and experiencing the country. “Don’t stop reading all those books,” said the prime minister, “but the only way to really get to know Canada’s geography is by canoe. We’ve got to get you in a canoe now, Jack!”

Cheng says he was thrilled to meet the prime minister. “He didn’t seem like I imagined a politician would be. You can tell he really loves geography too,” he said. “And Kirsty Duncan is so cool, because she’s a medical geographer. Those are my top interests.”

“We’re so excited to have Jack as our new national champion,” says Geiger, who explained that the support of the prime minister for the Challenge and geographic literacy in general is a great honour to the Society — and crucial to its mandate of making Canada better known to Canadians and to the world.

—Nick Walker

ASSINIBOINE RIVER WATERSHED BIOBLITZ Can Geo Education partnered with the International Institute for Sustainable Development to host a bioblitz on Manitoba’s Assiniboine River watershed from June 6 to 18. The event, made possible through the support of the RBC Blue Water Foundation, saw more than 250 high school students from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota conduct a field study of the watershed, recording species of flora and fauna, testing the water’s pH level and more.

CEDC WINS EMERALD AWARD The Classroom Energy Diet Challenge, Can Geo Education’s student energy-saving program, won the Alberta Emerald Award for Public Education and Outreach on June 8. The Alberta Emerald Foundation, which recognizes environmental achievements across all sectors in the province, presented the award at Calgary’s Telus Spark science museum. Since it launched in 2011, the Classroom Energy Diet Challenge has tasked 18,500 students in 695 Alberta classrooms alone with reducing energy use.

—Michela Rosano

he scoreboard at the 2016 Canadian Geographic Challenge was tight for the entire competition, but Jack Cheng held on to earn the title of national champion. The Grade 10 student from Calgary was calm as he faced off against four other students in the June 5 final — all that remained of the 20 competitors who had arrived in Ottawa from across the country on June 3 — and the crowd was treated to a showcase of geographical knowledge.

“I’m pretty proud of myself,” says Cheng, who attributes his win to a considerable amount of preparation, including reading and studying maps. He hopes to use his $5,000 award to promote geography at his high school.

Finalist Jessica Cao, of Thornhill, Ont., identified Old Town Lunenburg as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, securing second place in a tie-breaker against Grade 7 student William Chapman of Stittsville, Ont., the Challenge’s youngest finalist.

The 45 questions in the final — on everything from cultural geography to map reading — were presented in a game show style, including Jeopardy!-type video questions featuring luminaries such as diver Jill Heinerth and astronaut Roberta Bondar.

The goal of the challenge is not only to get kids excited about geography, but also to highlight its importance and relevance in our daily lives, says Gilles Gagnier, COO of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and publisher of Canadian Geographic.

“These national finalists give us hope that our future leaders will have a strong background in geography.”

—Vanessa Hrvatin CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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FELLOWS

FEATURED FELLOW: SHELLEY WRIGHT Shelley Wright’s work focuses on the differences between aboriginal and non-aboriginal experiences and attitudes.

2016 RCGS RESEARCH GRANTS The Royal Canadian Geographical Society awarded four $5,000 research grants to Canadian researchers in 2016.

Robert Way (above), originally from Goose Bay, Labrador, won the James Bourque Northern Doctoral Scholarship for his field and modelling investigations of permafrost conditions and distribution in northeastern Canada.

or the past 15 years, Shelley Wright has been working to bridge an information gap — one that exists between the indigenous and non-indigenous experience of climate change. And while Wright is not aboriginal, she has a unique viewpoint that helps reconcile the different ways people affect, and are affected by, Canada’s North.

In her book Our Ice Is Vanishing/Sikuvut Nunguliqtuq: A History of Inuit, Newcomers, and Climate Change, Wright draws on her 10-plus years as the northern director of Iqaluit’s Akitsiraq Law School (she’s now an aboriginal studies professor at Langara College). The book, which examines Inuit tradition versus European ambitions in the Arctic, won the 2015 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature.

“Reconciliation basically means getting to know people and understand their different stories,” says Wright. “It’s important because we’ve got huge environmental

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issues such as climate change to deal with.

If we don’t learn to work together, we’re not going to solve these problems.”

A major challenge in writing about indigenous experiences is plain ignorance, Wright says. Every group has its own history, language and culture, which, though unique, are related to those of other groups.

To learn those stories, it’s crucial to establish trust, which takes time. This kind of patience is useful in her teaching career, where she often develops deep, long-lasting friendships with her aboriginal students.

Wright’s next book will also focus on how aboriginal and non-aboriginal worldviews collide, not just in the Arctic but across North America. “I don’t necessarily have the authority to speak on behalf of indigenous people,” she says, “but I think I know enough that I can explain what nonindigenous people really need to learn.”

—Sabrina Doyle

Erin Hanson’s work examines how a First Nation such as Tsleil-Waututh responds to resource development in light of the groundbreaking 2014 Supreme Court Tsilhqot’in ruling that requires federal and provincial governments to consult with, and in some circumstances acquire consent from, First Nations prior to beginning development projects in their territories.

Emma Davis’s study assesses how biotic factors (such as competition, seed production and viability, and seed predation) and abiotic factors (such as microclimate and soil characteristics) influence how treeline environments respond to climate change in the Canadian Cordillera.

