All matters Canadian / Canada

[marct]

Hi Sam,

When you look at European landscapes most of the forests have a manicured look. Sit down on a weekend and watch the hunting shows and the european hunts have that same look as a nice American park.

I remember the first time I was in Austria - I found it "quaint" and almost like a series of toy villages (outside of Vienna, which I love!). When we flew back, we landed in D'Or Val and bussed back to Ottawa - the difference couldn't have been more apparent.

With the changing population migration patterns and more people moving into cities the general concepts of frontier are being lost. Even suburbia is loosing the more wild feel to it. People in general are becoming more removed from nature, scope, scale, danger, and so much more. Take a city dweller into the woods and watch them stumble around. These are people who stumble on a raised edge of a sidewalk crack. Ask them to judge distance and they are done for.

All true, although I suspect that of our major cities, Toronto is probably the worst for that. It used to be that children were taken out of the cities during the summer - originally to try and escape the polio season. This created a culture of cottages and summer camps for both boys and girls, and a large part of this culture was woodsmanship - canoing, swimming, tracking, survival skills (slave labour building gigantic log cabins ), etc. That still seems to exist, but it is getting less common.

All of that to get to here. Consider northern Canada and especially the Northern Rockies and mechanized transport is not going to happen. You can't fly jets into those box canyons and even missiles are of nearly no use. Yet you could hide an Army in there for a long time. Outside of Hope, BC you could interdict the entirety of the cross Canada rail road pretty much at will if so desired (and as done by the Cree in the 90s). A lot of the same skills that you might expect in Afghanistan would be required to fight in that area.

Yup, and the same is true of most of the Canadian Shield area, although it is nowhere near as mountainous.