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Wild Spaces And Outdoor Life · Cariboo Signals

0:00
Casey: Hey, welcome back. On today's episode: the Xatśūll First Nation just terminated every agreement with Spanish Mountain Gold, and Kathryn Askew is the new NDP candidate in Cariboo-Chilcotin. Then, in our deep dive, we ask if a small volunteer search-and-rescue crew in Chilcotin country is the right size for the job, or a thin line holding everything up. That and more, coming right up.
0:35
Casey: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Casey. It's Friday, October 2nd, 2026. Speaking to you from the traditional territories of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations here in the Cariboo region. Today's theme is Wild Spaces & Outdoor Life.
0:55
Riley: And I'm Riley. Today is about the people who move through the backcountry and the rules and roads that decide how far they get. Out at Horsefly Lake it's drizzly this morning, around 7 degrees, with a high of 12 and rain showers through the day. 100 Mile House is around 5, Williams Lake and Quesnel around 7, and Riske Creek around 5, all with drizzle or light rain.
1:19
Casey: Wet across the board, then. On to the news.
1:22
Riley: A lot of today's news sits close to home, and a good share of it is about who gets a say, at the ballot box and at the negotiating table.
1:31
Riley: The Williams Lake Tribune reports that Kathryn Askew of Canim Lake has been named the BC NDP candidate for Cariboo-Chilcotin. She's a retired school teacher. The Tribune says she spent 32 years in education, held leadership roles with the BC Teachers' Federation and her local union, including local president and bargaining chair, and received a national award for innovative teaching. She also volunteers with the Hawkins Lake Volunteer Fire Department, the Forest Grove Legion and the Canim Lake Community Club. The Tribune quotes her saying she "saw the damage caused by cuts to schools and public services under the previous government." The seat has been held since 2020 by Lorne Doerkson. Elections BC results from 2024 show he was first elected as a B.C. Liberal and re-elected as a B.C. Conservative, and the Tribune calls him the interim Conservative leader and incumbent MLA. The province votes October 24th. The show hasn't established who else has filed in the riding yet, and nominations close tomorrow.
2:36
Casey: The Tribune gave her a full profile. Filers nobody has profiled will get less ink.
2:42
Casey: Staying with politics. The Williams Lake Tribune, via Black Press, reports the NDP is calling on the Conservatives to fire their North Island candidate over claims about vaccines he made in 2022. He's a physician as well as a candidate. That's a Vancouver Island race, nowhere near our two ridings, but it shows how quickly a candidate's old statements get pulled into a short campaign. Twenty-two days is not much time to answer for something said four years ago. The Conservatives' response isn't in the material we have.
3:12
Riley: In 108 Mile Ranch, Canadian Architect has a feature on the Northern Secwépemc Cultural Centre. The piece describes the approach from Highway 97, where the road breaks out of the forest beside 108 Mile Lake, with water to the south and ranchers' hills to the north. From there you look back toward the aspen and evergreens and catch a glimpse of the building. It's a design story about a Secwépemc cultural facility placed carefully in that landscape, and the writer spends real time on how the architecture answers the view rather than competing with it. For the South Cariboo, it's a public building that belongs to the people whose territory it sits on.
3:52
Casey: Nazko opened a cultural site last week too.
3:56
Casey: The Williams Lake Tribune reports alcohol impairment is suspected in a two-vehicle crash near Williams Lake. The report was published Thursday. It carries few details beyond the suspected impairment, so we'll leave it there. The roads are wet this morning, so drive for the conditions.
4:13
Riley: My Cariboo Now reports the Xatśūll First Nation has terminated all agreements with Spanish Mountain Gold. The nation says the project has undergone significant and fundamental changes that don't provide a mutually beneficial relationship between the First Nation and the mining company. The announcement was posted Thursday. The report doesn't say what the changes were or what happens to the project next. For the region, it matters because those agreements were the formal basis for the project going forward in that part of the Cariboo, and a nation walking away from all of them is a decision, not a pause.
4:51
Casey: An agreement is only as durable as the project it was signed for.
4:55
Riley: Down in the Kamloops area, CFJC reports that the Coldwater Indian Band is denouncing a lack of consultation over the new Pacific Link pipeline. The band's words: "There is anger in our community." That's a Nicola-area story, not a Cariboo one, and the report doesn't lay out the route or the timeline in what we have. It's the same question as the Xatśūll news from a different angle. Who was at the table before the line was drawn?
5:22
Casey: And the answer, again, seems to be nobody the project needed to hear from.
5:27
Casey: Over to wildlife. Country Living reports on Scotland's wildcats, the so-called Highland tigers. Wild-born kittens have arrived following a conservation effort, and Britain's last native cat species is making a comeback. The milestone is the births in the wild, because it means released animals are surviving, finding territory and breeding without help. Scotland's wildcat story took decades of decline to reach this point. The rural angle is familiar here: recovery depends on the people who live next to the animals tolerating them.
