North Vancouver (district municipality)
The District of North Vancouver is a district municipality in British Columbia, is part of Metro Vancouver. It surrounds the City of North Vancouver on three sides; as of 2016, the District stands as the second wealthiest city in Canada, with neighbouring West Vancouver the richest. The municipality is characterized as being a quiet, affluent suburban hub home to many middle and upper-middle-class families. Homes in the District range from mid-sized family bungalows to large luxury houses; some developments have popped up across the district in recent years, however the District remains a suburban municipality. The District is served by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, British Columbia Ambulance Service, the District of North Vancouver Fire Department. For thousands of years, the Indigenous Squamish and their kin Tsleil-Waututh, of the Coast Salish, resided in the land known as North Vancouver. Over 200 years ago, the people of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh living on the North Shore had their first glimpse of Europeans.
First the Spanish arrived, giving their name to Vancouver's Spanish Banks and, in 1792, Captain George Vancouver explored the local shores. But it was not until 1862 that the first attempt was made to harvest the North Shore's rich stands of timber, leading to fuller settlement of the area that would become North Vancouver; the first industry on the North Shore was Pioneer Mills, founded in 1862 to log the huge trees of the coastal rainforest. After twice changing hands, the operation was bought by Sewell Prescott Moody in 1865. Near where the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool grain elevators now stand, the town of Moodyville grew up and stood as the main centre of activity on the North Shore until the mill closed in 1901; the first school was established in Moodyville. The second, Central School, opened in 1902 in a building that still stands as part of what is now Presentation House at 3rd Street and Chesterfield Avenue, the current home of the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. In 1891, the first municipality on the North Shore was formed as the District of North Vancouver.
It stretched across the North Shore from Horseshoe Bay to Deep omitted Moodyville. In the early years of the 20th century, a real estate boom took place, with speculators – including the British poet Rudyard Kipling – eager to turn a quick dollar. A new community began to take shape. In 1902, the Hotel North Vancouver was built. A newspaper, the Express, commenced publication in 1905 and in 1906 the British Columbia Electric Railway began streetcar service. Industry shipbuilding, became central, with the magnificent stands of trees a rich resource for a society in which ships and most other manmade things were constructed of wood; the Wallace Shipyards moved in 1906 to the area just east of Lonsdale Avenue, drawn by the arrival of electricity. Over the years, this company known as Burrard Dry Dock and Versatile Pacific Shipyards, became a major force in the local economy. Many of the shipyard's buildings still stand. Economic prosperity and rapid growth in the Lower Lonsdale area of North Vancouver led to the establishment in 1907 of the separate City of North Vancouver, with a population of 1,500.
West Vancouver separated from the District in 1912. Apart from the addition of Moodyville in 1915, the boundaries of the City have not changed though far more people now call the District home. Communications with Vancouver have always been an important factor in the development of the North Shore; the first ferry service was supplied by "Navvy Jack’s" rowboat in 1866. In 1867, the Sea Foam established regular ferry service that continued until 1958; the SeaBus re-established water transportation in 1977. Rail service was slower in developing. While the Pacific Great Eastern Railway inaugurated a 12.7-mile run from North Vancouver to Whytecliff Park in 1914, it was not until the completion of the first Second Narrows Bridge in 1925 that rail and road links with the Lower Mainland supplemented the local ferry service. Early plans for North Vancouver were ambitious; the City as a communications hub and industrial centre was surrounded by the more rural District, both municipalities in a magnificent geographical setting that appeared to open endless possibilities.
But early grandiose plans met with a number of setbacks. The real estate boom was overtaken by a worldwide depression in 1913 and World War I delayed many projects; the depression that began in 1929, coupled with disruptions to communications over the Second Narrows caused by ships colliding with the bridge, led to economic difficulties and severe tax shortfalls. Both the City and the District were placed in receivership in 1933, but the opening of the second road crossing, the Lions' Gate Bridge in 1938 was a significant factor in making the North Shore more accessible. And the war years led to an economic revival of North Vancouver because of the many ships built in the Burrard Dry Dock at the foot of Lonsdale for the Canadian war effort. In the postwar years, the City and the District of North Vancouver boomed, with most of the growth taking place in the District because of its greater land resources; the District of North Vancouver is separated from Vancouver by the Burrard Inlet. It can be accessed by the Lions' Gate Bridge, the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, the SeaBus passenger ferry.
