Summary

• The Rainbow, Jordan and Frisby valleys in British Columbia’s rare inland temperate rainforest are home to endangered species and ancient trees.
• Two logging companies hold licences to log in the old-growth valleys, while the government agency BC Timber Sales has operating areas there.
• A 2019 proposal to permanently protect 10,500 hectares in the three valleys as a provincial park has gained renewed interest as Revelstoke city council announced in February that it supports increased conservation of the critically endangered inland temperate rainforest.

We’re trying out staff-written summaries. Did you find this useful? YesNo

Toby Spribille trickles water onto a rare dark grey lichen that looks like a crumpled piece of paper someone set on fire and left to smoulder. It’s a bright summer day in the Rainbow Valley rainforest, in British Columbia’s southern interior. Sunbeams slant through ancient cedar trees as tall as 20-storey buildings. Moss unfurls across the forest floor like bright green shag carpet. But the small, shrivelled lichen on a stunted hemlock tree is what Spribille, a scientist, is eager to show us: smoker’s lung lichen. “It looks a little bit like the pictures on the warning packages of cigarettes,” he says with dark humour, noting the lung lichen is perfectly healthy even though it’s almost black.

As Spribille mimics rainy weather with his water bottle, the lichen begins to uncrumple, as if it’s waking up and stretching. Despite its name, smoker’s lung lichen thrives only when the air is pure. Spribille is amazed to find the lichen, which is at risk of extinction in Canada and other countries, so far south. He peers at the lichen’s underside: ashy black with irregular white polka dots. The specimen, he declares, is “utterly spectacular.”

Spribille, who teaches at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, is one of the world’s leading lichenologists. He’s tall and sturdy, with a greyish blonde ponytail, black-rimmed glasses and the authoritative enthusiasm of David Attenborough narrating a film. Late one night in 2017, Spribille had been surfing Google Earth the way some people binge Netflix. For hours, he searched for somewhere he could study lichens in B.C.’s globally rare inland temperate rainforest. Lying in scattered valleys in the Columbia and Rocky mountains, the rainforest is home to trees more than 1,000 years old and harbours an extraordinary diversity of species, including the world’s only deep-snow caribou. 

But all Spribille saw in valley after valley were checkerboards of logging clearcuts and fragments of forest too small to support many sensitive species.

Then his cursor landed on a dark green U-shaped valley about 40 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., a resource and tourism town in the Columbia Mountains. As Spribille zoomed in, he saw the trees had conspicuously large crowns; he guessed they were cedars at least half a century old. Silvery streams meandered through the valley, which had no clearcuts and no roads. “Oh my word, this must be quite the valley,” he remembers thinking. “I just couldn’t believe it.” The valleys on each side, folded into the mountains like green origami, were also unlogged and unloaded, a rarity in a landscape fractured by decades of industrial forestry.

The discovery of three adjacent intact old-growth valleys has led to increasing calls to halt logging and protect the area once and for all. For Spribille and others, it’s clear the valleys are utterly unique.

When Spribille and other biologists took a small motor boat across the Revelstoke hydro-electric reservoir the following year and hiked into two of the valleys, Rainbow and Frisby, they found ancient forests so luxuriant they seemed to be from primeval times. Grove after grove of enormous red cedar trees stretched unbroken for kilometres. Seas of feathery ferns lapped at their waists. Supersized skunk cabbage leaves brushed their chests and thickets of spiky devil’s club towered over their heads.

Streams fed by mountain icefields cooled and moistened the valleys, boosting biological diversity. One mycologist found 112 species of mushrooms in the Frisby Valley — in just five hours. On a single trip, a botanist documented 49 species of mosses and 182 species of vascular plants. Biologists found habitat suitable for two dozen bird, reptile and mammal species at risk of extinction — wolverine, grizzly bear, short-eared owl and western painted turtle among them. 

Spribille and a colleague documented hundreds of lichen species, including rare and at-risk species with evocative names like Methuselah’s beard and cryptic paw. “We also found species new to science,” Spribille says. “They haven’t been named yet.”

Spribille’s latest research trip to the Rainbow Valley, in July 2023, was organized by the Valhalla Wilderness Society, a non-profit group that aims to protect Canada’s vanishing inland temperate rainforest and its wildlife. These incredibly rare rainforests grow far from the ocean and exist in only three places on the planet: Russia’s far east, southern Siberia and here, in British Columbia.

In 2019, Valhalla put together a proposal to permanently protect 10,500 hectares of rare and undisturbed ecosystems in the Rainbow Valley and adjacent Frisby and Jordan valleys as a provincial park. But the inland temperate rainforest valleys, which sit on Crown land, remain unprotected and are open to industrial logging.

Two forestry companies, Downie Timber Ltd. and Stella-Jones Inc., hold operating licences in the valleys, according to the B.C. forests ministry. The provincial government agency BC Timber Sales, which manages about one-fifth of the province’s allowable cut, also has operating areas in the three valleys. 

Neither of the forestry companies responded to The Narwhal’s emails and phone calls, while the B.C. Forests Ministry says there are no plans for BC Timber Sales to log “at this time,” with both private and government-run operations currently avoiding harvesting here. 

But the ministry also says the province has not recommended the three valleys for park protection. That’s led to a renewed push to protect the area. 

“I cannot single-handedly influence British Columbia forest policy,” Spribille says, adding he doesn’t see that as his job as a scientist. “But one of the things I can do is highlight areas where there are jewels still intact.” The Rainbow and Frisby valleys are two such ecological gems, he says. “There’s no reason on earth why we should go in and log.”

Spribille says it’s likely rare and endangered lichens, and possibly species new to science, will also be found in the Jordan Valley. Satellite imagery shows the Jordan Valley has the same attributes as Frisby and Rainbow; it’s cooled by icefields, has large tree tops indicative of ancient trees and is unlogged and almost entirely unroaded. But unlike Rainbow and Frisby, which scientists can easily hike into from the Revelstoke reservoir, the Jordan Valley’s old-growth inland temperate rainforest is hard to access.

While provincial support to protect the region remains elusive, Valhalla’s efforts were recently given a boost by Revelstoke city council, which passed a resolution in February pointing out the inland temperate rainforest is under-represented in protected area networks and saying it supports increased conservation efforts for the Rainbow-Jordan wilderness and the inland temperate rainforest. Ktunaxa Nation council also supports Valhalla’s proposal to protect the three valleys.

Revelstoke council noted local governments throughout B.C. “bear direct responsibility and expense for responding to the downstream impacts of deforestation,” acknowledging old-growth forests provide benefits like climate regulation and mitigation, fresh water and biodiversity conservation — and reduce the risk of hazards such as wildfires, flooding and landslides. At the annual Union of BC Municipalities meeting in September, Revelstoke will ask other municipalities to support increased protection for the Rainbow-Jordan wilderness and the inland temperate rainforest.

B.C. rainforest is home to world’s only deep-snow caribou 

A century ago, Canada was home to an estimated 1.3 million hectares of inland temperate rainforest. Today, less than five per cent of the core, old forest still stands. So little of the ancient rainforest remains that scientists and ecologists warn the ecosystem is close to collapse.

That collapse has already begun. The International Union for Conservation of Nature — the global authority on the status of the natural world and measures necessary to safeguard it — lists B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest as “critically endangered,” posing existential risks to wildlife. Biologists are building fake old-growth trees to save endangered rainforest bats, while pregnant deep-snow caribou are helicoptered to mountain-top pens until their newborn calves are old enough to stand a better chance of survival in the fractured landscape. 

B.C.’s deep-snow caribou get their name because in late winter they eat hair lichens they reach by splaying their feet to walk on top of metres-deep snow. But as Canada’s inland temperate rainforest has disappeared, so have the caribou that depend on the rainforest for shelter and food. “Not enough has been protected,” Amber Peters, a biologist who works for the Valhalla Wilderness Society, tells The Narwhal. Peters, who guides a reporter and photojournalist through the Rainbow Valley, has a no-nonsense attitude and an amiable yet commanding presence. She carries a can of bear spray clipped to the front of her backpack, near a two-way radio and an emergency satellite communication device.

As Peters picks her way through a patch of devil’s club toward a sun-splashed grove of giant cedars, she stoops and peers at something on the ground. “This is some scat that we just found and it looks like caribou poo,” she says as the rest of us catch up. “And that would be amazing.” She sets down her pack and pulls out a clear plastic bag, kneeling on the ground as she gingerly moves aside devil’s club stems lined with tiny spikes as sharp as needles. “It’s my most glamorous scat-collecting moment,” she jokes.

The scat, which resembles chocolate-covered almonds, is well-camouflaged among oat ferns, foam flowers, bunchberry and small clusters of brown needles shed by the cedars. It’s too old to show the grooves that indicate caribou scat; Peters will take it home and freeze it until genetic analysis can be done. “Why is this amazing?” she continues. “Because as far as we know, there are only six [animals] left in the Frisby-Boulder-Queest herd. So to find them in this park proposal area would be really important.” 

Eight deep-snow caribou herds in southeast B.C. have winked out over the past 20 years, including the Frisby-Boulder-Queest herd, which biologists say is too small to survive. The remaining ten herds are on the cusp of extinction.

“A major part of this ecosystem is the deep-snow mountain caribou, which we have nowhere else on earth,” Peters says. “And these animals are showing us what’s happening to the ecosystem with their decline. That’s why we call them an indicator species, or a canary in a coal mine.”

When the group takes a lunch break, Valhalla cofounder and co-director Craig Pettitt lies back contentedly next to an enormous cedar tree, half-hidden by ferns. The vegetation is so dense it muffles sounds; the fluting song of a nearby Swainson’s thrush seems very far away. Pettitt, a former parks ranger, wildland firefighter and ski-touring company owner, has seen large swaths of ancient cedar trees clearcut in the inland temperate rainforest, including in critical habitat for deep-snow caribou herds. “The whole past philosophy has been to cut them all down because they aren’t worth anything for lumber,” he says, referring to old cedars that are often hollow. 

The cedars, which are often used for fence posts and garden mulch, make excellent wildlife habitat when they are left standing or topple over from age or in a windstorm. Bears den in their root bowls, bats roost in crevices in thick, sloughing bark and birds nest in their foliage. When the cedars fall, they become bridges across streams and creeks for animals like bears and bobcats, as well as nurse logs that create microhabitats for insects and plants. Pettitt says the B.C. government’s primary focus on lumber values doesn’t take wildlife into account. “They don’t look at species diversity.”

Logging isn’t imminent, but clear protection plans aren’t either: government  

Despite the BC NDP government’s promise to safeguard old-growth forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss, Peters says the government’s response to Valhalla’s park proposal has been lukewarm at best. Last September, Peters, Pettitt and two other Valhalla representatives met with B.C. Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Randene Neill and other government representatives. 

Peters says Neill told them to contact B.C. Forests Minister Ravi Parmar to discuss the park proposal, and that they tried, twice, but were first deferred then ignored. In an emailed response to questions, the Forests Ministry says it is aware of Valhalla’s “rich and unique” proposal for a provincial park and values the group’s work in identifying, mapping and researching the region. The ministry says it looks forward to engaging and partnering with First Nations and other governments and “working with all.” It notes the province has not recommended the three valleys for provincial park protection, saying the government looks forward to engaging and partnering with First Nations and other governments and “working with all” to explore conservation opportunities “as they arise.”

The Sinixt, Ktunaxa, Okanagan (Syilx) and Secwépemc all consider parts of the Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan their territories. “Because of these very complex overlapping First Nations territory claims, we leave that to government-to-government negotiations to resolve,” Peters says. “Our role is to bring the ecological significance of the area to the public.”

In an emailed statement, Ktunaxa Nation council notes Valhalla’s park proposal aligns with the recommendations of B.C.’s old-growth strategic review, saying “conserving rare, old-growth ecosystems is essential to ensure ʔa·kxam̓is q̓api qapsin (all living things) continue to thrive in ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa for generations to come.” Marilyn James, Autonomous Sinixt Smum iem matriarch, says protection “is mandatory to study and preserve what these ancient forests have yet to reveal.” James points to the value of the three valleys for old-growth forests, at-risk species and species new to science. “These are areas that need to be preserved, that are the very root and foundation of not only creating corridors, but critical habitat for very threatened, red-listed species,” she says in an interview.

Jarred-Michael Erickson, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Sinixt Confederacy, says he will need to have a conversation with his full council before deciding whether to support protection for the three valleys, adding the tribes “tend to support” initiatives to protect caribou and the inland temperate rainforest. The Sinixt Confederacy was created by the confederated tribes following a landmark court decision recognizing the tribes’ rights in Canada. (The Narwhal also reached out to Okanagan and Secwépemc nations, which were not able to respond before publication time.) 

The Rainbow-Jordan wilderness park proposal is one of three park proposals Valhalla has developed to protect important areas of the inland rainforest that remain open to industrial logging and other development. “We’re focusing on the richest remnants that are still intact of this very rare ecosystem type,” Peters explains, “but also on creating landscape connectivity and including these valley bottom, very old and ancient inland temperate rainforests which have almost totally been left out of our parks system.”

Although the B.C. government worked with Valhalla and First Nations to create a large conservancy about 50 kilometres southeast in 2023, that’s not enough to prevent ecosystem collapse, according to Peters and other biologists. The Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan valleys are especially valuable because they represent intact and connected ecosystems, from mountain top to valley bottom, making the area more resilient to the impacts of climate change, Peters says. “There are really steep mountainous areas that mean that you don’t get really hot, beating sun in the valleys. And so they’re cooler, and they maintain a deep snow pack later in the year, and they maintain moisture. They’re incredibly important.” 

In an emailed response to questions, the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship says voluntary old-growth logging deferrals in the valleys “are not permanent protections” and additional planning work is underway to develop long-term solutions. The Rainbow-Jordan park proposal and Valhalla’s other two park proposals are not currently recommended for protections but “may be considered as part of future recommendations,” the ministry says. The ministry also points to a collaborative habitat planning initiative for caribou that includes parts of the inland temperate rainforest. The initiative seeks to identify habitats that could benefit from increased conservation efforts, “ranging from improved management to protection,” the ministry says, noting specific areas have not yet been identified.

Rare and endangered lichens found in three unlogged sister valleys 

Back in the Rainbow Valley, Spribille bounds from lichen to lichen and plant to plant, peering at the lichens through a magnifying lens with an LED light that hangs from his neck on a lanyard. He stops near a shiny, four-leafed plant and announces he’s just found a plant that hasn’t previously been documented in the Frisby and Rainbow valleys. The plant, a herb commonly known as boreal bedstraw or northern wild licorice, is a species of concern in B.C. Until that moment, Spribille says the southernmost known locality of the plant was the Seymour Valley, some 60 kilometres away. 

He pulls out a hammer and chisel from his pack and crouches down beside a large boulder with a thick overcoat of vibrant green mosses. A bare patch of the rock looks like it’s covered in small black dots. With the magnifying glass, Spribille sees “a world of its own,” which he later describes as a “miniature landscape of tiny mosses and lichens that have their own peaks and valleys and fruiting features and a thousand different hues of green.” He chips off a small piece and pops it into one of the brown paper lunch bags he carries for samples, labelling it with the GPS coordinates.

