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National Geographic
10-05-2025
- National Geographic
Try the Skeena, a budget alternative to Canada's famous Rocky Mountaineer
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK). 'Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be making an unscheduled stop here to pick up another passenger,' announces train manager Alain Vermette. 'In fact, we need to back up. We just missed his stop.' Brakes squeal and gears grind as Via Rail Line 6 — better known as 'the Skeena' — slows, shifts into reverse and trundles back down the track. A minute later, a burly man in a baseball cap, hunting boots and jeans emerges from the forest, rucksack slung over his shoulder, a cheroot poking out from his grizzled grey beard. 'Afternoon, Alain,' he says, waving a greeting up to the conductor, who's leaning out of the train window. 'Running a little late today, ain'tcha?' The train pulls to a stop — but since there's no platform, Alain has to hop down onto the track and put down a set of portable steps. I follow him down, and together we help the man haul himself up through the train's side door. Soon the engine chugs into life and we're off again, hurtling onwards into an endless sea of pines. The Skeena stops to pick up hitchhikers in the backcountry. Photograph by Oliver Berry On Canada's railways, freight takes priority, so passenger trains must wait for them to pass. 'There's a joke that 'Via Rail' actually stands for 'Very Irregular Arrival',' quips train attendant Dany Clarissa. Photograph by Oliver Berry On the Skeena, request stops have always been part of the service. Completed in 1914 as the western end of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, the train travels through some of British Columbia's wildest backcountry, including the 24,700sq mile Great Bear Rainforest, the largest temperate forest on Earth. It's one of Canada's great wildernesses, a haven for wildlife including moose, elk, eagles and, as its name suggests, black and grizzly bears. The route begins on the Pacific coast in Prince Rupert, BC, and ends 720 miles further east high in the Rocky Mountains in Jasper, Alberta. Since it's often the only way to get from one backwoods town to the next, locals use it like a bus service, flagging the train down as it passes three times a week. It's been classed as an essential service since 1990, but if it was judged on purely economic terms, it would probably have been closed long ago. 'The Skeena is a lifeline for so many people,' Alain explains as we chat inside the train's compact cafe car, watching stereotypically Canadian vistas blur beyond the window: sprawling forests, turquoise lakes, snow-topped peaks. Originally from Quebec, with a Francophone lilt to his accent, he's dressed in his Via Rail uniform: short-sleeved shirt, navy waistcoat and trousers, a shiny pin badge of the Canadian flag tacked to his lapel. 'We call the people who live way out in the bush 'flaggers', and we keep an eye out as we pass their stop,' Alain continues. 'Usually they signal with a flagpole or a high-vis jacket hanging beside the track. But we stop for hikers, too; forest workers, hunters, people like that. Recently we picked up a family who'd got lost. It was lucky we found them, actually.' I'm riding the Skeena eastbound on a two-day, 21-hour journey from the Pacific to the Rockies, with an overnight stop in Prince George en route. The timetable is more guide than gospel — on Canada's railways, freight takes priority, so passenger trains must wait for them to pass. Delays are inevitable. 'There's a joke that 'Via Rail' actually stands for 'Very Irregular Arrival',' quips train attendant Dany Clarissa, on secondment from her regular gig on Via Rail's flagship route, The Canadian — 2,775-miles, linking Toronto and Vancouver. Sure enough, a minute later we pull into a siding to allow a gigantic goods train to rumble past, its steel boxcars daubed with graffiti. 'This one's only a small one, but they can be three miles long,' Dany says. Thankfully, the Skeena is one train where you're almost glad about the hold ups. The train has a retro elegance reminiscent of the 1950s. The carriages are made from functional brushed steel, with curved lines and stamped rivets that remind me of an Airstream trailer. Each passenger gets their own deep-padded seat in brown leather, with windows running along each side. At the train's rear is the cafe and lounge car, where a metal staircase climbs up to a viewing deck with bubble windows offering widescreen views of the Canadian wilderness as it zips by. Catch some of Canada's great wilderness while passing through the Great Bear Rainforest. It's a haven for wildlife including moose, elk, eagles and, as its name suggests, black grizzly bears. Photograph by Getty Images; Kenneth Canning And when it comes to scenery, there are surely few trains on the planet that can compare to the Skeena. One minute we're thrashing along the banks of a wild river, thundering with whitewater; the next we're rattling over a box bridge, teetering along the rim of a high-walled canyon or skirting the slopes of a glacier-studded mountain. Images from Canada's past flicker by like a film reel: rickety sawmills, abandoned salmon canneries, gold mines, ghost towns. Occasionally, we pass Indigenous communities, where First Nations peoples, including the Gitxsan, Kitselas and Tsimshian, have lived for thousands of years. Wildlife guest stars, too: I watch bald eagles circling over the treetops, elk grazing along the sidings, and a distant black bear ambling through a meadow, its fur freckled with dandelion blossom. As dusk falls, we trundle into the outskirts of Prince George — a former logging and fur-trading outpost that's now sometimes called BC's 'northern capital' — in search of our overnight accommodation. The next morning, the train departs at 8.15am sharp. Alain serves coffee and pastries as we run westwards along the Fraser River, watching the sunrise turn the water copper. Logging was once the prime industry in this part of BC, but most of the mills have long since been abandoned, leaving the forest to slowly regenerate. We trundle through little towns like Penny, Crescent Spur, McBride and Dunster — mostly just a few clapboard houses and a single-pump petrol station — slowly threading our way between two mountain ranges: the Cariboos, to the south; the Rockies to the north. Flurries