The Mountains Endure – all else is subject to change without notice - Guest Post by J.E. Barnard

Canadian author J.E. Barnard is a writer and editor of award-winning fiction. She’s won a CWC Award of Excellence and Alberta Book of the Year, and been shortlisted for the UK CWA Debut Dagger and the Prix Aurora. Barbara Fradkin, author of the award winning Inspector Green Mysteries, said of her first novel: "a compelling, intricate tale of love, community, and betrayal in the high-stakes worlds of big oil and pro hockey."

Her Falls Mysteries (Dundurn Press) tackle murder, marriage, friendship, and occasionally wild animals.

In todays guest post, Jayne tells us about the mountains she loves and the threats the people living there face - from both human and natural sources - every day.

The Falls mystery trilogy

Mountains form the spine of North America, from the Arctic down to Mexico. The Rockies, the Sierras, the Cascades and Coastals are vast and varied and apparently eternal. 

Elbow Falls for which the series was named

The Falls Mysteries unfold along the Rockies’ Eastern Slopes—half prairie and half wilderness, gravelly foothills and dusty plains alike sliced by glacier-fed rivers. It’s tangled, forested territory in which people get lost with frightening regularity, fall off mountainsides, run afoul of grizzly bears, trap themselves in blind canyons. There’s hiking, mountain biking, mudding, camping, hunting, fishing… and logging, oil-and-gas drilling, coal mining that constantly threaten the watershed that provides for millions of Canadians and thousands of farms across the arid prairies. The region’s Indigenous inhabitants strive to sustain their ancestral lands against industrial encroachment that promises jobs and money and all their darker effects too. The Eastern Slopes might look like unchanging mountainsides but they’re subject to constant, conflicting pressures between inhabitants and industry, environmentalists and outdoor sports groups, rich urbanites and cash-poor ranchers. And the unforgiving climate itself: bone-dry for months both winter and summer, baked or blizzarded, at constant risk from fire and flood.

When the Flood Falls, first of the Falls Mystery series of Canadian wilderness suspense, centers on Bragg Creek, Alberta, a hamlet a half hour west of Calgary. With its toes in three different Rural Municipalities, Bragg Creek is barely within the screen of trees that mark the first shift from the flat, dry prairies toward the high, dry peaks. The Rocky Mountains rise abruptly from one bank of the normally narrow, glacier-fed Elbow River, while the other shore sees minimal elevation change from the town center to Calgary’s outskirts.

When the Eastern Slopes were pelted by a stalled sou’easter that June day of 2013, bringing down the winter’s snowpack in 24 hours, there was nowhere else for all that water to go but down to the valley floor, straight through the town, and headlong toward the plains. All night the people and animals retreated. By the following noon, the highway bridge upstream was gone; the downstream bridge was crushing million-dollar homes against its abutments. The waters went on across the prairie, wiping out farms and subdivisions, cutting roads and bridges, isolating the petro-towers of Calgary in an oily, reeking pond for much of the summer.  

Flood scour near the highway 40 bridge

In the aftermath, the whole river valley dried in a new configuration, its glacial till scoured to bedrock, its former shallow braids of channels abandoned for newer and deeper curves. Vast swaths of boreal forest were cast up in miles-long tangles far from the old riverbanks. And every spring since that day, the collective psyche tenses further with every thickening cloud. Every eye is on the milky turquoise rivers and creeks, scrying for the first threads of brownish silt that might herald another catastrophe.

This fraught annual atmosphere greets traumatized ex-Mountie Lacey when she seeks shelter with her old friend Dee, only to find Dee has her own trouble: a midnight prowler who grows bolder with every visit. Each day the river, and the tension, creep higher until it all spills over. And just when the wreckage seems complete, the waters recede, exposing old secrets and new horrors.

 Looking west from Powderface Trail, a stiff hike NW from Elbow Falls

Where the Ice Falls, the second in the series, moves northwest of Bragg Creek for deep-foothills cross-country skiing and treacherous icefalls, past the Stoney-Nakoda First Nation. This too is transitional land: pebbly soil held together by the tenacious roots of prairie grasses, scrub pines climbing the mountains’ shoulders, the Ghost River flowing deep and largely unseen along its rocky bed until pressure brings it to the surface. Plenty of places to dispose of one’s enemies, especially in the deep dark of winter, when skin freezes in minutes of exposure to the bone-carving cold of the nigh-eternal west wind.

Why the Rock Falls begins high up in the Ghost River valley, amid the best limestone climbing of the Canadian Rockies, before penetrating the trackless forests of the Ghost River Wilderness Area. Trackless, that is, except for dead-straight cut-lines left by seismic crews, roads scraped in to isolated oil-well sites (increasingly solar powered these days), streambeds churned by off-roading ranchers and riggers, all claiming space from the cougars, wolves, and grizzly bears. It’s a land where petro-millionaires build their ski chalets facing away from the same oilfields that finance those vacation homes, and cement company execs tear down whole mountains to fuel Calgary building booms. Both sorts throw their wealth and power into endless propaganda wars against wind and solar energy projects, partly on the grounds of protecting the province’s ‘pristine view-scapes’.

I think anyone who sees this wild land must love it as I do, and since they can’t all travel here, I write my own kind of love songs – yes, murderous love songs – to help them experience it. 

Eastern front of Nihahi Ridge from PowderfaceEastern front Trail

Sadly, my next story may be of its destruction. Drought dries riverbeds that should be swelling with snowmelt now, draining the irrigation canals relied on by farmers and ranchers, the leisure and recreation areas of city dwellers, the tourism industry, the habitats of thousands of aquatic and land species, and the drinking water for rural and urban residents and industries across two thousand miles of open prairie. Yet Alberta’s present provincial government is busy resurrecting a vast zombie coal mining project that’s been killed by previous governments provincially and federally, mainly for the benefit of an Australian coal billionaire.

The Rocky Mountains endure. Every other aspect of life in the transition zone that is the Eastern Slopes is part of a never-ending struggle for survival.