Then Spribille’s eye lands on a cluster of orange tufts on the rock. Magnified, they look like the tops of truffula trees from the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax. The tufts aren’t rare, and they aren’t lichens, Spribille explains. They’re a special group of algae called trentepohlia, or golden hair. Their genomes and the way they replicate DNA — “some of the very basic stuff about how they do life” — is unusual, Spribille says. “They’ve got very, very strange biology.” The golden hairs can photosynthesize — converting sunlight into energy — but they can also feed themselves by breaking down decaying organic matter, the way fungi and bacteria do. No one has ever been able to sequence or annotate their genomes. Spribille chips off a sample to bring back for one of his students to study.

On earlier research expeditions in the Frisby Valley, Spribille found rare greater green moon lichen — which depends on old-growth forests with pristine air quality — and cryptic paw lichen, a federally threatened species strongly associated with old-growth cedar and hemlock forests. Cryptic paw, which has fruiting bodies that face downward like the pads of a dog’s paw, is part of a group of species mostly found in rainforests in the southern hemisphere. In Canada, it grows only in B.C.

In the Frisby Valley, hiking near waterfalls that divide the upper and lower parts of the valley, Spribille and a colleague were stunned to see large colonies of Methuselah’s beard lichen, also known as old man’s beard. The pale green lichen, which drapes from tree branches and shrubs like Christmas tinsel, is threatened or lost from most of its historic range. Only small fragments had previously been found anywhere in the inland temperate rainforest.

After spending time in the Rainbow and Frisby valleys, Spribille sometimes reflects on the 15 years he lived in Europe, where many ancient forests have disappeared. Germany’s Black Forest has become a mythological place, even though many of its habitats are gone. “I went to places that they considered their trophy remaining old-growth forests and they’re so sad. They have been completely, in some cases, reduced to very small, postage stamp sizes, or with the superimposing pollution on them they’ve lost all their lichens of any kind of conservation significance.”

British Columbia still has a chance to protect old-growth rainforests and rare habitats and lichens with conservation significance, Spribille says. He believes there might be species new to science in the three valleys that biologists haven’t had a chance to see. What they’ve found so far on brief research trips continues to astound and excite him. “I feel it’s our responsibility to report back to society about what the public needs to know.”

Without pausing for breath, he says, “there’s some stuff on that rock that I’m gonna grab real quick,” and dashes off.

Updated on March. 3, 2026, at 12:52 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct an error in a photo caption that misidentified Valhalla’s cofounder and co-director. He is Craig Pettitt not Craig Peters.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Two summers ago, biologist Cori Lausen was searching for highly endangered northern myotis bats near Revelstoke, British Columbia. The bats, which weigh little more than a loonie, look as fluffy as rabbits and have long, dark ears. Lausen and her team members slowly made their way up the heavily logged Columbia River Valley. Each evening as the sun set, once birds had settled into their nests for the night, they strung nets and waited. They caught and released a few bats, but not a single northern myotis. 

On the shores of the Kinbasket hydro reservoir, about 160 kilometres north of Revelstoke, Lausen and her team decided to make one last attempt. They walked across a causeway to a small island in the reservoir and placed their nets. Almost immediately, they caught a northern myotis.

The light-brown bat was a juvenile female, which indicated the species — dependent on old-growth trees — was reproducing in the area. Northern myotis bats roost and raise their pups in crevices under the thick, sloughing bark of old trees. Dozens of females congregate in larger crevices, taking turns to guard each other’s babies while colony members forage for insects like mosquitoes and spongy moths (formerly called gypsy moths). Lausen, director of bat conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, wondered if the species might have somehow adapted to roost in young trees after most of the region’s old-growth inland temperate rainforest disappeared.

She shaved off a tiny area between the bat’s shoulders. Using non-toxic surgical adhesive glue, she stuck on a teeny transmitter, hoping the bat would lead biologists to its maternal roost. The bat flew away, over the reservoir. That surprised Lausen; it was unusual for a northern myotis to be out in the open where it could more easily be spotted by an owl or hawk.

The researchers walked around the island, listening to the transmitter’s ever-fainter beeps. It seemed the bat, smaller than Lausen’s hand, had flown clear across the reservoir. The next night, a volunteer with a boat ferried two researchers out onto the water. The transmitter led them to the reservoir’s far shore. They hiked about 100 metres through a second-growth forest and found a small, solitary grove of old-growth cedar and hemlock trees that was home to a northern myotis bat colony.

“Now we know how to find old-growth patches,” Lausen says. “You track this bat that is dependent on old-growth. It’s been an eye opener.” 

Rare inland temperate rainforest heading for ecological collapse 

Old-growth patches are all that’s left of most of B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest. The ancient rainforest, found in valley bottoms drenched with rain and snow, is home to giant trees normally associated with coastal places like the Great Bear Rainforest, Clayoquot Sound and Fairy Creek. Only in two other places in the world — Russia’s far east and southern Siberia — does a temperate rainforest grow so far from the sea. 

A century ago, B.C. had an estimated 1.3 million hectares of inland temperate rainforest. Today, following decades of industrial logging and other disturbances — including flooding for hydro dams — fewer than 60,000 hectares of the core, old forest remain, according to researchers. A peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Land, found logging approvals in the inland temperate rainforest increased 40 per cent between 2020 and 2021 — even as the B.C. government promised to protect old-growth forests and at-risk ecosystems. 

The study’s authors concluded ecosystem collapse in the inland rainforest, an area of rich biodiversity, was possible within nine to 18 years. That collapse has already begun: mountain caribou herds that depend on the rainforest for food and shelter are disappearing, while scientists are rushing to document rare lichen species before they are lost. With less than five per cent of the core rainforest remaining, the study’s authors noted “full protection of remaining primary forest is especially warranted.” 

Northern myotis bats, which are federally listed as endangered, are found in many parts of Canada. They’ve been documented in different regions of B.C. According to the B.C. Conservation Data Centre, there’s a dearth of data on the size of the provincial population. Lausen says the bats’ inland temperate rainforest habitat is so badly eroded scientists aren’t sure how the bats are faring, or how successfully they’re able to reproduce in the region. “Are they still here?” she wonders. “Because if they’re still here, we should be trying to mitigate habitat loss.” 

The bats need all the help they can get. A deadly fungal disease called white-nose syndrome is moving westward and north. The disease, which has killed millions of bats in North America, is expected to render some bat species extinct. Detected in bats in Washington and Alberta, it’s thought to be only a matter of time before it spreads in B.C. The fungus grows on the bats’ noses, wings and bodies, waking them up from hibernation so they often starve to death by spring.

To help northern myotis bats in the inland temperate rainforest, Lausen and her team decided to try making imitation old-growth trees. “This is really all about a stopgap measure,” Lausen explains. “This isn’t a solution in any way. This is really just trying to buy time until the rest of the trees catch up and start to create some of these natural crevices they need, that are just not available in younger forests regenerating after logging.” 

On a blue-sky summer day, Lausen heads out to check on some of the fake old-growth. From Revelstoke, she drives south to a ferry that takes her across the Arrow Lakes reservoir. Travelling along a two-lane highway, toward a speck of a town called Beaton, she passes clear cuts and young, replanted forests. Lausen pulls off at a grassy track and parks a short distance from the highway in a clearing bright with wildflowers. The clearing is surrounded by scraggy young poplars, western hemlocks and thin Douglas firs with tangles of underbrush. “This whole area used to be a lovely forest,” Lausen says. “Over time, we’re just seeing less and less habitat available for bats to use.”

She points to a tree at the edge of the clearing. The trunk is about the height and diameter of a telephone pole. Following directions from Lausen’s team, a month earlier an arborist had lopped off all the branches, topped the tree and ringed it with a chainsaw to prevent sap from flowing. The aim is to force the newly killed tree into becoming a snag — natural bat-roosting habitat.

“I know it sounds weird, but literally we are killing trees because we’re trying to advance the production of snags,” says Lausen, who is wearing a necklace with a metal pendant in the shape of a bat. 

Growing up south of Calgary, Lausen lived in an old house with a little brown bat colony in the attic. Sometimes, a pup found its way into the family’s living space. Lausen’s mother locked herself and the kids in the bathroom while her father killed the tiny intruder. Lausen wondered why adults were scared of something so small and “cute and fluffy.” 

As a biology undergraduate student in Alberta, she worked on a bat research project. She was nipped on the hand by a big brown bat. “It was love at first bite,” she recalls. Most small mammal species have short lifespans and large litters, but the bat that bit her hand was older than Lausen. “Here are bats, living very old, having hardly any young, breaking all the rules. That was the eureka moment. … I just needed to know more about them. And I never looked back.” 

At first glance, the branchless tree doesn’t look like anything special. But fastened to it is a yellow “Wildlife Tree” sign that says, “This tree has been modified for use by bats.” A sheaf of thick brown plastic, 1.3-metres long, wraps around the trunk some distance from the ground. The plastic, called BrandenBark, is open a few centimetres at the bottom, allowing bats to squeeze under. If bats need to warm up they can stay on the sunnier side. If they’re hot, they can crawl to the shadier side. “We’re basically starting off small, throwing confetti to the wind, seeing what works, what doesn’t work,” Lausen explains. The Wildlife Conservation Society had already installed imitation bark in other places in the Columbia River Basin, with some success: endangered little brown bats were using it for roosts.

Attached to the wildlife tree trunk are four wood-framed trays with fine wire-mesh bottoms. Standing on her tiptoes, Lausen peers into a tray. With her index finger, she shuffles aside fir needles, white poplar fluff and crispy leaf fragments. “Oh yeah,” she says happily. “Bat guano.” 

Three pieces of guano, or poop, each about the size of a grain of rice, are difficult to spot. They look like mouse droppings, only shinier from bits of iridescent insect wings. Lausen fetches a stepladder from her truck and leans it against the tree. She snaps on a pair of latex gloves. Then she climbs up the ladder and picks up a leaf fragment. With the concentration of a curling player about to win a game, she slowly sweeps the largest dropping into an envelope. “That’s a tiny little prize,” she says with satisfaction.

The two smaller droppings might be from California myotis bats, meaning there could be two species present. She’ll send the guano to a lab in Nelson, B.C., for DNA analysis, hoping it will indicate northern myotis, formerly known as long-eared bats, are already using the structure.

Directed by Lausen’s team, a chainsaw-wielding arborist had also made sideways gashes in three other trees in the clearing — new “wildlife roosts” — to create little cavities for northern myotis and other bat species.

Efforts to help northern myotis bats come as scientists warn the planet is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event. Close to one million species are at risk of extinction, many within decades, according to a landmark global study that points to habitat destruction as a major culprit. In Canada, more than 5,000 wild species are at some risk of extinction. B.C., the country’s most biodiverse province, officially has more than 1,300 at-risk species. (More than 1,000 additional species meet provincial requirements for listing but have not yet been added, in part because more information is needed.) 

B.C. lacks stand-alone legislation to safeguard wildlife, so the vast majority of at-risk species, including northern myotis bats, receive no automatic protections. Canada’s Species At Risk Act only grants automatic protections to wildlife found on federal land — a scant one per cent of B.C. — as well as to migratory birds, fish and marine mammals. 

Bats play ‘huge role’ in healthy ecosystems 

Building fake old-growth trees might have been a nonstarter were it not for the discovery of an endangered Indiana bat maternity colony in a proposed firing range on the Fort Knox, Kentucky, military base. Like northern myotis bats, Indiana bats are tiny — they have pink lips and mouse-like ears — and typically roost under the sloughing bark of older trees. The U.S. Department of Defense turned to Replications Unlimited, one of the leading producers of artificial outdoor scenery for American zoos, parks and displays, which modified an existing plastic product called Flex-Bark. The company added wire mesh to allow bats to grip and hang from the undersurface, calling the new product BrandenBark after a military base biologist whose last name was Branden.

In Kentucky, a team fastened BrandenBark to poles, leaving just enough room at the bottom for the bats to squeeze in. Less than two months later, Indiana bats were documented using the fake trees. A three-year study found the bats, dispossessed of their natural roosting habitat, used the fake bark on a regular basis. Five other bat species also began roosting in the structures, which mimic the microclimate conditions and visual clues of natural bark roosts. Today, the product is used in 19 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces, according to Zachery Baer, a biologist with a U.S. consulting firm that oversaw the creation of the bark. 

The Wildlife Conservation Society project paid up to $900 a sheet for the imitation bark, including import duties and taxes. Each tree requires one sheet. “This is not the long-term solution for many reasons,” Lausen observes. “But mostly, at this point, this stuff is way too expensive.” 

Lausen doesn’t like to think of a world without bats, a creature more closely related to humans than to mice. Bats have been on the planet for more than 53 million years, long before early humans evolved and made their way out of Africa. They’re the world’s only mammal with powered flight. Some mammals, like flying squirrels, have membranes that stretch from wrist to ankle, allowing them to glide from tree to tree. Bat flight differs from bird flight, with a motion more like swimming than flapping. Their wings, resembling a human hand, have fingers with skin stretched between and a small, protruding thumb for climbing on surfaces after they land. Often dark in colour, they fly at night when humans can’t see, giving rise to myth. Blind as a bat. They will suck your blood. Bats fly into your hair. You’ll get rabies. 

Although they’re largely out of sight, bats provide billions of dollars in annual ecosystem services in North America. In southern reaches they fertilize plants and throughout the continent they keep insect populations in check, including agricultural pests and forest pests such as spongy moths and spruce budworm. “When it comes down to a healthy, intact ecosystem, bats are playing a huge role,” Lausen says. 

The majority of B.C.’s 17 bat species require old-growth or mature trees, which have appropriate crevice conditions for roosting. Old-growth trees provide a myriad conditions ideal for raising young, and sometimes for hibernating, although bats will also over-winter in caves or mines. “The biggest misunderstanding that most people have is that they look around, they see trees, and they think ‘Okay, well there’s habitat for bats.’ But most bats, and especially ones that are going to produce young, require very specific characteristics in trees, traits that are typically not present in young trees.” 

And not just one tree. A northern myotis colony will use up to 60 different roost trees — “really just somewhere where a bat will hang out” — over a summer. Females with young pups have very particular needs. “They need roosts that are usually well insulated, like a big old-growth tree, where it will retain the heat at night, so the pups can continue to grow even though mom’s out feeding and her warm body isn’t right next to them.” 

Once the pups start to fly and become independent, females find a roost with the right temperature and humidity to enable them to quickly put on fat before a long winter spent hanging by their toes in torpor, lowering their body temperatures to conserve energy. Sometimes females opt to roost alone, to avoid burning fat to keep their body cool when they are nestled among other colony members. During pregnancy, they choose a warmer nook or crevice. “I call it the Goldilocks approach,” Lausen says. “They need the just right temperatures to successfully raise young and so we need to provide all the options.” 

Females return to the same roosting trees over and over again — in some cases, depending on the longevity of the species, for 30 years. If their roosting trees are gone, they search for nearby trees with similar characteristics. When their natal forest has been logged and they can’t find a suitable tree, or expend too much energy hunting for one, they’re likely to die. Bats are so small they lose water and warmth much faster than most mammals.

