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Wild Spaces And Outdoor Life · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Casey: Hey, good to have you. Today on Wild Spaces & Outdoor Life, we've got the Moab 240 ultra called off mid-race, with about 70 runners stuck on a mountain overnight. We're also looking at three hunter emergencies in fourteen hours near Steamboat Springs, and the Next Generation 9-1-1 rollout hitting Prince George on October 29th. Then the Deep Dive asks who makes the call when fire season closes a backcountry road, and where that decision gets written down. Stick around.
• 0:42
  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 23rd, 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.
• 1:01
  Riley: And I'm Riley. Today we follow people past the last gate, onto the roads and trails that decide who gets out there. Out at Horsefly Lake this morning, clear skies and around minus 1. Today's high is 7 and the low is minus 2, overcast through the day, with no precipitation expected. Across the Cariboo, 100 Mile House is around minus 3 under clear skies, Williams Lake is around minus 1 and mainly clear, Quesnel is around minus 1 with fog, and Alexis Creek is around minus 2, also foggy. If you're driving into Williams Lake later, watch for fog.
• 1:36
  Casey: On to the news. Most of it is close to home today, and a good share is about Saturday's ballot.
• 1:43
  Casey: Williams Lake has a Rotary Peace Pole in front of City Hall. The eight-foot pole was dedicated on Wednesday, October 21st, and its message, "May Peace be in our Communities," appears in six languages: Tsilhqot'in, Carrier, Métis, Secwepemc, English, and French, with a Braille plaque as well. Williams Lake First Nation opened the ceremony with a prayer from William Lulua, and an honour song followed. Rotary's Amber Stratton said the pole joins more than 250,000 others in over 180 countries.
• 2:13
  Riley: Six languages on one pole is a small project with a lot of consultation folded into it.
• 2:20
  Riley: Advance voting for the provincial election is finished. In Cariboo-Chilcotin, 8,283 people voted at five advance polls, out of 33,726 eligible voters. The busiest day was Monday, October 19th, with 1,875 ballots cast. In Prince George-North Cariboo, 7,021 people voted early over five days, out of 34,290 eligible. Voting day is Saturday, October 24th. We had the candidate lists on Thursday: Kathryn Askew, Lorne Doerkson and Douglas Gook in Cariboo-Chilcotin, and Denice Bardua, Sheldon Clare and Randy Thompson in Prince George-North Cariboo. All of those seats are contested.
• 3:00
  Casey: Roughly one eligible voter in four in Cariboo-Chilcotin got to a ballot early.
• 3:06
  Casey: The Veterans Review and Appeal Board has upheld a 2019 Veterans Affairs decision to deny disability benefits to a Quesnel RCMP officer. The officer, who is not named, joined the force in 2008. In 2016, while working as a general duty officer in Quesnel, he developed severe abdominal pain, had two emergency surgeries, and used a colostomy bag for four months. Veterans Affairs found his diagnosis, perforated diverticulosis, was not directly related to his work. The board's July appeal decision was published in October. His submission says he is on a gradual return to work with limited hours.
• 3:42
  Riley: Next Generation 9-1-1 starts rolling out across B.C. on October 26th, beginning at RCMP dispatch centres in Surrey and Courtenay. The system reaches the RCMP's Prince George centre on October 29th, and that centre serves about 40 communities across northern B.C. Callers won't notice much at first. They'll still reach an E-Comm operator, and the only new public feature is an automated callback for calls that drop or get abandoned.
• 4:11
  Casey: Forty communities, one centre, and a new system going live in the middle of it.
• 4:17
  Casey: A towering eagle now spreads its wings across a grey wall at Eagle Home Building in Quesnel. Local artist Keith Prestone created the mural with building owner Don Kroeker and the City of Quesnel. They tried the idea last year and it didn't work out, so they reworked the design, and the city approved the new proposal.
• 4:36
  Riley: For twenty years, TLKemchEEN, from Lytton First Nation, has run the annual clean-up of the Fraser and Thompson rivers. The target is ghost nets, lost fishing gear that keeps trapping and killing fish. This September, 40 volunteers put in a combined 20 hours on the water over two days, working from Lillooet to Lytton and then from Lytton to Yale. The story was co-published with The Narwhal through its 2026 Indigenous journalism fellowship.
• 5:04
  Casey: Twenty years of the same job, mostly on volunteer hours. That's usually where the funding thins out.
• 5:11
  Casey: Wildfires have been burning in Indonesia's peatlands, forests, and farmland since July. The country has produced the highest September emissions in the world. The EU's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service says January to September emissions were among the highest in 24 years. Smoke has reached Malaysia and Singapore, and thinner plumes stretch as far as northwest Australia. Severe drought is behind the outbreak, and the fires are encroaching on the site of the country's new capital on Borneo.
