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page b3+B4 // the jasper local // issue 141 // friday, march 15, 2019
FEATURE // STORY AND PHOTOS BY BOB COVEY
BEHIND THE CURTAIN
PYRAMID BENCH TOUR SHO A DIVERSE FOREST’S FUTUR The crunch of sticks, needles and pine branches are constantly underfoot as Dave Argument walks along a haul road high above the Jasper townsite on the Pyramid Bench. The spur road, which connects to the Cabin Lake Fire Road and provides access to a 60 hectare cut block skirting Hibernia Lake, wasn’t here several months ago.
like this, take out everything that’s merchantable and prepare the site for replanting,” Argument said. In this case, to help with natural forest regeneration, loggers are leaving 40 cubic metres of coarse woody debris on the forest floor per hectare. Anything in excess of that which is not merchantable gets piled and burned. Wherever possible, all of the non-fire-prone species, such as aspen and Douglas Fir, are retained. “It’s not going to be too long before things
potential—has been met. O after more than three mon the harvest stopped. All of cut blocks—including the o at the most westerly point o project, near the Miette Riv where a wildfire would hav direct path to the commun have been cleared. The bul remaining work involves h the timber out and reclaim roads.
Now that the flammable ca has been knocked down, A
Neither was the cut block. On March 6, The Jasper Local was part of a media delegation which toured the vast changes to the forest on the Pyramid Bench. The tree harvesting is all part of Parks Canada’s fire protection project: 500 hectares of dead and dying trees in mountain pine beetle affected forest west of the Municipality of Jasper are being removed. Over the background sounds of logging trucks, loaders and forwarders—part of an arsenal of more than a dozen heavy machines being used to remove, collect and haul away up to 30 truckloads of mature pine and spruce trees per day— Argument, Parks Canada’s resource conservation manager, explains that if this were a logging operation in a working forest, things would look a lot different. “Typically they’d go through a block
“It looks like a cut block now with all this stuff on the ground, but I’m actually excited about where it’s going to go moving forward. Just the bird diversity alone is going to be interesting.”
start to green up,” Arsenault said. “You’re going to see these forwarding trails will be detectable for a little while but there won’t be a long term impact.” The haul roads, of course, will leave a longer lasting scar, but balancing out that impact is the fact that the objective of the project—to remove the red and dead pines, with their canopy fuels and crown-fire
and his colleagues can bre easier come summer.
“A fast moving crown fire c