By David F. Rooney
Michael Enright is known for his eloquence. But the host of CBC Radio’s popular Sunday Edition current affairs morning had to take a moment to describe the avalanche he saw in Rogers Pass Thursday morning.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” he said of the avalanche triggered by a Canadian Army howitzer crew in the Pass.
To his eyes, the slide thundered down the mountain and over a snow shed “like a river.”
“I even got to fire a howitzer,” Enright said during an interview at the Days Inn. “I’ve never done that before.”
Sounds like fun, but it’s serious stuff and he doesn’t take it lightly.
“This is a winter country, an avalanche country,” Enright said and then remarked on the snow that blankets our valley and the mountains that surround it: “In the East, the effete East, you call in the army or whatever when it snows. In the mountains, it’s a way of life.”
In the two days that he has been here, Enright has been interviewing local people and experts including Buck Corrigan of the Revelstoke Search and Rescue unit, Ian Thom of the Canadian Avalanche Centre, Mark Shaede of Revelstoke Snowmobile Tours and others.
You can hear Enright’s radio documentary on CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition on March 13 at 9:12 am, just after the news.
