New Flathead video on YouTube!

Teaser unveiled for upcoming Flathead documentary

About a year ago, Fernie’s Ryland Nelson had an idea for a creative project.
Nelson, a Wildsight member — and an avid skier, mountain biker and videographer — imagined a feature-length documentary on B.C.’s Flathead River Valley.

“I wanted to tell the story of a Flathead most people don’t hear,” Nelson said. “The idea to make the Flathead into a park goes back nearly a hundred years.”

Nelson’s research led him all the way back to the year 1911, when “Kootenai” Brown, Waterton Lakes National Park’s very first superintendent, suggested expanding the park’s boundary west to include the Flathead.

“Since then,” Nelson said, “countless individuals and organizations have been seeking the same thing. That’s a 98-year effort!”

Nelson would like to make a full-feature documentary to trace the efforts to protect the Flathead River Valley, which is one of North America’s most unique wilderness areas. He would like to distribute it online and at mountain film festivals around the world.

“The Flathead River Valley is an amazing storehouse of biodiversity that deserves to be known all over the world,” he said.

Film teaser online now!

Recently, Nelson finished a three-minute “teaser” for the documentary and posted it on YouTube.

The teaser incorporates a “Google Earth” — an expanding view of Earth from space that takes the viewer right into the area in question and helps them place the Flathead River Valley firmly in their geo-spatial sense of place.

“It is amazing how long people have been trying to expand the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park,” Nelson said. “That is what I find so fascinating. This is clearly an idea whose time has come.”