Teacher, trailblazer, author, and now ambassador, Eagle Walz will speak at Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival on Sunday, February 10, about the Sunshine Coast Trail. He hopes to convince more trail runners to experience the raw beauty of the Upper Sunshine Coast.
Club Fat Ass, a Vancouver-based running club, invited Walz to make a presentation at its Trail Running Show, one part of the festival, about the evolution of the Sunshine Coast Trail. Ean Jackson, a club member, ran the trail’s 180 kilometres non-stop in 2004. A member of the group made a documentary about it called XS-NRG.
“Club Fat Ass has been really supportive of what we’ve been trying to do in Powell River,” said Walz, a founding member of Powell River Parks and Wilderness Society (PRPAWS).
The evening will start out with a screening of the documentary and then Walz will make his presentation. He’ll screen a slideshow of photographs which highlight the hidden gems of the old-growth forest, the waterfalls and ocean that can be seen along the trail from Sarah Point to Saltery Bay.
Walz prefers to let his photography tell the trail’s story. “A picture is worth a thousand words, they tell me,” he said.
The trail’s European-style huts are a big part of recent improvements. “A lot of changes have occurred especially in the last three years with the building of nine huts.”
PRPAWS received a $160,000* from Island Coastal Economic Trust grant for materials to build the huts. Community groups and individuals worked together to build the huts along the trail, so hikers do not have to carry tents.
Walz plans to show a short time-lapse film called Hut in Motion which shows “a hut unfolding as if it were a flower coming out of the ground.” It is set to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee.
“We’re hoping that a number of people that will be there at the presentation will be coming up to Powell River to join us for the 20th annual Marathon Shuffle,” he said.
The event, held on April 28, happens along the trail and can be run as a 29-kilometre race or hiked at a more leisurely pace. Additionally, Walz hopes to float the idea of an ultra-marathon relay race that could be run by teams in stages along the whole length of the trail.
The trail will continue to change over the years and Walz said he hopes it will “attract people to Powell River and show them what a beautiful place it is.”
Walz is currently working on the fourth edition of his definitive guidebook to the trail and said that it will have “many significant changes in it over the last book.” He hopes to have it published in April.
The show will begin at 7:30 pm on Sunday, February 10, at Centennial Theatre in North Vancouver.
(*Editor's note: This amount has been corrected from the original.)
