One of Victoria's 100-ton log hawg's.

Primeval Lessons From First Nations Foresters By Ingmar Lee Research on Canada's Tribal Land Shows Use and Care For Land

At any moment the most monstrous of industrial machinery, the full 100-ton-loaded, off-road Pacific logging truck could come roaring toward you with its load of enormous ancient logs stacked twice as high as the truck. The on-rushing beast takes up the entire road. It stops your heart. The rule of the road is that might is right and barring any nearby pullout, your immediate and only survival option is the ditch. The deal on these public-financed roads is that if you get stuck there, or worse, the log-hauler will back up and pull you out.

Krista and I are headed out beyond the exhausted, belching, forest-consuming pulp-mill of Port Alice, the farthest community reachable by blacktop on the island. There are still 100 kilometres of active logging road to travel to get to the Pacific Ocean where we intend to commence a research expedition to the remotest and wildest corner of Vancouver Island. Going against the grain of voracious timber extraction, we stuggle on in my old beater Volvo, Veronica, with hearts in mouth. On into the dust-choking onslaught of big logging. We face a rotation of trucks which are hauling out of East Creek, out through the gutted Klaskish valley. The trucks continue to move along the wasted Klaskino Inlet and out to the Mahatta River log-dump where they unload into Quatsino Sound and head back for more.

It is truly heartbreaking to see these trucks loaded with 1,000-year-old yellow cedar from the highlands of the East Creek valley, the 85th of Vancouver Island's 91 primary watersheds to be roaded and logged in 150 years of massive industrial logging. The primeval forests of the Klaskish Valley, immaculate until 1997, have already been destroyed by Interfor. And just last year an incredibly steep mainline was punched from there into East Creek. Now another unconscionable assault on our island's magnificent wilderness is in full swing – the move into East Creek.

The East Creek valley is an intact primeval ecosystem and contains an elk herd, wolves, cougar and bears. Marbled murrelets nest in its ancient moss-laden trees and six species of salmon run up its crystal-clear streams. But it is so remote and so far from the general public radar screen that this vicious crime against nature is being perpetrated virtually unchecked. In our wildest dreams, we hope that our efforts at East Creek might somehow help protect this jewel of wilderness from the depredations of the planet's  most voracious logging corporations.
We launch our kayaks into the robin-egg blue waters of Klaskino Inlet which gets its colour from white marble silt carried by streams into the Pacific’s salt water. It’s here that we begin the five-hour paddle to the Brooks Peninsula where we plan to set up our base camp. Soon the clanking roar of the log-hogs begins to dissipate and is superseded by the sounds and silence of nature. Nevertheless, it's still a long way to our destination of real wilderness.

Gradually we pass under the flanks of Yaky Kop Mountain and reach Tsowanachs, an ancient, now abandoned Quatsino village site. All that remains of this village are middens of deep shell berms that outline the old house footprints, which are all growing over with thimbleberry bushes. Its ideal location behind a chain of islets has protected the sandy beachfront from the Pacific storms, but the entire landscape surrounding the village has been brutally stripped of trees. Directly across the inlet looms one of Vancouver Island's most disgusting logging obscenities, Weyerhaeuser's Red Stripe Mountain, better known as 'Road Stripe'. Its flanks are completely roaded and denuded from peak to beach.

There are three abandoned villages sites that are known about in this area between the north Brooks Peninsula and Quatsino Sound. Tsowanachs, as well as the village on the north side of Klaskino Inlet at Side Bay have had their surrounding forests ruined by the insatiable clearcutting. The third village site, called Klaskish, lies at the base of the Brooks Peninsula near the East Creek estuary. Klaskish and the forested land base that sustained it has thus far been spared the axe.

We plan to do a reconnaissance of the forests of East Creek and the Klaskish village environs, looking for Culturally Modified Trees. CMT's are living heritage trees, which show evidence of usage by traditional First Nations who once lived in the area. Our project is to wander through the forests and drill increment bore samples of select CMT's which we might find. By counting the rings in the calluses that grow across the barkstrip, or plank-split wounds, we can get an idea of when people last lived in these forests -- and how far and wide they travelled through them. So little is known about this village, and there is a lot to learn from the amazing story that is written in these CMT's.

As we paddle around Heater Point and out into the unobstructed Pacific Ocean swells, the hideous Red Stripe Mountain finally disappears behind us. We set our bearings on Mount Doom, in the centre of the Brooks promontory. And as we paddle a porpoise surfaces, and a raft of curious sea otters bob their whiskered heads in our direction before slipping under the sea to swim away. Few people in today’s world will ever again have the chance to experience the Earth's magnificent wilderness. It is disappearing so fast.

