Older
forests 'as rare as sasquatches'
GLENN BOHN
Sun Environmental Reporter
The Vancouver Sun,
Tuesday, October 18, 1994
Lower Mainland Section
The mufflers blasted
and the brakes whined as a worker just two years away from retirement
inched his truck around the hairpin curves. Between gear shifts,
George jabbed a finger towards the second-growth forest in the
previously logged Pitt River Valley
below. The valley floor on either side of the log-littered river
looked like a lush green carpet.
George, 63, the local
shop steward with the woodworkers' union and an employee of J.S. Jones
Logging Ltd, said that most people don't realize how fast trees grow
back after clearcutting. The trouble is, the average age of the trees
in the valley is 60 years and they wouldn't normally be harvested for
another three or four decades. So the logging company wants to go into
other publicly owned forests in adjacent valleys. But never-logged
watersheds near the Lower Mainland are becoming as elusive as the
sasquatch, a legendary man-like animal that is supposed to live deep
in the wilderness.
The past summer, during
the last truck run of the day, George saw some kind of black-haired
beast walking on two legs. Black bears don't normally walk like that,
he noted. "I'm not saying it was a sasquatch, but this creature was
over six feet tall," he said.
© The Vancouver Sun