of snow speckle the peaks like icing sugar. In a few months, the drifts will stand 10ft high or more, but the Skeena will run on regardless; the train's cowcatcher frame acts as a snow plough, Alain explains. For now, though, it's the perfect autumn day for sitting on a train. Blue skies shine overhead. The forest blazes with colour: golds, scarlets, chestnuts, tangerines. The hulking outline of Mount Robson, Canada's highest mountain, rises like a pyramid as we cross over the Alberta border and change time zones, from Pacific to Mountain time. We climb on, over the Continental Divide, and finally into the cradle of mountains around our terminus, Jasper, still scarred by the wildfire that swept through town in August 2024. As I step off the train onto the platform, breathing in pine-scented mountain air, I check the station clock. We're only 53 minutes late. By Skeena standards, that's pretty much right on time. The Skeena travels in each direction on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tickets cost from £160 per person. Published in the May 2025 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK) To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Tesla vandals are terrorists, according to President Trump
A version of this story appeared in CNN's What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. President Donald Trump's administration is trying to expand the definition of domestic terrorism as it aims to crack down on a wave of attacks in which Teslas have been shot and set on fire, apparently to protest CEO Elon Musk's powerful but murky role in cutting the US government. Critics of Musk and Trump will see irony in use of the term 'domestic terrorism' to describe people attacking electric vehicles after Trump issued mass pardons for more than 1,000 January 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol and tried to disrupt confirmation of the 2020 election results. Under President Joe Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice announced a new national strategy to combat domestic terrorism after January 6 as well as a wave of deadly mass shootings by White nationalists and right-wing extremists. The term will apparently take a new meaning under Trump as the FBI and law enforcement agencies will now focus on anti-corporate vandals targeting vehicles. Usually, the word 'terrorism' is not used to describe vandalism, Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. 'There is a lot of property destruction, at times for political reasons, and this is almost never labeled as terrorism. These attacks seemed designed not to harm people,' Byman said. Attorney General Pam Bondi described Tesla desecration as 'nothing short of domestic terrorism' in a statement released Tuesday. She promised to 'impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.' Bondi did not elaborate on who might be behind the scenes coordinating the vandalism, so it's appropriate to wonder if there's any evidence of any such coordination. There have been documented incidents of Tesla vandalism in the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast and around the country, not to mention countless posts on social media. Federal prosecutors charged a woman in Colorado with using incendiary devices — Molotov cocktails — to target Tesla vehicles, and federal agents in South Carolina made an arrest in connection with a fire set at a Tesla charging station, according to the Associated Press, which reported that an affidavit mentioned the man's opposition to Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Bondi released her statement after an incident in Las Vegas where Teslas at a repair center were shot and set on fire in what Assistant Sheriff Dori Koren of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department described as a 'targeted attack on a Tesla facility.' He said officers have increased their presence at Tesla locations. CNN's Josh Campbell reported that the FBI's joint terrorism task force is investigating the Las Vegas attack. Domestic terrorism is not a specific crime with which a person can be charged, but it is defined in US law as acts that are dangerous to human life, violate US or state law, and are intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping Trump agreed that the vandalism is terrorism during an interview on Fox News Tuesday and tried, without evidence, to seed a conspiracy theory that the attacks are part of a coordinated and funded campaign. 'I think that you will find out that they're paid by people who are very highly political on the left,' Trump said, without naming who might be behind such a campaign or what evidence has led him to that conclusion. Musk also sees coordination in the violence, although he also did not offer specific allegations. 'I think there are larger forces at work as well,' Musk said in his own Fox News interview on Tuesday. 'I mean, I don't know who's funding it and who's coordinating it because this is this is crazy.' There's currently no indication of any kind of coordinated campaign, but the attacks, which range from the slashing of tires to the slinging of Molotov cocktails, are clearly illegal, and probably counterproductive if their aim is to protest what Musk is undertaking with his Blitzkrieg effort to downsize the federal government. John Miller, CNN's chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, told me that prosecutors should be looking at allegations of domestic terrorism clinically rather than through a political lens. 'If firing bullets into the windows of Tesla dealerships or throwing Molotov cocktails inside cars in the lot is being done for political reasons, that would seem to fall into the category of domestic terrorism,' he told me by email. Suspects would be charged, as they were for January 6 rioters, under standard federal or local statutes. Some people involved with January 6, like those belonging to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups were charged, tried and convicted by juries with more serious crimes, including seditious conspiracy, before Trump commuted their sentences. Despite the verdict of the justice system, Trump viewed January 6 rioters as 'hostages.' Now back in the White House, he wants to put anyone coordinating an attack on a Tesla dealership in prison. 'Once politics enters the picture of what is or is not domestic terrorism, this is where we start to see imbalance,' Miller said.