“You might think that what we’re trying to do is like a big waste of money and kind of crazy,” Lausen says. “I can kind of see that perspective, to step back and look at it that way. Right here, we’ve got three BrandenBark roosts and three wildlife roosts. So basically we provided six roosts, and I’m just telling you now that they need 60. So we’re not giving them everything they need.”

The modified trees are an essential component of a larger plan to create corridors for northern myotis bats and other wildlife dependent on old-growth trees, she explains. Lausen and her team are part of the Kootenay Connect project, which aims to create ecological corridors linking wildlife habitats, biodiversity hotspots, protected areas and climate refugia. 

Researchers chose the clearing near Beaton because it’s only a few hundred metres from five ancient cedars near the banks of the Incomappleux River, all that’s left of the inland temperate rainforest in the area. Cedars don’t have the type of bark under which the bats can crawl, but old cedars have roost cavities made by woodpeckers. The clearing is also a short distance from a privately owned grove of ancient cedars where northern myotis bats roost. (The bats can fly about 25 kilometres in a night, one way.) 

And it’s bat-flying distance from the recently protected Incomappleux Valley, the largest tract of old-growth inland temperate rainforest left in the region, making it a likely home for northern myotis and other bats. “What we’re trying to do is figure out places where bats might be commuting and need these routes. … We’re kind of looking at these in terms of corridors for these animals to be able to move across the landscape and not have to make these giant leaps where there’s actually no place for them to roost if they need to,” Lausen says.

To that end, the team also installed BrandenBark on six other trees in two locations nearby. Lausen checks the trays on the trees for guano but doesn’t find any.

She says it’s too early to tell if the fake old-growth trees are helping northern myotis bats in the inland temperate rainforest. But as she searches for rice-sized guano, Lausen also doesn’t want to lose sight of the bigger picture for the bats here. The “number one solution,” she says, is “don’t cut the trees down in the first place.” 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Biologist Erin McLeod is running late. She’s been up most of the night with a sick caribou calf, she explains as she unlocks a metal gate on a forest service road near Nakusp, in southeast B.C. A large yellow “Controlled Access Area” sign is fastened to the gate. It’s watched over by a video camera that sends photos to McLeod’s laptop when it detects movement. “There was a moose at the gate just before you arrived,” McLeod says matter-of-factly after driving the last kilometre up the road to the caribou pen she manages. 

McLeod is wearing weathered Blundstones, black hiking pants and a pale pink and white tie-dye T-shirt. She seems unflustered despite her nighttime duties nursing the ailing calf in a cabin at a nearby hot springs resort and extra tasks that July day. The pen’s two shepherds are off sick, leaving McLeod to dish out the morning feed of pellets and green and brown hair lichens, hand-picked by volunteers. 

Inside the pen rest some of the last members of the critically endangered Central Selkirk caribou herd — 10 adult females, four yearlings and seven calves, not including the ailing newborn. In late March, biologists tethered to helicopters captured pregnant females and yearlings using net guns. As soon as the helicopter landed, they sedated the animals and hobbled and blindfolded them, easing the caribou into transport bags before hoisting them into the aircraft and flying them to a landing near the pen. From there, the caribou were transported on a snowmobile skidder to the enclosure, where they’ll be held until calves are at least one month old and stand a greater chance of surviving in the wild.

The 6.6-hectare pen is obscured by tall, black geotextile fabric and encircled by an electric fence. McLeod parks by a red shipping container with a plywood observation blind perched on top. Silently, she leads the way up a flight of narrow stairs and unlocks the door to the observation room. It’s known as the ’boo shack. 

The ’boo shack is the operations centre for what could become a multimillion-dollar effort to try to save the herd by protecting and nourishing females and increasing the number of calves. In early 2019, the last two mountain caribou populations to the south became extirpated, or locally extinct. The transboundary South Selkirks herd — also known as the Gray Ghost herd — divided its time between B.C. and northern Idaho and Washington state, while the Purcells South herd ranged nearby.

The Central Selkirk population was now the most southerly caribou herd left in western Canada. In 1997, before much of the inland temperate rainforest where the caribou live for part of the year was destroyed or disturbed, there were 268 animals in the herd. By 2019, just 29 animals remained — and only two were calves. If the herd winked out, the boundary for caribou would once again be erased and re-drawn hundreds of kilometres to the north.

Nearby communities and businesses faced a difficult decision. They could either say goodbye to the herd, or everyone — including snowmobilers, heli-skiers, businesses, Indigenous communities, the township of Nakusp and the B.C. government — could join forces at the eleventh hour to try to recover an animal that has lived in the area since the end of the last Ice Age. They chose to act.

On the ’boo shack’s far wall, a video monitor displays real-time footage from cameras around the pen, which includes a small stream and young and old cedar and hemlock forest. Binoculars, a laptop, notebooks, an iPad and a camera with a telephoto lens sit on a shelf by a wall-length window overlooking the inside of the pen. An assortment of thick and thin caribou antlers, shed by females after they give birth, line the window sill. On the other side is a feeding area — a clearing with two black plastic troughs and a scale.

McLeod and a visitor, Lyndsey DuBrock from the Kalispel Tribe of Indians in Washington state, pick up binoculars and scan the scraggly, young forest around the clearing. The animals are out of sight, likely hanging out by a leftover snowpile covered with cedar bark mulch where they keep cool, McLeod says. 

Speaking in hushed tones, McLeod recounts how, two days earlier, one of the shepherds found the sick newborn calf by the pile of snow. The shivering newborn was too weak to nurse and his young mother, known by her number, Eight, didn’t seem to know what to do. She charged other caribou who ambled over with their calves to investigate the scrap of mocha-coloured fur and bony legs akimbo.

The shepherd summoned help and soon the calf was in a truck en route to a veterinary clinic, wrapped in blankets and cradled on a lap. The vet attached an intravenous drip, took blood samples and kept the calf overnight, giving him fluids, antibiotics, probiotics and plasma to boost his immune system. After the calf was discharged from the clinic, McLeod and the vet took him to the hot springs resort cabin rented by the Arrow Lakes Caribou Society, the non-profit that manages the pen. 

As the newborn lay on a soft red blanket in a dog crate, McLeod and the vet took turns waking up every few hours to feed him. They gave Little Eight — that’s what they called him — moose calf formula with a syringe, sticking a finger into his mouth so he could learn to suckle. Each time they fed the calf, they squeezed a dog squeaky toy they’d bought at a pet store, so Little Eight would associate the sound with food as he transitioned to bottle feeding. 

The squeaky toy, a purple pig, sounds “just like a caribou grunt,” McLeod says. The first time the vet squeezed the toy, the calf perked right up and walked over on wobbly legs. “He was looking for a caribou, I think.” 

Little Eight was born on Canada Day, the youngest of this year’s crop of calves and by far the smallest. He weighed just 4.4 kilograms. All the other calves tipped the scales at eight to 12 kilograms. In the wild, he might not have been born at all, McLeod says. Caribou normally don’t have calves until they are three years old. Little Eight’s mother was only two, but likely able to become pregnant because of the extra nourishment she had received as a yearling in the pen the previous year. 

Kalispel Tribe in U.S. funds pen in hopes of caribou recovery 

McLeod scans the forest around the ’boo shack again. Not a single caribou is in sight. “They come pretty quickly when there’s food.” She disappears down the stairs and reappears inside the pen a few minutes later, carrying a bucket of pellets and a bucket of lichen. Twice a day, staff feed the caribou 20 kilograms of food pellets and a pound of lichen, a food staple for mountain caribou in the wild. McLeod empties the pellets into the feeding troughs and walks around the clearing, hanging strings of hair lichen on tree branches. She’s barely stepped back into the observation room when a caribou ambles slowly into sight, a long-legged, café au lait-coloured calf at her hooves.

The adult caribou heads straight for the food trough. Then more caribou arrive — yearlings and several females with their weeks-old calves. DuBrock and McLeod peer through binoculars, trying to spot the caribou’s ear identification tags and record their weight if they step on scales beside the trough.

DuBrock works for the Kalispel Tribal Economic Authority, headquartered in Washington state. The Tribe lost its caribou when the transboundary Gray Ghost herd became extirpated in 2019. They hoped the Central Selkirk herd — the surviving herd closest to Washington — might one day be sufficiently robust to allow caribou to be reintroduced in their territory and once again hunted. “Hunting is a very huge part of the culture for the tribe,” DuBrock says. “And as numbers of certain food sources start to be susceptible to predation and human interference, it makes it harder for the Tribe and Tribal members to have sustainable access to food.” She describes the reservation’s rural location as “a bit of a food desert,” saying many community members rely on hunting to feed their families. “Having those traditional food sources available is something that I think is really important to the sustainability of the Tribe and its people.”

The Tribe is under no illusion that caribou reintroduction will take place anytime soon, says DuBrock, who worked at the pen in 2022 as a volunteer shepherd, feeding the caribou and checking on them, recording her observations and walking around the perimeter of the pen. “Rebuilding an endangered population is going to take a lot of time.” But they’re passionate about the project for many reasons. “There’s a hopefulness, not just in restoring this beautiful animal population, but also something that will benefit future generations of Tribal members.”

One of the first caribou to arrive in the feeding area is a female nicknamed Revy. (Revy is what locals affectionately call the ski and mountain-biking town of Revelstoke, north of Nakusp.) Revy, the last animal from the extirpated Columbia South deep-snow caribou herd, the population immediately to the north of the Central Selkirk herd, had been flown to the pen in a helicopter. Because she was geographically isolated during the rutting season, she doesn’t have a calf. 

Revy is taller and sturdier-looking than the other animals in the pen and has impressively large antlers for a female. She’s molting; her sides look like a relief map of the world with oceans and continents. She strolls right past the feeding trough and heads straight for the lichen dangling from tree branches. While the other caribou eat pellets at the trough, Revy quickly munches lichen like a kid on Hallowe’en gobbling up  the best candy. She’s bonded with one of the yearlings who follows her around, emulating her lichen habits, “like a little shadow,” McLeod says. “She’s one of the ones that knows that we have the lichen in the bucket. We try to hang it in trees so that she has to look for it more, but she’s a little bit like a vacuum, and she just follows you around and eats it all.” 

In the wild, Revy might be munching on hair lichen to her heart’s content. In the pen, although she’s accepted by the Central Selkirk caribou, she’s a survivor amongst survivors. She can’t return to the place where she’s from — following decades of industrial logging, there’s not enough inland temperate rainforest left to support a deep-snow caribou herd. 

Deep-snow caribou losing habitat, food sources 

Deep-snow caribou are a subspecies unique to British Columbia. They live in the wet belt, a 16-million-hectare area along the windward slopes of the Columbia and Rocky Mountains, in the south-central interior of B.C., that receives substantial rain and snow. Within the wet belt, some disjunct valleys receive more precipitation than others. These valleys are known as the inland temperate rainforest. Today, they are home to ancient, moss-covered forests with an extraordinary diversity of species — the type of rainforests usually associated with B.C.’s coast in places like Clayoquot Sound, Fairy Creek and the Great Bear Rainforest. Towering western red cedar and western hemlock trees are commonly 500 years old in the interior rainforest, while some venerable cedars are 1,800 years old and five metres thick. Only in two other places in the world — in Russia’s far east and southern Siberia — does a temperate rainforest grow so far from the sea.

In mid- to late-winter, deep-snow caribou migrate to higher elevations. They spread their hooves wide to balance on snow that can be 20 metres deep, elevating them to arboreal hair lichens that are their only food source that time of year and grow in the greatest abundance on old trees. In spring, late fall and early winter, they’re often found in the inland temperate rainforest, where they eat lichens and leafy plants like false box. 

A few years ago, nine scientists and ecologists from Canada, the United States and Australia decided to examine the state of B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest. How much had been flooded for hydro dams, fractured by logging roads and clear cut for lumber, fence posts and mulch? Where was the rainforest still intact? How fast was it being depleted? 

Less than a century ago, B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest covered an estimated 1.33 million hectares. By 2021, fewer than 60,000 hectares of the core rainforest remained, the scientists and ecologists wrote in a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Land. (Core rainforest is 100 metres from logging roads and other disturbances.) The International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global authority on the status of the natural world and measures required to safeguard it, lists B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest as “critically endangered.” In 2021, with less than five per cent of the core rainforest remaining, the study’s authors noted “full protection of remaining primary forest is especially warranted.” 

The study found logging rates in the inland temperate rainforest have nearly doubled every decade since the 1970s. From 2020 to 2021, as the B.C. government pledged to protect old-growth forests and ecosystems at the highest risk of collapse, logging approvals in the inland temperate rainforest increased 40 per cent, according to the study. In the absence of protections, the scientists and ecologists calculated ecosystem collapse was possible within nine to 19 years. 

Ecosystem collapse, explains one scientist, is like slowly tilting a glass of water. The water moves towards the rim but doesn’t pour out. But keep tipping and tipping, little by little — and eventually your glass rim angles down and some of the water spills. Keep tilting, and all the water spills. Once the glass topples over, giving it a small push won’t set it upright or refill it with water.

Clearcuts, logging roads and other linear disturbances make it far easier for wolves and other natural predators to gain access to caribou. Fresh growth in clearcuts attracts moose and deer; wolves and cougars pad after them into caribou habitat. Fewer old-growth trees means fewer lichens for caribou to eat and fewer places for them to survive.

In 2017, as Central Selkirk herd numbers dropped, the provincial government captured some animals and outfitted them with GPS collars for tracking. Over the next two years, three of nine caribou with collars were lost to cougar predation, according to B.C. government caribou biologist Aaron Reid. Heavy snow killed off deer — and cougars needed to eat. “So that’s a third of our sample that were eaten by cougars and one of them had a calf so that’s actually four,” Reid says in an interview. 

Annual caribou capture is ‘high risk, stressful’ 

As the herd’s fate hung in the balance, 300 community members attended two public forums to discuss caribou recovery efforts. Out of those meetings arose the Arrow Lakes Caribou Society, with a mandate to address caribou recovery while reflecting local needs and values. Without recovery efforts, Reid says the Central Selkirk herd would die out in about five to 10 years. “It would be done,” he says. “So it was either all in, or all out.” 

One of the society’s first orders of business was to raise money to build the pen, in part through a GoFundMe campaign and also with an initial $74,000 from the B.C. government. The pen began operating in 2022, with seven captured females and one yearling. Even though six calves were born in the pen, it wasn’t an easy year for the herd, underscoring how difficult last-minute recovery efforts are when herd numbers fall so low. Grizzly bears preyed on two female collared caribou, and a third female with a malpositioned stillborn calf died in the pen, while a pen-born calf died in the wild. 

Reid doesn’t want to gloss over the annual caribou capture, calling it “a very high risk, stressful endeavor for everyone involved.” This year, a female yearling died during capture. “The maternity pen is the last resort,” Reid says. “No one wants to do a maternity pen. It sounds all positive and cute and cuddly — and they are not. The only reason we’re doing the maternity pen is because we have to grow calves, we need to increase calf production in order for this herd to survive. Without it, they’re gone … We don’t have any excess animals to transplant here. We don’t have a captive breeding facility like burrowing owls or spotted owls.” 