We pass beyond the Cutting Edge, that point where modern civilization and so-called progress stops. We are now heading out into a pristine, primordial place. Before us stretches that rarest and most precious of Vancouver Island’s vistas, an unobstructed forested landscape as far as the eye can see in every direction. But now there's a difference in how it's seen. There's a sea-change in consciousness moving from one world to this wild and lonesome place. With all Babylon blasting behind, and the wondrous whelm of wilderness ahead, we press on, brought directly into the moment. Entering into the planet primeval, in which we seem so genetically, if not instinctually familiar, our moment is suspended in these gentle ocean undulations, juxtaposed in vulnerability and survival, and haunting, fearsome and mysterious beauty. How distant it is, so increasingly rare and alien to us, that we look at it as though we originated from somewhere else.

But people lived here in the distant past, in wilderness, as did we all, and did so as fully functioning participants in the ecological processes of the land and sea. Native civilization persisted here harmoniously for millennia. We have come here to discover some of the story of their tenure which is hidden very subtly, deep in these forests.

After a couple of hours of paddling down the shores of Brooks Bay we pass out of the ocean swells into the calm waters behind MacDougall Island and glide silently up to the beach at the Klaskish village site. This is where we will stay for the next two weeks. We pull the kayaks right up into the forest behind the wall of green foliage that backdrops the beach.

The forest floor bears the compactions of the press of bare-feet passing to and fro over centuries. The glittering shell middens piled against the walls of the long-lost houses, the only material evidence of their time, are gradually leaching their calcium back into the clam flats beyond the beach from where they were gathered. As anyone does who tends a place for sustenance, the mud flats in front of the beach have been cleared of boulders, which might have otherwise interfered with the clam harvest. Next to the beach, a small river flows from a lake beyond, which provides fresh water and the annual Sockeye salmon run that nourished the village.

Klaskish village is perfectly located, too, with easy access to the bountiful sea and excellent protection from the violent Pacific storms. The pebble beach allowed a large canoe to be easily slid up as though on smooth ball-bearings. Surrounding the village grows an ample cedar forest woodlot, from where the other necessities of existence could be gathered.

There are long views out along the coast of Brooks Bay. Mount Harris, a nunatack which protruded free of ice during the last glaciation about 10,000 years ago, rises behind us. The base of this steep mountain is cloaked in thick forest, which melds into a belt of wind-blasted krummholz trees with elevation gain, and its peak is capped in rock.

We set up our tent and prepare a hanging food cache as we've seen a large and glowing purple pile of poop on the beach. The Huckle, the Salal and the Salmon berries are out in their full voluptuousness, so we don't need to worry about hungry bears, but we hang our food just in case. One dreams of this beach laden with ocean-going cedar canoes pulled up to the forest; the big cedar houses and the smoke and hubbub of village life echoing across the bay. Although we are totally alone, there's still somehow a lingering sense of community, and there's a comfortable coziness and intimacy about the place. The sun is out and the silence is deep as we strip off naked to swim in the warm water and then stretch out on the beach just to soak it up. Later we get a fire going and cook while a seal swims languidly back and forth nearby. While washing in the ocean, phosphorescence sparkles in the lingering luminescence of the sunset.

Yellow cedar abounds. It's unusual to see these yellow cedar trees so close to sea level, and in this area every tree has been bark-stripped. We don't know if the early bark gatherers had a preference for red or yellow cedar bark, but this forest has been meticulously stripped, and all the trees are still alive and well. The people who gathered this bark knew true sustainability, and during their watch these forests exploded in biodiversity.

The trail passes through a grove of enormous ancient red cedars, one we measured at 14 feet in diameter. That makes in the eighth largest cedar tree on the planet. The tree has a hollow burnt out centre which has standing headroom inside for ten people. I sheltered in that tree once during a blasting storm that blew in off the Pacific. A friend and I spent a pleasant day in there waiting out the storm by a little fire inside the tree, stoked by sheltered bone dry wood.

Big Trans-National Logging is on its way here, on its grotesque corporate mission: invasion, occupation and massacre. We think there is a lot to be learned about true civilization here in this final vestige of Vancouver Island's, even the world's, primeval forest. We want to stop this monster before that opportunity is gone forever. Being in this magnificent ancient forest so replete with subtle hints of historic human involvement, we know that something precious is missing here. As much as we marvel at its awesome beauty, we are only strangers in here; in this silence, stumbling around with our academic objective and our quantifying, measuring instruments.

Dreadfully, at times we can hear snippets of the rumble and roar of big logging on its way here at the very moment. All around this landscape we have found traces of this gracious civilization which was so loving and considerate of its forests. Human beings have lived
on this land even as the glaciers of the last ice age began receding away from the ocean. They were participants in the development of this incredible efflorescence.  Some 200 years ago, as our dendo-chronological data is telling us, they vanished from their land. And now the forest mourns for the loss of its human element.

Ingmar Lee has spent 21 years as a professional treeplanter, crawling through British Columbia’s stumpfields. He would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and participation of the Quatsino Nation who allowed Lee and fellow researchers to travel on their land. Lee can be reached at ingmarz@gmail.com.