Voracious industrial logging between Klaskish and Klaskino Inlet
by Ingmar Lee
April 15, 2023
Around 20 years ago, Michael Mascall and I spent 2 days
hiking into the headwaters of East Creek, which at the time was the
79th of 81 primary Vancouver Island watersheds to face the axe.
Brooks Peninsula - Google Maps' Version of Reality
At the time East Creek, the 1st watershed north of the Brooks Peninsula, was entirely primaeval; intact. It was a terrible, difficult 2 day thrash to climb up to the height of land between the Klaskish and East Creek watersheds, and alas, we were following the flagging for the slated-to-be, new East Creek Mainline, -probably the steepest main I've seen after 21 years of treeplanting around the BC Coast.
Listen to Ingmar discuss this with Gorilla Radio here.
Our
plan had been to climb over the top and descend down the East Creek to
the estuary, but we were already exhausted, so after having a good look
of the vista of the beautiful wild, unlogged valley, back-dropped by the
spectacular Nunataks of the Brooks Peninsula. We turned back and
thrashed back to my car, spent another night, and then decided to try
getting to the East Creek estuary via the Klaskish Basin. So we waded
down the Klaskish River to the estuary, and then thrashed around the
headlands towards East Creek. At about noon, we were only half way
there, and as we ate our lunch we debated on pressing on, or turning
back.
It was a beautiful day, and we decided
that we would press on regardless, with no food or tent, sleeping bags
etc. We decided we would just rough it. Eventually, around dusk, we
finally got there, went for a swim in East Creek, built a fire. Mike went back to a great big old hollow cedar we'd seen, while I just
curled up on the beach by the fire and dozed, stoking the fire whenever I
started getting cold. It was a beautiful night, with the full moon
suddenly rising straight over Mt Nunatak, the highest mountain on the
Brooks.
This was my first of many trips to East
Creek, as we were working feverishly to do something/anything to
protect it from the same fate as virtually every valley on the island. I
kayaked out there with friends, launching from a spot we'd pioneered
down the mountainside from the road to the beach in Klaskino Inlet, next one north of Klaskish from where we'd paddle to Heater Point and
camp out hoping for good weather to round the cape and quickly paddle
the completely exposed water to MacDougal Island, and then to our
camping place at Canoe Creek at the toe of the Brooks.
Eventually,
Krista and I did a joint-discipline study of CMT's [Culturally Modified Trees] in East Creek and
did many kayak trips out there increment drilling trees to gather
temporal and spatial information for our paper. We had protocol
permission to do this, and to stay at the ancient village site there
from the Quatsino First Nation. The Quatsino had tried to save East
Creek, working with the Sierra Club and a bunch of other ENGO's. Alas,
the campaign to save East Creek got sidetracked and ultimately abandoned
by the ENGO's. (As far as I could tell, it was sacrificed as part of the
'Great Bear Rainforest' negotiations).
The whole
area is very dear to my heart, and it has been utterly horrifying to
see the voracious, heartless and absolutely devastating logging that has
since destroyed the valley. Once Lemare Lake Logging got the East Creek
Mainline built, they began relentlessly logging the valley right up
to the boundaries of the Brooks.
And I've
been watching that happen, for the most part on Google Earth, which is
usually at least several years behind the facts on the ground. In the
old days, when Google Earth first showed up, their graphics showed the
voracious wanton industrial destruction of the BC Forest very
distinctly, with fresh clearcutting showing as brown patches. But over
the years, no doubt in my mind at the behest of the logging industry,
the graphics have changed considerably and don't come near to portraying
the shocking reality as clearly as they used to.
Brooks Peninsula Google Maps Screen Shot 2 2023-04-16 at 4.31.jpg
Just
now, I came across a post from Bill Henderson, showing a series of
slides taken from space of herring spawn along the BC Coast. the 1st one
is off Metlakatla, then Cumshewa Inlet, Haida Gwaii, and the 3rd is of
the Brooks Bay, Klaskish Basin and the East Creek estuary that I am
writing about .
Brooks Peninsula Herring Spawn (in pale blue) Satellite Photo
At first, I was quite moved to see the beauty of the
herring spawn, that persists miraculously in spite of the best efforts
of the murderous Jim Pattison/DFO consortium that is going all-out to
exterminate the species. But then my heart skipped a beat to see on
that slide that the entire waterfront from Heater Point to the Klaskish
Basin has now been utterly destroyed by logging!
This, I believe, is
the dreadful work of INTERFOR, masterminded, no doubt, by its
grovelling henchflak spokesman, Ric Slaco, just another UBC educated "BC
Forest Professional," the same organization that is DIRECTLY
responsible for the near total devastation of forests everywhere across
the province.
I am absolutely sickened to
see this! This company learned NOTHING form the hideous, disgusting
entire stripping of every single tree on Mt Redstripe, on the Klaskino
Main. And Interfor itself committed the dreadful atrocity against nature
that is Mt. Paxton and St Paul's Dome further south at Kyuquot. This is
an absolute OBSCENITY that this has been allowed to happen.
Brooks Peninsula Google Maps Screen Shot 1 2023-04-16 at 4.31.06 PM
Canada's most magnificent final forest frontiers are being destroyed
right behind our backs and Google Earth is conveniently too far behind
the times to have depicted it yet. The clearcuts are plainly visible in
the herring spawn screenshot attachment I enclose, but are missing in
the Google Earth screenshot I just took and have also included.
