Older forests ‘as rare as sasquatches’

PITT RIVER VALLEY — Logging-truck driver Jack George talked about his sasquatch sighting and the disappearing old-growth forests as he brought another 75 tonnes of old-growth timber down a steep mountain road.

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.

Article courtesy Ken Kristian September 5, 2002


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