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
TO
WEST COAST SASQUATCH RESEARCH PAGE