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June 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: A river to ruin Feature: Brothers in biology Feature: Scar sands Feature: Simply Superior The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

A hunter pulls off the road beside me as I am photographing a mountainous cinder-black tailings pile near the Coal Mountain Mine in the Elk River valley in southeastern British Columbia. We chat amicably until he learns I am an American journalist.

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“I know what you’re going to do,” he says. "You’re going to show that picture in a magazine and people are going to say, ‘Oh, my gosh! Is that what we want in the Flathead River valley?’”

“Well,” I ask, “how do you feel about something like that being in the Flathead?”

“I think that should be our problem, eh?”

The hunter, 61-year-old Simon Senycz, has been stalking elk in the area for more than 40 years. He is not exactly endorsing the Cline Mining Corporation’s proposal for an open-pit mine to extract two million tonnes of low-quality coal annually near Lodgepole Creek in the neighbouring Flathead valley. What he is saying is that my fellow Americans and I should mind our own business.

That’s not likely. The Flathead River winds some 50 kilometres southward through a valley in southern British Columbia that is unmatched on this continent for the spectacular richness of its flora and fauna. When it crosses the border into Montana, the river is called the North Fork Flathead River. In the United States, the valley’s eastern flank is protected as part of Glacier National Park, and the river corridor is managed under some of the most restrictive protections available in U.S. law.

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