By Alan Mattson
The Eagle
A fire at the old water treatment plant near Riverview Drive is reportedly being treated as arson.
A fire was set in the basement of the building in the early hours of July 19. The Cochrane fire department responded to an anonymous tip, according to station officer Grant MacKinnon.
The fire was sparked in a space where treated water was stored, which is all concrete, so there was no damage to the building.
“We arrived on scene, popped the doors, ventilated for a little bit . . . we put the fire out and sealed the place back up,” MacKinnon said.
Because the suspects closed the lid over the fire, the firefighters had some “trouble” finding the source, eventually using a thermal imaging camera.
Cochrane RCMP could not be reached for details by press time, but MacKinnon was certain it was arson.

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By Alan Mattson
The Eagle
A woman was killed after her vehicle hit a moose near Redwood Meadows last week.
At about 1 a.m., the 19-year-old hit the moose at the intersection of Highway 22 and Manyhorses Drive.
She ran into the moose, veered off the road and travelled about 200m in the grass before hitting a sign.
She was transported by STARS air ambulance to the Foothills Hospital with critical injuries and later died. She was the only person in the vehicle.
Cochrane Fire/EMS station officer Grant MacKinnon said it’s the first moose-related death he’s seen in nine years.
The identity of the woman is being held until family members are notified, said RCMP.

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Cochrane-area chuckwagon driver Grant Profit finished sixth in the rain-shortened Badlands Dinosaur Derby at Drumheller over the weekend.
Rain on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon forced officials to close the event after two runs.
Profit had a two-day aggregate of 2:16.53 on his Ja-Co Welding and Consulting rig.
Luke Tournier won with a time of 2:14.03.

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By Brad Herron
The Eagle
Cochrane council won’t be back to work until mid-August.
After cancelling a public hearing scheduled for July 21, council also called off a special meeting scheduled for July 24 to allow more time to research the proposed Municipal Development Plan (MDP).
Council was set to debate a new MDP, which would update the current plan that was approved in 1998.
The MDP is scheduled for second reading at the Aug. 11 meeting of council.

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By Alan Mattson
The Eagle
A new plan to protect water quality in the Bow River basin is gaining traction in southern Alberta.
The Bow Basin Watershed Management Plan (BBWMP) was adopted by the City of Calgary as a planning tool on July 23.
Of 61 recommendations, the plan’s priorities are setting targets for water conservation, moving development away from rivers, improving water treatment methods, and gathering more data.
“The report sets standards, and then the expectation is that all those groups, agencies, communities who are stakeholders will monitor and maintain the standards,” said Hugh Pepper, a councillor in the M.D. of Bighorn and a member of the Bow River Basin Council (BRBC), the organization that created the plan.
It’s only the first phase of a much larger plan yet to be completed, but it’s drawing praise.
Cochrane’s town council and administration support the plan, along with communities like Canmore, Banff, Okotoks and Chestermere.
“I think it’s an excellent document,” said Gary Wagner, Cochrane’s environmental co-ordinator. “It’s a big job. They’ve tackled that process very, very well.”
Cochrane has not officially adopted the plan, but council and Mayor Truper McBride expressed support after a presentation from the BRBC on March 10.
The BRBC is a non-profit organization made up of 203 members from municipalities, Aboriginal communities, industry and water experts. The group has been working on the plan since 2005.
John Jagorinec, a senior water quality analyst for the City of Calgary, helped with the technical side of the plan.
“I think these watershed management plans are certainly a step in the right direction,” Jagorinec said. A similar plan to manage the Elbow River basin has also been released.
Together, they are part of a new conservation philosophy. All factors — from oil and gas production, to new subdivisions, to new treatment technology — have to be counted before a management strategy can be effective.
“Water, air, land, taken together, have to be managed together,” Pepper said. The challenge, he adds, is weaving together hundreds of groups and interests into a single voice, a single plan.
The BBWMP represents this new strategy, he said. “The climate right now is extremely positive. People are aware that there are all these interacting factors . . . The whole area is growing — we’re all now part of the same system.”
But there is still a long road ahead. More data has to be collected before concrete targets and solutions can be set out. The creators of the plan used “best estimates” of data for their recommendations, because it would take too long to actually collect it, according to Jagorinec.
“It’s really difficult to ever conclusively point the finger at one contributor or one problem because it takes so much data over the years to draw those conclusions,” he said. “And a lot can happen in those years.”
Federal and provincial governments aren’t funding water research like they used to. “A lot of that local watershed data collection is falling to local conservation and environmental groups,” Wagner said. “They, of course, have limited resources and capability.”
Wagner now sees the province shifting toward water management as a priority. But getting an entrenched conservative government and the public on board may be difficult, he said.
“As little as five years ago, Canadians still believed that we had the most fresh water on the planet, and we didn’t have to worry about managing it.”
In Cochrane, the town is working on a Wetland and Riparian Areas Conservation and Management Plan, which Wagner said lines up with much of the BBWMP.
“We’re pretty proud of our water quality management already,” he said.
Another challenge will be integrating many new developments with water protection strategies, especially wetlands, Wagner said.
“A lot of wetlands in southern Alberta were drained or paved over. There aren’t as many as there used to be. We have to be careful that we are managing the ones we have left as carefully as we can.”
Water is the base of any ecosystem, and the work of the BRBC is vital to protecting that base, Pepper said.
“The watersheds are extremely fragile in this area, and so it’s important to have a plan to not just maintain them, but safeguard them from future misuse.”

