November 15, 2018

Wild Times by Joe Foy

My mom says it when she wants to make the point that something is rare, scarce, or non-existent. “As rare as hen’s teeth,” she says. That pretty much describes the number of unprotected intact valleys remaining in the Lower Mainland.

If a valley wasn’t granted park protection in this most populated part of the province, then it probably has a network of logging roads side-hill gouging its length and breadth and has had its wild forest logged from stem to stern.

Don’t believe me? Check out Google Earth. In the mountains and valleys of southwest BC you’ll see the once vibrant cloak of old-growth forests are now a tattered quilt of clearcuts and tree plantations strung together along a tangle of eroding logging roads. Here and there in parks the landscape remains mercifully free of logging and roads.

The abundance of blasted landscapes has had an effect on local wildlife. Grizzly bears, who require roadless landscapes, have been pushed back to the fringes of the region. Spotted owls, once numbering in the hundreds, have dwindled to numbers in the wild you could count on your fingers – of one hand.

But still, as surprising as it sounds, the Lower Mainland is in much better shape than many other populated areas of Earth. We still have enough wild nature left to put our Humpty Dumpty landscape back together again.

One of the first things we need to count and then protect is our remaining intact valleys. These precious survivors must be conserved at all costs if we are going to rebuild natural wild abundance. One of the places we can start is in the Manning and Skagit parks region. There are some wonderful opportunities to protect several intact unprotected valleys there. Hikers will know the name Silverdaisy Peak, the destination of a hiking trail that starts in Manning Park’s Sumallo Grove. Most of the Silverdaisy Valley is in the “Manning Donut Hole,” an unprotected swath in the middle of parkland. If our government intends to protect Silverdaisy Valley, they better hurry, because BC Timber Sales wants to log it out starting next year. 

26 Mile Valley, also in the Donut Hole, is also being targeted by BC Timber Sales – which is, by the way, an arm of our BC government.

The adjoining region has an abundance of popular hiking trails, such as Ghost Pass and Eton Lake, whose beautiful valleys are not yet protected.

This all adds up to an amazing treasure trove of intact valleys right next to two popular provincial parks – for the life of me I can’t understand why the government doesn’t act now to protect them all. After all, they are as rare as hen’s teeth and getting rarer every day in today’s battered and depleted world. 

To see original article in the Watershed Sentinel click here.