Saving Western Canada's only endangered tree

As the wind picks up and lashes icy rain from clouds that threaten to swallow the subalpine landscape, Sybille Haeussler and Alana Clason stride up a hill known locally as Toboggan Hill on Dzilh Yez, or Hudson Bay Mountain, in Smithers, B.C. Clason points out a scraggly mid-sized tree at the top of a rocky knoll. “It's a bit like an upside down toilet brush,” she says. The tree is whitebark pine, the first and only tree in Western Canada to be designated an endangered species and the