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Wild Spaces And Outdoor Life · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey there, welcome in. Today on Cariboo Signals we've got free transit in Quesnel, Williams Lake, and Bella Coola on election day, and a Rocky Mountaineer pause that's got Quesnel wondering. Then the big one: Simon Fraser University's model puts climate wildfire costs above $2 trillion this century, and Casey and I ask what that number leaves out. That and more, coming right up.
• 0:37
  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 9th, 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.
• 0:57
  Casey: And I'm Casey. We're looking at fire, smoke, and the backcountry today, and what the totals leave out. Out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's light drizzle and around 7 degrees, with a high of 11 and a low of 4 today. Moderate rain showers through the day, about 9 millimetres, with a 100 percent chance of precipitation. Across the region, 100 Mile House is around 5 with slight rain showers, Williams Lake is around 7 and overcast, Quesnel is around 6 and overcast, and Anahim Lake is around 2 and mainly clear.
• 1:28
  Riley: On to the news.
• 1:30
  Riley: Most of today's news lands in our own backyard, and the wildfire thread runs through the rest of it.
• 1:37
  Casey: Free transit is coming to Quesnel, Williams Lake, and Bella Coola on Saturday, October 17th. The Williams Lake Tribune reports that residents in those communities can ride for free that day, which is election day for the local and regional vote. The provincial vote comes later, so the two ballots stay separate. The article doesn't say what the fare loss costs the transit budget.
• 1:59
  Riley: A free ride is a nudge to the polls, and that's the point.
• 2:04
  Riley: BCAA is investing in a wildfire mental health program in Williams Lake, in collaboration with the Canadian Mental Health Association in B.C. The stated aim is to support communities affected by wildfire. The story runs with a photo of the Felker Lake fire, which is a reminder of where the program's clients come from.
• 2:25
  Casey: The Indoor Multisport Turf Facility Working Group in Williams Lake has had a feasibility study awarded. Brian Hansen, who speaks for the group, said the working group held a community open house on Saturday, October 3rd, where a draft design of the upper level of a potential facility was shown. The excerpt we have doesn't carry a construction cost or a timeline. A feasibility study is the step that answers whether the building is worth designing, so the next number to watch is the one the study produces.
• 2:55
  Riley: In Quesnel, a contract has been awarded to rebuild the food hub that a fire destroyed. My Cariboo Now's item is short and gives no dollar figure for the contract. Rebuilding the building is the easy part of what a food hub does for a town. The hard part is the producers and buyers who depended on it, and the article doesn't say how those relationships are being carried through the rebuild.
• 3:20
  Casey: The last Rocky Mountaineer train through Quesnel for the foreseeable future left town on the morning of October 7th. The headline calls it the potential last one, and the article's own wording is "for the foreseeable," so nothing has been declared final. For a town that sees the tourism value of that train mostly in passengers stepping off to look around, the pause matters more than the schedule does.
• 3:44
  Riley: The B.C. Conservatives are proposing to replace ICBC's no-fault auto insurance with what they call a "hybrid" system. The plan would restore some accident victims' right to sue. That's a party promise, not a law, and the provincial election is still ahead. Our Tuesday rundown covered Cariboo-Chilcotin, with Lorne Doerkson for the Conservatives, Kathryn Askew for the NDP, and Douglas Gook for the Greens. Yesterday we covered Prince George-North Cariboo, which includes Quesnel, with Sheldon Clare for the Conservatives, Denice Bardua for the NDP, and Randy Thompson for the Greens. The article doesn't set out how the hybrid model would work in practice.
• 4:23
  Casey: Ask all three Cariboo-Chilcotin candidates what "hybrid" means before the vote. Then ask what it costs a driver in Horsefly.
• 4:31
  Casey: CFJC Today reports that the Salute to the Sockeye returned to Adams River, with the headline calling it one of the great natural spectacles on the planet. The celebration went ahead, as reported on October 8th, and the story is the kind that brings visitors to a river valley for a few days each autumn.
