News Release

Cross-country Tour Takes Canadians on Celebration of Boreal Forest

November 1, 2004 – Whitehorse – Local songbird Sonja Anderson will join emcee James Raffan – author of 10 previous books, a former governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a popular wilderness raconteur – on November 8th at the Beringia Centre as part of a national 10-city tour organized by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) that will take Canadians on a trip down their spectacular boreal rivers through stories, songs and big screen images.

The “True North Wild and Free” tour recaptures the magnificence of Boreal Rendezvous 2003, a summer-long series of canoe trips down 10 of Canada’s most spectacular boreal rivers that involved community members, conservationists, photographers, writers, artists and celebrities including: Cathy Jones, Justin Trudeau, David Suzuki, Ken Dryden, Sarah Harmer and many others. Four of the 10 trips occurred in the boreal of the Yukon on the Coal River in southeast Yukon and the Wind, Snake, Bonnet Plume (Three Rivers) in the north. The Coal River will be the Yukon’s featured watershed at the Whitehorse presentation on November 8th.

The November tour will visit Toronto, Edmonton, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Montreal and Ottawa. A rotating cast of well-known Canadians including Trudeau, Thomas King, Colin James and Connie Kaldor, will join emcee James Raffan at various locations.

The content for the evenings is based on Rendezvous with the Wild: The Boreal Forest, a magnificent book based on the 2003 canoe trips, edited by Raffan and published this fall by Boston Mills Press.

“We’re very excited by the opportunity to share with Canadians the tremendous beauty and ecological value of our boreal forests. We as Canadians have a responsibility as global citizens to protect this forest and we are excited to bring it home to them,” says CPAWS national boreal program director Tim Gray.

Canada’s boreal forest region covers the country like a wide green ribbon, stretching from coast to coast, beginning just north of our temperate forests and prairies, and ending where the arctic tundra starts. It holds about 25 percent of the world's last great remaining stretches of intact forests and wetlands. Most of the Yukon is in this great continental boreal region.

For more information or for interviews with James Raffan or Thomas King (who participated in the Yukon’s Boreal Rendezvous 2003 trip down the Coal River) contact:

Theresa Gulliver
Telephone: 867-393-8080 ext. 8
E-mail: tgulliver@cpawsyukon.org

or

Erica Heuer
Telephone: 867-393-4440

View event details at www.cpawsyukon.org/events and www.cpaws.org/boreal