An adventure, a famous photo and a love of the outdoors passed through generations.
words :: Ilanna Barkusky
One of my favorite childhood photos takes me back to one of my first memories. At three years old, my first helicopter ride was an unplanned evacuation out of the Elaho Valley due to a washed-out road. It was a loud, scary and chaotic experience for a toddler. But not long before that, my mother had taken this photo of me playing on the sandbar. Just a kid in the rain in a beautiful spot, but as the photo circulated amongst the outdoor and conservation community my mom gave it a title: “I’m Only Three, Save Some for Me.”
Inclement weather could not stop us from returning to the Elaho for many years to participate in the Uts’am Witness Project, an initiative co-founded in 1997 by artist/photographer Nancy Bleck/Slanay Sp’ak’wus, world-renowned mountaineer John Clarke Xwexwsélken and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh/Squamish Nation Hereditary Chief találsamkin-t siyám Bill Williams.
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At a time when this area of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territory was threatened with logging, those visionaries invited the public to participate in summer wilderness camping weekends at Sims Creek and a traditional Coast Salish Witness Ceremony. Spanning ten years and involving around ten thousand people, the Uts’am Witness Project ultimately succeeded at preserving the area from logging and bringing it under protection through the Squamish Nation X̱ay Temíxw/Sacred Use Plan, which was designed to manage the future of forests and wilderness in specific areas of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territory.
As a child, I thought nothing special of an outdoor upbringing involving equal parts recreation and active environmental activism. My parents wanted me to realize these wild places where I played year-round needed our voice in advocating for their protection, and that it was not enough to merely enjoy my time in these beautiful parts of the Coast Mountains.
It wasn’t until much later that I truly experienced deep gratitude for those early lessons. In the summer of 2025, I journeyed to Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories to honour my late mother’s legacy and make a film based on an unpublished memoir chronicling her own Nahanni experience at 21 years old in 1974. I read about her concerns for future generations while traveling through a landscape essentially the same as she found it 50 years ago.
And I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that I’d been able to experience Nahanni as she had hoped. I’m Only Three, Save Some for Me first appeared as a physical print in a conservation-related art exhibition in 1997. As a sign of our digital times, it resurfaced in 2023 in an Instagram post from Pacific Wild in support of a campaign against old-growth logging. The spirit of intergenerational responsibility expressed in this image taken in the Elaho Valley so early in my lifetime, lives on.
We each have our own special outdoor spaces that hold memories and moments with families and friends. And whether our experiences end with a smile or an unwanted helicopter evacuation, when we continue to share the outdoors with others, we ensure that these places will always have a voice in our ever-changing world.
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