The District is bounded by the Capilano River to the west, Indian Arm to the east, Burrard Inlet to the south, the Coast Mountains to the north
Deep Cove, North Vancouver
Deep Cove refers to the community in the easternmost part of the District of North Vancouver, in British Columbia, is the geographic name of the small bay beside the town. It is affectionately referred to as "The Cove" by local residents. Located at the foot of Mount Seymour, Deep Cove faces due east, fronting onto Indian Arm, a branch of the Burrard Inlet; the area is the traditional territory of the Squamish Nations. Deep Cove is 13 kilometres from downtown Vancouver. Deep Cove, or Deepwater as it was first known, is a traditional clamming and fishing area of the Tsleil-Waututh nation who lived in the area since time immemorial. British and Spanish naval explorers scouted Indian Arm in the late eighteenth century, by the mid-nineteenth century, whales were being caught and flensed on the Cove's shores. Deep Cove became a popular summer resort for Vancouver residents in the 1910s, with cabins and granite quarrying featuring in the local history. For many years, the focal point of the community included a yacht club, dance hall and general store.
The population grew in the 1960s and 1970s, when access to the area improved following the completion of the Second Narrows Bridge to Vancouver in 1960. However, Deep Cove held on to its rural feel, a large, open horse paddock sat adjacent to Gallant Avenue in this period. Today, the Cove remains a popular attraction in the district, drawing visitors from neighbouring Cove Cliff, Parkgate, Indian Arm and Woodlands areas. With its proximity to forests, skiing, hiking and the water, Deep Cove is well known among outdoor recreation enthusiasts; the Deep Cove Bike Shop, a local institution, brought the first mountain bikes to Vancouver in the early 1980s. Deep Cove is a popular small boat centre, with a Rowing Club and kayak rentals and lessons, a marina; the bay in front of the community is one of the few in Indian Arm which has both a sheltering shape and the shallow bottom required for overnight anchorage of pleasure vessels. The Baden-Powell Trail leading up to the lookout point, Quarry Rock, is a popular spot for visitors in the summer.
The Cultural Centre houses the First Impressions Theatre Company in the 130-seat air-conditioned Shaw Theatre, the Seymour Art Gallery, the Deep Cove Heritage Society. Deep Cove is served by three community schools, Cove Cliff Elementary, Seycove Secondary and Sherwood Park Elementary School; as well as two other schools in the surrounding area. Students participating in the French immersion program attend Argyle Secondary School, Windsor Secondary School, Sherwood Park Elementary School, or Dorothy Lynas Elementary School. A number of childhood learning and care facilities serve the residents as well; as the teaching philosophies and practices differ, the common banner term of "Preschool" or "Pre-k" are appropriate. Canadian artist Charles van Sandwyk spent his teen years in Deep Cove. Canadian nature artist Annora Brown lived and painted in Deep Cove during her retirement years, dying there in 1987; the actor Ben Affleck had a residence in Deep Cove in the early 2000s. The writer Malcolm Lowry lived as a squatter in nearby Dollarton in the 1940s.
Darren Schemmer, the Canadian High Commissioner to Ghana, is from Deep Cove. Photos and information about Deep Cove, North Vancouver, BC Tsleil-Waututh Nation
Snow
Snow refers to forms of ice crystals that precipitate from the atmosphere and undergo changes on the Earth's surface. It pertains to frozen crystalline water throughout its life cycle, starting when, under suitable conditions, the ice crystals form in the atmosphere, increase to millimeter size and accumulate on surfaces metamorphose in place, melt, slide or sublimate away. Snowstorms develop by feeding on sources of atmospheric moisture and cold air. Snowflakes nucleate around particles in the atmosphere by attracting supercooled water droplets, which freeze in hexagonal-shaped crystals. Snowflakes take on a variety of shapes, basic among these are platelets, needles and rime; as snow accumulates into a snowpack, it may blow into drifts. Over time, accumulated snow metamorphoses, by sintering and freeze-thaw. Where the climate is cold enough for year-to-year accumulation, a glacier may form. Otherwise, snow melts seasonally, causing runoff into streams and rivers and recharging groundwater. Major snow-prone areas include the polar regions, the upper half of the Northern Hemisphere and mountainous regions worldwide with sufficient moisture and cold temperatures.
