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Wild Spaces And Outdoor Life · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey there, glad you could make it. Today on Cariboo Signals we're on burned ground, and the Summerland slides that came down a week after the fire was called contained. Plus Millar Western extends the Quesnel River Pulp curtailment to December 1st, and England's first wildfire summit unveils its national plan. And the big question: when a burned slope keeps failing, who owns that risk? Let's get into it.
• 0:39
  Riley: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Riley. It's Friday, October 30th, 2026. Today's theme is Wild Spaces & Outdoor Life. Reaching you from the heart of the Cariboo, the homeland of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations.
• 1:00
  Casey: And I'm Casey. Today we're on burned ground and backcountry trails, and on what happens after a fire is called contained. Out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's mainly clear and minus 3, with a high of 6 and a low of minus 3, overcast through the day. Across the Cariboo, 100 Mile House is minus 6 and clear, Quesnel is minus 4 and clear, and Alexis Creek is minus 5 and mainly clear. Williams Lake is minus 3 with fog, so take it slow heading in.
• 1:27
  Riley: Over to the news.
• 1:29
  Riley: Let's start close to home with some business and arts news from the Cariboo.
• 1:34
  Casey: Millar Western has extended the temporary curtailment at Quesnel River Pulp. It was announced to run from September 4th to November 1st, and it now runs to December 1st. The company points to ongoing market challenges: sustained weak demand, poor pricing and reduced order volumes. It also cites significant tariffs on Chinese exports. About 90 workers are affected, and for a mill town that is an extra month of reduced operations.
• 2:00
  Riley: The mill is the local economy in Quesnel, so a month's extension lands hard here.
• 2:06
  Casey: 100 Mile House is hosting its first Evening of Song at Martin Exeter Hall on November 7th. The two-hour show features live, local and original music from musicians of all ages. Trish Chung organized it after being inspired by SOCAN's Music Creator Day, which is celebrated across Canada that same day. The idea grew out of the Forest Grove Legion's open mic, which has run on the first Friday of each month this year. Chung says she's excited by the line-up of singer-songwriters and would really love to fill the room.
• 2:36
  Riley: A monthly open mic turned into a concert. Local scenes usually start that way.
• 2:42
  Casey: The Quesnel and District Chamber of Commerce held its annual Business Excellence Awards on October 17th, a sold-out evening at the Quesnel Seniors' Centre. Winners were named in categories including Social Leadership, Greatest Improvement, Excellence in Tourism, Agricultural Excellence, New Business of the Year or New Ownership, and Business of the Year at both five-employee tiers. The Chamber says the awards recognize the grit and innovation of the people who keep the town vibrant. Quesnel has about 9,000 residents, so a sold-out room is a real turnout.
• 3:16
  Riley: Now to the wider world, starting with the fight over wildlife. Several U.S. states have ballot measures this November that would direct money toward habitat protection or toward mitigating climate impacts. Vox reports that one of them could reshape wildlife management in a mountain state, and could also lead to the indiscriminate deaths of many kinds of wild animals. The piece ties the ballot fight to the federal government's rollbacks of endangered species protections, and argues that this backdrop gives the measures an outsized impact this year.
• 3:49
  Casey: So this November, voters settle part of the American wildlife fight directly.
• 3:55
  Riley: A Nature meta-analysis covering up to 1.14 million people across 46 research groups has identified 1,260 genetic variants associated with the Big Five personality traits. Of those, 824 had not been reported before. The study finds personality is polygenic, shaped by thousands of small genetic effects working alongside life experience. It also finds shared genetic roots between neuroticism and psychiatric illness. The Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania put out the source release.
• 4:29
  Casey: No single gene for being outgoing. Thousands of tiny effects, each close to zero.
• 4:35
  Riley: Three landslides hit Summerland's Garnet Valley this week after heavy rain on Tuesday. Rocks, water and debris spilled into a field at Campbell Creek Farm. Marty Campbell described it as a wall of rocks and water. The slopes burned in this summer's Bald Range fire, which stripped vegetation and left the ground more vulnerable to erosion. Shawn Campbell says another slide from the mountain behind the farm is a major concern. Summerland is in the Okanagan, south and east of the Cariboo.
