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EXPEDITIONS Fierce winds and deep snow on Yukon's Mount Logan in June were thwarting James Coleridge's attempt to reach the peak, part of his quest to climb the highest point in every Canadian province and territory. Coleridge, of White Rock, B.C., was tired and sore after having to store batteries and equipment in his sleeping bag each night to keep them from freezing. And despite those efforts, his satellite phone would cut off every six or seven minutes in his hour-long "Live from Logan" chats with schools across the country.
Coleridge and his 13-person team's ultimately unsuccessful bid to summit Canada's highest mountain was part of a plan hatched while he was waiting out a storm in August 2003 on the slope of Mount Elbrus in Russia's Caucasus Mountains. Trapped in a tent with a group of Ukrainian climbers, Coleridge found himself fielding questions about Canadian geography. "I was a little obsessed with the quest for the seven summits," he says, "but they just wanted me to talk about Canada." His Summits of Canada Expedition, funded in part by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, has taken him to the top of Alberta's Mount Columbia, Ontario's Ishpatina Ridge, in Temagami, and will soon see him summit an unnamed peak in the Northwest Territories, which he is hoping to formally name with the help of First Nations and the territorial government. For Coleridge, the expedition is more than a mountaineering exercise - it is a broad-ranging experiment in education. Although he has no actual teaching experience (he has a degree in international business, has worked as a baker, an art dealer and a producer of the Bugs Bunny Film Festival and has served as a city councillor in White Rock for more than 20 years), he has now reached out to tens of thousands of students in Canada and around the world. "I think in many ways we are all educators, but not in a traditional way," he says. "By taking our ability to converse or to share or to tell, we become a tool for formal educators." The Logan trip was a lesson in determination, and Coleridge and his crew plan to make a second attempt next spring. As for how to pee while mountain climbing, he advises keeping a clearly marked water bottle close at hand and timing things so that you never have to venture outside during a storm. Patricia D'Souza AWARDSAs Quebec's delegate to Mexico and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, Henri Dorion realized that his native province was not well known at home or abroad. "Few publications offered a comprehensive view of Quebec, one that might grab the public's interest," he says. The outcome, two decades later, is an ambitious bilingual coffee-table book and DVD on the geography of Quebec. The first of a four-volume series, The Nature of Québec/Le Québec au naturel, about the province's natural landscape, has been awarded The Royal Canadian Geographical Society's Gold Medal. The DVD/book was published last fall by Communications TerDor Inc. of Saint-Lambert, Que., a small newmedia firm founded in 1999 by Dorion's daughter, Anik Dorion-Coupal, and Clément Thériault. It combines geographic detail, poetic prose and artistic aerial photography and features video and film excerpts, an original soundtrack, cartography and 3-D animation. "The interpreters of the landscape are not only scientists," says Dorion-Coupal, "but artists, singers and musicians." The next volume, The Inhabited Landscape of Québec/Le Québec habité, about the province's communities, is to be released in the fall. Monique Roy-Sole SPEAKER SERIESDavid Phillips gets big laughs when he talks about the day in 1921 when it rained frogs in Calgary (they had been carried away in a windstorm). But his weather tales are countered with more sombre events, such as the 1987 tornado in Edmonton that killed 27 people as it overturned train cars, tore apart trailer parks and swept farmhouses from their footings. Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada, will recount these stories and more during The Royal Canadian Geographical Society speaker series in Edmonton and Calgary in October. "Some of it is going to be humorous," he says, "and some of it is going to be devastating, in terms of reliving some of those moments." But don't expect Canada's best-known weatherman to sound off about climate change. "I talk about the changing climate, but I say that just because we had the Edmonton tornado or a couple of real Texas gully washers in the cities of Calgary and Edmonton, we're not going to hell in a handbasket," says Phillips. "We need to do something about it. I think we're up to it." Kwok Wong FELLOWS Maurice Haycock was a true Renaissance man: an internationally respected mineralogist, a classical musician and Canada's most travelled Arctic artist — the first to have painted at the North Pole. Haycock, an RCGS Massey medallist who died in 1988 at the age of 88, was also a cultural historian with a singular passion for documenting historic sites in the North. Compiled by his daughter Kathy Haycock, On Site With Maurice Haycock: Artist of the Arctic is a new book featuring his art and writings on notable cairns, gravesites and ancient villages. Kathy started working on her father's manuscript in 2003, when her home was razed by fire. The manuscript and the paintings, photographs and diaries that were in her possession were destroyed. "About a year after the fire," she says, "I was talking with another artist about my father's legacy and how important it was to let people know about him. So much was lost in the fire. It was kind of urgent that I do something." Fortunately, Kathy's sister found one of their father's earlier manuscripts and supplied paintings and photos from her own collection to complete the project. For more on the book, visit www.haycock.ca. — Monique Roy-Sole
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