The Local News Grapevine

     I have often referred to the Village of McBride as being isolated and remote.  We sometimes feel cut off from the “outside world”.   Because of our remoteness, during my early years living here, we depended upon CBC radio and TV to give us the news about what was happening out there beyond our mountains.  Because those news sources originated provincially or nationally, rarely did they cover any of the events that had happened in the Robson Valley.

       We did have a weekly newspaper that gave us news of some of the things that happened locally, but because the newspaper only came out once every week, the “news” it reported on, was already “old news” by the time the paper came out.

    All of the current local news we got, came from word of mouth.  During the 1980’s to the 2000’s most of that up to date local news came to me during the coffee breaks at work in our Forest Service office.  I was reminded of that fact yesterday while going through my 1995 diary, when I came upon these two unfortunate local events that happened in February of 1995:

The Aubreys of Crescent Spur had been successfully running a lodge and heli-skiing operation for a handful of years.  (Heli-skiing is flying skiers in a helicopter up to the alpine, so they can ski in the deep powder) Tragically, one of Aubrey’s helicopter skiing clients was killed on a run during one of their ski trips.  An avalanche was triggered which buried the skier under four meters (23 feet) of snow.  The Aubreys, who run the heli-skiing business were devastated by the accident.

        There are several small cabins located up in a few local alpine areas for people to use for overnight hiking or skiing trips.  One of those cabins is located up in the remote Eagle Valley alpine.  Those cabins were inaccessible to any kind of communication.  

        In a coffee break a couple of days after hearing about the heli-skiing death, I heard that there was a local guy who was staying up at the Eagle Valley cabin on a cross-country skiing trip.   He couldn’t be reached so he couldn’t be told that while he was up there skiing, his house in Dunster had been destroyed by a fire.

        Another vital source we have to get local news is Pam, the cashier at the grocery store.  She always knows what is happening around here, both past and present.

        Of course most of the local new stories we hear are not that dramatic as those two examples, but our local news grapevine does serve the important purpose of communicating to the community what is happening in our isolated valley.  

        The photo shows part of the Eagle Valley.

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