• 5:39
  Riley: Satellite data is how anyone knows how far that smoke went.
• 5:44
  Riley: Three hunter emergencies in fourteen hours, near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on October 14th and 15th. Routt County Search and Rescue responded as snow fell on rain-soaked mud, fog hid the landmarks, and fallen trees blocked the way back to camp. One hunter, Korin Pusillo, 39, was on her first elk hunt. The men in her group had hunted the same country for years, and she said their confidence drained as the weather turned.
• 6:11
  Casey: Decades of local knowledge, and it still went wrong inside a day.
• 6:17
  Casey: The UN Environment Programme's 2026 emissions assessment says U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions rose by 133 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025, the largest increase among major economies. The U.S. accounted for about 70 percent of the net increase across the 124 countries whose emissions grew. Global emissions held roughly level at 58.4 billion tonnes. Under existing policies, the assessment says warming could reach 2.8 degrees this century, and about 2.6 degrees if national pledges are fully met.
• 6:51
  Riley: Grimshaw and Aspect Studios have finished a 3,300 square metre visitor centre at the Twelve Apostles, in Port Campbell National Park in Victoria, Australia. The rammed-earth walls are shaped to read as part of the land, and the complex has a cafe and a rooftop ocean lookout. The Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation helped decide the scale and position of the building, to respect the site within Keerray Woorroong Country.
• 7:18
  Casey: Ask who was in the room before the first wall went up.
• 7:22
  Casey: Raven Chacon, the Diné artist and Pulitzer Prize winner, spent a couple of nights in early October improvising at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. His table held mixers, synthesizers, speakers, a turkey call, and a ceramic horn. Hyperallergic's interview covers his work reclaiming the technologies of colonial violence through sound, and the piece also points to Indigenous-artist shows around the city.
• 7:47
  Riley: The City of Toronto and DIALOG have announced a long-term Western Beaches Public Realm Plan, covering the waterfront from Ontario Place to the Humber River. Two Row Architect served as the Indigenous design and engagement consultant. The city says some items from the 2009 master plan went ahead, including trail upgrades and boardwalk repairs. The Waterfront West LRT and the Lake Shore Boulevard realignment remain unfunded.
• 8:14
  Casey: The trails got done. The transit is still waiting on money.
• 8:19
  Casey: Attackers released a malicious version of LiteLLM, an open-source gateway for connecting to AI models, on October 21st. It went out through PyPI and Docker images as version 1.107.0. The package carried a credential stealer and a backdoor that could collect cloud and AI service keys, private keys, and browser data. LiteLLM says attackers used three engineers' GitHub credentials to alter and approve the release, and it hasn't said how they got them. Users are told to rebuild from a clean environment, rotate exposed credentials, and use version 1.106.2 while the investigation continues.
• 8:55
  Riley: Stanford researchers report that bleached coral fragments fully recovered within seven weeks in lab tests, after brief contact with healthy, genetically identical clones. The study was published October 14th in Science Advances. In some cases five days to a week of contact was enough, and algae moved between fragments within three days. The method only works with matching clones, which keeps it in controlled settings for now. The team plans to test other ways of delivering algae.
• 9:27
  Casey: Cleveland-Cliffs has announced layoffs at its Hamilton, Ontario, steel plant. The same week, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Doug Ford unveiled a C$8.7 billion support package for steel, auto, and critical-mineral businesses. It includes up to C$1 billion in federal money for roads serving the Ring of Fire, matched by Ontario. We covered that Ring of Fire road money yesterday.
• 9:49
  Riley: Same package, layoffs in one place and a road getting funded in another.
• 9:55
  Riley: The Battery Show North America was held in Detroit earlier this month, and CleanTechnica's takeaway is that the show was about who can deliver, not the next breakthrough.
• 10:06
  Casey: FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton has told state emergency officials to keep their own financial reserves and response capacity, rather than waiting for federal disaster declarations. He said changes to federal assistance could begin within six months. The agency's own report says state disaster offices are typically understaffed and underfunded, and a developing El Niño is expected to worsen extreme weather through spring 2027.
• 10:32
  Riley: Six months is a short time for a state budget to catch up.
• 10:37
  Riley: A reviewer spent a week with Nvidia's RTX Spark and concluded it isn't a MacBook Pro killer. Tom's Guide highlights self-healing game code and autonomous local agents as the standout features.
• 10:50
  Casey: Local agents on your own machine means you carry the support load.
• 10:53
  Riley: That's the news for today. Next up is a local group doing the steady, unglamorous work of keeping waste out of the Cariboo.