But the pen will only work if the number of natural predators in the herd’s range is reduced, Reid says. For the past four years, the B.C. government has annually contracted sharpshooters to kill wolves and cougars from helicopters “because otherwise we wouldn’t have had any adults left to work with.” In the two years after the predator cull began, every adult female caribou with a collar survived. Over the past four years, 35 wolves and 17 cougars have been killed in Central Selkirk habitat, for a total cost of $343,150, according to the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. In an emailed response to questions, the ministry says no adult caribou mortalities have been documented as a result of cougar or wolf predation since predator reduction began. The decision to reduce predator populations “is not taken lightly,” the ministry states. It has approved wolf and cougar culling until 2026. 

But despite the pen and predator culls, Reid cautions the Central Selkirk herd remains on the brink of extirpation. “It’s right on that line. There’s only nine cows left and they’re all in that pen.” The death of three females last year was a blow to recovery efforts. At last count, this past spring, the herd had only 25 animals. Calves aren’t counted as herd members until they survive their first 10 months. 

Amidst the stress and sheer hard work, Reid and others involved in the project experience moments of wonder watching the animals interact with each other from the observation room. “They all have personalities,” Reid says. “Some of them are grumpy and some of them are kind.” 

Revy, the last animal from the Columbia South herd, fit right in with the Central Selkirk animals. “She’s well, she’s gaining weight, she’s doing everything she should be doing,” Reid says. “In the short-term, it was definitely the best choice for animal care.” 

Efforts to save the Central Selkirk herd also don’t come cheap. Over the past year, the Arrow Lakes Caribou Society recorded more than $300,000 in revenues. Veterinary fees and supplies, including emergency animal care and calving supplies, cost more than $60,000. According to the society’s financial statements, presented Dec. 6 at its annual general meeting, the province contributed $150,000 in grants towards the society’s 2023 budget and an additional $31,500 in gaming revenue. Over the past four years, the B.C. government has spent $484,000 on the penning project, according to the Resource Stewardship Ministry. Reid says the program will need another decade or so, along with the necessary funding, to turn the corner on extinction.

One of the project’s major funders is the Kalispel Tribe of Indians, headquartered in Washington state. According to Bart George, the Kalispel wildlife program manager, the Tribe has contributed about US$160,000. The Tribe has also leveraged about US$45,000 in funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which paid for the three helicopters this year to capture and transport the caribou to the pen.

George says Kalispel members were heartbroken to lose the transboundary South Selkirk herd. Plans for a maternal pen to help the herd were well underway when the herd became extirpated. “The situation we’re faced with is [that] the nearest remaining caribou are in the central Selkirks,” he says in a phone interview. “So we’ve sort of switched gears and started pouring our resources into that, with the hope that over time that population will be rebuilt and sustainable and we can start discussing moving some animals back into the south Selkirks and repopulating that area.”

Like DuBrock, he’s under no illusion that will happen soon. “It’s not probably going to happen in my career, or maybe even in my lifetime, but for the Kalispel people to be able to go into the Selkirk Mountains and harvest a caribou would be the ultimate goal of this whole project.” Without caribou and other native species such as grizzly bears, wolves and lynx, the Selkirk Mountains don’t feel as wild and as natural as they should, George says. “When we lost caribou, we really lost a piece of the Tribal culture and a piece of the ecosystem that we need to find a way to get back.”

Heliskiiers and snowmobilers agree to avoid caribou 

When Dave Butler, who works for CMH Heliskiing and Summer Adventures, heard about the community meetings in Nakusp in 2019, he was keen to attend. Butler, who lives in Cranbrook, is vice-president of sustainability for the company, the largest heli-skiing operator in the Central Selkirk caribou range.

Butler says CMH already had a program in place in southeast B.C. to monitor the location of caribou and other wildlife, including mountain goats, wolverines and grizzly bears, through habitat maps, previous sightings and tracks in the snow. If caribou were on a ridge near a ski area, he says CMH would close the run. Even before Central Selkirk caribou collar data was available daily, the company’s guides and pilots would sit down twice a day to talk about which ski runs they might be able to use, based on a range of factors, including snowfall, weather, avalanche hazards and the presence or absence of wildlife. The Central Selkirk caribou data has been added to the mix, Butler says. “There are times when we’re looking and saying ‘geez, those runs in that basin, they would be amazing, the stability’s good, the weather’s good. We could fly in there, but there are caribou in there.’ So we literally close all those runs, and we go somewhere else. And there are some times when we actually don’t ski in a day. Like we literally sit on the ground with the guests.” 

Because some of the caribou and calves from the pen are still hanging around close to the pen, CMH has temporarily closed its staging area nearby the pen and moved operations to the Nakusp airport, Butler says. “And we’ll continue to do that until the caribou are moving well out of that area, and then we can use a staging area again.” 

Heli-skiers aren’t the only ones who are making changes to their backcountry activities to help Central Selkirk caribou. A pilot project called Snowmobile Selkirks, which was already in the works, launched in December 2021. Instead of closing all caribou habitat to snowmobilers, about 300 members of two local snowmobile clubs are permitted to ride in designated areas as long as the Central Selkirk caribou aren’t present. Club members agree to check a provincial government map before they ride to see which designated areas in the herd’s range are open for snowmobiling. Any areas with caribou are closed. The map automatically updates each morning before 7 a.m., using telemetry data from caribou collars. 

“If a collar is within three kilometres of a boundary, it closes the next boundary,” explains Donegal Wilson, executive director of the B.C. Snowmobile Federation. Wilson says the project is the first one to use daily caribou collar data to determine riding areas. Only members of the two snowmobile clubs — the Arrow Lakes Ridge Riders and Trout Lake Recreational Club — have access to the map. She says the reaction of snowmobilers has been extremely positive because they can see how they’re contributing to caribou recovery. 

Penalties for non-compliance are hefty; snowmobilers can be fined up to $250,000 for a transgression. Conservation officers can also impound their snowmobiles or trucks. 

Not all caribou in the Central Selkirk herd are collared. If snowmobile club members encounter caribou while out riding, they must follow a protocol, outlined in a memorandum of understanding the B.C. Snowmobile Federation signed with the provincial government. “It’s basically to stay on your snowmobile and turn it off, unless you can easily turn around and leave,” Wilson says.

B.C. government continues to sanction clearcutting in caribou habitat 

Underscoring the complexity of caribou recovery efforts, as one B.C. ministry funds and supports the caribou penning project, another ministry continues to approve new clearcutting in the Central Selkirk herd’s range. BC Timber Sales, the government agency responsible for allocating 20 per cent of the province’s annual allowable cut, is still auctioning off cutblocks in the herd’s range. 

The Valhalla Wilderness Society, a grassroots, non-profit group based in New Denver, B.C., tracks the logging. Valhalla director Craig Pettitt says BC Timber Sales recently logged cutblocks on the west side of Duncan Lake, in one of the largest tracts of low-elevation forest left in the area — an area Pettitt says could be very important for Central Selkirk herd recovery. 

The ministry said 166 hectares were harvested in the area on the west side of Duncan Lake in 2023, including in the Morgan and Lardeau valleys. “The area logged does not contain any mapped core caribou habitat,” the ministry said. 

But new cutblocks in the Morgan Creek area lie about one kilometre from Central Selkirk herd members with radio collars, according to telemetry data reviewed by Pettitt. He says logging shouldn’t occur so close to caribou because road-building facilitates access for wolves and other natural predators. “They’ve just built a highway for wolves to hunt along until they pick up a scent of prey, and in they go.”

On the opposite side of the ridge, in the Lardeau River Valley, about 15 kilometres from the west Duncan as the crow flies, BC Timber Sales has also opened up roads for cutblocks very close to Central Selkirk caribou telemetry points, Pettitt points out.

“Caribou pens are a Band-Aid issue. Until we start protecting more key caribou habitat, there’s no point trying to put more caribou on the ground. We need habitat.” 

Smallest caribou calf moved to wildlife rehabilitation centre 

In the fourth week of July, as temperatures in the region climbed into the 30s, pen staff prepared to release the caribou. It was a little earlier than they hoped, but they worried the animals, who are accustomed to being at higher altitudes in the summer, would suffer in the heat. “They aren’t really able to manage their body temperatures as well when it gets that hot, so we don’t want them to get heat stressed,” McLeod explains in a phone call. “They can go up [to] higher elevations where they can kind of get some more relief from the heat.”

Staff moved the feeding trough to a fence panel they planned to cut open, so the animals could get used to being in that area of the pen. At 5 a.m. on July 21, the shepherds placed a feeder with lichen outside the pen. They cut open the fence, watching the caribou from outside. “They slowly make their way out and kind of look at the feeder and eat some lichen,” McLeod recounts. “And then they kind of realize that they’re in the open and take off pretty quickly.”

Later that day, telemetry data from collars showed the caribou had reached a subalpine area visible from the pen, where they split into two groups. 

But Little Eight — renamed Selkirk, “Kirk” for short — was not among them. Once the calf was rehydrated, they tried to reunite him with his mother. “But she didn’t accept him,” McLeod says. “The calf ran towards the group of caribou and was making grunt noises at them, trying to get his mom’s attention. And she ran over to him, and then smelled him and ran away.”

Pen staff put the calf in a mini enclosure within the pen so he could be near the other animals but accessible to the shepherds for feeding. The calf spent one night there but his body temperature dropped too much for him to be able to stay healthy. Making matters worse, rain was in the forecast. “He was still quite weak. So they took him back to the chalet.” 

Kirk’s brief return to the pen confirmed he couldn’t be released with the other caribou. Staff took the calf to the BC Wildlife Park in Kamloops, for orphaned and injured wildlife. One month after Kirk’s birth, he weighed nine kilograms, about the size of a newborn calf. “I think we’re all comfortable that we made the right decision for his survival,” McLeod says. “And now he’s got the chance to be an ambassador for caribou recovery, if he does have to stay in captivity.” Another option is for Kirk to return to the pen next year and be released with the group as a yearling “if he’s looking healthy enough for that.” 

Every week or so, Reid, the provincial caribou biologist, checks a map application to see where the Central Selkirk females are, based on daily GPS signals. The collars have a mortality switch; if a caribou doesn’t move for 12 hours, the person monitoring the herd receives a text or email. “That’s when you start trying to investigate what happened,” Reid explains. In mid-November, the collars indicated every female from the pen was still alive. (The calves weren’t collared this year, so biologists won’t know until next March whether they survived.)

Towards the end of November, Reid received a phone call from Parks Canada, the agency that put the GPS collar on Revy, the lichen-loving sole survivor from the Columbia South herd. Revy’s collar had stopped sending signals four days earlier, Parks Canada informed Reid. The next day, Reid and other biologists helicoptered into the mountains about 20 kilometres from the pen, in search of Revy’s collar. “We weren’t sure exactly where it was, or what we were going to find but unfortunately we did locate the collar,” Reid says. “After a short hike up the mountain, we found her dead.”

Telemetry showed Revy likely stayed with Central Selkirk herd members until early November, when she peeled off on her own. 

All around Revy’s carcass were signs of wolverine predation: tracks in the snow, caches of caribou meat and a hole at waist-height in a giant red cedar tree where the wolverine had unmistakably crawled in and out to eat. 

Describing Revy as a “beautiful cow,” Reid says he can’t dwell on individual caribou deaths in his line of work or he might not sleep at night. “These two species have been a part of that predator-prey dynamic since the beginning,” he says. “Wolverines would be the only thing that the mountain caribou would have to deal with in winter, historically, as far as predation risk, so they know each other well.”

Reid had high hopes Revy would produce a calf next year. It wasn’t an easy decision to bring her to the pen, he says, but it was the best option to give her a chance at survival. 

“We gave her other caribou to be with for the last six months of her life,” he says. “So that was a good gift. That’s what I think about.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Eddie Petryshen stands on a muddy logging road in one of the world’s rarest old-growth temperate rainforest ecosystems, eyeing the steep slope above. “Up there,” he says, pointing to a sea of green bushes and trees. He takes an iPad from his truck, hoists up his backpack, clips a can of bear spray to the chest strap and calls his border collie, Tully, who is sniffing a bush.

Petryshen, who works for the conservation group Wildsight, is on a detective mission of sorts. He’s about to bushwhack into the Nagle Creek Valley, 150 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., to ground-truth provincial government logging maps he obtained in May. The maps outline the government’s plans for new clearcuts in the disappearing inland temperate rainforest, in core habitat for an endangered caribou herd. 

According to BC Timber Sales, the provincial government agency responsible for planning and auctioning off the cutblocks, the cedar and hemlock trees slated for logging are between 224 and 336 years old. Petryshen, who’s been scrolling through forest inventory data and cross-matching maps, isn’t so sure. “We question whether this is a reliable estimate,” he says. Forests above 400 years old are classified as ancient, meaning this forest would automatically meet provincial government criteria for old-growth logging deferrals. 

The Nagle Valley sits in the snow-tipped Monashee Mountain range, near the north tip of the Revelstoke hydro reservoir. It’s anchored by a squiggly, glacier-fed waterway called Nagle Creek, which empties into the reservoir that decades ago re-engineered the Columbia River, putting ancient rainforests and a mosaic of wetlands under 46 metres of water to generate electricity. Over the past decade or two, BC Timber Sales has auctioned off about a dozen cutblocks in the lower reaches of the Nagle Creek drainage, close to the reservoir. A satellite map shows most of the valley, shaped like an upside-down pot handle, is still dark green, unroaded and intact. 

That’s a rarity in Canada’s inland temperate rainforest, an ecosystem found only in two other places on the planet, in Russia’s far east and southern Siberia. A temperate rainforest, with moss-draped trees and old-growth ecosystems brimming with life, is almost always associated with coastal places like the Great Bear Rainforest, Clayoquot Sound and Fairy Creek. But more than 500 kilometres from the ocean, in wet valley bottoms along the windward slopes of the Columbia and Rocky Mountains in the south-central interior of B.C., lies a largely forgotten temperate rainforest with cedar and hemlock trees hundreds of years old. Many interior cedars are 600 or 800 years old; some venerable giants are estimated to be 1,800 years old, meaning they were saplings back in the days of the Roman empire.

Salmon spawn in clear, cool streams in increasingly scarce intact interior rainforest valleys. Grizzly and black bears hibernate inside or under old trees, pulling branches across den openings so they close like screen doors. In wintertime, deep-snow caribou, an ecotype unique to south-central B.C., subsist on nutritious green and dark brown hair lichens that grow only on old trees. For Petryshen, deep-snow caribou are the canary in the coal mine for the inland temperate rainforest. “They speak to the health of an ecosystem and they’re very tied and connected to this ecosystem,” he says. “They’ve survived Ice Ages. And they can’t seem to survive us.” 

A century ago, B.C. was home to an estimated 1.3 million hectares of inland temperate rainforest that stretched from B.C.’s Cariboo Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. Following decades of industrial logging, flooding for hydro dams and other human disturbances, only about 60,000 hectares of the core, old forest remain, according to a 2021 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Land. The scientists and ecologists who authored the study concluded B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest ecosystem is at risk of collapse in as few as nine to 18 years.