It is hard to be more disgusted!
Ingmar
Pt. II
In maps recently received, I've found a
lot of what I'm looking for regarding the recent primaeval waterfront
logging depredations along Vancouver Island's west coast. The formerly
magnificent and intact section between Heater Point at the south
entrance to Klaskino Inlet and the Klaskish Basin at the foot of the
Brooks Peninsula has, as I suspected, been destroyed primarily by
Interfor and its henchflack, Lemare Lake Logging with its "management"
subsidiary, Lions Gate Forest Products.
Interfor
punched in the "Heater Point Main" via the south side of Klaskino
Inlet, along the flanks of the previously entirely denuded Yaky Kop
mountain, which joins Interfor's infamous forest destruction of Mt
Paxton and St Paul's Dome near Kyuquot, and Weyerhaeuser's Klaskino
atrocity, Mt Red Stripe as THE most disgusting crimes against nature on
Vancouver Island. Many years ago, I treeplanted on Mt Paxton which was
entirely clearcut of every single tree, right from the beach, over the
summit and down the other side. Seedlings on the western flanks of Mt
Paxton are so continuously blasted by wind that the bark is sanded right
off at ground level, effectively girdling each seedling. The mountain
has required numerous replants over the years as it keeps coming up
"NSR," aka "not sufficiently restocked" as a result.
A
massive slide bisected St Paul's Dome directly behind Kyuquot village
shortly after it was denuded by Interfor, and after we planted it. Mt
Paxton was featured in National Geographic back in those days, and I
believe that JFK jr. described it as the worst example of heartless,
careless, voracious industrial logging he'd ever seen.
Brooks Peninsula Cut Block Map
According
to above map, the Heater Point area is described as being
in "the North Coast Natural Resource District" and doesn't seem to be
part of a TFL or TSA. It has been designated, by the Ministry of
Logging, as a "Special Management Zone," -a designation that is
described as "Areas whose management priorities must incorporate
identified primary environmental, recreational and cultural heritage
areas. The area had shared this "special" designation with just 8% of
Vancouver Island's forest, so even the log-it-burn-it-pave-it "Forest
Professionals" that mastermind government logging plans must have found
it "special" indeed.
20 years ago, when Krista
and I were conducting our CMT research project on the Brooks, while
thrashing through the immense salal thickets and typical jumble of
wind-thrown tree trunks we took every advantage of animal trails to help
us get through the bush. And as we kayaked across that very exposed
stretch between Heater Point and the Klaskish Basin, with unimpeded
ocean swell rolling in from across the Pacific, it occurred to us that
the ordeal of crossing that stretch would have isolated the historic 2
First Nation villages, namely the Canoe Creek village site at the north
foot of the Brooks and the Amos Creek village at the very west side of
the Brooks from the Tsowanachs village site in Klaskino Inlet, and the
next one at Side Bay, and then the numerous villages at Winter Harbour
and along Quatsino Inlet. For much of the year, those waters would have
been, and still are extremely challenging and dangerous for much of the
year.
Gradually it began to dawn on us
that there must have been an overland trail that would have connected
all of these villages, and that perhaps the 'animal trails' that we had
been taking advantage of may have actually been part of an ancient human
trail that has been partially maintained by opportunistic animal
traffic since the last regular human traffic, at least 100 years ago.
CMT research puts the lie to an entrenched colonial stereotype trope
that claims pre-contact First Nations were primarily ocean-dependent peoples
who derived all their sustenance from the sea. CMT's provide spatial and
temporal information that debunks this narrative, and it is being
revealed that FN were actually advanced and skilled "sustained yield"
foresters who managed the land and its fruits over thousands of years in
an unprecedented manner that permitted extraction of forest produce,
while allowing for the steady evolution of biodiversity which has
resulted in the most magnificent primaeval forest cover ever to grace
the planet. People were already inhabiting the ice-free refugia of the
SW Brooks thousands of years prior to the winding down of the last
ice-age and would have participated and enhanced the advancement of the
forests as the glaciers receded from the landscape.
I
believe that Interfor has now not only destroyed once of Vancouver
Island's most spectacular and precious final vestiges of ancient,
primaeval forest, but has also significantly obliterated much of the
areas ancient human heritage, including trails and CMT's. This is a
staggering crime against nature and humanity, that from between 2017 and
today, in just 6 years, they have been able to get away with such
dreadful, grotesque destruction.
I intend
to put names to this atrocity.
I want to know the names of the
registered BC "Forest Professional's" (RFP) who signed off on this, and
their Interfor counterparts who masterminded it. I think that the
decades-long Interfor PR mouthpiece, RFP Ric Slaco has a direct
responsibility for this and he needs to be confronted for his shameful
explanation.
The area had been previously identified as a "special
area," that warranted particular care and attention. Instead it has been
utterly gutted and irrevocably damaged by Interfor greed. This final
insult, where Vancouver Island's 150-year industrial forest slaughter is
the end-game of a continent-wide stripping of forest cover is tragic
beyond measure. We need to name and shame the grotesque culprits that
made this possible.
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