• 5:05
  Casey: Containment ends the fire. Nobody told the slope.
• 5:10
  Riley: England held its first-ever wildfire summit, in Liverpool, and Prime Minister Andy Burnham used it to unveil the first steps of a national wildfire plan. Some Royal Air Force Chinook helicopters and A400M planes will be equipped for firefighting for the first time, and civilian fire services can request them for remote moorland and steep hillsides. Fireline crews get more specialist teams and lightweight PPE designed for wildfire suppression. Up to £45 million goes to fire crew resources, and £25 million goes to landscape transformation: restoring dried-out peatlands and fireproofing farmland. Burnham said an August fire that destroyed numerous homes in Stourbridge drove his push.
• 5:53
  Casey: The landscape money is a little over half the crew money. Watch that split.
• 5:59
  Riley: Investigators used DNA from a felled tree to trace bigleaf maple poaching in Olympic National Forest in Washington State. In 2018, timber thieves accidentally started a wildfire there, and the federal government opened an investigation into the poaching allegations. The DNA led investigators to the men they believe did it. Wood from a single bigleaf maple can fetch thousands of dollars on the black market before it's made into rare violins. Outside covers the case in its Long Read podcast, based on Nick Davidson's investigative feature.
• 6:34
  Casey: Canada's Changing Climate Report 2026 was published in September. CleanTechnica's writeup highlights a headline projection that glaciers will be gone by 2100, and quotes the report's description of iconic landscapes changing across the country. The piece contrasts Canada's approach with that of the United States, arguing the report trusts citizens to read the science and form their own views.
• 6:57
  Riley: A 2100 clock. Fire seasons run on a much shorter one.
• 7:03
  Casey: The Tyee looked at the B.C. election campaigns and asked what the parties are promising on disasters. Despite wildfires, floods and heat domes, the campaigns have made few commitments on mitigating future disasters, according to the piece, published October 22nd.
• 7:18
  Riley: Three kinds of disaster and a short list of promises.
• 7:22
  Casey: The 2026 Lancet Countdown report, from 146 researchers in 30 countries, estimates that heat cost $1.07 trillion in lost worker productivity in 2025. Extreme drought affected about 52 per cent of global land for at least a month. Southeast Asia and Africa took the largest productivity losses, equal to 3.9 and 3.2 per cent of their GDP. The researchers want governments to treat climate change as a global health emergency and to direct climate and health funding to vulnerable countries. Clean-energy investment reached $2.1 trillion in 2025, nearly twice fossil-fuel investment, but fossil fuels still supplied more than 80 per cent of global energy.
• 8:05
  Riley: Burnham has also defended the UK government's approval of the Jackdaw North Sea gas field. He says it won't change the UK's commitment to net zero by 2050, and that domestic gas has a lower carbon footprint than imported gas. Researchers say Jackdaw could meet only about 2 per cent of UK gas demand for ten years, and only if none of its output is exported. They warn the approval could weaken Britain's credibility at international climate talks, where it had backed a roadmap away from fossil fuels. A court quashed an earlier approval in 2025 over a failure to account for emissions from burning the gas.
• 8:44
  Casey: Two per cent of demand for ten years is a short-term supply argument.
• 8:49
  Riley: The 2026-27 El Niño has strengthened across the tropical Pacific and is forecast to rank among the strongest on record, peaking over the northern autumn and winter. It raises the likelihood of drought in some regions and heavier rain in others, but forecasters say it does not determine local weather on its own. In the United States, forecasts point to less rain and snow in the Pacific Northwest. Former NOAA climate scientist Tom Di Liberto, now with Climate Central, told The Guardian the U.S. forecasting system has not been tested at scale since the staffing and research cuts. Former officials and scientists say NOAA has lost roughly one-fifth of its staff since January 2025.
• 9:33
  Casey: A big El Niño, and fewer people watching it.
• 9:36
  Riley: The New York Times reports that AI tools are uncovering a flood of software flaws, and engineers are racing to fix them before hackers can exploit them. The October 28th story describes an industry scrambling to patch code as fast as the machines find problems.
• 9:53
  Casey: Machines find the flaws. People still have to patch them.