In the Southern Hemisphere, snow is confined to mountainous areas, apart from Antarctica. Snow affects such human activities as transportation: creating the need for keeping roadways and windows clear. Snow affects ecosystems, as well, by providing an insulating layer during winter under which plants and animals are able to survive the cold. Snow develops in clouds; the physics of snow crystal development in clouds results from a complex set of variables that include moisture content and temperatures. The resulting shapes of the falling and fallen crystals can be classified into a number of basic shapes and combinations, thereof; some plate-like and stellar-shaped snowflakes can form under clear sky with a cold temperature inversion present. Snow clouds occur in the context of larger weather systems, the most important of, the low pressure area, which incorporate warm and cold fronts as part of their circulation. Two additional and locally productive sources of snow are lake-effect storms and elevation effects in mountains.
Mid-latitude cyclones are low pressure areas which are capable of producing anything from cloudiness and mild snow storms to heavy blizzards. During a hemisphere's fall and spring, the atmosphere over continents can be cold enough through the depth of the troposphere to cause snowfall. In the Northern Hemisphere, the northern side of the low pressure area produces the most snow. For the southern mid-latitudes, the side of a cyclone that produces the most snow is the southern side. A cold front, the leading edge of a cooler mass of air, can produce frontal snowsqualls—an intense frontal convective line, when temperature is near freezing at the surface; the strong convection that develops has enough moisture to produce whiteout conditions at places which line passes over as the wind causes intense blowing snow. This type of snowsquall lasts less than 30 minutes at any point along its path but the motion of the line can cover large distances. Frontal squalls may form a short distance ahead of the surface cold front or behind the cold front where there may be a deepening low pressure system or a series of trough lines which act similar to a traditional cold frontal passage.
In situations where squalls develop post-frontally it is not unusual to have two or three linear squall bands pass in rapid succession only separated by 25 miles with each passing the same point in 30 minutes apart. In cases where there is a large amount of vertical growth and mixing the squall may develop embedded cumulonimbus clouds resulting in lightning and thunder, dubbed thundersnow. A warm front can produce snow for a period, as warm, moist air overrides below-freezing air and creates precipitation at the boundary. Snow transitions to rain in the warm sector behind the front. Lake-effect snow is produced during cooler atmospheric conditions when a cold air mass moves across long expanses of warmer lake water, warming the lower layer of air which picks up water vapor from the lake, rises up through the colder air above, freezes and is deposited on the leeward shores; the same effect occurs over bodies of salt water, when it is termed ocean-effect or bay-effect snow. The effect is enhanced when the moving air mass is uplifted by the orographic influence of higher elevations on the downwind shores.
