ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Wayne Sawchuk's cameras are constant companions on his long journeys through northeast British Columbia's Muskwa-Kechika wilderness area. His photos reflect his broad diversity of wildlife and wilderness subjects, and have been widely published in Canadian Geographic, Beautiful BC, The National Post, Explorer Magazine and BC Oudoors, among others.

"When I was a boy, my father and uncles talked about “going up in the mountains” to a fabulous land somewhere “up north.” Led by outfitters like Leo Rutledge, with native guides like Marvin Desjarlais and Johnny Gauthier, pack trains of 50 horses took a month to reach the hunting country. The caribou were so thick up there, they said, the bulls would come into camp at night, or charge the pack trains on the trail, and try to gore the horses. I didn’t know it then, but the land they were talking about was the Northern Rockies.

The wilderness surrounding our family's farm, 19 km (12 mi.) west of the small town of Chetwynd, was really part of the same great ecosystem. In the late ‘50s when I was a child, northeastern B.C., and the foothills of the Rockies where we lived, was lightly touched by human hand. The exploitation of natural gas was just beginning and logging was limited to a few small mills scattered in the valley bottoms. The only major road, the Hart Highway, connected the recently-built Alaska Highway in the east to the B.C. interior. All but a few of the remaining valleys were roadless and pristine. Today, almost all of the valleys south of the Peace have been roaded, and their forests fragmented, in the search for timber, natural gas or coal. As a result, many now feel that the future looks bleak for wide-ranging animals like caribou in the landscape south of the Peace River. "