Three months ago, Cortes Currents published a story about some old growth trees cut down in one of Quadra Island’s woodlots. It almost immediately became apparent that some of the information I had been given me was incorrect and there was more to the story. So I published a retraction. As the site was buried under two feet of snow, the woodlot licensees invited me to examine the site myself in the Spring. That was how I came to visit woodlot 2031 on Saturday, March 19, 2022. 

I decided to not name my sources for this story, but they are well known on Quadra Island and easy to identify. 

The license holders have been in the industry since the 1980s and started actively logging Woodlot 2031 in 2014.

“Our dream is to manage this land base, all the resource values for the long term, and to be able to pass along a legacy for our children or for somebody else in the future,” the male licensee said. “We have harvest plans that take us out to 2070. They’re rough because they’re only map exercises. But by 2070, another 50 years from now, we only account for about 35% of the total land base on this forest.”

(Their plans call for what appears to be roughly a 150-year-harvest rotation – my calculation, not the licensees – on the part of their woodlot that is to be logged.)

In addition, they set aside ‘all of  the stands that were identified as old growth’ and added adjoining second growth trees to the retention area.

This will eventually all be old growth. 

“As we go forward, we also plan to add more in terms of long term retention in riparians and other areas too,” he said.

There are also isolated old growth trees scattered throughout their cutblocks.

“We are targeting the harvest of the second growth, but there are places where the road location interferes with individual trees, or worker safety would be compromised if we left all of the old growth trees,” he said. “We have removed a small number. The total to date is about 2% by volume of the total number of trees that we’ve taken since 2014, or the past eight years. It’s a very small percentage of our overall harvest. We leave probably two-thirds to three quarters of the old growth trees standing either in or adjacent to the harvest areas. So the vast majority of those that we encounter with our harvesting are being left.”

He directed my attention to some of the old growth standing just outside the cutblock (images above and at top of page). These are not the massive cathedral like trees most of us think of when we hear the words ‘old growth.’ Some were simply dead spars. I remember some healthy trees, but do not see them in my photographs. Lastly there were what I am going to call mangled trees. In one case the top was missing. Many trees were missing their lower branches. In one case the license owner told me that if we were closer to what appeared to be a distant spar, some living branches would be visible. 

He confirmed that some of the old growth were healthy and also made a reference to the fact that all the old growth in this area are survivors of Quadra Island’s great fire of 1925. 

Last January, someone informed Cortes Currents that he found stumps on woodlot 2031 with rings indicating ages between 350 and over 500 years.  

The licensee showed Cortes Currents two of those old growth stumps, in a cutblock from 2019. 

The photographs above were taken from one of those stumps. Note the wood decay in both pictures. Cortes Currents pulled a chunk of decomposing wood from the side of the stump and placed it in the lower right hand corner of the lower image. 

“Those two old growth were close to where the road was built and they were close to the work area that the loggers were processing and loading wood. They determined, based on what they could see of the trees, that they would be unsafe to leave in the long term. They took them because they represented a safety hazard” said the licensee.  

He explained that WorkSafeBC defined the ‘danger zone’ around an unsafe tree as one and a half times the height. For a 36 metre high tree, that works out to 54 metres. 

The licensee said that they have been building roads since 2014. Some follow old overgrown logging roads, but they have needed to put in new roads as well. This enables them to disperse their logging activities (and also gives their neighbours access to previously difficult to reach parts of the woodlot.

He estimates that roughly half of the old growth trees cut down in woodlot 2031 were removed because of safety issues. 

One of the allegations I have hearing on Quadra Island is that loggers are using roadbuilding as a pretext to cut down old growth. This may be true in other locations, but there are definitely some healthy old growth left in the potential ‘danger zone’ beside woodlot 2031’s roads. There is a picture of one below.

Top photo credit: Mixed old and second growth trees at top of the cutblock – Photo by Roy L Hales

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