Editorial
Ask anyone who has visited the Columbia Valley, Invermere in particular, and they will tell you it’s one of the most beautiful places in B.C. to roam. (Just listen to the B-52’s song ‘Roam’ and you might swear the band wrote it with our lovely valley in mind.)
But apparently Invermere is also “eccentric,” according to a travel article in World Atlas. If you look up the definition, the words “slightly strange” and “unusual” pop up (in a good way in our case).
However, every community has its negatives, or skeletons in the closet, as one local couple discovered.
Amazingly, to their discontent, the husband and wife team picked up nearly 1,000 discarded cans and bottles in the community, and the bulk of them were beer cans. Does this suggest there is a lot of drinking and driving in Invermere? Hope not.
The couple started along the south end of Westside Road and the Legacy Trail.
“We very much enjoy running that trail and (recently) we counted 85 cans/bottles in a three-kilometre stretch from the Hoodoo parking lot going toward Invermere.”
After lunch that day they spent two hours combing both sides of the road and collected 600-plus beer cans and bottles. The next couple of days they did more scouring and collected approximately 300 more. Doing the math, they found nearly 1,000 bottles and cans between the south end of Westside Road to the Hawke Road parking lot. What a disgrace!
“Of huge concern is the fact that the vast majority of the containers we picked up were beer and cooler cans; very few soft drink containers,” they said. “As your newspaper wants to hear from locals, I thought you might find this interesting, if not rather sad, that drinking, driving and littering is quite prevalent, especially on this particular road in our community.”
The litter-fighting duo turned all of these cans into funds for the Columbia Valley Airport Society. But they would have preferred to see these containers dropped off at one of the many bins in the community dedicated for recyclables.
There is simply no excuse to use this beautiful community as a dumping ground for cans and bottles —1,000 over a few kilometres? Really? It’s rather shameful. These litterbugs are not only disrespecting their own community but tarnishing Invermere’s reputation as a lovely district.
What is truly disturbing is the inference that some residents are drinking and driving, risking the safety of others as well as their own. Do people need a reminder of what happened last summer in Wilmer where three young men died following a single-vehicle accident that allegedly involved an impaired driver? These life-long tragedies are so preventable.
Litter is a blight on this community and doesn’t need to happen. But kudos to residents who do their part in keeping Invermere clean and to those who donate their recyclables for a worthy cause.
Lyonel Doherty, editor