This uplifting can produce narrow but intense bands of precipitation, which deposit at a rate of many inches of snow each hour resulting in a large amount of total snowfall. The areas affected by lake-effect snow are called snowbelts; these include areas east of the Great Lakes, the west coasts of northern Japan, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, areas near the Great Salt Lake, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Baltic Sea, parts of the northern Atlantic Ocean. Orographic or relief snowfall is caused when masses of air pushed by wind are forced up the side of elevated land formations, such as large mountains; the lifting of air up the side of a mountain or range results in adiabatic cooling, condensation and precipitation. Moisture is removed by orographic lift, leaving drier, warmer air on the leeward side; the resulting enhanced productivity of snow fall and the decrease in temperature with elevation means that snow depth
Colony of British Columbia (1858–1866)
The Colony of British Columbia was a crown colony in British North America from 1858 until 1866. It was founded by Richard Clement Moody, who became the first Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia from 1858 to 1863. At its creation, it physically constituted half the present day Canadian province of British Columbia, since it did not include the Colony of Vancouver Island, the vast and still uninhabited regions north of the Nass and Finlay Rivers, the regions east of the Rocky Mountains, or any of the coastal islands; the Colony of the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Stikine Territory were merged with it in 1863, it was amalgamated in 1866 with the Colony of Vancouver Island to form a new Colony of British Columbia. The explorations of James Cook and George Vancouver, the concessions of Spain in 1794 established British claims over the coastal area north of California. Similar claims were established inland via the explorations of such men as John Finlay, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser, Samuel Black, David Thompson, by the subsequent establishment of fur trading posts by the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company.
However, until 1858, the region which now comprises the mainland of the Province of British Columbia was an unorganised area of British North America comprising two fur trading districts: New Caledonia, north of the Thompson River drainage. With the signing of the Treaty of Washington in 1846, which established the US border along the 49th parallel, the HBC moved the headquarters of its western operations from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River to the newly established Fort Victoria, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island and the surrounding Gulf Islands in the Strait of Georgia were organised as a crown colony in 1849. Meanwhile, the mainland continued to function under the de facto administration of the HBC, whose chief executive, James Douglas happened to be governor of Vancouver Island; the non-aboriginal mainland population during this time never exceeded about 150 at Fort Victoria HBC employees and their families. By 1857, Americans and British were beginning to respond to rumors of gold in the Thompson River area.
Overnight, some ten to twenty thousand men moved into the region around present-day Yale, British Columbia, sparking the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. Governor Douglas - who had no legal authority over New Caledonia – stationed a gunboat at the entrance of the Fraser River to exert such authority by collecting licences from prospectors attempting to make their way upstream. To normalize its jurisdiction, undercut any HBC claims to the resource wealth of the mainland, the district was converted to a Crown colony on 2 August 1858 by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, given the name British Columbia. Douglas was offered the governorship of the new colony by the colonial secretary, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, on condition that he sever his relationship with the HBC. Douglas accepted these conditions, a knighthood; the influx of people into the new colony required Douglas to act in drawing up regulations and creating infrastructure. Magistrates and constables were hired, mining regulations drawn up, town sites surveyed at Yale and Fort Langley to discourage squatting on crown land.
In addition, roads were constructed into the areas of greatest mining exploration around Lillooet and Lytton. The colony, was not granted a representative colonial assembly, because of uncertainty as to whether the gold rush would yield a stable, settled population. Douglas, who had endured unhappy conflicts with the assembly on Vancouver Island, was relieved; the rush indeed was short lived, the exodus of miners and merchants was underway by the time the Royal Engineers had laid out the colony's new capital at New Westminster. Prospecting continued and additional finds farther inland in the Cariboo region in 1860 signalled an impending second gold rush. Provisioning was proving to be an acute problem, with more distant finds it became clear that wagon trains would have to replace pack horses, necessitating new infrastructure. Throughout his tenure, Douglas was engaged in a bitter feud with Richard Clement Moody; when news of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush reached London, Moody was hand-picked by the Colonial Office, under Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, to establish British order and to transform the newly established Colony of British Columbia into the British Empire's "bulwark in the farthest west" and "found a second England on the shores of the Pacific".
