Selkirk Mountains

Nikko with its temples.

Loch Lomond, Lake Tahoe, Windermere, Tintagel by the Cornish Sea, the Yellowstone and the Canyon of the Colorado, the Crater Lake of Oregon, Sorrento with its Vesuvius, Honolulu with its Pelee, the Yosemite, Banff with its Selkirks, Prince Frederick's Sound with its green fjords, Chamonix with its Mont Blanc, Bern with its Oberland, Zermatt with its Matterhorn, Simla with the great silent wonder of the snows.

Even now as I write, says Whimper, the master mountain climber, they rise before me an endless series of pictures magnificent in effect, in form, and color.

I see great peaks with clouded tops seeming to mount upward forever and ever.

in that whole world.

Um, he died in the Selkirk Mountains of BC, Canada.

Oh.

Um, and so, I mean, for perspective for any of your listeners, it would be like showing up at a pickup basketball game wearing a Michael Jordan jersey somewhere in the city and someone looking over and just saying, "Ah, who's Michael Jordan?"

It covers the whole of the country which we call New Ontario and also the upper part of the province of Quebec.

Outside of this territory there was at the dawn of time no other land where North America now is except a long island of rock that marks the backbone of what are now the Selkirk Mountains and a long ridge that is now the mountain chain of the Alleghenies beside the Atlantic slope.

Books on geology trace out for us the long successive periods during which the earth's surface was formed.

Even in the Archaean age something in the form of life may have appeared.

Louisa?Absolutely.

And where these bears are, um, in the Coeur d'Alene, near C- Coeur d'Alene are in the Selkirks ecosystem, a tiny remnant, um, population of 50 to 60 bears.

I mean, that is pretty close to zero.

Those bears are very vulnerable, and their future rests on being connected to other populations in the Cabinet-Yaak and further south in the Selway-Bitterroot.

They said, "Okay, here's a chunk in Yellowstone.

Here's a chunk in Glacier.

Here's a teeny chunk in the Selkirks and Cabinet-Yaak." And the science has really shattered that notion.

The, the, the genetics of, scientifics coming out of genetics, as well as, uh, science coming out of environmental change, of the sus- susceptibility, you mentioned disease, that's an issue.

So the Eastern forest is where things get a little more complex because you have, You have the altitude from the Cascades.

You've got the Selkirks, the foothills, the Rocky Mountains.

What are you going to see there? You're going to see a lot more pines, ponderosa pines.

The ponderosa pine is the ubiquitous tree of the West, too.