They found less than five per cent of the core inland temperate rainforest –— forest at least 100 metres from logging roads and other disturbances — still stands, concluding “full protection of remaining primary forest is especially warranted.” The remaining forest includes swaths of the Nagle Valley, where Petryshen is heading with his partner, Bailey Repp, a photographer, and their energetic collie. 

Petryshen peers at his iPad, where he’s stored detailed maps of the proposed cutblock boundaries. It might take a few hours to reach them. 

The five planned cutblocks sit on opposite sides of the steep-sided Nagle Valley. First, we’d bushwhack into three almost contiguous cutblocks BC Timber Sales calls K6DS, K9PX and K6DP, where the agency says cedar and hemlock trees are 324 to 326 years old. 

Then we’d try to access two much more remote cutblocks, K5TK and K5TF, on the valley’s south side, across the creek, where, according to BC Timber Sales, the cedar and hemlock forests are 224-years-old and 234 years old. Petryshen has a more detailed description. He calls K5TK and K5TF “intact and roadless areas likely to contain low-elevation old growth, which is extremely rare on today’s fragmented landscape.”

Cutblocks sit in habitat of endangered B.C. caribou herd

We haul ourselves up the first steep slope, grabbing onto roots and bushes like climbing ropes as our hiking boots scrabble for purchase. At first, the cedar and hemlock trees are relatively young, perhaps 100 or 200 years old. The slope levels out as we dodge compact meadows of sleeve-ripping Devil’s Club. Tully finds a moist gully where she cools down, and the wrinkly nose smell of skunk cabbage, whose scent attracts pollinating insects, wafts through the air. The cedars and hemlocks grow taller and wider as we hike further into the valley. 

Petryshen, who is in the lead, stoops to pick something up from the forest floor. He holds up a fist full of wiry strands of green lichen that have fallen from a tree branch. “This is alectoria sarmentosa. This is what caribou eat, along with the other hair lichen, bryoria. This is what they subsist on in the winter,” he says. “The snowpack often acts kind of like an elevator; you’ll have 10 feet of snow and then they’ll be able to access some of those bigger branches that have higher loads of tree lichen.”

The proposed cutblocks sit in core habitat for the endangered Columbia North caribou herd, one of the last two caribou populations left in the Kootenay region following the local extinction of seven other deep-snow caribou herds — named because the animals balance on deep snow to reach arboreal hair lichens. With 209 animals, the Columbia North herd is by far the largest surviving population. The only other herd, the Central Selkirk population, has just 28 animals and is the focus of elaborate and expensive rescue and recovery efforts, centered around a maternal pen for pregnant females. 

The caribou herd closest to Cranbrook, where Petryshen grew up, was known as the South Purcell population. It became locally extinct in 2019. The herd’s extirpation, Petryshen explains, is a “big driver of the work I do … We’ve lost those caribou, and home doesn’t feel the same.” 

Petryshen, who is tall and lanky, attended an American university on a basketball scholarship. But part-way through a geography degree, deeply concerned about the state of Canada’s natural world, he decided to put conservation theory into action. He left his studies and basketball team and returned to the Kootenays, where he began working for Wildsight as a conservation specialist. 

Telemetry data shows the Columbia North animals frequent the upper Nagle Creek drainage in the summer, migrating to the lower Nagle at other times of the year. Petryshen worries BC Timber Sales’ logging plans will fragment that connection. Almost 40 per cent of the herd’s core habitat is already disturbed, he notes. Clearcuts and logging roads, including a bridge over Nagle Creek, would make it easier for natural predators like wolves to gain easy access to caribou in areas where they would normally have to expend too much energy to make the pursuit worthwhile. “We’ve logged and roaded most of the Columbia North caribou’s range,” Petryshen observes. “If it’s an old-growth forest and in an intact area, that’s the really rare stuff.” 

Earlier that morning, after crossing the north end of the Revelstoke reservoir on a bridge, we have a bird’s eye view of some of the reasons for the demise of deep-snow caribou. After taking a wrong turn in a maze of logging roads near the mouth of the Nagle Creek drainage, we end up on a mountain slope surrounded by fresh clearcuts — cutblocks auctioned off by BC Timber Sales. The agency, which allocates about 20 per cent of the province’s annual allowable cut, marks out planned cutblocks and puts them up for auction. 

One cutblock is so new a yellow and black excavator, taller than a two-storey building, still perches near the terminus of the logging road it helped build. Slash piles line the road, waiting to be burned. We pass a cedar stump about one-and-a-half metres in diameter that was a tree, Petryshen estimates, about 400 years old. “The cedar is the big money tree,” he says. “An individual large cedar can be worth thousands and thousands of dollars … The hemlocks are just in the way most of the time. And so often, when they’re falling these trees, they’ll lay down the hemlock as a bed for the cedar when it falls, so that the cedar doesn’t explode on impact on the ground.” 

Clearcut after clearcut stitches nearby mountain slopes into an uneven patchwork of greens and browns. To our right lies the narrow tip of the Revelstoke reservoir, which runs down the valley and disappears around a bend. To our left sits the Mica Dam, looking like a stubby grey pencil. Its reservoir, Kinbasket Lake, sparkles turquoise in the sun. Low waters make the Kinbasket’s muddy shoreline seem, from that distance, like a beach. “So this is the reality of what caribou have to deal with,” Petryshen points out. “We’re standing over the Columbia, which was once one of the most productive salmon rivers in the world. And probably a lot of these forests are missing salmon, in terms of those nutrients. This is an ecosystem that is on the brink, and we’re seeing all of these cumulative effects add up.”

B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest at risk of ‘ecosystem collapse’

The GPS tracking dot on Petryshen’s map guides us through a lush, ankle-snarling understory, up and down gullies, towards the southwest tip of planned cutblock K6DS. He’d downloaded the map from BC Timber Sales’s website, overlaying it with a map of core caribou habitat. The old-growth detective process, Petryshen says, involves “knowing a bit of the landscape and trying to figure it out. What are the puzzle pieces we can lose? Sometimes there are certain sacrifice zones.” For other areas, “if we do lose those pieces, it’s going to be really bad for the future of caribou or old growth, all those sorts of values.” The Nagle Valley, he says, is one of those areas because it’s still largely intact.

“The critical point is the inland temperate rainforest is a red-listed ecosystem at high risk of ecosystem collapse,” Petryshen explains later, referring to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s classification of B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest as critically endangered. “We should not degrade more of the ecosystem’s best core intact primary and old forests — particularly when they are some of the most carbon-rich temperate rainforests anywhere and when they’re critical to the future viability of caribou populations and rare endangered plants and lichens.”  

We’re on a wildlife path — perhaps traversed by migrating caribou, bears or deer — in provincially designed core caribou habitat, flanked by trees Petryshen estimates to be 400 or 500 years old. One large tree has a hole in its raised root ball — a perfect spot, he notes as he clambers down a bank to examine it more closely, for a bear to hibernate during the long winter and shelter newborn cubs. 

Finally, we spot a pink flagging ribbon tied around a young hemlock tree. “I’m not sure what this ribbon is,” Petryshen says, consulting his iPad. “I don’t have the roadmaps but they might have a lower road coming in here. We’re close to the cutblock boundary.” 

A short distance further, an orange BC Timber Sales block boundary ribbon demarcates the beginning of cutblock K6DS. “This is their defined tenure area, if you want to call it that,” Petryshen says. “They developed the block for sale, and then it gets sold to a [logging] company.”

He surveys the tall, mature trees inside the cutblock boundary. “This is a nice little old-growth forest,” he announces. “This is a really nice cedar-hemlock stand.” We’re surrounded by false box, a shiny evergreen shrub in the bitterroot family that caribou paw through snow to reach in early winter.

Entering the planned cutblock, Petryshen stops at a large, shaggy barked cedar tree. He pulls out a diameter measuring tape and wraps it around the tree, stretching up his arms around the tree’s far side where the ground is lower. The tree is between 1.8 metres and two metres in diameter, likely making it 600 and 800 years old, at least double BC Timber Sales’ estimate. “I would think a lot of the bigger cedars in here are probably in that 600-year-old range,” Petryshen says, looking around as we hike about one-third of the way into the cutblock before turning back. 

The plan was to retrace our steps back to Petryshen’s truck. From there, we would drive a short distance to Nagle Creek, and cross it to access the two remaining planned cutblocks, K5TK and K5TF, on the south side of the valley. 

But Petryshen’s plans for ground-truthing the BC Timber Sales claims were stymied by Nagle Creek. The glacier-fed creek, studded with boulders, had waist-deep pools and a fast-moving current that could have swept us away. “You would be swimming for your life,” Petryshen says, surveying the gushing waterway. The only other way in, without being dropped off by helicopter, lay through an avalanche chute almost a kilometre wide, thick with tall alder and interspersed with grassy habitat favoured by grizzly bears: in other words, Petryshen says, “really bad bushwhacking.” 

Later, Petryshen asks why BC Timber Sales is targeting old-growth stands “when the province has committed to protecting old growth, caribou habitat and shifting the paradigm in B.C. forest management.” 

It’s a question many are asking as old-growth continues to fall in the inland temperate rainforest, more than three years after the government promised to protect ancient forests and biodiversity. 

In 2019, as debate about logging old-growth forests intensified, the B.C. government appointed two foresters to lead an independent, old-growth strategic review panel charged with making recommendations about how to manage old forests. Following months of consultations, the foresters issued a landmark report that concluded old-growth forests are irreplaceable. They called for a paradigm shift in the way B.C. manages old forests, saying they should be managed for ecosystem health, not for timber supply. 

One of the panel’s 14 recommendations — all of which the B.C. government promised to follow — was to defer logging in areas at the highest risk of near-term biodiversity loss. Panel member Garry Merkel, a member of the Tahltan Nation, says areas aren’t at risk of biodiversity loss if 70 per cent of naturally occurring old-growth is left on the landscape. “But as you go past that, and you start taking more, your risk to biodiversity increases.” When only about 30 per cent of the old-growth remains, you get into a “very high-risk situation,” Merkel says in an interview. “If you’ve got only 30 per cent left, you are in high risk of losing major mammal species, ecological functions, smaller species, a whole bunch of things.”

That scenario, Petryshen points out, is already well advanced in the inland temperate rainforest as caribou herds become endangered and disappear. 

To identify at-risk old-growth ecosystems and prioritize areas for temporary logging deferrals, the B.C. government struck a technical advisory panel. Ecologist Karen Price was one of three panellists. She says panel members used the best available government data to mark out old-growth deferral areas, knowing the data was imperfect but also aware of the urgent need for deferrals before more irreplaceable old-growth was logged. “Getting better data is never an excuse to not do anything,” Price says. 

When panellists compared the government data to on-the-ground data from close to 7,000 sites to which they had access, the data deficiencies became even more apparent. They found the accuracy of the projected age of trees fell significantly for stands older than 200 years. They also found some areas that government data classified as intact old-growth had already been logged.

“We knew that there would be misclassifications,” Price says. And even before they examined the data, Price and her colleagues knew much of B.C.’s remaining inland temperate rainforest and coastal temperate rainforest would be old growth — the forests are wet and disturbances like fire are rare. “A large proportion of it is actually going to be ancient. The data does a really poor job of recording ancient forest.”

The technical advisory panel was only mandated to look at the age of forests, not at other considerations such as caribou, biodiversity or carbon storage, Price points out. Old-growth inland and coastal temperate rainforests are some of the most productive terrestrial ecosystems on the planet, she says, meaning they contain the greatest biodiversity and the biggest trees that store the most carbon. “These are incredibly ecologically important ecosystems. … My professional opinion is that we shouldn’t be logging there at all. They are so valuable, and at such high risk.”

Given gaps in reliable data, Price says she’s not surprised Petryshen found ancient cedars and old-growth hemlocks proposed for clear-cutting in the Nagle Valley that meet provincial requirements for automatic logging deferrals. 

If BC Timber Sales saw 600-year-old trees during cutblock boundary and logging road surveys in the Nagle, the agency should have automatically flagged the area for deferrals, she says. “This should be on the deferral maps … I am not surprised, but I am very disappointed that BCTS and the province didn’t take a leadership role in adding them to the deferrals. They didn’t put ecosystems first. They didn’t didn’t demonstrate the paradigm shift. They’re still making decisions based on the old timber priority paradigm.”

Challenge ahead for B.C. to reliably identify remaining ancient trees

Merkel cautions it’s not easy to make such a massive paradigm shift, which he equates to changing your religion overnight from Roman Catholic to Buddhist. “Are we getting everything right? No, of course not.” 

The key, he says, is to build a strong foundational partnership with First Nations, grounded in public understanding and involvement in the process. That will make it next to impossible for a future government to undermine or abolish the new paradigm, Merkel says. “It takes time to build those things … And yes, there might be some casualties along the way in terms of areas that maybe shouldn’t have been logged but were. But if we can get to that longer term where we have everybody on side and supportive in the longer term, we’ll be way ahead, because we’ll set a floor that you can’t go backwards on, as opposed to just trying to jam it down people’s throats and then having the next administration come in and reverse all of it.”

BC Timber Sales, while somewhat of an independent body, doesn’t exist in a vacuum, Merkel points out. “It’s driven by politics as much as anything. And so yes, it’s changing as quickly as it can. From what I’ve seen, they are trying their hardest to meet the intent of what we’re trying to do here.”

Following Petryshen’s trip to the Nagle Creek Valley, the government paused plans for auctioning off the five Nagle Creek cutblocks, according to the B.C. Ministry of Forests. In an emailed response to questions, after turning down The Narwhal’s request to interview B.C. Forests Minister Bruce Ralston or another spokesperson, the ministry said one cutblock was deferred “for old-growth protection” following consultations with local First Nations. (The ministry did not identify the nations.) The ministry also said it could not reveal which cutblock will be deferred, underscoring how challenging it is for the public and groups like Wildsight to get up-to-date information about logging plans in the inland temperate rainforest. 

A decision “to pause proceeding with the [other] Nagle Creek blocks” was made so BC Timber Sales can develop “a process to evaluate each block” within core caribou habitat, the ministry wrote. The four cutblocks not designated for old-growth deferral “will be considered within the context of caribou habitat protection actions and plans,” the ministry said. It referred questions about caribou habitat protection actions and plans to the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. 

In an emailed response to questions, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship said critical habitat maps and conservation scenarios are not available because they are still being finalized with First Nations. Engagement with First Nations whose territories overlap the group of caribou that includes the Columbia North herd began in early October, the ministry said. It said details on the conservation scenarios cannot be released without the consent of all participating First Nations, while critical habitat maps “will form a central part of public engagement in the future.”

The Forest Ministry’s change-of-mind about new logging in the Nagle Creek drainage came after Wildsight shared its information and concerns with provincial government staff and First Nations. Among other comments, Wildsight asked the government if BC Timber Sales staff would access the more remote stands to determine if they meet criteria set out in the province’s old-growth deferral guide. “As we know, the underlying inventory data can be unreliable and many high value productive old-growth stands can be missed — and this is why field verification is very important,” Petryshen says. 