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By Brad Herron
The Eagle
Kathie Geleta considers herself lucky.
Instead of losing four toenails like she did last year after finishing the 60-kilometre Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk in Calgary, she may only lose one or two this time around.
Three years and three months ago, Geleta was diagnosed with breast cancer. To ward off the aggressive form of cancer, she had a bilateral mastectomy and endured eight months of “brutal” chemotherapy.
Cancer free, she has walked in the Weekend to End Breast Cancer for the past two years. This year, her nine-person team called Team Ta-Tas, which included daughters Nicole and Kaitlyn Geleta, raised $37,613. In total, the walk raised more than $4 million.
Kathie said July 28 that she walked the 60 km with blistered feet and bursitis in her left hip, not for herself, but for her 18- and 21-year-old daughters who are now at a greater risk of being diagnosed with the disease.
“I’m walking 60 kilometres because I don’t want to walk a mile in my family’s shoes,” Geleta said.
The Cochrane mother said having her daughters walk stride-by-stride with her was an experience she will never forget.
“You think of someone going through something you have been through that has been pretty tough,” she said before tearing up.
The kindness and generosity of strangers is also etched in her mind. Crowds gathered on city streets to give encouragement to walkers and urge them to press through the pain.
“You’re walking down the road and there are little kids handing out freezies saying, ‘Thank you so much, my mommy’s in the hospital with breast cancer,’ or there is a little, old guy who is 90-years-old sitting in his lawn chair handing out water bottles or just standing up to shake your hand and saying, ‘Thank you so much, my wife died,’” she said.
Because of that encouragement and the overall experience, she said she will walk and raise money for as long as she can.
“With those kinds of numbers we are going to find a cure, we have to find a cure,” Geleta said.

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By Alan Mattson
The Eagle
Two highway cyclists were injured over the weekend, and Cochrane Fire/EMS are reminding people to be safe while riding on busy roads this summer.
On July 25, the first cyclist hit a car parked on the shoulder near the intersection of Highways 8 and 22.
“He had his head down and was just giving ’er, and ran right into the back of it,” said Cochrane station officer Grant MacKinnon. The Calgary man then flipped onto the trunk.
The cyclist wasn’t wearing a helmet, but luckily suffered only minor cuts and bruises.
The second collision happened later that day on Highway 22 near the entrance to Redwood Meadows.
“The driver of the car had a last-minute brain fart, swerved over to make a right hand turn and cut the cyclist off,” MacKinnon said. “He plowed into the side of him, went up over the car and landed on the opposite side of the car.”
The cyclist was transported to hospital with a broken collarbone. He was wearing a helmet, which got damaged and “may have very well prevented a head injury.”
MacKinnon said the lesson is to “pay attention when you’re cycling. Just because you’re on a bike clipping down the highway at only 30 km/hr, you’re not out of the woods by any means.”