5:58
Riley: Earlier this week, My East Kootenay Now reported on a restoration project north of Cranbrook. It's working to reduce wildfire risk while improving forest, grassland and wildlife habitat in one go. That's a different Interior setting from ours, and the report is short on numbers. The idea is thinning and restoring so the land burns less severely and still works as habitat. For Cariboo ranchers and forest communities, it's the same pitch: one piece of work that serves fire protection and the animals together.
6:30
Casey: The Narwhal reports that Seattle's dams blocked Canadian salmon, and that could finally change. U.S. Tribes won a hard-fought agreement to restore fish passage around those dams. First Nations in British Columbia are now preparing for the possible return of salmon to waters they've been cut off from. A negotiation in the United States could reshape rivers north of the border, and it started with Tribes who kept pressing for years.
6:55
Riley: Fish passage is the kind of project that takes decades.
6:59
Riley: ScienceAlert reports a huge haul of Ice Age mammoth bones turned up beneath a construction site in the Czech Republic. Researchers are treating it as an Ice Age hunting mystery, trying to work out how so many animals ended up in one place. Construction crews often find these things first, which is true of gravel pits and road cuts across the Cariboo as well.
7:22
Casey: NASA has powered up the Roman Space Telescope's 300-megapixel infrared camera, according to ScienceDaily. It's designed to capture enormous stretches of the cosmos with Hubble-like sharpness. Its planet-hunting coronagraph is part of the instrument too. The report was published earlier this week, and the next step is the observatory's work itself.
7:43
Riley: Outside Online ran a piece on gait analysis for hikers. Runners have used it for decades to manage chronic pain, and the writer got one after hip pain kept showing up on hikes with a heavy pack. The finding was that the problem wasn't new gear. It was how the writer moved. For anyone carrying a pack up a Cariboo trail this fall, a cheaper fix than another pair of boots.
8:07
Casey: The New York Times looks at Nemuro, a Japanese fishing town that depends on Russia for trade while leading the fight to win back islands Moscow seized in World War II. Putin reignited the dispute. The town is stuck in the middle, and its fishermen are the ones who feel it first.
8:24
Riley: Outside Online reports a second flash flood hit Grand Canyon National Park on September 16th. It destroyed temporary worker housing and damaged water infrastructure near Bright Angel Canyon. That comes less than a month after a deadly flood in August, and it set back the recovery and deepened water-crisis closures across the South Rim.
8:45
Casey: The park is still dealing with the first one.
8:49
Casey: Last one. The BC Wildfire Service says it will conduct pile burning in the Redmond Pit Road area near Vanderhoof. It could begin as early as October 5th and may continue until the project is complete. Piles are cleared fuel, burned once the ground is wet enough to keep the fire contained. Prescribed work like that matters for what we get into next.
9:09
Riley: There's a question in there about who does the work between fire seasons.
9:15
Casey: Today is World Habitat Day, so a word for Habitat for Humanity Cariboo. They build affordable homes for Cariboo families in need. Their ReStore keeps building materials out of the landfill and the sales help fund housing projects. If you want to volunteer, the website is habitatcariboo.org.
9:32
Riley: A hammer and a free Saturday go a long way there.
9:35
Riley: Back to the backcountry, then. Who's out there when something goes wrong?
9:39
Riley: In July we talked about Moab and Squamish, where rescue calls outpaced team capacity within a couple of seasons of media coverage. Today it's about the crews themselves. A volunteer search-and-rescue team covering Chilcotin country: is that the right size for the job, or a thin line holding up a system nobody wants to pay for?
9:59
Casey: Both can be true. A small crew knows the ground. They know which road washes out and which drainage the same family always goes up. That's response time you can't buy with a bigger budget.
10:10
Riley: Local knowledge is real. So is the arithmetic. Fire season pulls the same volunteers into evacuation support, road watch and everything else a community needs. Then a lost hunter needs them in the same week.
10:23
Casey: And they're volunteers with jobs and ranches. One retirement and the knowledge walks out the door.
10:29
Riley: That's a design flaw. It gets fixed by making the crew bigger, or by giving it better tools. Satellite communicators changed the equation. A hiker with a two-way device sends a location and a message. The search area shrinks from a whole drainage to a few hundred metres.
10:46
Casey: Smaller, yes. Still needs people to walk in.
10:49
Riley: The device cuts the hours. Fewer hours means fewer volunteers burned out per call. In July I pointed to satellite communicators changing outcomes in remote terrain, and that's still the strongest case for staying small. You don't need forty people on standby if the first message tells you which creek to drive to.
11:08
Casey: If someone measures it. I haven't seen a regional report that counts volunteer-hours per callout and shows the trend. Without that, we're arguing from impressions.
11:17
Riley: The absence of a report doesn't mean the tools aren't working.
11:21
Casey: It means nobody can show it. That's the problem with small. When it works, nobody writes it down. When it fails, somebody's picture is in the paper.