After travelling to the Nagle Valley, Petryshen tromped around inland temperate rainforest in the upper Adams River watershed, amidst “spectacular old-growth stands that continue to be logged” in Columbia North caribou habitat. The Adams is the only place in the inland temperate rainforest where one rare lichen species, lobaria oregana, a lettuce lichen found in coastal rainforests, has ever been documented.

Petryshen also assessed the inland temperate rainforest in the Goldstream River area, about 100 kilometres north of Revelstoke, where he says plans are in the works to punch a logging road through an old-growth deferral area. “There was a bunch of forest that was missed, also ancient forest that is currently laid out [for clearcutting.]” Part of an old-growth deferral area sits in a Goldstream River wetland; “It’s important for biodiversity but it’s not old-growth forest.” It would make sense, Petryshen says, for the wetland to be removed from the old-growth deferral area “and add in that area that was missed in the mapping, where there’s high-value ancient forests that are being targeted for logging right now.” But that hasn’t happened. 

“We’re still logging lots of primary and old-growth forests in the inland temperate rainforest and pushing it to the brink. This is a red-listed ecosystem right at imminent threat of ecosystem collapse — and that’s the reality,” he says. “And the longer we wait to act, the closer we get to that collapse.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

A globally endangered rainforest with cedar trees more than 1,000 years old will be permanently protected in a new conservancy in southeast B.C. 

The 58,000-hectare conservancy in the Incomappleux Valley was announced Wednesday by Premier David Eby, who called the valley’s rare inland temperate rainforest “one of B.C.’s greatest treasures.” 

“It’s home to old-growth cedars and hemlock trees that are four metres in diameter,” Eby said at a press conference. “Over 250 species of lichen can be found in these forests, including some that are completely new to science. This is just a snapshot of the rich biodiversity of this area.”  

Less than five per cent of Canada’s inland temperate rainforest remains, following decades of industrial logging and hydro-electric projects that flooded valley bottoms. Scientists have warned the rainforest will suffer ecological collapse in as few as eight years if industrial logging continues.

The rainforest, one of the most imperilled temperate rainforests on the planet, is found in moist interior B.C. valleys that stretch from the Cariboo Mountains east of Prince George to the Rocky Mountains close to the Alberta border. Only in two other places in the world — Russia’s far east and southern Siberia — does a temperate rainforest grow so far from the coast.

The Incomappleux Valley is part of the historic range of the highly endangered Central Selkirks deep-snow caribou herd. It provides habitat for many other at-risk species, including grizzly bear, wolverine and a plethora of lichens, which supply food for mammals, nesting materials for birds and homes for insects. Many lichen species — known for imaginative names such as cryptic paw lichen and smoker’s lung lichen — are found only in old-growth forests. The river system in the valley supports kokanee salmon and bull trout, in addition to numerous waterfowl and wetland birds. 

Logging prohibited in new conservancy

Logging, mining and large hydro-electric development will be prohibited in the conservancy, which covers the northern three-quarters of the valley — an area approximately the size of 150 Stanley Parks. 

The southern one-quarter of the valley — 17,000 hectares — will receive a special designation under B.C.’s Forests Act to prevent timber harvesting but allow mineral exploration and mining, according to a letter the forests ministry sent to the Regional District of Central Kootenay, a copy of which was reviewed by The Narwhal. 

In the Dec. 14 letter, Grant Neville, director of strategic initiative for the forests ministry, said logging has not occurred in the valley for more than 15 years due to an unsafe trestle bridge. 

Removal of the area from the tree farm licence is expected to have no impact on the forest sector or the economy of local communities, Neville said in the letter, which also notes the southern part of the valley contains “a high number” of mineral claims. 

Speaking via a video connection, Chief James Tomma of Skw’lax te Secwépemcúlecw (Little Shuswap Lake Band) said the intact Incomappleux Valley provides a glimpse of what B.C. looked like prior to widespread resource extraction. 

“Old-growth was just seen as a dollar value,” said the chief, who is also chair of the Pespésellkwe te Secwépemc Leadership Council. “Now people will be able to go and look and see the grandeur that the Creator put before us … I’m very excited. It’s quite an honour. And hopefully in the future we can go up and take a look at it and see exactly what our ancestors and first contact walked through and looked at.” 

In a written statement, the Shuswap Band chief and council said the nation appreciates that important considerations are emerging in the forest sector “other than fibre.” “We feel that stewardship of the lands and resources is long overdue and that this transfer is a step in the right direction,” the chief and council said.

Eby said the conservancy was made possible because Interfor, one of the world’s largest forest products companies, “released” more than 75,000 hectares of its tree farm licence in the valley. 

The Nature Conservancy of Canada raised $4 million for the conservancy, including to buy out Interfor’s tree farm licence in the valley for an unspecified sum. In a news release, the Nature Conservancy said funding came from Teck Resources, the Wyss Foundation, the Wilburforce Foundation, individual donors and Environment and Climate Change Canada through the Canada Nature Fund.

Eby said previous governments didn’t make protecting the Incomappleux a priority. “They believed we had to choose between growing the economy and protecting unique wild spaces like this for generations to come,” the premier said. “That’s a false choice. British Columbians know we can and must do both.”

Incomappleux biodiversity unparalleled in interior B.C.

The conservancy announcement follows a recent commitment by the B.C. government to meet national and international targets to protect 30 per cent of lands and water by 2030 to address the deepening global biodiversity crisis. 

Craig Pettitt, director of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, a non-profit group that campaigned for more than 20 years to protect the Incomappleux, said the valley is unparalleled in B.C.’s interior for its antiquity, biodiversity and intactness. 

Pettitt described the intact, old-growth western red cedar and western hemlock forest in the new conservancy as the “rarest of the rare,” saying some of the largest cedar trees could be almost 2,000 years old.

“This deal has greatly relieved our concern for the magnificent primeval forest of the Incomappleux,” Pettitt said in a statement that also questioned why the government did not designate the area a Class A park, the strongest protection possible in B.C. 

A conservancy designation permits some types of development, including wilderness lodges accessed by helicopter. Pettitt noted there are already three wilderness lodges in or around the conservancy, and at least six overlapping helicopter tenures. “This development can kill or displace grizzly bears, mountain caribou, mountain goats and wolverines — and it has already gone too far,” he said. 

At the press conference, B.C. Finance Minister Katrine Conroy, the MLA for West Kootenay, acknowledged the work of the Valhalla Wilderness Society in securing protection for the Incomappleux rainforest.

The society has long proposed that several parks be created to safeguard the inland temperate rainforest, including a 156,000-hectare area — known as the Selkirk Mountain Caribou park proposal — that would connect Glacier National Park and two other existing parks. Glacier park adjoins the new conservancy, providing connectivity for wildlife.

In an interview, Pettitt said the new Incomappleux Conservancy is slightly larger than the valley protections included in the society’s park proposal, noting that the extra portion in the south includes clearcuts and other additions are “rocks and ice.” 

He questioned the Interfor buyout, saying it sets a precedent for buying out forestry tenures in other ecologically significant areas slated for protection. “There’s something drastically wrong with this picture. Tenures were awarded to these companies by the government, and they should also be able to be removed if the circumstances warrant.”

Speaking at the news conference, Nancy Newhouse, the nature conservancy’s B.C. regional vice-president, said the conservancy was honoured to facilitate the collaboration that led to the Incomappleux agreement. “When we work together with Indigenous communities, government, industry and private citizens, we can achieve great results for nature,” Newhouse said in a statement. “Incomappleux is an exciting example of this strategy in action.” 

The new conservancy will permanently protect a 40,000-hectare area in the Incomappleux that was deferred from logging in 2020, following a strategic review commissioned by the B.C. government that concluded the province’s scant remaining old-growth forests should be managed for biodiversity and not for timber values.

Environment Minister George Heyman called the Incomappleux conservancy “one of the most significant protected areas established in B.C. in over a decade.”

“It’s a first step, and more work will need to be done to protect these incredibly rare forests.” 

Heyman said the importance of ecosystems like the inland temperate rainforest has not been fully understood or appreciated in the past.

“We thought we could simply go in and harvest without paying attention to the impacts. We all now know, including corporations, that we can’t do that,” he said. “We need to take measures before it is too late and these ecosystem values have disappeared.”

Editor’s note: The Incomappleux conservancy was supported in part by the Wilburforce Foundation, which provides grant support to The Narwhal. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the Wilburforce Foundation did not have any editorial input in this story.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Two years after B.C.’s forestry watchdog warned biodiversity in the Prince George timber supply area may be at “high risk,” the provincial government has mapped important old-growth areas — and told logging companies to steer clear.

Though these areas have not been legally protected, Ministry of Forests officials told logging companies in a Dec. 21 letter that they expect the old-growth parcels to be “respected as no harvest areas.”

The move is “quite significant,” Michelle Connolly, a forest ecologist and director of the non-profit Conservation North, told The Narwhal.

“It’s an extensive area — it’s a quarter of a million hectares of high-value primary forest,” she said, adding, “they’re extremely important areas ecologically.”

“The staff that did this actually should be commended,” she said.

However, the new no-go zones don’t amount to new conservation, she said. Rather, the maps are meant to ensure a longstanding biodiversity policy — which was introduced in 2004 and designed to retain old forest— is implemented more effectively. 

Mapping the old-growth areas preserved from logging can be helpful, Karen Price, an independent forest ecologist, told The Narwhal. But the key, she said, is conserved areas are large enough, include old-growth areas with big and small trees and there are corridors between them for wildlife to move freely.

Whether it’s mapped or not, “if you don’t maintain enough, then we’re not going to be maintaining biodiversity,” she said.

With the information available, it’s challenging to assess how much big tree old-growth is being conserved in the Prince George timber supply area unless you know the area on the ground really well, she said.

A red flag for Price in the letter to logging companies, is that it seems like some changes to proposed old forest areas were made to avoid impacting the timber supply in the short term. 

The changes come two years after the Forest Practices Board, the forestry watchdog, wrapped up an investigation into the way biodiversity is managed in the Prince George timber supply area, following a complaint from a local resident. 

Old-growth forests support a vast array of wildlife, including at-risk species such as southern mountain caribou, goshawk, fisher and wolverine. When the forests they rely on are whittled away, at-risk species are pushed closer to extinction.

The Prince George timber supply area is among the largest in the province, covering almost eight million hectares in the north central interior. About three million hectares — including rare inland rainforests found only in B.C., Russia’s far east and Siberia — are available for logging.

“They’re areas that the corporations operating there should have protected in the first place but failed to,” Connolly said of the newly mapped parcels. “That’s why the B.C. government has to step in and actually draw lines around these forests of ecological importance.”

But even these changes aren’t likely enough to prevent ecological collapse, Connolly warned, noting the biodiversity targets themselves are in need of an update.

“The problem is that the province prioritizes timber harvest over ecosystem health and biodiversity,” Price said. “That is what has driven our forests into the state that they’re in today.”

The Ministry of Forests did not respond to the Narwhal’s request for comment.

Watchdog investigation finds biodiversity at ‘high risk’

The Forest Practices Board investigation focused on a 2004 order that laid out biodiversity objectives for the Prince George timber supply area. While the board determined logging companies had technically complied with the order’s old-growth requirements, it raised several concerns about how biodiversity was being managed, especially since old forests within the timber supply area weren’t mapped.

The problem, the board found, is that companies weren’t required to map the old-growth areas they left standing and generally only categorized old-growth based on age, without considering other important factors, such as the size of old-growth areas, connectivity between those areas or the rarity of ecosystems.

“Biodiversity, as it relates to old forests, may be at high risk in the [Prince George timber supply area,” the board wrote, noting threats to biodiversity could be diminished if old forests were mapped. “This is especially important where the amount of old forest remaining is low.”

Logging ramped up in the Prince George timber supply area around 2000 in response to a major mountain pine beetle outbreak. As those stands dwindled, a spruce beetle eruption led the way accelerated logging in the supply area, including in the rare inland temperate rainforest.

“If you look at photos of these valleys, they look like hell,” Connolly said.

Forests in the Prince George timber supply area are part of the interior wet belt, inland rainforests, where the trees tend to get very old because of limited wildfires, Connolly explained.

The move to protect areas of these forests is significant, she said, “because the ecosystem is in trouble.” 

An international team of researchers, including Connolly, determined the interior wet belt is endangered in a 2021 study. Within the bioregion, they warned the interior temperate rainforest could be at risk of ecological collapse — marked by rapid biodiversity loss — within two decades depending on the pace of logging moving forward.

Connolly pointed to the Anzac Valley northeast of Prince George as the “poster child” for poor forestry management.

“That valley is exactly what you get in a place where licensees do what they want and don’t even have to identify old-growth on the landscape,” she said.

Updated science-based biodiversity targets needed to support wildlife

Connolly said the mapping of old forest areas is “a starting point” for improving conservation for biodiversity, but ultimately she’d like to see them receive permanent, legal protection.

“And we actually need science-based targets to be developed,” she said. The existing targets laid out in the almost two-decade-old biodiversity order “lack rigour” and won’t be sufficient to prevent ecological collapse, she said.

The Forest Practices Board also raised concerns that the biodiversity order had never been updated despite “significant changes to the landscape and increased knowledge.”

Alongside mapping old forest areas, the board recommended the province review and update the biodiversity order itself.

“All the species that evolved in environments where the forests get really old, like this one, are adapted to those types of forests,” Connolly said. “So all the species that I mentioned: caribou, goshawk, fisher, wolverine — that’s what they’re used to.”

Some of these species are already at risk of extinction and further incursions into their habitat will only push them closer to the edge. The endangered Hart Ranges caribou herd, for instance, rely on the lichen that thrive in old-growth forests. When those old trees disappear, their food does too.

Moving forward, Connolly said the province should pull together a team of ecologists and biologists to advise on the development of science-based biodiversity targets.

“The targets for old-growth retention provincewide are too low and in the [Prince George timber supply area] that is also very true,” Price said.

One of the big challenges is forestry regulations limit conservation to areas that won’t unduly impact B.C. timber supply, she said. 

She pointed to the international target to conserve 30 per cent of lands and waters by 2030 — to which both Canada and B.C. have committed. But even that is just to avoid the highest risks to biodiversity. Those targets need to be representative of different ecosystems as well, she said, that means 30 per cent of ecosystems with big trees as well as ecosystems with small trees.

In 2020, the old-growth strategic review recommended B.C. shift its approach to forestry to one that prioritizes ecosystem health.

“We’re still waiting to see what that looks like,” Price said. But until that change is made in legislation, “everybody is legally required to put timber first,” she added.

The old-growth deferrals are “a tiny step towards ecosystem health, they’re just halting the bleed,” she said. 

Conservation measures not to blame for job losses, forest ecologist says

More stringent conservation requirements can be a difficult conversation in communities suffering from the decline of a mainstay industry.

Earlier this month, Canfor announced plans to permanently close a pulp and paper mill in Prince George, eliminating about 300 jobs.