• 9:57
  Riley: A Nature study led by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, with an international team, finds the Amazon often releases more carbon than it absorbs. The forest comes close to carbon neutral only in its wettest years. Years of deforestation, drought and fire have eroded how much carbon the rainforest can store.
• 10:17
  Casey: Drought and fire again, the same two pressures on burned ground in the Chilcotin.
• 10:23
  Riley: Hikers are fighting to save two Appalachian Trail shelters. The National Park Service plans to tear down the Eckville shelter and a nearby structure called the 501 shelter. Eckville is an 1880 bunkhouse at mile 1,235, and its caretaker has lived in a converted barn in Berks County, Pennsylvania, for nearly 40 years. The NPS told Outside the shelters aren't up to its safety standards. The campaign is called Save Our Shelters.
• 10:52
  Casey: Safety standards are the stated reason. Maintenance budgets usually decide the rest.
• 10:58
  Riley: EU agriculture ministers agreed a partial negotiating position on the Common Agricultural Policy for 2028 to 2034 and left the budget unresolved. Negotiations with the European Parliament remain, and the new policy is scheduled to take effect January 1st, 2028. The farm group Copa-Cogeca warned that the Commission's budget proposal could mean cuts of more than 20 per cent in most member states, an estimate rather than an adopted decision. Poland is pressing for an "active farmer" definition that doesn't exclude people who also work off the farm.
• 11:35
  Casey: The money is the part nobody has settled.
• 11:39
  Riley: Chiricahua in southeastern Arizona became the 64th U.S. national park in October, after Congress passed a bill and President Trump signed it into law. The 12,000-acre area had been a national monument for more than a century. Its rock spires and canyons formed as erosion wore away volcanic deposits from eruptions about 27 million years ago. Chiricahua Apache communities lived there before Spanish colonization, and four biogeographic regions meet in the park, which holds about 1,000 plant species.
• 12:12
  Casey: That's the wire for today. Closer to home now, a group doing steady work.
• 12:17
  Casey: The Cariboo Brain Injury Association runs a peer support group in 100 Mile House. It helps Cariboo residents understand, navigate and heal from brain injuries, and it gives survivors and their families a place to sit with people who already know the road. If a brain injury has changed things for you or someone close to you, you don't have to work it out alone. You can find them at cariboobraininjury.com.
• 12:41
  Riley: Peer groups in small towns do a lot of caring that never shows up in a budget.
• 12:45
  Casey: Burned ground has the same problem. The slopes keep failing long after the flames are out, and someone has to own that risk.
• 12:53
  Riley: When a burned slope keeps failing after a fire is declared contained, who owns that risk? Should it be assigned and timed the way the fire line is? Summerland gives us the test case. Three slides came down on Tuesday, October 27th, and the Campbells are the ones standing in the field.
• 13:11
  Casey: Containment is the finish line in every report. Once a fire is called contained, the ground drops out of the paperwork. The Campbells got three slides after that.
• 13:20
  Riley: The mechanism is simple. Burned vegetation holds less soil, so heavy rain runs off and carries rock and debris downhill. The Bald Range fire burned up to 70 per cent of some catchment areas above Garnet Valley. The danger outlasted the fire, and that's predictable.
• 13:37
  Casey: Predictable to whom? Shawn Campbell is worried about the mountain behind his farm. A family watching its own hillside is the warning system right now.
• 13:46
  Riley: Predictable to the people who write recovery plans, and the regional district there is already involved in mitigation. A slope belongs to somebody, even when the paperwork is thin. Put the hazard in the plan with a name next to it.
• 14:01
  Casey: And a date. A name with no deadline is a hope.
• 14:03
  Riley: The name comes first. Then the date.
• 14:06
  Casey: Look at the UK, then. Burnham's plan puts £45 million toward fire crews and £25 million toward landscape work, restoring dried-out peatlands and fireproofing farmland. Of everything we've read this week, it's the clearest funded line for the ground itself.
• 14:21
  Riley: I'd copy that design. The crews get money, and the ground gets its own line in the same plan. Most places fund the crews and leave the ground to the next budget cycle.
• 14:32
  Casey: The landscape line is barely half the crew line. And it was unveiled at a summit, as a first step. Announcements are cheap. The record is ground that actually got worked.
