KANANASKIS, Alta. (CP) - Prime Minister Jean Chretien wanted to get away from it all and back to basics at this year's G-8 summit so the natural choice became Kananaskis - a tony resort that converts easily into a fortress as impregnable as a medieval castle.
Kananskis Village, where the Group of Eight will meet next Wednesday and Thursday, consists of three low-rise hotels with 400 rooms total, one general store and a post office.
They sit about 23 windy kilometres off the Trans-Canada Highway, nestled in a long valley an hour's drive southwest of Calgary, where the foothills collide with the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
The village is penned in on the east and west flanks by Mount Kidd and other soaring peaks. To the south, the land falls off sharply into a picturesque valley highlighted by two 18-hole golf courses.
Chretien named Kananaskis the host site at the end of last year's violence-scarred G-8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, where running street battles between protesters and police left shops and cars burned and smashed, hundreds injured and one protester dead.
The sheer number of delegates and hangers-on, pegged at 2,000, had made the summit unworkable, Chretien said at the time, adding that the protests and TV images of burning cars had usurped the message of the meetings.
Kananaskis would be different, he said.
The name of the area comes from explorer John Palliser, who wrote in the 1800s about a native named Kananaskis who took an axe to the head but survived.
Palliser reckoned such spirit deserved to be celebrated, so he named two lakes, two passes and a river after Kananaskis.
The village is part of a 4,000-square kilometre recreation area that has provincial parks, grazing lands, oil leases and recreational land. It was established in 1977.
The area was a corridor for early settlers heading to the Oregon Territory and later a German prisoner of war camp in the 1940s but became famous as the site of downhill ski races during the 1988 Winter Olympics.
Because it's situated between foothills and mountains, there is a wide range of trees, flowers, birds and animals. Hikers could as easily run into white-tailed deer as moose, elk, grizzly bears and bighorn sheep.
Chretien has even touted the "500 bears" in the area as natural protection against lawbreakers. But Dave Neilsen, the director of Kananaskis Country, said that while nobody's counted the lesser bears, his staff have radio-collared eight resident grizzlies so their whereabouts are always known.
Environmental critics have complained that bringing such a large-scale meeting to Kananaskis threatens the area's delicate ecosystem.
Neilsen, said he, too, initially thought it was a mistake, "because we know what the size of the G-8 summits have been over the last several years and Kananaskis Village just didn't have that capacity."
Summit organizers have taken pains to limit the environmental damage. The only infrastructure was the laying of a fibre optic cable from the village to the main media centre in downtown Calgary.
Troops guarding the area - including the 6.5-kilometre security perimeter around the village itself - have been trained to avoid wildlife, bird nesting areas and have been ordered to pack up their own waste and cart it out of the bush. There will also be four times the usual number of wardens around to protect the protectors.
The troops are part of a massive security operation to protect the leaders of the seven leading industrialized countries - Canada, the United States, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and Britain - along with Russia.
Joint Task Force Grizzly, as it has been dubbed, includes a 150-kilometre no-fly zone around Kananaskis with CF-18 fighters and ground-based missiles ready to shoot down any intruders. Cars travelling close to the village will be checked thoroughly and sent in convoys.
A snowy spring in the Rockies has dampened any fears of anarchists dropping matches into the trees to burn the meeting down. But it's caused a flurry of activity up at the village, where crews have been frantically planting new shrubs, trees and flowers to liven it up.
Dale Dyck, the general manager of Delta's Kananaskis Lodge, touts the place as a brilliant mix of a world-class resort side by side with nature - the perfect place for a $4.55 small latte while watching a mountain waterfall.
About 60 per cent of the regular guests at the lodge are Canadians and of those, more than half come during conventions or other big events. The fibre optic cable is expected to help attract further meetings.
"Without sounding cavalier about it, we're preparing for this much like any other convention," said Dyck.
But while all the attention and a booked hotel has been great, July may not be as strong with bookings down 50 per cent in what Dyck calls a "G-8 hangover."
"There is a perception out there that there will be some residual damage to the area," he said.
"But my personal belief is we're in the safest place in the world."
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