Tag Archives: Forestry on Cortes

Birth of Whaletown as a community abt. 1885-1914

Whaletown may get its name from an old whaling station, but Europeans really did not settle in the area for another 15 years or so. In today’s program Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, traces the modern community back to a logger named Moses Ireland.

First Nations people were using Whaletown Bay before that and a fish trap is believed to have once stretched across the entrance of the lagoon.

The whalers came for 18 months, in 1869 and 70.

“It wasn’t very many years after the whaling station left, in the mid 1880s,  that Moses Ireland moved into the area as a logger and set up camp where the whale station had been,” explained Jordan.

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Cutting Old Growth: Quadra Woodlot holder responds

On August 17, Cortes Currents published a review of David Broadland’s report ‘Land-use planning on Quadra Island has been undone by the Ministry of Forests.’

Broadland wrote that while all of the other Quadra Island woodlots leave big trees standing, Okisollo Resources fells a substantial number. In ‘before’ and ‘after’ satellite images from one of their cutblocks at Hummingbird Lake, he showed that 35 out of about 50 were logged in July and August of 2019. 

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Controversy over a Quadra Island Woodlot

David Broadland recently wrote a devastating critique of the old growth logging at Hummingbird Lake on Quadra Island. It is sometimes necessary to cut down an old growth tree, so I asked the Cortes Community Forest how often this occurs in their operation.

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Mark Vonesch 5: Issues that divide us

Mark Vonesch hopes to bring a new kind of politics to Cortes Island if he is elected Regional Director on October 15, 2022. 

“One of the biggest things I want to do with this campaign is bring people together who think differently than each other,” he explained. “What I can do is initiate conversations and get people talking about them.”

He then went on to outline the same issues that our current Director has been wrestling with: housing, climate change, ecosystem protection, economic development, land use planning, parks and recreation, and truth and reconciliation.

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Focusing on wildfire fuel mitigation

The Cortes Forestry General Partnership is currently focusing on wildfire fuel mitigation strategies. 

While none have been large, there were recent fires on West RedondaReadQuadra and Sonora Islands.

“It’s highly possible that we can have a fire here,” said General Manager Mark Lombard.  

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