SEA TO SKY MARINE TRAIL “That would never be realized – there’s no way we could get that many – but we think it is certainly possible to increase what we’re looking at by another two times. We think it would be pretty cool to get in the neighbourhood of 30 sites, and that would open up the whole area. The sites we have now are a little more oriented toward the north end. What we’re looking at now is expanding it into a whole island archipelago so that there are ways in which you can access Howe Sound from any location and go in any direction and go camping for week-long trips over four different years and not hit the same camping sites twice.”
H
owe Sound itself remains a study in contrasts – beautiful
mountain and ocean scenery, a mix of large and small islands to explore, three provincial parks and yet some of the worst industrial polluters on record. “Howe Sound didn’t have much recreation before. It was a toxic wasteland. You had some of the most egregious point sources of pollution in the land with Woodfibre and Port Mellon, but also Britannia Mine which was so lethal that if you put salmon in a cage near the mouth of Britannia Creek the salmon would be dead within hours,” McKeever says. Added to that was a chlorine plant on the Squamish waterfront. “They would routinely lose some of their product into the ecosystem so you’ve got chlorine coming in as well,” McKeever says. It was about as grim as it could get for a marine zone – between untreated sewage, chlorine spills, sulphates from both pulp mills at Port Mellon and Woodfibre and acid from the Britannia Creek copper mine, Howe Sound became labelled a marine dead zone.
“Even algae were hard to find,” writes Michelle Molnar, an environmental economist for the David Suzuki Foundation Ü. The region’s crab and prawn fisheries closed, salmon disappeared from the smaller streams, herring vanished and rockfish dropped to two percent of the historic population. Slowly, though, the picture began to change. Woodfibre closed and Port Mellon upped its game, adding cleaning technology in the late 1980s. Britannia Beach had a water treatment plant added to filter out heavy metals and eventually the ecology began to recover. Most evidence of the recovery may be underwater, but sometimes it reaches the surface. “Not too long ago I was out there with a group and we saw a small pod of killer whales swimming past the north end of Anvil Island, and that’s a pretty amazing thing to see right in close to this highly populated and previously heavily industrialized area. That speaks to the really cool ecological change that has the potential to happen in Howe Sound if we’re careful,” Allen says. “That’s one of the things we hope to encourage by getting as many marine trail places or recreational places as we can in Howe Sound.” McKeever adds that’s a key part of the puzzle. “ It’s important to inject a bit of recreation into the milieu to see if we can shift the values just a bit,” he says.
J
ust as the industrial backbone of Howe Sound seemed
to be broken, a new project is emerging. A Liquid Natural Gas plant is being proposed for the old Woodfibre site south of Squamish. The company, Woodfibre LNG Limited, sees it as the perfect location u
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bcmarinetrails.org SUMMER 2016
WILD COAST MAGAZINE
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