The Five Bridge Lake area will be accorded official wilderness status tomorrow, The Coast has learned. The area is designated on this map:
The total area to be protected is larger than that proposed, and will exceed 25,000 acres, but we don’t yet have exact boundaries. We’ll have more after tomorrow’s announcement, at 1pm.
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2011.
HIP HIP HOORAY for the wildlife – I mean the fourlegged kind not the two legged kind running wild in this province-our worse animals.
What’s that pink-red shaded bit? That’s quite central. I’m familiar with that area – if that has some kind of special exempt, developmental status then you may as well kiss off the entire “protected” idea.
realist– that’s HRM-owned land, which is zoned as protected wilderness. So is the land to the immediate east of the wilderness— between the Otter Lake landfill and the new wilderness. HRM has placed both areas in a sort of “we’ll deal with this later” category. The intent is to name them the Mainland Common Wilderness Park or some such, and to create a seamless park consistent park of city and provincial land, just as is supposed to happen at Birch Cove/Blue Mountain. I’ve never heard anyone even suggest that anything else should happen to the land.
Thanks, Tim, for the extra info. I’m glad to hear it.
I tend to alert on differences like that. I am still minded of when the first parts of the multiuse trail were put in along Lake Micmac and Lake Charles, and for quite a while there the land right across from the existing MicMac Mall exit was undeveloped. This in fact had been unposted (in my memory) land going back to the 60’s or 70’s, so everyone I know (including myself) made the natural assumption that because of the trail and all, that it was also now park land. As we all know that was Charlie Keating land that got developed into a badly-situated mini-subdivision. Very shortsighted land use. Yeah, yeah, I know – in theory the information was available that it was private property; in practise I get the impression that if certain parties don’t want ownership to be too well known it can be rather successfully obscured.
Realist – the MicMac & Lake Charles propert belonged to Charlie McCulloch developer of MicMacMall and formed part of his estate after he died.
Dartmouth zoned it, and other land owned by other people, ‘Park in an attempt to render the land almost worthless but refused to buy the properties and forced owners to pay property taxes. Eventually the city relented and the McCulloch relatives regained control and sold the lots. Adjacent land with water frontage was bought by Dartmouth from other owners for a very cheap price in late 1991 or early 1992 – less than $10,000 an acre and now forms part of the trail.
Land ownership in that area was very well known in Dartmouth and the subject of numerous articles in the newspapers as well as TV and radio reports.