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SAS Home > Background Information > Commentary > Sea to Sky Highway |
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The Sea to Sky Highway Improvement Project The Sea to Sky Highway Improvement Project is the official name of the provincial Ministry of Transportation's ambitious plan to widen Highway 99 from Vancouver to Whistler into what will be mostly four lanes. The terms of reference emphasise the need to design for safety, reliability and increasing capacity. For climbers, as with everyone else, this will allow faster and safer driving, but the impacts of the project have underscored how vulnerable many crags are to highway widening, and how we park and access them. This is especially true in the Murrin area, the Papoose, at the Chief and Rogue's Gallery. The SAS has been involved with the STSHIP from the very beginning in 2003 (in fact we've been involved since 1986 when highway widening was first discussed by the province), with early presentations, including a landmark report by Kevin McLane, Highway 99, The Rockclimbers Perspective. In late 2003 the ministry established a special Recreation Focus Group to address all recreation impacts along the Sea to Sky corridor, and the SAS is represented by Tyrone Brett, John Howe and Kevin McLane. It was, as provincial affairs go, an exceptional situation for the public to be given such an up-close opportunity to influence and shape the design and outcome of this lengthy planning process. One factor that quickly became very evident to the SAS was that among ministry staff there was a woeful lack of understanding of what climbers do and why, and where. To the credit of the senior personnel involved, that has now changed substantially, and as we have been told, climbing is now more firmly on the government radar than ever before, in no small measure because of our lobbying efforts at the Recreation Focus Group. |
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