11:30
Riley: Then look at where somebody did write it down. The BC Wildfire Service and BC Parks are working with the Lower Similkameen Indian Band on phase two of a cultural burn, up to about 165 hectares in the western section of the South Okanagan Grasslands Protected area, with support from the BC Wildlife Federation. The release says the area is in the traditional area of the sməlqmix people. That's a small crew doing prescribed work that lowers the fuel load before the season, and it has a name, a partner list and a phase number.
12:03
Casey: That's small done right. A Nation's territory and knowledge, the province as a partner, phased over time. It's also the South Okanagan, not here, and a prescribed burn has a schedule. A lost hunter doesn't.
12:15
Riley: The model transfers. Xatśūll, WLFN and the Secwépemc communities around here have people who know fire and know the land. The question is whether they hold authority or just get invited to the table.
12:27
Casey: That's the part I doubt. Invited to the table is how consultation usually goes. The Coldwater story this morning is the template. Anger because the decision was made first. And Xatśūll just terminated every agreement with Spanish Mountain Gold. Nations are saying no because the partnership stopped being one.
12:45
Riley: Both of those are resource projects with a company on the other side. A burn has the Nation as the operating partner on the ground.
12:53
Casey: One burn, one partner. I'd want to see it in year five, with the same staff and the same trust.
12:58
Riley: Year five is why you write it into an agreement, not a press release.
13:03
Casey: Sure. And who audits the agreement?
13:05
Riley: The release says phase two. Somebody funded phase one and it worked well enough to continue. That's an audit of a kind.
13:12
Casey: That's a sequel, not an audit.
13:14
Riley: Back to rescue. Quesnel Search and Rescue got equipment donations, and in July you said gear doesn't solve throughput. What would?
13:22
Casey: Paid coordination. A part-time position that handles the paperwork, the training schedule, recruiting and call logs. Volunteers do what only they can do, which is walk into the bush.
13:32
Riley: That's a staffing model. What does it cost?
13:35
Casey: I don't have a number for the Cariboo, and I won't invent one.
13:38
Riley: Then the first step costs nothing. Count the hours. One season, one team, one spreadsheet. Callouts, hours per volunteer, how many people did most of the work.
13:48
Casey: And if three people did most of it, that's your answer about whether small is working.
13:53
Riley: Or whether it's resilient. Thirty people each doing a bit is a different team from three people doing everything.
14:00
Riley: Wildfire makes it sharper. The Cranbrook-area restoration work is meant to make the land burn less severely. Pile burning near Vanderhoof does the same on a smaller footprint. Every hectare treated is a hectare where the crew on the ground has a better day in August.
14:17
Casey: Treated hectares don't answer who's staffing the August fire. Fuel work reduces the odds. It doesn't remove the call. And the same people who stack piles in October are the ones who get pulled in July.
14:28
Riley: Which is the case for counting. If the plan assumes the same twenty volunteers are on the fire line, on evacuation support and on the search team, the plan is counting them three times.
14:40
Casey: So ask the regional district. What does your emergency plan assume about volunteer availability in August?
14:46
Riley: And ask whether anyone has checked. The Cariboo has a single-corridor problem on its highways, as we got into on July 31st. A rescue team coming from Williams Lake to the Chilcotin has the same problem: one road, and fire or flooding can close it.
15:02
Casey: Then small and local isn't a virtue in that case. It's the only option. If the road is closed, the nearest team is the team you have.
15:10
Riley: That's the argument for small. Distance makes remote capacity worthless on the day it's needed.
15:16
Casey: It's an argument for local. Local can still be thin. Nobody here has shown me that a team in Riske Creek or Alexis Creek has enough people when the road is cut, and that's the number that decides it.
15:27
Riley: I'll give you that nobody has published it. The fix is still cheap. Publish it.
15:32
Casey: That I'll back. The vote is October 24th, and it's a provincial question, since the province runs emergency management. Kathryn Askew is the NDP candidate in Cariboo-Chilcotin, per the Tribune, and Lorne Doerkson holds the seat. Ask each of them what they'd do about volunteer search-and-rescue capacity and how they'd measure it.
15:50
Riley: Same question, same standard for everyone on the ballot. In Prince George-North Cariboo, which includes Quesnel, Sheldon Clare holds the seat per Elections BC's 2024 results. The show hasn't established the full field there yet.
16:05
Casey: So the question goes to whoever files. Nominations close tomorrow.
16:09
Riley: I still say small works when it's wired to the right tools and the right partners. A crew that knows the Chilcotin and carries a satellite messenger covers ground a distant team can't.
16:20
Casey: And I say small without a count, a budget line or a successor is one retirement from gone. We don't agree on which one the Chilcotin has, and neither of us has the data to settle it.
16:31
Riley: Then the data is the next move.
16:33
Casey: If you run a search-and-rescue team, sit on a regional district board, or know how callout hours get tracked around here, tell us. Feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
16:42
Riley: Enjoy your weekend.
16:43
Casey: Stay dry out there.