Lytton desired to send to the colony "representatives of the best of British culture, not just a police force": he sought men who possessed "courtesy, high breeding and urbane knowledge of the world" and he decided to send Moody, whom the Government considered to be the archetypal "English gentleman and British Officer" at the head of the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment, created by an Act of the British Parliament on 2 August 1858. The Engineers were believed to exemplify the qualities sought by the Government. Moody and his family arrived in British Columbia in December 1858, commanding the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment, he was sworn in as the first Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia and appointed Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works for British Columbia. On the advice of Lytton, Moody hired Robert Burnaby as his personal secretary, the two became close friends. Moody's letter to his friend Arthur Blackwood Esq. at the Colonial Office, dated 1 February 1859, contains several passages of sublime poetical description that demonstrate the qualitie
Canada
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres, making it the world's second-largest country by total area. Canada's southern border with the United States is the world's longest bi-national land border, its capital is Ottawa, its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto and Vancouver. As a whole, Canada is sparsely populated, the majority of its land area being dominated by forest and tundra, its population is urbanized, with over 80 percent of its inhabitants concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, many near the southern border. Canada's climate varies across its vast area, ranging from arctic weather in the north, to hot summers in the southern regions, with four distinct seasons. Various indigenous peoples have inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years prior to European colonization. Beginning in the 16th century and French expeditions explored, settled, along the Atlantic coast.
As a consequence of various armed conflicts, France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces; this began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom. This widening autonomy was highlighted by the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and culminated in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with Elizabeth II as its queen and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the federal cabinet and head of government; the country is a realm within the Commonwealth of Nations, a member of the Francophonie and bilingual at the federal level. It ranks among the highest in international measurements of government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, economic freedom, education.
It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many other countries. Canada's long and complex relationship with the United States has had a significant impact on its economy and culture. A developed country, Canada has the sixteenth-highest nominal per capita income globally as well as the twelfth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index, its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks. Canada is part of several major international and intergovernmental institutions or groupings including the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the G7, the Group of Ten, the G20, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. While a variety of theories have been postulated for the etymological origins of Canada, the name is now accepted as coming from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, meaning "village" or "settlement".
In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona. Cartier used the word Canada to refer not only to that particular village but to the entire area subject to Donnacona. From the 16th to the early 18th century "Canada" referred to the part of New France that lay along the Saint Lawrence River. In 1791, the area became two British colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada collectively named the Canadas. Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the legal name for the new country at the London Conference, the word Dominion was conferred as the country's title. By the 1950s, the term Dominion of Canada was no longer used by the United Kingdom, which considered Canada a "Realm of the Commonwealth"; the government of Louis St. Laurent ended the practice of using'Dominion' in the Statutes of Canada in 1951. In 1982, the passage of the Canada Act, bringing the Constitution of Canada under Canadian control, referred only to Canada, that year the name of the national holiday was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day.
The term Dominion was used to distinguish the federal government from the provinces, though after the Second World War the term federal had replaced dominion. Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada include the First Nations, Métis, the last being a mixed-blood people who originated in the mid-17th century when First Nations and Inuit people married European settlers; the term "Aboriginal" as a collective noun is a specific term of art used in some legal documents, including the Constitution Act 1982. The first inhabitants of North America are hypothesized to have migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 14,000 years ago; the Paleo-Indian archeological sites at Old Crow Flats and Bluefish Caves are two of the oldest sites of human habitation in Canada. The characteristics of Canadian indigenous societies included permanent settlements, complex societal hierarchies, trading networks; some of these cultures had collapsed by the time European explorers arrived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries and have only been discovered through archeological investigations.
The indigenous population at the time of the first European settlements is estimated to have been between 200,000
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, branded as CBC/Radio-Canada, is a Canadian federal Crown corporation that serves as the national public broadcaster for both radio and television. The English- and French-language service units of the corporation are known as CBC and Radio-Canada and both short-form names are commonly used in the applicable language to refer to the corporation as a whole. Although some local stations in Canada predate CBC's founding, CBC is the oldest existing broadcasting network in Canada, first established in its present form on November 2, 1936. Radio services include CBC Radio One, CBC Music, Ici Radio-Canada Première, Ici Musique. Television operations include CBC Television, Ici Radio-Canada Télé, CBC News Network, Ici RDI, Ici Explora, Documentary Channel, Ici ARTV; the CBC operates services for the Canadian Arctic under the names CBC Radio-Canada Nord. The CBC operates digital services including CBC.ca/Ici. Radio-Canada.ca, CBC Radio 3, CBC Music/ICI.mu and Ici.