• 4:50
  Riley: Mother Jones, reprinting Inside Climate News, runs a piece on AI, drones, and robots in wildfire response. It uses the Sand Creek Fire, which has burned since the start of August, as its case. The piece is about tools that find fire faster and let crews see the ground without sending people into it. Detection is the part vendors like to demonstrate, so the useful question is what happens after the alert.
• 5:15
  Casey: Faster detection still needs somebody to act on the alert, and somebody to pay for the crew that answers it.
• 5:23
  Casey: WIRED argues that the data center backlash should also be a climate fight, and says it isn't one yet. Climate groups are moving into the opposition, but whether they can get people to care about the atmospheric impact of the facilities is an open question. The piece is about messaging as much as emissions, and that gap is where a lot of local opposition either grows or fizzles.
• 5:46
  Riley: Vox, reprinting High Country News, has a piece on a weather threat it says costs the country billions and is about to get worse. The reporting opens in a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, where researchers study the physical side of a changing climate. The article's core claim is that the costs are already on the books, spread across insurers, utilities, and households, and the bill grows each year the models are not acted on.
• 6:14
  Casey: Mother Jones, reprinting Yale E360, reports that Germany is building a digital ark for US climate data. Technicians in a five-story building in central Hamburg are preserving datasets that might otherwise disappear. The article frames it as a hedge against a federal government that may stop maintaining the records.
• 6:32
  Riley: Data nobody copies is data nobody can check later.
• 6:37
  Riley: Global News reports on an Indigenous cultural burn in the grasslands west of Osoyoos, in the Okanagan. The smoke over the grasslands this week is part of a carefully planned burn meant to do more than reduce wildfire risk. The Okanagan is south and east of the Cariboo, and the article doesn't name the nation whose burn it is, so we won't guess at that.
• 6:59
  Casey: Who signed off on it, and who decided what the fire was for? Those are the questions I'd ask first.
• 7:06
  Casey: Dwell reports on a home in Australia designed with concrete walls and a corrugated-metal roof to ward off flames. It nearly burned before it was finished. A team stepped in and saved the residence, and the design features are the reason it survived. The story is a builder's lesson in what a fire-resistant design buys, and what it can't buy if the crew isn't on site.
• 7:27
  Riley: The Tyee asks who will fix Vancouver's aging pools and community centres before the city's park board election. The revitalization of Britannia Community Centre is on pause for lack of funding, according to the photo caption. The article lays out where the parties stand on the infrastructure backlog, which makes it a useful comparison for any Cariboo council with a pool or a rink on a list of deferred repairs.
• 7:53
  Casey: Deferred maintenance is the quiet version of the same problem everywhere. It doesn't make the headline until the pool closes.
• 8:02
  Casey: Outside Online ran an oral history of the Melanzana Micro Grid fleece hoodie. The hoodies are sewn by hand in Leadville, Colorado, and there's a waitlist. Former employees, locals, and longtime fans tell the story of how a small fleece company became an outdoor institution, and the waitlist is part of the appeal. The company's own history is a case study in building a product around the people who wear it.
• 8:25
  Riley: A waitlist for a fleece is a production decision that doubles as marketing.
• 8:29
  Riley: Fire, smoke, and what gets counted when the season ends. That's where we're going next.
• 8:36
  Casey: Before the deep dive, a word about First Journey Trails.
• 8:39
  Riley: First Journey Trails designs and builds trails, and runs the Indigenous Youth Mountain Bike Program. The program puts young people to work on trail building and on the bikes. If you ride, you know a good trail depends on people who understand the ground under it. Find them at firstjourneytrails.com.
• 8:58
  Casey: Trail building is local knowledge with a shovel in its hand. That's a good thing to support.
• 9:03
  Casey: Let's get to the heart of it. Smoke, cost, and who's left holding the bill.
• 9:09
  Riley: Simon Fraser University's model puts the cost of climate-driven Canadian wildfire at more than $2 trillion over the 21st century. The study is by Sian Kou-Giesbrecht and was published in Environmental Research. SFU News reported it on October 7th. Under a realistic worst case of three to four degrees of warming, the model puts total annual costs at about $43 billion by the end of the century. Kou-Giesbrecht says the researchers wanted to translate the issue into terms the public can grasp. A dollar figure is something a council can set against a budget, and that's a use I'd defend.
