socraticgadfly's review

Go to review page

5.0

Y2Y, if you're not eco-minded, is "Yellowstone to Yukon." The idea behind is that large animals, above all grizzlies, need a lot of room to roam -- and this room needs to be adequately networked and connected, with as few human-disturbed chokepoints as possible.

Well, Karsten Heuer, a native of Canmore, Alberta, and a former Parks Canada ranger at Banff, decided to hike all the way from Yellowstone National Park to the British Columbia-Yukon border -- more than 2,000 kilometers/1,200 miles, and involving skiing and canoeing, not just hiking. Breaks in the trip were jam-packed with PR work on both sies of the border.

This book is about his trip. It's also about some of the problems the development of Y2Y corridor would face.

Surprising for many from the American side of the border (and contrary to one brief reviewer, this is about preserving ALL the Rockies, not just the American portion of those mountains) overall, more of the problems are probably on the Canadian side of the border. And that's in spite of the often anti-environmental leadership that currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Both exploratory oil drilling and coal mining crowd closer to the heart of the Rockies north of the border. Logging in the north involves more rapacious cutting, often clear-cutting in places it wouldn't be allowed in the U.S.

What's driving this is Canada's governmental structure, which is even more "provincial rights" in *reality*, in many ways, than the U.S.'s is "states rights" in *hyperbole.* And the Alberta and B.C. provincial governments have generally been as knee-jerk pro-development as California's anti-environmental Congressman Richard Pombo -- and in a position to do more with that.

Read this book, complete with stunning photos, to show why Y2Y needs preserving.

howse's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous informative inspiring slow-paced

4.5

dreesreads's review

Go to review page

3.0

I love long distance hiking books, this one is actually fairly disappointing.
More...