“In recent years, several sawmills have permanently closed in the Prince George region due to reductions in the allowable annual cut and challenges accessing cost-competitive fibre,” Kevin Edgson, Canfor’s chief executive officer, said in a Jan. 11 press release announcing the closure.

“This has had a material impact on the availability of residual fibre for our pulp facilities and we need to right-size our operating platform,” he said.

Neither Canfor nor the Council of Forest Industries responded to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

Over the last few days, Connolly said she’s heard some concerns that caribou protection is to blame for the recent job losses. But, despite pressing concerns about declining populations, no new land has been set aside for caribou in the region in the last two decades, she said, not since 2003.

“That was the last time an area, an ungulate winter range, was set aside for caribou, and it’s way up in the subalpine,” she said. “It’s of no interest to logging companies.”

No old-growth deferrals areas were approved in the region either, Connolly said, referring to a series of temporary deferrals on old-growth logging in certain areas that were meant to give the B.C. government time to develop new approaches to manage forestry.

“It’s a pattern in forestry dependent communities, that these mills exist for several decades, and then they blink out, we actually need community stability here,” she said. 

In recent mandate letters to his ministers, Premier David Eby laid out the heart of the challenge B.C. is facing. The forest sector “has never been under greater stress,” he said. But at the same time the forests themselves are “exhausted.” 

“So, we’re forced into this corner,” Connolly said. And, “we have to decide whether we want to meet the non-negotiable needs of the other life forms that are unfortunate enough to have to share a planet with us.” As for the communities that have relied for generations on the forests for their livelihoods, Eby directed Forests Minister Bruce Ralston to focus on transitioning the forest sector “from high-volume to high-value production, with fewer raw log exports, more innovative wood products manufactured locally, and support to mills to transition to second and third growth trees.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Biologist Rob Serrouya received word of the female caribou’s possible demise at 8:20 a.m. one Monday in late November. An automated email message warned the caribou’s radio collar had slipped into mortality mode, meaning no signals of movement had been transmitted through a satellite for six hours. 

Serrouya doubted the relatively new collar had malfunctioned or was lost in the snow on the slopes of the Monashee Mountains, north of Revelstoke, B.C. Likely something else had happened to the caribou from the highly endangered Columbia North herd. He grabbed his cell phone, a knife, a spot safety beacon and a telemetry receiver. 

Two hours later, a helicopter dropped Serrouya off on a sloping patch of open snow in the forest of Engelman spruce and subalpine fir. He snowshoed about 900 metres through the trees, towards the collar’s signal. The snow was unusually shallow, barely a foot deep, for that time of year. “Not a good sign,” he thought. Then he saw a mess of flattened bushes and broken branches and instantly knew he was dealing with a battle scene.

Serrouya is co-director of the Wildlife Science Centre for Biodiversity Pathways, which collects scientific data on species and their habitats to inform decision-making. For more than two decades, he has tracked the Columbia North herd. The herd makes its home in the Kootenay region in southeast B.C., migrating seasonally from the old-growth valley bottoms of the rare inland temperate rainforest to snowy alpine meadows in the Monashee, Columbia and Rocky mountains. It’s one of B.C.’s deep-snow caribou populations, a moniker conferred because during late winter the caribou access hair lichens growing on trees in subalpine forests by walking on top of metres-deep snow.

Over the past 15 years, a calamity has befallen B.C.’s deep-snow caribou — a caribou ecotype found nowhere else in the world. In 2005, B.C. had 18 deep-snow caribou herds. Today, only ten remain. All are on the cusp of local extinction. Nine deep-snow caribou herds once lived to the south of the Columbia North herd. Eight are gone. Only about two dozen animals remain in the ninth herd, an amalgamation of two herds. Bucking the dispiriting trend, and following costly interventions such as shooting wolves, in 2022 the Columbia North population grew by almost two dozen, to 209 animals.

Make that one fewer, Serrouya thought, as he surveyed the blood-stained ground. Near the base of a spruce grove, etched in the snow amidst large and small broken branches, were drag marks, as though a toboggan had been pulled along. “The poor gal put up a good fight,” Serrouya recalls. “She battled hard.” Most of the caribou’s furry brown body and an arc of ribs poked up from the snow. Only internal organs, including the liver, were missing. Serrouya pulled out his knife and pared back the flesh on the caribou’s rump; the fat was more than one inch thick. She wasn’t a poorly nourished animal heading into winter. “She was in great shape.” 

Wolf tracks, with four symmetrical toes and claw marks, made a beeline to what looked like a wolf bed hollowed out in the snow. The wolf, or possibly a pair of wolves — Serrouya saw no signs of a pack — could still be nearby. A wolf might even have watched him as he unfastened the caribou’s collar, tucking it into his backpack. 

The wolves had almost certainly accessed the Columbia North habitat through an extensive clear-cut on the privately owned and managed Beaumont lands immediately to the east, a conduit to the alpine where caribou would normally be secure. Wolves follow moose and deer into newly logged areas, conserving energy by travelling along linear disturbances such as logging roads and seismic lines. 

Climate change deals a double whammy: a deeper snowpack would have prevented wolves from accessing the slope where the caribou lay. “Had it been a normal snow year, it would have been very unlikely that the wolf could have been traveling at such high elevations,” Serrouya says.

Extreme measures can ‘buy time’

Perhaps no other animal highlights Canada’s role in the planet’s unfolding sixth mass extinction event as much as caribou, the species engraved on the Canadian quarter. Worldwide, more than one million species face extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations report. In Canada, one in five species are at some risk of disappearing. 

Caribou are in trouble across the country, following decades of industrial logging, mining, oil and gas development, hydro dams, road-building and motorized backcountry recreation in their habitat. “Generally speaking, the picture is still quite grim,” Justina Ray, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada president and senior scientist, tells The Narwhal.

Ray says we know how to save Columbia North caribou and other deep-snow caribou herds from local extinction — just as we know what actions to take to thwart climate change. But governments lack the political will to save caribou, she says, as they also lack the gumption to slash carbon emissions to safe levels. And as with climate change, the conundrum is that the longer we wait, the more difficult, expensive and painful the action becomes. 

Monitoring the Columbia North population — including the purchase and deployment of radio collars — cost the provincial government $70,000 last winter, according to an email from the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. In 2022, the government spent $119,000 to shoot three wolves and five cougars in Columbia North habitat, from a province-wide $1.7 million budget for caribou “predator reduction.” In 2021, the government spent $112,000 to kill six wolves and four cougars in Columbia North habitat, out of a $1.4 million province-wide budget.

The B.C. government also invested in a $2.4 million pen for pregnant females from the Columbia North herd, who were tranquilized and transported to the enclosure by helicopter and skidoo. The pen was shut down after three adult caribou died and two calves sustained injuries and were euthanized. That didn’t stop the government from spending about $360,000 on a new maternal pen that began operations last year in a desperate effort to save the only other caribou herd left in the Kootenay region — the Central Selkirks population, with only 28 animals remaining. (Project partners spent an additional $200,000 in in-kind time and equipment.) The pen, funded by First Nations and non-governmental organizations as well as the government, has a first-year operating budget projection of $290,000, according to the ministry.

Studies show such interventions can stave off near-term extirpation — local extinction — for herds in rough shape like the Columbia North population. But while extreme measures buy time, Ray and other biologists say they are not a solution if habitat destruction continues simultaneously. “We’re nullifying the problem on the one hand but we’re still continuing to create the problem on the other,” Ray observes. 

Plans to clear-cut in critical caribou habitat

Last spring, the conservation group Wildsight discovered an approved cutblock in the Wood River basin, north of Revelstoke, in the Columbia North herd’s critical winter habitat — habitat the federal government deems necessary for the herd’s survival and recovery. The group also documented numerous other cutblocks overlapping Columbia North herd critical habitat. Many cutblocks were auctioned by BC Timber Sales, a government agency that manages about 20 per cent of the province’s annual allowable cut. 

In November, Wildsight sounded the alarm about plans to clear-cut more of the herd’s critical habitat, in the Seymour River watershed north of Revelstoke, in an area biologists refer to colloquially as the “hub” for the Columbia North caribou because herd members spend so much time there. Wildsight tallied up 620 hectares of clear-cuts — a total area larger than one-and-a-half Stanley Parks — planned in the herd’s habitat in the rare inland temperate rainforest, a highly endangered ecosystem. 

The clear-cuts were planned despite a request from Splatsin First Nation for a moratorium on logging in Columbia North habitat, in the nation’s territory, until herd planning is complete. Led by the B.C. government, the herd planning process aims to identify activities to reduce the decline of individual herds and restore habitat. 

“It’s really a frustrating state of affairs,” says wildlife biologist Corey Bird, who works for Yucwmenlúcwu (Caretakers of the Land) LLP, Splatsin Development Corporation. “Caribou require a functioning ecosystem, not just old trees … It really kind of boggles the mind that we’re able to continue to impact habitat.” 

Trina Antoine, Splatsin title and rights cultural liaison, recounts how caribou were once so numerous in the nation’s territory it took four hours for the animals to pass. Caribou were essential for the Splatsin and other Indigenous nations, she explains. The thick hides were tanned to make hardy, waterproof footwear, and animals were harvested in the late summer when meat held a high fat content. 

Today, Splatsin members don’t know what caribou meat tastes like, Antoine says. “How we go hunting now is the IGA and SuperValu. Back then, the refrigerator was the land. If people were hungry they just had to go outside and they could find their food, whether it was through foraging or game or fish.” 

According to knowledge gathered from Elders, the demise of caribou in Splatsin territory began in the 1920s after thousands of miners flocked to the area and needed to be fed. Construction of the Mica and Keenleyside hydro dams dealt another blow, impeding caribou migration routes and flooding old-growth forest habitat. Recreational vehicles such as snowmobiles and ATVs — and alpine activities such as heli-skiing — also disturb caribou, Antoine points out. “People won’t leave well enough alone. They have to develop every little place, every space that’s available. Nobody can leave places for the wolves to be, for the caribou to be, for the grizzly bear to be.”

Speaking for herself and not for the nation, Antoine says it’s easy to make wolves the scapegoats. “When it really comes down to it … this is not a wolf problem. This is a human problem. These caribou didn’t disappear because of wolves. They disappeared because of the destructions that we have put upon them.” 

Caribou discussions moving at a ‘very slow pace’

In 2020, to stave off an emergency order under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, the B.C. government signed a much-touted caribou recovery “framework agreement” with the federal government. 

The agreement came after the environmental law charity Ecojustice, acting on behalf of four conservation groups, asked the federal government to invoke emergency powers under the Act to save the Columbia North herd and other imperilled B.C. caribou populations. Emergency powers grant Ottawa responsibility for decisions that are normally provincial jurisdiction, such as whether to issue logging permits in critical habitat for endangered caribou herds.

“The current situation with southern mountain caribou is dire,” Ecojustice told then-federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in 2018. “After years of federal delay under SARA [the Species at Risk Act], and in the face of B.C.’s ongoing failure to protect the species and its habitat, this species needs immediate action to ensure it can survive and recover.”

The framework agreement referenced somewhat vague commitments to protect and restore habitat, manage predators, institute maternal pens and captive breeding, monitor populations and incorporate Indigenous Knowledge into recovery efforts. 

Almost three years later, Bird says framework agreement discussions are moving at a “very slow pace.” 

“We’re feeling very frustrated at the pace at which discussions are occurring and any foreseeable change in what’s happening on the land,” he says. “It’s hard not to feel like the efforts being made in some ways are lip service.” 

Eddie Petryshen, conservation specialist for the non-profit group Wildsight, questions whether the framework agreement has helped the Columbia North caribou. “The province and the federal government have committed to recovering caribou, but so far all we have seen is a plan to make a plan,” Petryshen says. “Right now it’s business as usual on that landscape … There’re places that are extremely high-value caribou habitat that have been logged in the past three years, while that agreement was in place.” 

To illustrate his point, Petryshen emails The Narwhal photographs of core Columbia North herd habitat that was clear-cut after the agreement was signed. One photo shows a logging road surrounded by felled trees in an area known locally as the Devil’s Garden, about 90 kilometres north of Revelstoke, in the transition zone between old-growth cedar and hemlock forests and sub-alpine forests of Engelmann spruce and fir. The clear-cut was part of the old-growth deferral areas announced in November 2021 by the B.C. government to protect forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss. It went ahead after the deferrals were announced, ostensibly because it had been pre-approved.

A second photo shows a clearcut in a “beautiful, spectacular big old-growth valley bottom,” in core Columbia North herd habitat in the inland temperate rainforest, about 110 kilometres north of Revelstoke. Petryshen says the area was logged in the winter or spring of 2021. 

Two aerial photographs Petryshen shot from a small float plane during a bumpy, three-hour ride depict a landscape fractured by multiple clear cuts, zig-zagging logging roads, a hydro line corridor and the Revelstoke hydro reservoir, all in Columbia North herd habitat. One photo shows a brown square in the herd’s habitat, all that remains of what Petryshen describes as a “beautiful, ancient forest” that was logged in the fall of 2021. 

The B.C. government says 35 per cent of the Columbia North herd’s habitat is “protected” in parks and other designations such as ungulate winter range. Yet 65 per cent of the herd’s habitat remains open to logging, mineral exploration and other cumulative impacts such as recreation and heli-skiing, Petrynshen points out. “Decades of science has shown that caribou need vast swaths of intact forest in order to survive. The vast majority of their habitat needs to be undisturbed or minimally disturbed.” 

B.C.’s 2007 mountain caribou recovery plan aimed to protect 95 per cent of winter range for caribou. But Petryshen says that didn’t happen in the Columbia North herd habitat, where the majority of caribou winter range remains unprotected and open to logging and road building. Most habitat loss from logging in recent years has occurred in low elevation ranges where the herd spends upwards of half the year in old-growth cedar-hemlock forests, Petryshen notes. “You don’t need to look far to see how the status quo is failing caribou,” he says, pointing to all the extirpated herds in the Kootenay region.  

Local extinction monitored on website

Trevor Goward calls government-sanctioned logging in core caribou habitat “designer extinction.” Goward is a lichenologist with a particular interest in B.C.’s deep-snow caribou herds, which rely on nutritious arboreal hair lichen for sustenance in wintertime. The lichen grows only in sufficient quantities on old-growth trees, money-makers for the logging industry.

Goward has been monitoring the deep-snow Wells Gray South caribou herd for decades, ever since he began to have memorable encounters with herd animals on hiking trips in the mountains near his home in Clearwater, B.C. He’s watched the herd disappear from the southern half its range and drop over a 20-year period from 350 animals to about 140 — even though, unlike other deep-snow caribou herds, the Wells Gray South population has about 40 per cent of its core range in a provincial park.

One problem, Goward observes, is that only about one-fifth of the Wells Gray South herd’s extended range occurs in the park, making animals vulnerable to human-induced predations arising from clearcut logging. The herd is also now forced to spend much of its time in steep, rugged terrain where hair lichens are less abundant, expending more energy to find food in deep snow than in preferred habitat further south. In winters where tree-dwelling hair lichens — their only source of food in the winter — are difficult to access, the herd must move to old-growth forests at lower elevations to find food. “This seasonal migration used to serve them well,” Goward says. “But now most of these old-growth forests have been logged.”