TOU. TV, owns 20.2% of satellite radio broadcaster Sirius XM Canada, which carries several CBC-produced audio channels. CBC/Radio-Canada offers programming in English and eight aboriginal languages on its domestic radio service, in five languages on its web-based international radio service, Radio Canada International. However, budget cuts in the early 2010s have contributed to the corporation reducing its service via the airwaves, discontinuing RCI's shortwave broadcasts as well as terrestrial television broadcasts in all communities served by network-owned rebroadcast transmitters, including communities not subject to Canada's over-the-air digital television transition. CBC's federal funding is supplemented by revenue from commercial advertising on its television broadcasts; the radio service employed commercials from its inception to 1974, but since its primary radio networks have been commercial-free. In 2013, CBC's secondary radio networks, CBC Music and Ici Musique, introduced limited advertising of up to four minutes an hour, but this was discontinued in 2016.
In 1929, the Aird Commission on public broadcasting recommended the creation of a national radio broadcast network. A major concern was the growing influence of American radio broadcasting as U. S.-based networks began to expand into Canada. Meanwhile, Canadian National Railways was making a radio network to keep its passengers entertained and give it an advantage over its rival, CP. This, the CNR Radio, is the forerunner of the CBC. Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt lobbied intensely for the project on behalf of the Canadian Radio League. In 1932 the government of R. B. Bennett established the CBC's predecessor, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission; the CRBC took over a network of radio stations set up by a federal Crown corporation, the Canadian National Railway. The network was used to broadcast programming to riders aboard its passenger trains, with coverage in central and eastern Canada. On November 2, 1936, the CRBC was reorganized under its present name. While the CRBC was a state-owned company, the CBC was a Crown corporation on the model of the British Broadcasting Corporation, reformed from a private company into a statutory corporation in 1927.
Leonard Brockington was the CBC's first chairman. For the next few decades, the CBC was responsible for all broadcasting innovation in Canada; this was in part because, until 1958, it was not only a broadcaster, but the chief regulator of Canadian broadcasting. It used this dual role to snap up most of the clear-channel licences in Canada, it began a separate French-language radio network in 1937. It introduced FM radio to Canada in 1946, though a distinct FM service wasn't launched until 1960. Television broadcasts from the CBC began on September 6, 1952, with the opening of a station in Montreal, a station in Toronto, Ontario opening two days later; the CBC's first owned affiliate television station, CKSO in Sudbury, launched in October 1953. From 1944 to 1962, the CBC split its English-language radio network into two services known as the Trans-Canada Network and the Dominion Network; the latter, carrying lighter programs including American radio shows, was dissolved in 1962, while the former became known as CBC Radio.
On July 1, 1958, CBC's television signal was extended from coast to coast. The first Canadian television show shot in colour was the CBC's own The Forest Rangers in 1963. Colour television broadcasts began on July 1, 1966, full-colour service began in 1974. In 1978, CBC became the first broadcaster in the world to use an orbiting satellite for television service, linking Canada "from east to west to north". Starting in 1967 and continuing until the mid-1970s, the CBC provided limited television service to remote and northern communities. Transmitters were built in a few locations and carried a four-hour selection of black-and-white videotaped programs each day; the tapes were flown into communities to be shown transported to other communities by the "bicycle" method used in television syndication. Transportation delays ranged from one week for larger centres to a month for small communities; the first FCP station was started in Yellowknife in May 1967, the second in Whitehorse in No
Snowshoe
A snowshoe is footwear for walking over snow. Snowshoes work by distributing the weight of the person over a larger area so that the person's foot does not sink into the snow, a quality called "flotation". Snowshoeing is a form of hiking. Traditional snowshoes have a hardwood frame with rawhide lacings; some modern snowshoes are similar, but most are made of materials such as lightweight metal and synthetic fabric. In addition to distributing the weight, snowshoes are raised at the toe for maneuverability, they must not accumulate snow, hence the latticework, require bindings to attach them to the feet. In the past, snowshoes were essential tools for fur traders and anyone whose life or living depended on the ability to get around in areas of deep and frequent snowfall, they remain necessary equipment for forest rangers and others who must be able to get around areas inaccessible to motorized vehicles when the snow is deep. However, snowshoes are used today for recreation by hikers and runners who like to continue their hobby in wintertime.
