Drew Anderson profiles Karsten Heuer, a conservationist who has dedicated his life to putting preservation before profit in Alberta, Canada.
In October 2021, Karsten Heuer found himself sprawled on the ground, helpless, at the bottom of an aspen tree.
He had been searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley, perched in a hunting stand nearly eight metres off the ground. Then he fell. He doesn’t know how. He was unconscious, lying on the ground for more than an hour before rescuers arrived.
His back was broken in several places, ribs too; his sternum was cracked and he was struggling to breathe with collapsed lungs.
He was alone in the mountains he loves.
“I wasn’t in pain,” he remembers, sitting in his backyard in Canmore on a June afternoon, sun streaking one side of his still-youthful face. “I was actually okay with it. It was October, the sun was on my back, I could hear trumpeter swans on the lake calling, and other bird songs, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a pretty nice place to die.’ ”
An immensity looms. The bulk of the mountain, the heaviness of what’s to come for Heuer, Allison, their son and their close friends and colleagues.
Bow Valley Engage continues to fight against the massive Three Sisters development. Heuer and his collaborators are awaiting a judicial ruling on an Alberta government decision to skip an updated environmental impact assessment (the original was conducted 32 years ago, long before the current iteration of the proposal). Heuer says the valley and the proposal have changed significantly over those decades.
It is just one of the foundations Heuer has laid for those he will leave behind. He says he has struggled throughout his life to pass tasks on to others, but he’s learning to let that go and make peace with the fact he won’t know how things end.
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