Whistler trash helps light Seattle homes
WHISTLER, B.C. – Whistler’s trash is now lighting homes in the Pacific Northwest.
The trash is trucked and then hauled by rail to a state-of-the-art landfill at Roosevelt, Wash., in the arid country along the Columbia River in south-central Washington, about 550 miles (900 kilometers) from Whistler.
Methane of the landfill’s decomposing trash is captured and then burned to create electricity, powering 7,000 homes. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more effective at trapping heat than is carbon dioxide.
In 2005, Whistler closed its landfill, so the site could be used for the athletes’ village at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Whistler plans to trap the methane, generating both heat and electricity for the athletes’ village for 15 years, reports Pique.
LaChapelle remembered as geographer of fluidity
SILVERTON, Colo. – In her own way, Dolores LaChapelle may have been one of the original ski bums. LaChapelle spent her life among the snows of the West, from Banff to Aspen, and from Alta to her final decades in Silverton, where she died recently at the age of 82.
But to call her a ski bum – a term actually of admiration, not condescension – does not fully convey what she was about. She was a thinker and a writer and a stirrer of the pot. ‘She moved easily in a world of big ideas, just as she skied fearlessly in deep powder snow, letting the flow take her down the mountain. Leaving us to follow in her tracks,’ wrote one of her friends, Art Goodtimes.
Moving to Silverton, by herself, she made a living writing books, publishing seven altogether from 1969 to 1996. She wrote often of the connection between the external and internal landscapes linked in powder skiing. LaChapelle was credited with the first ski ascents of chisel-shaped, glacier-covered Mt. Columbia, the second highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, and Snow Dome, the hydrographic apex of the continent. Both are located in Jasper National Park, on the Alberta-British Columbia border.
‘The embrace of motion, mountain and life swept my mother into a deep affirmation of the world of the spirit, obvious in her delight and excitement at being able to once again turn her skis down the mountain and let go,’ remembered her son, David. ‘Beyond the scholar, writer, and intellectual was a woman who was passionate about wanting others to experience the connection she felt.’
‘She was not always gentle in this service, but she was always fierce with her love, for she had little time for the ways in which we humans conspire to ignore the pulse of life as it flows through the earth, the trees, the sky and the beating of our hearts,’ David wrote.
In her later years, LaChapelle became an advocate of deep ecology, a philosophical movement, and founded the Way of the Mountain Learning Center. She also taught tai chi. As she aged, her hip gave out, and then the replacement was also giving out. She also suffered heart problems, but chose not to move to a lower altitude, where her life might have been prolonged.
‘She stayed because she chose to live out her life force in a hymn to the mountains which had so inspired her throughout her life,’ said David. ‘She taught us to look at the whole from within; not as spectators. Her life was well lived and there is a hole in the heart of the mountain; it will heal but not before we feel the emptiness.’