• 9:47
  Casey: Look at what the dollar figure counts. Wildfire suppression. Net timber yield loss. Nature-based recreation loss. Plus the global damage from the carbon the fires release. That's the whole domestic ledger, and it's three lines wide.
• 10:00
  Riley: Those are three real costs. Suppression is what governments spend. Timber is what the forest was worth to a mill. Recreation is what people lose when a trail closes for a season. Each line has a method behind it.
• 10:14
  Casey: It's real as far as it goes. The study says the numbers are probably conservative, because it leaves out Canadian wildfire health impacts, evacuations, infrastructure loss, and economic disruption. It also leaves out singular extreme events, like the 2023 season, which forced more than 200 communities to evacuate.
• 10:33
  Riley: Conservative means it's a floor, and a floor is still a number you can plan around. If the model is light, the fix is to add lines, not to throw out the frame.
• 10:42
  Casey: A floor that leaves out evacuations is the number a town hears when it's already been evacuated. Nobody in the model is paying for the hotel room, the lost wages, or the week a family spent without knowing whether the house was still standing.
• 10:57
  Riley: The study also says that if warming stays at or below two degrees, costs look similar to recent decades. That's a planning target with a price tag attached. The authors' point is that the trajectory is still set by present decisions, which is a reason to act, not a reason to give up.
• 11:14
  Casey: Two degrees is a target. What I want to know is what the model puts on recreation loss, in dollars, for a trail that burned, and whether that number means anything for a trail a family rides every August.
• 11:26
  Riley: Recreation values are usually estimated from travel costs or visitor surveys, asking what people would pay to keep a place open. It's imperfect, but it isn't a guess.
• 11:36
  Casey: And that method values the trail from the outside. Someone who runs a horse outfitting business on that trail is in the estimate as a line item, if they're in it at all. The season they lost is a single number, and it doesn't say whether they came back the next year.
• 11:51
  Riley: Then the question is whether a model that's wrong about the people is more wrong than a hectare total that's wrong about the forest.
• 12:00
  Casey: So what is a wildfire total actually measuring? Hectares burned tell you how much ground was in fire. They don't tell you whether the forest comes back in a decade, whether the grass returns for cattle, or whether a trail reopens with the same footing. A hectare counts area. It doesn't count recovery.
• 12:17
  Riley: Agreed on the hectare. It's the figure the headlines use because it's the one you can measure from a plane.
• 12:24
  Casey: Which is why it's the one we keep using.
• 12:26
  Riley: Right. And a plane can also count how many hectares came back green by the next spring. That's a second measurement, and the province could publish both.
• 12:35
  Casey: Publish both, then tell me who reads the second one. The recovery number tends to disappear from the news cycle before the land has finished recovering.
• 12:43
  Casey: Then take the smoke. NPR's story on smoke ecology centres on a researcher named Sanderfoot, who is trying to make the study of smoke's effects on wild animals a field of its own. Her earlier work includes a 2021 study on how wildfire smoke affects bird detection in Washington State. A 2024 study in The Auk analyzed two decades of banding data in California. Acute exposure to fine particles reduced bird capture rates. Chronic exposure had a positive effect on capture rates across the species studied.
• 13:14
  Riley: That's the part that matters for measurement. Banding data is one of the longest-running monitoring tools we have. A two-decade dataset in one state lets scientists see patterns a single fire season would hide. The field is maturing because the data is piling up, and the authors didn't stop at one dataset.
• 13:33
  Casey: Piling up, sure. But look at what the number is. A capture rate is how many birds went into a net on a given morning. It isn't bird health. The Auk paper also found that body condition was affected. And then the chronic result runs the wrong way: more smoke over the long run, more birds caught.
• 13:50
  Riley: That's a counterintuitive result, and counterintuitive results are where a field learns something. You don't throw out the dataset because one finding surprised people.