Snowshoeing is easy to learn and in appropriate conditions is a safe and inexpensive recreational activity. However, snowshoeing in icy, steep terrain can be more dangerous. Before people built snowshoes, nature provided examples. Several animals, most notably the snowshoe hare, had evolved over the years with oversized feet enabling them to move more through deep snow; the origin and age of snowshoes are not known, although historians believe they were invented from 4,000 to 6,000 years ago starting in Central Asia. British archaeologist Jacqui Wood hypothesized that the equipment interpreted to be the frame of a backpack of the Chalcolithic mummy Ötzi was part of a snowshoe. Strabo wrote that the inhabitants of the Caucasus used to attach flat surfaces of leather under their feet and that its inhabitants used round wooden surfaces, something akin to blocks, instead. However, the "traditional" webbed snowshoe as we know it today had direct origins to North American indigenous people, e.g. the Huron, so forth.
Samuel de Champlain wrote, referencing the Huron and Algonquin First Nations, in his travel memoirs, "Winter, when there is much snow, they make a kind of snowshoe that are two to three times larger than those in France, that they tie to their feet, thus go on the snow, without sinking into it, otherwise they would not be able to hunt or go from one location to the other". In 2016, Italian scientists reported "the oldest snowshoe in the world" discovered in the Dolomites and dated to between 3800 and 3700 B. C; the indigenous people of North America developed the most advanced and diverse snowshoes prior to the 20th century. Nearly every Indigenous peoples of the Americas culture developed its own particular shape of shoe, the simplest and most primitive being those of the far north; the Inuit have two styles, one being triangular in shape and about 18 inches in length, the other circular, both reflecting the need for high flotation in deep and powdery snow. However, contrary to popular perception, the Inuit did not use their snowshoes much since they did most of their foot travel in winter over sea ice or on the tundra, where snow does not pile up deeply.
Southward the shoe becomes narrower and longer, the largest being the hunting snow-shoe of the Cree, nearly 6 ft long and turned up at the toe. Smaller models, developed most notably by the Iroquois, are narrower and shorter, reflecting the need for maneuverability in forested areas; the Plains Indians wore. Despite their great diversity in form, snowshoes were, in fact, one of the few cultural elements common to all tribes that lived where the winters were snowy, in particular, the Northern regions. Snowshoes were adopted by Europeans during early colonialism in what became Canada and the United States; the French voyageurs and coureurs des bois began to travel throughout the land of the Cree and Algonquin groups of indigenous North Americans in the late 17th century to trap animals and trade goods. In order to travel in the terrain and climate, they utilized the tools of the native populations, such as snowshoes and canoes. Snowshoes became popular during the French and Indian Wars, during conflicts such as The Battle on Snowshoes, when both the French/Indian and British factions both wore snowshoes to battle above a reported four feet of snow.
The Oxford English Dictionary reports the term being used by the English as early as 1674. In 1690, after a French-Indian raiding party attacked a British settlement near what is today Schenectady, New York, the British took to snowshoes and pursued the attackers for 50 miles recovering both people and goods taken by their attackers; the "teardrop" snowshoes worn by lumberjacks are about 40 inches long and broad in proportion, while the tracker's shoe is over 5 feet long and narrow. This form, the stereotypical snowshoe, resembles a tennis racquet, indeed the French term is raquette à neige; this form was copied by the Canadian snowshoe clubs of the late 18th century. Founded for military training purposes, they became the earliest recreational users of snowshoes; the snowshoe clubs such as the Montreal Snow Shoe Club shortened the teardrop to about 40 inches long and 15 to 18 inches broad turned up at the toe and terminating in a kind of tail behind. This is made light for racing purposes, but much stouter for touring or hunting.
The tail keeps the shoe straight while walking. Another variant, the "bearpaw", ends in a curved heel in
