The Ottawa-Gatineau Climbers’ Access Coalition has announced an information session to discuss the impact of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan on climbing in Gatineau Park. It’s being held at the MEC Ottawa Store on Monday, April 19th at 7:15pm. If you’re a climber, you need to attend this very important meeting.

In case you haven’t heard about the GPECP and the ramifications for climbing, you should check out my entry about the plan in general and my in-depth look at Appendix 2.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken some night shots. The rain this evening offered some interesting possibilities that I couldn’t pass up.

While perhaps not the most interesting photograph, this 2 second exposure of the intersection of Holland and Scott taken from my balcony gave me a chance to play with some of the toys in Photoshop CS4.

You can see the usual orangey hue caused by the street lights. I manually fiddled with some of the settings before deciding to try the white balance tool.

Using the white stop bar at the bottom of the photo as the reference for white, I was able to get rid of the orange and produce this image:

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the intersection was being lit by giant floodlights. Very cool.

So, I’ve been reading the full version of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan during the last week or so, along with a number of research articles that it cites. Of particular interest (to me anyway) is Appendix 2, which is titled “Eardley Escarpment description and conservation issues”. This is where the authors of the GPECP lay out why, in their opinion, climbing should be all but banned from Gatineau Park.

It starts off by describing what an escarpment is, in general terms, and then moves on to describing the Eardley Escarpment thusly:

Eardley Escarpment is a cliff lying along a south-south-west line. It is approximately 300 metres high, with an average height of more than 200 metres, and is the dominant topographical element in the Outaouais region. It begins in the City of Gatineau and runs north-eastwards along the Ottawa River for several dozen kilometres, forming a characteristic rock slope alignment.

To the best of my knowledge, the Eardley Escarpment, the aspect of which is approximately southwest, follows a line that’s aligned roughly northwest-southeast. If it ran “north-eastwards along the Ottawa River”, it would actually be oriented almost perpendicular to the Ottawa River.

If you look at the image to the right, you can see the Eardley Escarpment (I’ve marked it with a red line) running most of the way from top left to lower right.

But this isn’t the most problematic part of Appendix 2.

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