• 14:41
  Riley: Most plans start with the line and set the timetable later. Once a landscape line exists, cutting it becomes a visible decision. That's how the money survives.
• 14:52
  Casey: Who keeps peatland work going in year five, once the summit photos are old?
• 14:55
  Riley: Nobody can answer that in year one. So copy the structure and watch the follow-through. Skipping the structure because the follow-through is unproven gets you nothing.
• 15:06
  Casey: Meanwhile the climate is moving the wrong way. The Lancet Countdown puts extreme drought on about 52 per cent of global land for at least a month last year. Drought dries the fuel. Then the El Niño forecast adds heavier rain in some regions. Dry years burn the slope, and wet ones bring it down.
• 15:24
  Riley: Those are global numbers, and forecasters say El Niño doesn't determine local weather on its own. In the Pacific Northwest, the U.S. outlook is actually for less rain and snow this winter. Plan around a global average and you can overbuild for a slope that never sees the storm.
• 15:41
  Casey: Summerland didn't need a strong El Niño. One Tuesday of heavy rain did it. You don't need the forecast to be right about one slope. Every fire season adds burned ground, and any hard rain on it is a risk.
• 15:53
  Riley: Which says plan. The Summerland slope tells you what to plan for. A global share can't tell a planner which hillside.
• 16:00
  Casey: Then name the slope. So far the only people naming this one are the Campbells.
• 16:05
  Riley: Right. Naming it is cheap. Assigning it is the work.
• 16:07
  Casey: Ha. Cheap is one word for it.
• 16:09
  Casey: The warning side is thinner than it was, too. Di Liberto told The Guardian the U.S. forecasting system hasn't been tested at scale since the cuts, and former officials say NOAA has lost about a fifth of its staff since January 2025.
• 16:22
  Riley: That's a U.S. system. I won't stretch it into a claim about B.C. warnings.
• 16:27
  Casey: Then take the local version. A warning only helps if someone is on the other end. Who gets the call when the rain hits on a Tuesday?
• 16:34
  Riley: Whoever has the authority to act on it. That's the gap. Ground monitoring after a storm is a practical tool. Instruments on a slope can flag movement before a family finds debris in its field.
• 16:46
  Casey: Plausible. Who maintains the instruments in year three, after the recovery money has moved on? A sensor nobody services is a press release with a battery.
• 16:55
  Riley: Then the monitoring line needs a maintenance line in the same budget. That's cheap compared with a second disaster.
• 17:02
  Casey: Cheap at the start. Neither of us has a cost figure for monitoring, so neither of us can say how cheap.
• 17:08
  Riley: Agreed. I won't invent one. Cost is the open question for anything on a slope.
• 17:13
  Casey: So who pays? The Tyee says B.C.'s campaigns made few commitments on disaster prevention, after fire, flood and heat domes. Platforms are where budgets get promised in public. If the platforms are quiet, that tells you something.
• 17:26
  Riley: A platform is a promise, though. Ministries spend outside election cycles, and the rehab money we're about to get to was committed without a campaign promise.
• 17:36
  Casey: The point stands. Prevention barely got airtime in a province that has burned and flooded year after year.
• 17:42
  Riley: Then judge it by what gets funded. Speeches at a podium won't tell you.
• 17:46
  Casey: Fine. Test it where the ground is.
• 17:48
  Riley: Wildfire rehabilitation projects are about to resume in the Cariboo Chilcotin Natural Resource District, led by the district's Wildfire Rehabilitation Coordinator. Some of it is already visible. On September 4th, the area restriction for Poplar Creek was rescinded, so people are back on that ground.
• 18:07
  Casey: What's actually on the work list? Fuel, or slopes?
• 18:10
  Riley: There's money behind it. My Cariboo Now reported more than $5 million in wildfire risk reduction projects. That includes $902,900 to Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation for hand treatments in Puntzi, Redstone and Alexis Creek, $450,000 for treatment in Dragon Mountain Park near Quesnel, and $827,600 for the Three Rivers area. The Forest Enhancement Society of BC and Natural Resources Canada help fund the work.
• 18:40
  Casey: Hand treatments in three named places. That's fuel. Does a crew in Puntzi touch a slope above a hayfield?
