Kananaskis Country

“It’s not the greatest cougar habitat out there, and we’ve got over a metre of snow, and ungulate density is fairly low in the winter time in that area."

“The MD of Bighorn has experienced significant growth along the Bow Valley Highway 1 corridor in recent years,”

“It starts with a little bit of theory in a classroom and as firefighters we have a limited time allowance so I am told it will be quite focused. We will go over the information they present. This will be a lot of hands-on.”

“When we see decreases in budgets, it’s really contrary to what Albertans are telling the government, which is that they want more protected areas, and more places they can be outside and recreate – all of these things require funding.”

“Some kinds of avalanche problems can be here for a few days and they go away, or last a few weeks and then they go away, but these kinds of problems, which we call a deep persistent slab, it doesn’t go away, so that’s kind of the set up we have this winter.”

“We just thought this was a good opportunity to be a bit more descriptive of what exactly it is we do on the landscape, and that also helps to avoid some of the confusion that has been happening for a long, long time.”

“Last year we didn’t have the traffic from those places. We didn’t have French Canadians, eastern Canada. The Australians didn’t come back last year. Now we are seeing them, and we are getting a lot of inquiries from those groups for the spring and summer.”

The funding is supporting projects including electric bicycle and walking food tours in Banff and Canmore, a year-round glamping experience in Kananaskis, and the development of destination marketing organizations’ tourism plans and strategies.

“It recognizes there’s a baseline for what we need to know and then there’s specialties. We’re trying to give each region, each team that has their own specialty areas to have that base level knowledge."