Dark Woods Forestry

Dark Woods Forestry

Dark Woods Forestry was a German family enterprise based in Canada. It was owned by a count

who bought up big tracks of land. I talked to people from this company over the years about

running the boundary lines on the property.

The company had a policy of retracing and remarking boundary lines every year, which cost a lot

of money. Their people believed in doing this systematically. I was hired by them to find some

of their boundary lines, one of which was sixteen miles long over the mountains.

It was quite a chore. A boundary had been marked just before the turn of the century with big

“durable” wooden posts. I only saw about two of these so-called “durable” wood posts by the

sixties and seventies. Most of them had deteriorated and rotted away or were knocked down. If

the loggers were working close to the boundary, they often knocked out some of them.

Dark Woods Forestry decided to expand one year and bought a large tract of land near Procter,

which is at the mouth of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake off the main Kootenay Lake. They

thought they could subdivide the land. The fellow that bought it thought that there might be some

timber on it. But when other people from the company looked at it, their timber people did not

think it was worthwhile trying to log it. So, they thought the land should be subdivided.

I was asked to look at doing the subdivision. I walked through the area and on the access roads.

The railway ran across the front of the property almost ruining the lake frontage. There was a

small strip of land between the railway and the lake, but it was not suitable for subdividing into

lots.

I recommended against subdividing the property. It is not very often that you run into a property

that you cannot do anything with. It was a real bummer and a poor investment. The company just

sold it to a chap who then tried to develop it on his own. But he ran into the same challenges that

I had identified. I was quite correct. There were some good parcels on the land, but not enough to

make it viable. I am certainly relieved that I had nothing to do with the later development and

was glad that my clients did not want to push ahead. There are some places that you simply

cannot develop.

I also did some work with Kootenay Forest Products, starting with some road surveys. In the old

days, roads were seen to benefit any property that the road went through and any properties lying

beyond. Then people started to get stricter with their legal rights. They would cut off access.

Under the Forestry Act, an established timber company was allowed to expropriate land. When

the Crown became a landowner, the government reserved one-twentieth of the area for road use.

The Crown did this because when land was being expropriated or sold, one could not know

where a public road might be needed on the property. But it was safe to assume that a road might

be needed at some point. When a decision was made to build a road, the Crown had the right to

take the land back for free. This right was used by the Highways Department to get roads

through properties and for the Forest Service to get a road through private land.

But the right created some difficult situations when we were surveying these roads. The owners

often did not want the road. But there was nothing they could do about it. As a surveyor, you

often had to go right back to what they called the Crown grant.

To trace the Crown grant, we often had to go back in ownership several years, sometimes two or

three owners back. I used to go to the Land Titles Office and do a search and bring out the record

and show people the situation that they would have to give up as much as one-twentieth of their

property for the road. Generally speaking, though, we never took that much land.

There was an interesting example involving a mining company, which had mined some property

and crushed ore that they stockpiled at Ainsworth. The company went bankrupt, and the lawyers

representing the claimants got involved. I got the job of measuring how much valuable ore might

be in this big pile. It was something like thirty or forty truckloads of ore—high-grade lead, gold,

and silver ore.

But it was not simple. We, as surveyors, could measure the size of the pile. But judging the

weight was something else. This ore’s value was measured in weight, not bulk. I remember

making a metal box about one-foot square. Then I took several samples and filled that box full. It

was exactly one cubic foot. I did not want to make it any bigger. It weighed more than a hundred

pounds as it was. So, I measured the pile, and then I weighed the material. Now I could tell the

lawyers in Vancouver the weight of the milled ore in that stockpile.

The funny thing about it is I never got paid for the work. The company was bankrupt with

apparently no money to pay anybody. But I foolishly undertook the work because I trusted

people when they said they would pay me. Then they found out that there was no money in that

account to pay me.

When you're in business, you have to learn to get the money up front. This was not common, but

it was far from unheard of. When I was working for a mining company or a mineral exploration

firm, I always had to make sure I was paid in advance. If I didn't, when the time came to pay me,

they would just say they did not have any money and there was no personal liability. You could

not get the president of the company or even a prospector working for a mining company to pay

the bills. There would be nobody willing to pay for it. I had to make sure that I had all my

expenses, at least, paid in advance—not necessarily the overhead but the basic out-of-pocket

expenses.