North Shore News - Living His Dream

He remembers keeping them in tanks as far back as age four, spending hours watching their every move, learning as much as he could about their behaviour and different species.

Growing up on the North Shore and in the Lower Fraser Valley with their many fish-bearing streams, creeks, rivers and wetlands, he was given countless opportunities to observe the fascinating creatures in their natural habitat. "I knew what I wanted to do when I was just a little kid," he says. "When I was going to elementary school at Upper Lynn, people would ask me, 'What do you want to do?' and I'd say, 'Well, I want to be a marine biologist, I want to work with fish.'"

Victor Elderton, principal of the North Vancouver Outdoor School, shows off the Fraser Salmon Hero Award he received for his contribution to the preservation, enhancement and improvement of the Fraser River watershed and its populations of Pacific salmon.

NEWS photo Cindy Goodman
(Click photo to view larger image)

Elderton points out that he was born in March, making him a Pisces. "I guess it goes way back," he laughs.

Today, the Blueridge resident and longtime principal of the North Vancouver Outdoor School is a well-known champion of the aquatic beings that have captured his imagination for so long, and he has dedicated his life to passing on his passion for the natural world.

For his efforts, Elderton was recently awarded a Fraser Salmon Hero Award. The inaugural award comes from the Fraser Salmon and Watersheds Program and is intended to recognize individuals contributing to the preservation, enhancement and improvement of the Fraser River watershed and its populations of Pacific salmon. Elderton was awarded in the education and engagement category.

"It's a real honour, from my perspective, to be recognized on a provincial basis, but it's also a real tribute to all the people that have to work together to make it possible," he says.

Launched in 1969, the North Vancouver Outdoor School is a long-running program of the North Vancouver school district. The overnight field school and educational resource for experiential environmental studies is located on 420 acres of ecological reserve in the Cheakamus River Valley near Squamish. More than 10,000 children and adults make use of its facilities, programs and natural experiences annually, both from within the school district and beyond.

While Elderton is young enough to have attended the outdoor school as a child, he unfortunately never made it. "The ironic thing is that my parents moved from North Vancouver the year that outdoor school began," he says.

In 1969, a young Elderton moved with his family to Maple Ridge; however, his interest in aquatic life was not deterred.

"I got to live on the South Alouette River with my own salmon run right out my front door," he says.

As an adult, Elderton found work as a fisheries field biologist, research assistant and educational interpreter at the Vancouver Aquarium and was director of the Parks Canada Wickaninnish Centre at Pacific Rim National Park (Long Beach) before coming to work at the outdoor school in 1984. The degree of positive change he's witnessed in his 25 years there is astounding, he says.

"We're at a time when salmon are seriously threatened," he says. "Issues around global warming may affect the world in such a way that it's going to be very difficult for salmon to survive. The work that we're doing is so important to put everything in place so that they can survive."

Back in the late 1990s, the federal government awarded the school district and the outdoor school with a special honour. "They gave us a special designation as a federal salmon reserve," says Elderton.

In addition to having a special covenant on the land with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the outdoor school is also at the centre of the Dave Marshall Salmon Reserve, a tribute to a biologist with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

When Elderton started at the school, 300 metres was designated for salmon, special habitat and reconstruction. Throughout the years, with multiple partners, the salmon reserve has greatly expanded from its more humble beginnings to somewhere between

The increase has translated into more fish. When Elderton started at the outdoor school for example there was only a handful of pink salmon spawning every second year in the reserve on school property.

"In the last eight years, there's been a huge comeback," he says.

Every other year, Elderton estimates they could have between 15,000 and 20,000 pink salmon spawning in the salmon reserve on the school grounds. When you include other salmon which spawn every year at the school, chum and coho, it can bring that number to more than 40,000.

"It's pretty remarkable to see that," says Elderton.

In addition to increased fish numbers, they're seeing more species. "When we started we were working with maybe one or two species of salmon," says Elderton. "Now we're working with chum, coho, pink, steelhead and chinook that are in the Cheakamus River."

It's an exciting time for those involved with the North Vancouver Outdoor School, says Elderton. In addition to approaching its 40th anniversary, the outdoor school is being re-envisioned, assisted by a $1 million legacy fund from the North Shore Credit Union Foundation in 2007. The major plan consists of building a state-of-the-art, sustainably-designed, environmental education centre with an anticipated opening date of February 2010. The building process is employing some environmentally sensitive techniques -- the centre will be built elsewhere then transported -- and will be situated on the land in such a way to cause as little impact as possible.

"It's a huge honour for me to work for the school district and also to have a place like the North Vancouver Outdoor School that I can work with and work in," says Elderton.

Over his 25 years spent educating visitors, he estimates he's worked with more than 100,000 individuals. "Nature gives me gifts every day. . . ," says Elderton. "There's always something that I didn't notice before." Being able to open people's eyes to those gifts is a constant motivator.

"When I have an opportunity to be there with kids, it's kind of like me helping them recreate the world that I was given when I grew up on the North Shore. . . . Maybe there's another Victor Elderton out there," he says.

The four 2008 Fraser Salmon Hero Award winners, which were jointly announced by the Fraser Salmon and Watersheds Program and Rocky Mountaineer Vacations June 24, were each given a $1,000 contribution to the project or group of their choice.