—Thomas Hall

LEFT: COURTESY SHELLEY WRIGHT; RIGHT: COURTESY ROBERT WAY

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Caitlynn Beckett received the James Maxwell Human Geography Scholarship for her work studying the mine remediation processes in the Canadian Subarctic and how local communities become involved in these processes.

ADVENTURES See us at canadiangeographic.ca

The Royal Canadian Geographical Society Founded in 1929, the Society is a non-profit educational organization. Its object is to advance geographical knowledge and, in particular, to stimulate awareness of the significance of geography in Canada’s development, wellbeing and culture. Primary fields of interest include our people, resources, environment, heritage and the evolution of our country. In short, the aim is to make Canada better known to Canadians and to the world. Canadian Geographic, the Society’s magazine, is dedicated to reporting on all aspects of Canada’s geography — physical, biological, historical, cultural and economic — and on major issues of concern to Canada in which geographical dimensions play a significant role.

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His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston C.C., C.M.M., C.O.M., C.D. Governor General of Canada HONORARY PRESIDENT

Alex Trebek HONORARY VICE-PRESIDENTS

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The toughest Canadian geography quiz ever, with fascinating and fun facts about our land, people, wildlife, climate and history that are sure to challenge you.

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87 Fellows Dinner th Annual

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Celebrating the Geological Survey of Canada’s 175th Anniversary with special guests featuring …

SIMON WINCHESTER Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2016

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Ottawa, ON

SIMON WINCHESTER is the author of 26 books, including The New York Times bestseller The Map That Changed the World — the fascinating story of William Smith, the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became ob-

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western Uganda, he began his career as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, based variously in Belfast, Washington, D.C., New Delhi and Hong Kong.

sessed with creating the world’s first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology.

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Canadian pilot Andrew McKeever climbs into a captured Fokker D.VII in 1919 (top).

Air Cadet League of Canada members work on a replica First World War plane (above).

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Arthur Roy Brown was 20, Gerald Birks, 19. Andrew McKeever and Joe Fall, 18.

Carl Falkenberg just 17. Their connection apart from their young age at the start of the First World War? Each young Canadian would become a renowned fighter pilot of the conflict.

As part of a partnership with Canadian Heritage and documentary makers Sound Venture, Canadian Geographic and its publisher, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, have helped create a range of materials sharing the stories of these heroic young men.

For the magazine, there’s the feature photo essay that will appear in the October issue. It shows members of the Air Cadet League of Canada, aged 12 to 18, re-enacting images of the aforementioned five pilots taken some 100 years ago during the days of the Great War. The cadets, along with volunteers from the Canadian Museum of Flight in Langley, B.C., even built two replica First World War-era Sopwith Pup planes as part of the larger initiative. It’s sobering stuff to see today’s youth in place of those young men who just a century earlier fought for freedom. In the “On the map” section, the focus falls on Vimy Ridge, which is also the subject of a new Giant Floor Map from Canadian Geographic Education (the map was created from charts made during the First World War and is available for educators to borrow).

Vimy Ridge is also the topic of a forthcoming hour-long Sound Venture documentary that explores the role of aerial photo-reconnaissance missions over Vimy Ridge, which helped create thousands of maps that were crucial in the Allied campaign to take that critical land.

As Remembrance Day approaches, it’s a compelling package of stories about the young men who helped shape Canadian history and cartography.

Subscribe or renew today at canadiangeographic.ca/subscribe or by calling 1-800-267-0824. The October 2016 issue hits newsstands Sept. 12.

CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC

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Canadian Geographic honours aviation aces

our country REVEALING CANADA

The Olympic gold medallist and reigning world champion trampoline gymnast reflects on her childhood summers in Muskoka, Ont.

What’s your favourite Canadian place?

Tell us on Twitter (@CanGeo) using the hashtag #ShareCanGeo. Or share it with us on Facebook (facebook.com/cangeo).

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When I was growing up, my family had a cottage in Port Sandfield, where Lake Rosseau connects with Lake Joseph. We’d spend all summer there and weekends in the spring and fall. It was where we came together as a family.

I have three siblings and two cousins, and as long as it wasn’t thundering, the six of us would be outside all day, every day — swimming, wakeboarding, waterskiing, tubing. Sometimes we’d have sleepovers in the boathouse, where you could hear the waves at night.

My grandparents also had a cottage on Lake Rosseau, and that’s where I learned a lot of the lessons that have translated into sport and the way I live my life.

I was the youngest and smallest of the cousins, but that was never a hindering factor. If there was something I wanted to do, my family would figure out a way to include me.

My grandparents had an activity chart up in the stairwell with all our names on it next to different skills; once you did an activity three times, you got a star. I remember being especially proud to get a star for doing a back dive, because it was something I was scared to do.

A week before my first Olympics in Beijing, I went to my grandparents’ cottage with my parents and one of my teammates. At dinner, my grandfather told us about how he qualified for the Olympics in 1940. It was the first time he’d really told me the story in full, and we sat around that table for hours, just chatting. A week later, he passed away. Looking back, that was one of the most special moments I had with my grandfather.

—As told to Alexandra Pope

ILLUSTRATION: SHELAGH ARMSTRONG/CAN GEO

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