in Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Southgate, West Grey
May 30, 2024
BY JOHN BUTLER — Beth Gilhespy, Chief Executive Officer of the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy (EBC), loves critters and places. She will share some of that love on Wednesday June 12 at 2:00 pm when she gives a free public talk at the Flesherton Kinplex (adjacent to Flesherton’s Library branch and arena.) This is the latest in a series of free public talks sponsored by the Grey Highlands Probus Club, the Grey Highlands Public Library and the Kimberley Community Association. All are welcome, and doors open at 1:30 pm.
In her talk entitled The Beaver Valley: Reflections on a Lifetime Love Affair, Beth will take participants on a journey highlighting her 43-year love affair with the Beaver Valley. She will tell tales of early hiking adventures and misadventures, touch on the geology of the Beaver Valley, and showcase the land conservation work being done by the Bruce Trail Conservancy (BTC) and the EBC.
Beth has only been with the EBC since March of this year, but she is no stranger to this area, or to the conservation movement. This is her third leadership role with a Conservancy (the other two were the BTC and the Toronto Zoo Wildlife Conservancy.)
Beth points out that the concept of conservancy is about valuing and protecting creatures — plants and animals — and valuing and protecting the places these creature call home. The conservancy she currently heads — the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy — cherishes spaces along the Niagara Escarpment. Through land donations and purchases it is now the steward of 23,000 acres of Escarpment land, adding about 1,500 acres each year (this past year it added 1,800 acres.) On these lands are more than 230 nature preserves, more than 80 kilometres of public trails, and 70 species at risk.
While at first hesitant to identify her favourite species among those that are part of her Conservancy “family”, she finally concedes that turtles and orchids have special places in her heart. Beth also points out that Conservancy lands involve both hardy environments and much more delicate environments, and both are important to her and to the Conservancy’s work.
Beth first developed her passion for nature as a child growing up in Toronto. Her mother was an amateur botanist. The species-rich ravines of the city, filled with their secret places, were where mother and daughter explored nature. Later, in high school, her geography teacher — Don Williams — inspired in her a desire to know more about landscapes — about the special spaces in our world, and their relationship to each other. Later in life she encountered Don again, as they pursued common environmental causes.
As a young adult, Beth’s prevailing passion was music. She planned to pursue a career in that field (the flute was her instrument), but during a musical group trip to Boston, Beth’s van passed through the northern arm of the Appalachian mountain chain. There she saw exposed folded layers of rock, a sight powerful enough to drive her toward a career that included geology. She went on to receive Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in physical geography and geology from the University of Guelph. The influence of teacher Don Williams, coupled with these degrees and with her own innate curiosity, has led her to ask and seek answers to the all-important “why” questions about our natural environments and their interactions with humankind. “Once I get interested in a subject, I just don’t let it go” says Beth with a laugh.
Her passion for the Beaver Valley ecology and geology has driven her to write two books, and a third is on the way. Her first book, Walking Through Time, profiles the Bruce Trail’s Beaver Valley section, with an emphasis on its geology. Says Beth, “Every walk on the Niagara Escarpment is a walk through time, starting 450 million years ago and continuing through the millennia to the still-changing landscape of today.” Her second book focused on the Sydenham section of the Bruce Trail (Meaford to Wiarton.) Her third book will focus on the Saugeen Peninsula, also known as the Bruce Peninsula. Information about her books is at www.walkingthroughtime.ca.
While her passion was initially about rocks and not the fossils embedded within them, a friend who was interested in fossils gave her a book about trilobites (a common, often spectacular, three-lobed fossilized marine creature) — and that led the exploration of fossils to become yet another part of her passion. Beth looks back with great fondness on her participation in a Royal Ontario Museum fossil-hunting expedition to a fossil bed near the world famous Burgess Shale fossil formation in the Canadian Rockies. And now that she heads the EBC, she has become fascinated with Manitoulin Island’s Fossil Hill site.
Beth has the distinction of having a side-trail of the Bruce Trail named in her honour by the Bruce Trail’s Peninsula Club. The Beth Gilhespy Side Trail on the Saugeen Peninsula is special to Beth because of its panoramic views of Georgian Bay and its dense stands of hardwood forest. Trekkers can find more about her 3.4 kilometre trail at pbtc.ca/beth-gilhespy-side-trail. Beth points out that the BTC — formerly the Bruce Trail Association — is more than a hiking club: it is a major conserver of Ontario’s natural sites and their plants and animals.
Does she have a single gratifying experience in her career of more than thirty years as a conservationist? She has many, but one that stands out for her has to do with the Pinnacle Rock area in the Beaver Valley — a magical place of caves and cliff faces that she visited often for inspiration and rejuvenation in her earlier years. Much later, on her watch, the BTC was able to achieve protected status for this place that had fuelled so many of her dreams, and the dreams of others.
If a passionate a yen for knowledge about the natural world is catching — particularly about a stunning part of it on our very doorstep — you just might catch it from Beth Gilhespy during her Wednesday June 12 Beaver Valley presentation at 2:00 pm at the Kinplex in Flesherton.
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