Originally published July 18, 2024 at The Narwhal. Read the full story here.

In October 2021, Karsten Heuer found himself sprawled on the ground, helpless, at the bottom of an aspen tree. 

He had been searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley, perched in a hunting stand nearly eight metres off the ground. Then he fell. He doesn’t know how. He was unconscious, lying on the ground for more than an hour before rescuers arrived. 

His back was broken in several places, ribs too; his sternum was cracked and he was struggling to breathe with collapsed lungs.

He was alone in the mountains he loves.

“I wasn’t in pain,” he remembers, sitting in his backyard in Canmore on a June afternoon, sun streaking one side of his still-youthful face. “I was actually okay with it. It was October, the sun was on my back, I could hear trumpeter swans on the lake calling, and other bird songs, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a pretty nice place to die.’ ”

It’s the kind of thought that might only occur to someone who has lived like Heuer. He has traversed thousands of kilometres through the Rockies on foot and followed a caribou herd for months through the north of the continent. As a conservationist, he worked to protect wildlife corridors in Banff long before they were well known. He led the team that brought bison back to Banff National Park for the first time in 140 years. He was executive director of the non-profit conservation group Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative for a time. He is a perpetual thorn in the side of a local developer that wants to dramatically expand Canmore. And he has written three books and is working on a fourth.

He was one of the early advocates of what is now known as large-landscape-scale conservation. This model takes into account the huge scope of some animals’ terrain, a departure from caring for the land in a patchwork of small protected areas. 

In conversation, Heuer, 55, flips easily between the large and the small — the 4,800-kilometre-long stretch of mountains he considers home, and the comparatively modest town of Canmore, whose population could be doubled if the development he’s fighting is green-lit. He also moves between straight autobiographical facts to experiences that touch on the spiritual. 

He fits the smallest pieces into the larger whole, his philosophy the result of a collection of experiences that few could match over the course of a long life.

But Heuer’s life won’t be long. He expects to be dead by the fall. 

Two years after surviving that fall from his tree stand, he noticed changes — he couldn’t drink a single beer without acting drunk, for one — and was diagnosed with a fast-acting and fatal neurological condition called multiple system atrophy.

Heuer says he isn’t willing to wait around for the worst of it. He has scheduled an assisted death for the fall, leaving on his own terms. 

It’s not known if the neurological condition was triggered by his accident in the woods, but lying there in the aftermath of the fall shifted Heuer’s relationship to his own mortality. When he finally received his diagnosis, there was an earned wisdom that gave him a measure of peace. 

“I was really close to the precipice already, staring at it,” he says. “And I was like, ‘This is okay.’ ”

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NARWHAL.