The magazine of outdoor recreation and adventure on Vancouver Island and coastal British Columbia
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The magazine of outdoor recreation and adventure on Vancouver Island and coastal British Columbia |
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By John Kimantas / March 2007 Travel far enough along Vancouver Island 's backroads and you're bound to bump into someone like Randy. Randy represents a certain breed: a type of man cut from a utilitarian cloth, where sturdy overalls, an old working man's shirt and long hair, sometimes pulled back in a pony tail, are standard equipment. He's part elderly hippy, part environmentalist, mostly just an old curmudgeon and, once you get to know him, a decent raconteur. You won't find Gor-Tex, just a good old yellow slicker. Everything he owns, which isn't much, is tried and true, and often so rebuilt you wonder if there are any original parts at all.
I pressed on to find a camping trailer set up at the very edge of a thick patch of alder. It was clear the owner had been here a while. I called out a welcome and Randy's head popped out of the camper, a tad suspiciously at first then more warmly as he realized I was just a hiker. He has his reasons to be suspicious. He and the forest companies don't get along too well, he confides, as he was involved in the 1991 protests that led to the protection of this part of the Walbran Valley in the Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park . But that's another story. Randy's most recent story began in November, 2006 when he took his camper out as far as he could go into the Walbran Valley to storm watch. He heard a big one was on the way. He was right.
In December two of his sons gathered together some friends, a truck and some chainsaws and cut to within three kilometres of the camper. But driving out was still a long ways away. And so there was Randy, sitting in his trailer in May, still waiting for the road to be cleared – the last casualty, if you can call him that, of the storms of 2006. The Lower Walbran Valley is one of two protected in Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park, known for its legendary giant trees, like the Carmanah Giant along Carmanah Creek's east bank, a sitka spruce that stands 96 metres (315 feet), about the height of a 30-storey building. But the largest is Maxine's Tree at the West Walbran Creek, the area I was out to visit this day. The fact that both the Carmanah Valley and Lower Walbran Valley are now protected might sound like a victory for conservationists, but it's open season for logging elsewhere in this region. This was brought home by the logging activity in the Upper Walbran Valley as I passed through. I waited for 30 minutes for a brief window to pass by a heli-logging operation. The speed at which they work is incredible – the helicopter will disappear over a mountain ridge, then return with a new load to drop every three minutes. I sat and waited next to my car directly under the helicopter's flight path as it used centrifugal force to swing the logs around the men, vehicles and equipment to drop the logs on a growing pile with a seemingly graceful ease. The friendly workers eventually waved me through, and laughed as I kicked up gravel in my rush to pass under a grappler before the helicopter arrived again. It's hard to begrudge these people a good living, and there has to be a balance somewhere between conservation and exploitation. The Wilderness Committee (formerly Western Canada Wilderness Committee) sent a team into the Upper Walbran Valley in June, and discovered two of the ten largest trees in Canada . Dubbed the Castle Giant and Tolkien Giant, the WC mounted a publicity campaign based on using these western redcedars to stop logging in the Upper Walbran. Perhaps the grove around these trees will be saved, but Randy, who has watched the Walbran closely since 1991, is skeptical for any improvements. “There's been no change,” he says of his observation of logging since that time. “Everything's done exactly the way it was done before – or worse.” Randy's presence in the valley was a stroke of luck for me, as he steered me towards the trailhead for the West Walbran Trail, an eight kilometre jaunt along the West Walbran Creek and through much of the best remaining old-growth forest on Vancouver Island. The trail is unofficial, created about 20 years ago by the Carmanah Forestry Society. It goes against the wishes of BC Parks that discourages travel into the Walbran and has even curtailed access into the Carmanah Valley, limiting formal trails to a short stretch along the Carmanah Creek while closing off the Upper Carmanah Valley and the south portion to the Carmanah Giant. It doesn't take long when walking the West Walbran Trail to see what the fight to save the valley was all about. We can all visit Cathedral Grove to see old trees, with the fenced walkways and trampled undergrowth. But a virgin forest isn't just large trees. It's an ecology about twice as lush as a tropical rainforest (ecologists will say it has more than twice the biomass). This means a vibrant, almost magical surrounding. I took pictures but never quite managed to capture the sheer majesty. I wandered along aging boardwalks to a waterfall cascading over several tiers, catching arguably the best photos of the day. The problem, I find, is big trees are so hard to photograph. You can never truly display how immense they are. They lose the proportion on film. Even seeing them it is hard to appreciate their height. Perhaps if there was a skyscraper nearby to compare. Imagine a 25-storey building with its views blocked by trees! I reached the major crossing of the West Walbran Creek, where a cable car once carried hikers across. That's long gone, and a newer log bridge lay in ruins along the shoreline. A ford is now the only way across – yet another example of how nothing man-made lasts for long in a rainforest. The trail north of the crossing means pushing through a great deal of scrub between stands of clear old forest, with occasional blowdown creating time-consuming and awkward diversions. Despite almost no hills it's not an easy trail. Other than seeing Randy I had yet to bump into another person in the valley. No surprise. The only other life was a furry face at the north trailhead. I clapped my hands to scare the bear away, then noticed three faces looking up at me. They stared at me for a moment, creating a furry-faced bouquet, then the two cubs ran straight up the tree with surprising speed and agility. The mother ran into the forest. My path was blocked; I had to backtrack to give the family time to regroup and move on. Ten minutes later when I returned there was no trace of the mother or cubs. On my way back I dropped into see Randy one last time. He was practicing using a slingshot against an old tarp, a skill honed to protect himself against an aggressive bear, he said. I thought winging a rock off its head might only incite something worse, but I held my tongue. On my way in I had passed a group of loggers with chainsaws clearing the trees off the Walbran Main. On my drive out they were gone and the path open. I considered going back to tell Randy the route was clear. But I didn't. I figured he was in no hurry to leave, and a way out might not necessarily be good news for him. I left him be. This article originally appeared in More Living Magazine. |
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I heard Randy before I met him, and right away I knew what I would find. I was walking along the end of Walbran Main deep in the heart of the Lower Walbran Valley, just about eight kilometres from the coast at Bonilla Point – about as close as you can get on foot to the West Coast without pushing into the backcountry. Here the logging road becomes impassable, overgrown and rutted, with alders starting to push up into the old right-of-way. I was looking for the start of the West Walbran Trail, and figured I would start from the end and work my way backwards to find the trailhead. I might have thought I was at the end of the road already if I hadn't heard a stereo pounding out an old Bob Dylan protest tune somewhere up ahead. The music couldn't have been more apt for the person I found. 
The storms that November laid havoc upon the coast, devastating places like Stanley Park in Vancouver and knocking down thousands of trees along the West Coast Trail. It also made the Walbran logging main impassable. And since the end of the road is deactivated – that is, no longer required for logging – there was no rush to clear it. 