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Coffee with Warren
by Warren Harbeck
Like an autumn leaf brilliant in celebrating its journey through the seasons, Randy Pausch won the acclaim of many for his glorious celebration of a life rich in experiences, but now brought to its final hours. The Carnegie Mellon University professor and human being extraordinaire died July 25, nearly two years after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. But like a beautiful waxed leaf, his final words have become an inspiring keepsake for those committed to embracing life to its fullest day by day. He was 47.
Since his passing, the news media have paid great respect to Professor Pausch — or simply “Randy,” as he has come to be known — not so much for his research leadership in computer science as for his modelling a lifestyle unintimidated by mortality.
He articulated this lifestyle last Sept. 18 in what has become popularly known as “The Last Lecture,” but was actually titled, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.”
Universities sometimes extend to retiring faculty members the honour of delivering to their students and colleagues a special last lecture, a retrospective, so to speak, of professional achievements. In Randy’s case, his audience might have reasonably expected his lecture to refer extensively to matters of struggle and despair, death and dying. But no, other than a brief introduction of the “elephant” that was with him on the stage — i.e., pancreatic cancer — the rest of his talk was about wisdom he hoped to pass on to his three children.
I am grateful to several of our coffee companions for bringing Randy’s lecture to my attention. Among other places, the video of his 76-minute presentation can be seen at http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch. (So far, the lecture has been accessed nearly 5 million times on the Internet.) Also, The Last Lecture is the title of a book jointly authored by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow and published earlier this year.
Randy had his own childhood dreams, which included experiencing weightlessness, playing football, and being an imagineer with Disney. His dreams did not, of course, include cancer.
Here are some of the lessons he learned along the way toward his dreams and shared in this amazingly passionate, upbeat lecture:
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” (This was a reference to how he chose to respond to his cancer diagnosis.)
“Brick walls are there for a reason; they let us prove how badly we want something . . . because the brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want it badly enough.” (This was his way of saying, when you really believe in something, don’t take “No” for an answer. In his case as an academic, he surmounted the seemingly insurmountable to realize his dream of co-operating with Walt Disney Imagineering in virtual reality development.)
“Wait long enough and people will surprise you and impress you.” (Randy had developed a reputation for going to bat for people he came to believe in, even when things may have started out on the wrong track.)
“If the students are standing close to each other, the world is good.” (Randy was referring to a photograph of some of his graduate students all bunched together in fun and friendship at the end of a successful virtual reality project.)
Did I mention fun? At the heart of Randy’s wisdom is having fun in what you do and not being afraid to draw on the help of others.
Here are 10 more Randy rules for achieving one’s dreams:
• Tell the truth.
• Be earnest.
• Apologize when you mess up.
• Focus on others, not yourself.
• Have a feedback loop.
• Show gratitude.
• Don’t complain.
• Be good at something.
• Work hard.
• Be prepared.
This lecture was not really about achieving one’s dreams, however, but about leading one’s life, Randy said. “If you lead your life the right way, . . . the dreams will come to you.”
I discussed his talk the other day with Hugh and Shirley Pepper, two of our Cochrane coffee companions who were also deeply moved by his words. I thought Shirley captured well the essence of the lecture and his life philosophy as “moments of presence.”
Indeed, in a CBS interview carried on YouTube, Randy Pausch, described as “a man who looked death straight in the eye and told millions of the rest of us what he saw,” declared:
“I’m not in denial, but I don’t see any reason not to enjoy today, and tomorrow, and the next day. Yeah, I’m going to die soon, but . . . not today!”
(c) 2008 Warren Harbeck
warren@harbeck.ca.

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Arts Cochrane
By Evelyn Grace Marinoski
When it comes to the arts, Cochrane is a very wealthy community.
There’s an abundance of artists and creative people living and working here. The problem is that it’s not nearly as well known about as it could be.
The goal of this column is to introduce you to what’s going on with the arts in Cochrane — and who knows, maybe even get some new things going! Let’s get the word out that this is a great place to be, and to visit, if you are an artist or are interested in the arts.
My name is Evelyn Grace. When I first came to Cochrane more than 20 years ago (yikes, that long?) I was given the opportunity to write an Arts and Crafts column in what was then the Cochrane This Week newspaper. (For the old-timers around here, that was under my maiden name as Evie Warkentin).
I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the people I wrote about back then. And I was more than thrilled at a number of things that resulted from bringing arts people and businesses together.
It was a question from a reader that got the Cochrane Artisans Guild started. For quite a number of years that provided a way for creative people to get together, to learn from and to support each other.
Meeting the many arts businesses that were here at the time lead to the formation of an Arts Business Group. That’s where the very popular annual “See How We Do It” event came into being. I can still remember how hard it was to get into some of the places during that event because there were so many others also trying to get in to see what was going on.
I’m aware that there is even more going on with the arts now, so I’d really like to see the arts in Cochrane become a unique and special draw to this community — for artists who would want to be part of this arts community, and also for tourists who want to come explore.
To do that, I’ll be writing this column. I have also set up a website at www.artscochrane.com. I’ve started it with a directory for artists and art businesses here in Cochrane and the surrounding area. There is also an online gallery so that local artists can present their work visually.
There is a blog so that we can begin a dialogue about what you as artists want to see happen in this community. As a starting point I’ve included a list of some ideas for your consideration.
So I would like to hear from you.
What’s happening with the arts here in town? Where would you like to see things go from here? How can we get the word out that this is an amazing arts community?
If there’s one thing I know from past experience, it’s that people can accomplish great things when they work together. So join me on the journey, and let’s see what we can do.
You can contact me at artscochrane@willowrosevillage.com or call 403-981-5910.
Evelyn Grace Marinoski is a long-time resident interested in promoting the arts in Cochrane.

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