VANCOUVER COAST MOUNTAIN
searching for the last of the
GIANTS T
he forests of my childhood in Germany were tree farms with neatly aligned trees of the same species, the same shape and size. When I came to British Columbia I was fascinated by the wild rainforest. Walking into it was like entering an ocean of endless shades of green: mosscovered branches, myriads of twigs, needles and leaflets, beams of filtered light, old trees toppled over, young ones growing on decomposing wood. Seemingly a chaos, it served well to hide the forest’s largest inhabitants. I was in awe when I first stood in front of one of these hidden giants, an enormous Douglas-fir in North Vancouver’s Lighthouse Park. I had to crane my neck to follow its massive straight trunk rising through the canopy of smaller trees to scrape the clouds above. Trees are among the oldest living things on earth. Bristlecone pines in the high mountains of Nevada and California have been documented to reach ages of over 5,000 years. Trees here in British Columbia may live up to 2,000 years, which is not as impressive until one considers that this still equals 100 generations on the human time scale. Even though our trees are younger than the stunted bristlecone pines, the mild and moist
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WILD COAST MAGAZINE
climate here allows them to grow into giants. Trees can grow to 80 metres tall, the height of a 20-storey building. Just like a multi-storey highrise, they provide ample living room. A diversity of fauna and flora inhabit the different levels of these trees.
I
n the second half of the 19th century Vancouver turned into a rapidly growing city. The pace of logging accelerated to provide wood for buildings. The tall straight trees were also very popular on the world market. The slopes of lower Hollyburn Mountain were logged until the 1950s. Grouse Mountain and the Capilano watershed were also extensively logged and in addition suffered from major fires. Artifacts from past logging activities can be found to this day; stumps with springboard notches, a maze of corduroy ‘skid’ roads and abandoned, rusted boilers. Historic photos of the time show entire hillsides bare of trees with just stumps left behind. It is nothing less than astonishing how quickly the forest recovered in just 50 years. But one only has to take a hike in the forest to see the difference between second growth and old growth. Old growth is much more diverse than second growth. There is a mix of tree species of different ages and sizes,
WINTER/SPRING 2016
including snags and dead trees. The canopy is multilayered and open where old trees are tumbled over. This diverse environment supports a great variety of animal and plant species. In 1926, Ernest Cleveland, the provincial water comptroller and first chief commissioner of the Greater Vancouver Water District, recognized that an intact watershed was mandatory to supply the growing population of Vancouver with clean drinking water, and so he prohibited logging in the North Vancouver watersheds. The dam at Capilano Reservoir is named after this early protector of old-growth forests. After Cleveland’s death in 1952, logging in Seymour Valley resumed, but was finally stopped in the early 1990s when activists recorded and made