• 11:02
  Riley: This is Waste Reduction Week, and the Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society has a program built for it. Waste Wise works with schools and businesses across School District 27 to cut down what ends up in the bin. The society has run Water Wise, Waste Wise, Skates for All, and school field programs since 1996. It's a nonprofit that has been doing this work in the Cariboo for thirty years. If you want to see what they offer, find them at conservationsociety dot c-a.
• 11:32
  Casey: Thirty years of programs is the kind of record I trust more than a launch.
• 11:36
  Casey: Which leads to the backcountry itself, and the roads that get people there.
• 11:41
  Riley: The Moab 240 is a 241.8-mile ultramarathon in Utah. Organizers called it off on Sunday, October 11th, after the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel brought flash flooding, high winds, sleet, and falling trees into the La Sals. About 70 runners and volunteers spent the night near the Bridger Jack aid station. All were accounted for, and no serious injuries were reported. ATVs and helicopters got people out. The organizer, Destination Trail, put out a statement that read, "Weather has other plans."
• 12:13
  Casey: Seventy people stranded on a mountain overnight, and the official word is one line about the weather. Is trust something a race director builds with each call, or something runners inherit from the last race they finished?
• 12:25
  Riley: Build it with calls. The stop came after the field was already out on the course, so the storm got there first. What the organizers controlled was the stop itself, and the count afterward. Cancelling is the safety tool, and they used it.
• 12:40
  Casey: Used it late. A tropical remnant is a known system, and the race was scheduled straight into it. I can't see in the coverage when the forecast first flagged it, or whether the start was locked in before anyone looked.
• 12:52
  Riley: Weather doesn't keep a schedule. Organizers could track runners live, which is how they knew where people were when the wind came up. Live tracking turned a bad night into a count of 70 accounted for. That's a tool doing its job.
• 13:07
  Casey: Tracking tells you where people are after the storm finds them. It doesn't keep them out of the storm. A race that long needs both jobs.
• 13:15
  Riley: The rescue is the part that could fail badly, and it didn't. Flash floods and falling trees leave little room for a slow helicopter response.
• 13:24
  Casey: The rescue held. But seventy people stuck overnight at one aid station suggests the margin was never there. Cottonwood Creek swelled, the trail flooded, and the access road became impassable. That's a planning problem upstream of the helicopters.
• 13:38
  Riley: October in high mountains is a known risk. You plan for it with pull points and cutoffs.
• 13:44
  Casey: And when the only road out floods, a pull point is a place to wait.
• 13:48
  Riley: Aaron Kubala was leading the men's race about 35 miles from the finish when conditions turned. He's 31. He was later hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis, which is a breakdown of muscle tissue. He told Outside he'd been running in pouring rain for twelve hours. Above 10,500 feet the rain stopped, the cold came in, and then the wind gusted near 50 miles an hour through ridges full of dead trees.
• 14:14
  Casey: He signed up for a hard race. He didn't sign up for thousands of dead trees coming down around him.
• 14:20
  Riley: Athletes accept the risk of a hard course. Race directors take on a duty once they know the forecast. Ultra runners aren't asking for a perfect prediction. They're asking for the call to come in time.
• 14:33
  Casey: He did what the protocol said and stayed at an aid station, shivering for hours. The body pays for the schedule either way.
• 14:40
  Riley: Colorado gives the same problem from the other side. Three hunter emergencies near Steamboat Springs in fourteen hours, on October 14th and 15th. Routt County Search and Rescue went out each time. Korin Pusillo, 39, was on her first elk hunt with her boyfriend, his brother, and their father, who had hunted that country for decades.
• 15:01
  Casey: The men who knew the ground were the most confident and had the least warning. Their trust sat in decades of memory, and the weather didn't check the memory before it turned.
• 15:11
  Riley: That's the argument for real-time information. A satellite or drone reading heat can show a hotspot before the smoke does, and a phone alert can say snow is coming. Tools like that earn trust when they get the call right, again and again. Memory of one bad burn fades when the evacuation call is right three seasons running.
• 15:31
  Casey: It doesn't fade that fast. Campers judge an agency by the last burn it handled, and one wrong call outweighs ten right ones. Trust in a tool is inherited from whoever ran it last.
• 15:42
  Riley: Then the tool has to reach the trip itself. An early-snow alert on a phone is cheap, and a local outfitter could run that test this season.
• 15:50
  Casey: Cheap tests get dropped when the grant ends. Who keeps the alert running in year two?
• 15:55
  Riley: Then the data needs an owner who stays. A local log, not a vendor one.
