Thanks for your column “We’re Asking Wrong Questions” (Armchair Mayor, Jan. 26.) –  right on the button.

I have just returned from a morning of skiing at the Stake Lake Ski Trails, which entails driving up and down Lac Le Jeune Road. On any weekend day there could be as many as 200 cars in the parking lot, and in January another 100 on the ice for motor cycle races. Numerous families live in the Lac Le Jeune subdivision. We all go through the proposed mine site along a steep, narrow, winding road on which the mine proponent wishes to put mine-related traffic and ore-carrying trucks bound for Vancouver.

This proposed mine could give the city a welcome boost in employment, for businesses and for families. But it would also change the hidden southern face of Kamloops forever. The proponents describe four major impacts on the landscape: a pit, two waste rock piles and a tailings pile. The tailings pile can be imagined as you drive north along the Coquihalla Highway towards Sugarloaf Hill and the City — it would stretch from a kilometre south of Inks Lake interchange and 150 metres up the side of Sugarloaf Hill two kilometres to the north. At the interchange it would be 200 metres high. The two 90-metre rock piles and the pit itself would be situated behind the present hills along Lac Le Jeune Road and aren’t so easy to imagine.

I thought it might help me visualise the real impact of these major insults to the landscape in the southern edge of the city if I drew the footprint of each of them on a map of the City in relation to familiar Kamloops features. The elevation of the Thompson River is about 350 metres; the 450 metre contours are sketched in on either side of the river as a guide to the height of the piles.

The map shows the scale of what we’d all be driving through to get to homes or the ski trails in the Stake Lake area. And what the destruction of the landscape and its natural heritage could look like in 25 years if the mine were to go ahead.

FRANCES VYSE

Kamloops