• 14:00
  Casey: No. But you don't build a prevention program on a sign that flips depending on the time window. When the proxy gives the opposite answer over a different timescale, the proxy is what you have to question.
• 14:12
  Riley: The fix is to measure more and measure longer. Monitoring networks are how you find out whether the proxy is misleading you.
• 14:20
  Casey: Fine. Then the networks need to track what the proxy misses. Birds caught, yes. Birds that never came back to the burned slope, no. Nobody's banding net catches an absence.
• 14:30
  Riley: Catrin Edgeley, at Utah State University, makes a related point in an editorial for the International Journal of Wildland Fire. Community wildfire adaptation may underperform because it downplays local context and local input. Her argument draws on community-based research across the U.S. She and Burnett made a similar case in 2025 about rural smoke adaptation: approaches have to match the social conditions of each community. A 2024 paper in the journal Fire questions whether standard community archetypes are still useful for wildfire planning at all.
• 15:05
  Casey: That's the same argument that has been made about every template for a long time. A standard smoke forecast is useful. A standard plan for a rural town can be wrong about what the town depends on, and the town is the one that finds out.
• 15:19
  Riley: Templates give small communities something to start from. Most small councils don't have a planner on staff. A proven framework and a standard forecast save months of work, and months are what a council doesn't have during fire season.
• 15:33
  Casey: And the rancher who runs cattle on that grassland knows which fields recover and which turn to weeds in a bad year. The template doesn't ask. Edgeley's point is that the failure of the template is the missing ask. The people who live with the cost are the ones it skips.
• 15:49
  Riley: Then build the ask into the template. Standard tools, with local input as a required field. The tool and the consultation aren't in competition.
• 15:58
  Casey: Required field is a tidy phrase. It still has to be filled in by someone who gets listened to, and that usually happens after the fire, when the decision is already made.
• 16:07
  Riley: Which is where the cost lands. The model excludes evacuations, but the cost of an evacuation is real to a family in Quesnel or Williams Lake even if the model doesn't price it. The BCAA-backed mental health program in Williams Lake is a cost that appears in no national total.
• 16:25
  Casey: Good example. That program exists because someone is carrying the cost after the flames are out. The total counts the fire. It doesn't count the people in the months after.
• 16:35
  Riley: And the Quesnel food hub fire is a loss of shared infrastructure, the kind of thing a national model would fold into infrastructure loss, which it also excludes. Local infrastructure gets rebuilt by local people with local budgets, and the rebuild shows up nowhere except the local paper.
• 16:52
  Casey: So who carries the cost of a bad year? The province carries suppression. Insurers carry some of the structures, and policyholders carry the premiums after. The trail society carries the closed trail. The rancher carries the grazing that doesn't come back. The model books the total and loses the names.
• 17:10
  Riley: Then the practical answer is for communities to keep their own record. A loss register, per fire, kept by the regional district or the local government. Trail closures counted in days. Grazing lost in animal units. Facilities closed. Households displaced. And the date each one came back.
• 17:27
  Casey: And who maintains that register in year five? I've watched local data projects start with a grant and a launch event. Most went quiet when the person who started them moved on. A register that depends on one clerk's memory is a register nobody can read in ten years.
• 17:43
  Riley: Good test. I'd answer it with an institution, not a volunteer. Put the register in the regional district's standing reporting, so it survives staff turnover and budget cycles.
• 17:54
  Casey: Standing reporting. The closest local government gets to a memory is its council minutes, and those are a generous description of the record.
• 18:01
  Riley: Then the minutes are the place to start. A standing register is cheaper than the next surprise.
• 18:07
  Casey: I'm not convinced it survives an election. A new council can drop a line item faster than anyone notices. But it's the first version of this I'd want to see on paper.
• 18:16
  Riley: So the test is simple. If the regional district can't name who keeps the loss ledger, the total we quote next year is still missing the people it's supposed to count. Write to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a with your own loss count, and enjoy your weekend.
• 18:32
  Casey: Check the trail reports before you head out, and check the smoke forecast twice.