Twinning Highway 3 detrimental to the Crowsnest Pass

By Lethbridge Herald on April 26, 2023.

GUEST OPINION
David McIntyre

Beneath storied peaks in the westernmost headwaters of the Crowsnest River, late day sunlight dances through the shadows of a forest so ancient it’s impossible to imagine a time when its ragged, wind-shaped sentinels were seedlings. 

Lost in the gathering darkness are memories of a prehistoric Ktunaxa fishing camp, wild tales of bootlegging, a daring train robbery, multiple murders, the graves of 189 men who died in Canada’s worst mining disaster, and a mountain that fell to become North America’s most deadly rockslide. 

This is Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass.

Should Albertans endorse the spending of hundreds of millions to blast this priceless heritage into oblivion — to build a twinned superhighway through Deep Time and the heart and soul of Eden?

The proposed twinning of Highway 3 through southern Alberta makes perfect sense … until it hits the Crowsnest River valley’s tight, rock-walled headwaters. Here, the proposal, heavily-funded, well-greased, and said to be essential, has become a runaway boulder that threatens to crush everything in its path.

And in its path, there’s this: a towering, structurally weak mountain, the same mountain (Turtle) that’s already claimed an estimated 100 lives and left a haunting sea of fractured tombstones. The 1903 Frank Slide, Crowsnest Pass’s most arresting historic site, is known around the world. 

Thankfully, the Government of Alberta created two designations to protect and preserve the rockslide’s “sea of debris” and its profile as an internationally revered cemetery.

Turtle Mountain’s anticipated future rockslide dynamics are well known. The mountain has the potential to, again, produce a rockslide that crashes across the valley floor to bury the railway and highway. 

Proponents of a twinned Highway 3 have ignored these designations and projections. Amazingly, engineers have been paid to author a plan that violates them.

 It’s time, they say, to dig up the Frank Slide’s dead, time to spend hundreds of millions to transform the Crowsnest River valley into a high-speed off-ramp into British Columbia. 

A Crowsnest Heritage Highway designation for the westernmost 45 km of Highway 3 in Alberta saves this headwaters paradise  and a cool 300-million.

Within this scenic corridor, the Crowsnest Heritage Highway:

Places quality of life issues at the fore.

Reduces the speed of travel to a level (80 km/hr) compatible with the existing highway’s footprint.

Opens the door to a year-round recreational wonderland.

Provides passing lanes and scenic pullouts.

Preserves internationally revered vistas.

Safeguards the Deep Time, sense-of-place-integrity of the river valley corridor.

Features a highway rest stop at Leitch Collieries Provincial Historic Site.

Provides cross-highway overpasses and underpasses to reduce the current large mammal mortality, millions in damage claims, and risk to human life.

The keys to this vision: a modest reduction in maximum highway speed, creation of a uniform sustained speed, and a catch-and-release brand of tourism. 

Picture a highway where motorists think more about casting a fly than a need to keep their foot on the accelerator .

The goal is not to fill the valley with concrete, or—as engineers have proposed—move the Department of Transportation Weigh Scales into the bloodiest core of Highway 3’s existing large mammal death-zone. The goal lies in retaining the land’s raw beauty.

The Crowsnest Heritage Highway — showcasing elegant simplicity and minimal impact on the environment—is a blueprint for Alberta’s future worth. 

Albertans don’t want:

A Deerfoot Trail brand of superhighway that destroys headwaters virtue. 

Racetrack noise and a cold concrete wall that severs a community and transforms the envisioned Jim Prentice Wildlife Corridor into the Jim Prentice Memorial Speedway.

To spend hundreds of millions to degrade one of Canada’s most intriguing, heritage-flush, wildlife abundant, scenery-rich communities and transform it into a wasted-space, high-speed exit-ramp into British Columbia. 

It’s time to honour a world-class, Crown of the Continent landscape, nurture quality-of-life living, and impress—and attract—international travellers with thoughtful designs that speak to a changing world, future wealth, and smell-the-roses prosperity.

Today is the day to bury yesterday’s high-priced, high-speed thinking and embrace the Crowsnest Heritage Highway.

David lives on the land he loves in the storied headwaters of southwestern Alberta’s Oldman River. He has passionate interest —and knowledge — in diverse natural history disciplines, and is a strong advocate for the long-range economic and ecological worth of intact landscapes. David holds a MSc from the University of Washington (College of the Environment) and, for decades, led multi-day study tours for the Smithsonian Institution — via hiking and whitewater rafting trips — throughout the U.S. West and the Canadian Rockies.