• 16:00
  Casey: That I can support. A log the community holds outlasts the vendor. The vendor can still switch the feed off, though, and the community has no say in that.
• 16:09
  Riley: The Cariboo has the same exposure. A backcountry caller near Williams Lake or 100 Mile House who calls 9-1-1 from a ridge is depending on a system that is changing this month.
• 16:21
  Casey: What changes for them?
• 16:22
  Riley: The B.C. RCMP starts its Next Generation 9-1-1 rollout on October 26th, in Surrey and Courtenay first. The Prince George centre goes live on October 29th. Callers still reach an E-Comm operator. The only new public feature is an automated callback for calls that drop or get abandoned.
• 16:42
  Casey: A callback needs a signal to call back. The dropped call from a ridge is the one case nobody puts in a press release.
• 16:49
  Riley: Which is why the callback matters. It's the one feature built for the failure case. A season of logged dropouts from those communities would show whether the failures cluster.
• 17:00
  Casey: The log is worth having. Who reads it in year five, and who answers when it shows the same dead zone again?
• 17:06
  Riley: A named role and a reporting date answer both. Put them in the contract.
• 17:10
  Casey: Written into a contract is one thing. Staffed and funded is another.
• 17:14
  Riley: Then look at the road. Scott McInnis, the Conservative candidate in Columbia River-Revelstoke, is running again. He was first elected in 2024, and he says rural health care, transportation, and backcountry access stay on his list. The riding runs down the Columbia Valley through Kimberley, Invermere, Canal Flats, Radium Hot Springs, Golden, and Revelstoke. The local argument is about Trans-Canada upgrades and how expansion might change access to neighbourhoods like Johnson Heights. The Revelstoke Review reported advance polling at 28 percent of registered voters.
• 17:50
  Casey: That riding isn't ours, but the phrase is. "Backcountry access" works for both sides. A wider road brings more visitors and more development, and the wild country being promoted is the first thing that changes.
• 18:02
  Riley: A narrow road brings no ambulance. Rural residents need reliable roads and health care, and emergency response is access too.
• 18:10
  Casey: An ambulance and a subdivision use the same road. Nobody gets to pick which one shows up first.
• 18:15
  Riley: So name the use in the design. The province controls the permits, and permits are the lever it can move. A decision at the planning stage costs less than a fight after the equipment arrives.
• 18:27
  Casey: Permits decide who gets the road. They don't decide who pays to keep it open, or who answers when it closes.
• 18:33
  Riley: Then write closure rules into the permit too. A date, a reason, and a reopening time, logged for each closure.
• 18:40
  Casey: Somebody has to fill that in at two in the morning when a fire flares up. I don't see that line in any announcement.
• 18:47
  Riley: Road closures are public decisions. They should have a public log. Test it on one road for one fire season, then decide whether to scale it.
• 18:56
  Casey: One road for one season is sensible. My worry is the year after, when nobody's assigned to the log. Goodwill doesn't keep it going.
• 19:04
  Riley: Then make it a line in the permit, with a name attached.
• 19:08
  Casey: The Twelve Apostles shows both sides. Eastern Maar helped decide the scale and position of that visitor centre, but a cafe and a rooftop lookout also bring more people to the edge. Whether anyone there had a say over visitor numbers isn't in the coverage.
• 19:22
  Riley: I'd still take that process over a building drawn in an office and handed to the community to live with. Decision-makers were in the room before the walls went up.
• 19:33
  Casey: The process matters. It doesn't settle what happens when the parking lot fills on a Saturday. That needs a limit written down.
• 19:40
  Riley: The Conservation Society's school field programs are access too. Somebody pays for the bus, the teacher, and the supplies every year.
• 19:49
  Casey: And those programs are a smaller bet than a highway. Smaller bets get cut first when budgets tighten. Thirty years of showing up is a good record, but it isn't a count.
• 19:59
  Riley: Then count it. How many kids reach a river each year?
• 20:02
  Casey: The programs that survive keep their numbers public. The ones that don't usually stop reporting them first.
• 20:08
  Riley: So the question for any wild place is the same. When fire season closes a backcountry road, who makes the call, and where is it written down? Ask the province for the closure log, one road at a time, starting with the busiest backcountry routes. Trust in a tool or an agency gets built when the call is right and the record is public, and that's something a community can demand.
• 20:31
  Casey: I'd add who is paid to keep that log accurate in year five. If nobody is, it's a press release with a spreadsheet. I still think one bad burn outweighs a lot of good logs, but a public record is the only way to start answering it. If you've hit a closed road with no notice, send it to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 20:49
  Riley: Check the road report before you go, and slow down in the fog.
• 20:53
  Casey: Enjoy your weekend.