• 18:46
  Riley: Some of it is about forest structure as well as fuel. The Palmer Project, led by the Indigenous-led Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation, is among the largest efforts of its kind in B.C. The Pressy Lake pilot and the Palmer work have completed about 1,000 hectares of risk reduction. That's a track record you can drive out and look at. Local people delivering it, with government and philanthropic money behind them, is the model I'd want for slopes too.
• 19:15
  Casey: A track record is worth counting, so count the other side. The plan calls for burning about 400 piles of woody debris and unused log decks to meet rehabilitation objectives. That's smoke over the same communities that breathed the fire all summer.
• 19:30
  Riley: Then put the smoke plan in the work order. Ask for it in writing. It costs nothing to request, and a district can publish it.
• 19:38
  Casey: And ask what the work is for. Burning piles and thinning stands makes a forest safer to live next to. That isn't the same as restoring it, and a forest takes decades to come back, far longer than any project cycle.
• 19:50
  Riley: For people living beside it, safer is the first job. Restoration can follow on ground that isn't going to burn again next August.
• 19:58
  Casey: A plan in writing beats none. The bigger problem is scale. In July, CBC reported the merged Pear Lake fire near Clinton at over 66,000 hectares. A North Island Gazette count on August 23rd put it at 164,740 hectares, still out of control. By early September it was about 166,000 hectares, and it destroyed structures on about 120 properties. It was later declared "being held," a weaker status than contained.
• 20:25
  Riley: Those numbers come from different dates and possibly different boundaries, so read them as a trajectory, not one figure. The wider Big Bar Complex was listed at about 186,738 hectares as of August 9th. Either way, the burned ground that needs a plan runs into the hundreds of thousands of hectares.
• 20:45
  Casey: At that size, a thousand hectares of completed risk reduction is a sliver. And "being held" is a long way from the word everyone else uses.
• 20:54
  Riley: It is. But look at what worked. The fire forced the evacuation of the entire town of Clinton, and hundreds of Thompson-Nicola residents were moved out, with Kamloops providing evacuation support. Moving a whole town safely is the success story. The recovery program is the second half.
• 21:12
  Casey: Then the second half is what I'm asking about. The fire season is over, and the TNRD Resiliency Centre, which ran out of the Clinton Curling Club, is still offering recovery services for people hit by the Pear Lake, Big Bar Creek and Fiftynine Creek fires.
• 21:27
  Riley: So support outlasted the season. It's in a curling club in the middle of town, where people already go. That's what a recovery program should look like.
• 21:36
  Casey: It's for people. Grief, lost income, a burned property. The centre helps with that. It doesn't watch the hillside behind anyone's house. And when the recovery funding ends, who's still at the curling club?
• 21:47
  Riley: The slope doesn't need a case manager. It needs somebody watching it, with the authority to act. That can sit with the rehab district, with a reporting duty attached.
• 21:58
  Casey: The district has a wildfire rehabilitation coordinator. That's a named role. But the job is rehabilitation work, not owning a slope after the rain comes.
• 22:07
  Riley: Then write the rain into the role. Nothing stops the district from doing that.
• 22:12
  Casey: Writing it in is easy. Keeping the line in the budget after the next election is what I'd want to see.
• 22:18
  Riley: That's the test. Nobody here has put a price on slope work, so I won't either. But the trade-off is clear to me. Fold the hazard into programs that already have offices and staff, like the rehab district and the resiliency centre, and fix the structure in the next cycle.
• 22:35
  Casey: Folding it into general recovery is how nobody ends up owning it. Clinton's support is built for people, and it runs on recovery funding that ends at some point. The ground needs a named owner, not a line in a general plan.
• 22:48
  Riley: Then we disagree on structure. Palmer and Pressy Lake show programs that already run can deliver work on the ground. I'd write the hazard into those rather than wait for a new office.
• 22:59
  Casey: And nothing in front of us yet shows a general program owning a slope through year three. Until it does, I'd rather have a named owner with a deadline. If you live below burned ground, or you've watched a hillside like the one in Garnet Valley, tell us who you call when it moves. That's feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 23:17
  Riley: Those answers would settle a lot of this argument. Enjoy your weekend, everyone, and give the slopes a look after the next rain.
• 23:25
  Casey: And take the fog slowly on the way into Williams Lake.