Goward was so disturbed by the downward population trend of the Wells Gray South herd that he launched a website called “Death by a Thousand ClearCuts: Canada’s Deep-Snow Mountain Caribou Going Down. “The pending extinction of the deep-snow mountain caribou is no oversight or accident,” the website says. “Rather, it’s a government-orchestrated instance of “designer extinction” — extinction by design — taking place in real time in one of the world’s largest, richest nations in utter contempt of Canada’s international obligations around species protection.”

The website details decades of resource decisions that have negatively impacted the Wells Gray South and other deep-snow caribou herds, including the Columbia North population. “The situation only keeps getting worse,” Goward observes. “Episodic winter starvation is just around the corner for many of the remaining herds.” 

The Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship says it is committed to “helping caribou populations recover,” with province-wide investments of more than $10 million annually. “Caribou recovery is a complex, time-consuming challenge, requiring multiple approaches across the landscape to help stabilize and reverse the decline of caribou herds in B.C.,” the ministry says. 

In 2022, the provincial government spent more than $1.1 million on habitat restoration work in southern mountain caribou ranges. Over the two previous years, it spent about $639,000, according to the ministry. That includes helping to fund a $300,000 Splatsin First Nation project to decommission two sections of road totalling about 10 kilometres. Calling habitat restoration an important, yet “band-aid” measure,” Bird says “it doesn’t replace what’s been lost.” 

‘Tyranny of small decisions’ blamed

Ray lays some of the blame for the demise of Canada’s deep-snow caribou herds on piecemeal decision-making. “Each action, each development, is considered one one at a time. Not in a broader context,” she says. “And that’s how we’ve always done business. It’s the tyranny of small decisions. And so it just nibbles away, and there’s no overall responsibility and restraint at the appropriate scale.”

For Ray, there are only three choices for the Columbia North herd. One is to continue business as usual in the herd’s habitat. “Business as usual right now would be continuing under the mirage of meaningful long-term action, plus the continued resource development,” she says. A second scenario would be to control the pace and scale of development in the herd’s habitat while focusing on intensive management efforts, in the hopes that recovery might still be possible.

And the third scenario, she says, is “being truthful about what’s happening.” 

The truth, Ray says, is that planning for industrial activities in the herd’s core habitat continues because governments have quietly deemed resource extraction in the region “more important than caribou.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

British Columbia’s rare inland temperate rainforest will suffer ecological collapse in as few as eight years if industrial logging continues, scientists and conservation groups are warning as new clear-cutting plans surface. 

“The crisis we are predicting in terms of loss of species and collapse of the ecosystem is probably that much closer,” Darwyn Coxson, a professor in the ecosystem science and management program at the University of Northern B.C., told The Narwhal. “I think we’re still going down the same road with our foot on the gas, a blindfold over our eyes and heading for the cliff.” 

Following decades of industrial logging, less than five per cent of B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest is still standing. The forest, scattered in moist valleys stretching from the Cariboo Mountains to the Rocky Mountains, is one of the most imperilled temperate rainforests on the planet. It’s home to giant cedar trees more than 1,000 years old and many species at risk of extinction, including caribou, wolverine, grizzly bear and lichens with names like cryptic paw and smoker’s lung.

An inland temperate rainforest is found only in two other places in the world, in Russia’s far east and in southern Siberia. 

Coxson is one of nine authors of a scientific study that last year warned ecosystem collapse in the rainforest was imminent in nine to 18 years if logging continued at current levels. Since the study’s publication, logging rates in the northern part of the rainforest, in the upper Fraser River watershed, have been “very, very high, perhaps some of the highest on record,” Coxson said.

Michelle Connolly, a co-author of the scientific study, also said little has changed since the study was released, cautioning that ecosystem collapse is likely in as few as seven-and-a-half years.

“We’re even closer to that tipping point for the inland temperate rainforest, because logging has not slowed down,” Connolly, director of the non-profit group Conservation North, said in an interview. “In fact, I think there’s evidence that it has sped up in the last year and a half since that report came out. It’s very distressing.” 

Last week, as delegates from around the world prepared to meet in Montreal for COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference, the conservation group Wildsight sounded the alarm about planned clear-cutting in the rainforest in the critical habitat of the endangered Columbia North caribou herd. 

BC Timber Sales, a B.C. government agency that manages about 20 per cent of the province’s allowable cut, plans to log about 266 hectares of predominantly old-growth forest in the herd’s core habitat in the Seymour River watershed northwest of Revelstoke. Pacific Woodtech, a U.S. engineered wood product company, plans to log about 356 hectares of predominantly old-growth forest in core caribou habitat in the watershed. 

Tracking ecosystem collapse in B.C. forests using lichens

Ecosystem collapse means the environment can no longer support the organisms that have evolved in it over thousands of years. “We know that habitats here used to support mountain caribou, and they no longer do,” Connolly said. “So that’s a sign of ecosystem collapse when animals that roamed these areas for millennia start blinking out. And that’s what’s happening over a really large scale in this ecosystem.”

Waterways in the inland temperate rainforest support at-risk fish species like chinook salmon, bull trout and sturgeon — species also in deep trouble. 

The poor state of aquatic species is a warning sign that other ecological services provided by the inland temperate rainforest ecosystem — including carbon storage, water filtration and providing buffers for flooding — are compromised and “reaching critical thresholds to not be able to support human and natural communities anymore,” Connolly said.

Coxson said one way to measure the collapse of an ecosystem, aside from tracking the demise of a “poster child” species such as caribou, is to go looking for known populations of species listed as threatened or endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Lichens, he said, are a good example. “How many known locations are we losing? How many are left on the landscape?” 

Many lichens grow very slowly and will thrive only in clean air, acting as a canary in a coal mine to warn of pollution. Lichens also provide food for animals like deer and caribou, nesting materials for birds and homes for insects, making them an essential part of the inland temperate rainforest ecosystem. 

“There isn’t a warning bell that goes off saying we’ve hit the extinction event, you sort of have to ask [the question] species by species,” Coxson said. “But where we have the expertise and where people have been able to find the time and resources to go and look, we’re losing things.”

‘We don’t know what we’re losing’

After Eddie Petryshen, conservation specialist for the non-profit group Wildsight, discovered new clear-cutting planned in the inland temperate rainforest — in the critical habitat of the endangered Columbia North caribou herd — he was curious to know if any at-risk lichen species were in the area.

He reached out to Alberta lichenologist Toby Spribille, who agreed to join Petryshen in the upper Seymour watershed to search for rare and endangered lichens. “So often, we don’t know what we’re losing,” Petryshen said. “And I think the Seymour is a perfect example of that.” 

Lichens are a complex life form that is neither a plant nor a fungus. Each species of lichen is a partnership between a fungus and a primitive plant called an alga. The fungus provides a home for the alga. In return, the alga produces food for the fungus. 

A full inventory of lichens in the area would have taken many weeks, so Spribille settled on a relatively quick reconnaissance of two of Pacific WoodTech’s planned cutblocks in the upper Seymour and one cutblock planned by BC Timber Sales in the Blais Creek area. “I was curious to get into the upper Seymour,” Spribille said in an interview. “I’ve looked at it for years on Google Earth and seen some pretty sweet looking old-growth forests from the Google Earth imagery.”

He and Petrynshen drove for several hours along logging roads, set up camp and hiked into the big tree cedar and hemlock forest. Spribille knew a spectacular coastal lichen called Methuselah’s beard had been recorded in the upper Seymour. The hanging hair lichen, which grows up to three metres long in coastal rainforests, had only ever been found in three locations in the inland temperate rainforest. But several decades had passed since its discovery in the upper Seymour. A significant portion of the watershed’s old-growth forest had been clear-cut in the interim; Spribille wasn’t sure the lichen was still present. “We found it the evening we got in, it’s still up there,” he recalled. “There’s a population of it. There’s not a whole lot of it. And it’s very, very fragmented due to logging.”

The Methuselah’s beard hung from about one dozen old-growth hemlock trees that had been left standing, surrounded by clearcuts. Spribille also found another patch growing near a creek.  “Otherwise, habitat was completely lost for that species because it’s old-growth dependent.” He described the find as “really spectacular” and a “claim to fame” for the upper Seymour.

“If Interior B.C. were a different country or a different province, this would be a strictly protected species,” Spribille said, referring to B.C.’s lack of stand-alone legislation to protect species at risk of extinction. “It’s one of those spectacular conservation species that every school child can recognize once they’ve seen it once.”

Forest critically important for at-risk lichen species 

The following day, the pair hiked into the areas slated for clear-cutting, through forests of hemlock and western red cedar trees more than 500 years old. “We’re talking about awe-inspiring trees that were spray-painted for felling,” Spribille said, comparing the forest to Fangorn, a woodland of giant trees in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “There are road rights-of-ways through this, and skid trail markings.” 

In all three upper Seymour sites slated for logging, Spribille found two federally listed lichen species, cryptic paw lichen, a leafy lichen whose upper surface can be yellowish, greenish or blueish grey, and smoker’s lung lichen, blackish and crinkly-looking. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, an independent scientific group that makes recommendations to the federal government about which species should be listed, describes cryptic paw and smoker’s lung lichens as “flagship species for a suite of rare and uncommon lichens and bryophytes that are dependent on humid, old-growth forests.” Bryophytes are liverworts, hornworts and mosses.

At one site designated for clear-cutting, Spribille also found a lichen named enchanter’s matchstick on rocks along a creek. It was only the third time the lichen, which resembles a curvy match, had ever been found in the inland temperate rainforest. At another site, he found endangered greater green moon lichen and threatened pebbled paw lichen. “Additional significant species may be identified when the collected material has been analyzed,” Spribille, who sits on the mosses and lichens subcommittee for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, noted in a Wildsight report.

The lichenologist concluded that the remaining unlogged forests of the upper Seymour River drainage are of “critical” importance if rare and at-risk inland rainforest lichen species are to have “any chance of maintaining viable populations at a regional and national level.” 

Spribille says he is sometimes at a loss for words that a province as rich as British Columbia — with the most biodiversity in Canada and the most species at risk of extinction — has no stand-alone law to protect at-risk species and nature. “I wish the delegates to COP15 would be able to have a tour to see the habitat loss and unsustainable habitat destruction that is happening in an array of different ecosystems during their time in Canada, I think it would be time well spent away from the conference rooms,” he said. 

“There are a lot of people who would be willing to show them around and give them an idea of the scale of habitat loss. Ultimately, habitat loss, together with climate change, is leading us to a situation of peril for many, many species. And this is being accelerated by the industrial logging in British Columbia, which is happening at such a large and unsustainable scale.”

In an emailed response to questions about clear-cutting in the upper Seymour River watershed,  the B.C. Ministry of Forests pointed to its Nov. 2 new release claiming old-growth logging in the province has declined to record lows. The news release was criticized by conservation groups and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs who accused the government of misleading the public by cherry-picking numbers and dates. 

“The inland temperate rainforest is a globally unique forest type that provides important habitat for wildlife and biodiversity and stores large amounts of carbon,” the ministry also stated in its email. 

Coxson said the cumulative effect of losing old-growth dependent organisms like lichens and caribou will render the inland temperate rainforest lifeless in fewer than 20 years, much like the tropical rainforests that have suffered so much degradation that only the standing skeletons of trees remain. Most wildlife, including charismatic species such as parrots, have disappeared from tropical rainforests suffering from ecological collapse, he noted.

In a recent assessment of smoker’s lung lichen for a committee report, Coxson travelled to known locations in the inland temperate rainforest — and beyond — that are now clear-cuts or immediately adjacent to clearcuts. “I know, with a high degree of certainty, that these are known locations that are probably now extirpated (locally extinct),” he said. 

Last year, Conservation North published an interactive map that reveals how little remains of B.C.’s original and ancient forests, showing logging and other industrial human activity on the once-forested landscape as a vast sea of red. The “Seeing Red” map demonstrates that very few primary forests — forest that have never been logged — remain in B.C.’s Interior. 

The Seeing Red map also shows the few areas of the inland temperate rainforest that are still intact. According to Connolly, they require immediate protection in order to avoid further biodiversity loss and ecological collapse. “And the opposite is happening. Companies are racing to finish off logging in their license areas.”

While restoration work is important for conserving biodiversity, Connolly cautioned that humans cannot recreate the structure and complexity of natural forests that have developed over hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of years. “If you want to protect biodiversity, if Canada and B.C. are to meet their biodiversity commitments, we have to protect natural ecosystems. Period.” 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The laundry list of ways the B.C. government has stepped in to protect the imperilled Columbia North caribou herd reads like something from a James Bond script: helicopters, tranquilizers, high-powered rifles and high-stakes captures.

First, it invested in a $2.4 million maternal pen (now defunct) where pregnant females were held until their calves were born and old enough to stand a chance in the wild. Then, it spent up to $30,000 to rescue three survivors from two Kootenay area caribou herds that became locally extinct, tranquilizing the animals and transporting them by helicopter, then trucking them through the snow to a pen and eventually merging them with the Columbia North population. Two years ago, it spent $100,000 to shoot 10 wolves that could gain easy access to the herd through logging roads, seismic lines and other linear disturbances that criss-cross caribou habitat. 

But even with these costly and elaborate recovery efforts underway, the B.C. Ministry of Forests continues to consider and approve industrial logging proposals in the Columbia North herd’s critical habitat — habitat the federal government deems necessary for the endangered herd’s recovery and survival.

As Canada prepares to host COP15, the United Nations’ biodiversity conference that aims to forge a new global agreement to curb extinctions and reverse the loss of nature, the conservation group Wildsight is once again sounding the alarm about potential clear-cutting and road-building in critical habitat for the Columbia North herd. The herd is the only caribou population in the Kootenay region that stands a chance of surviving in the long term as herds to the south wink out one by one.

The group has discovered logging plans in the rare inland temperate rainforest in the Seymour River watershed in the Monashee Mountains, northeast of Kamloops, in an area biologists refer to colloquially as the “hub” for the Columbia North caribou. Wildsight tallied up 620 hectares of clear-cuts — a total area larger than one-and-a-half Stanley Parks. The clearcuts are planned in old-growth western red cedar and hemlock forests, in an area known as the upper Seymour and near three Seymour River tributaries called Blais, Ratchford and Myoff creeks.  

“The Seymour’s right in the middle of the hub,” Wildsight conservation specialist Eddie Petryshen told The Narwhal. “That’s where most caribou in the Columbia North [herd] are and spend most of most of the year … It’s really the heart of their range.” 

Caribou biologist Rob Serrouya said clear cutting in the hub of the Columbia North herd will “increase risks to the whole population.” He said the hub has the “some of the most mellow terrain in an otherwise very rugged landscape” that includes many steep mountain slopes prone to avalanches.

“The hub is the most important to protect in terms of habitat,” said Serrouya, co-director of the Wildlife Science Centre for Biodiversity Pathways, which collects scientific data on species and their habitats to inform decision-making.

“But I don’t want to diminish the other areas of the herd range in terms of habitat protection either because we find that the herd may be expanding to the west and to the northeast. So you don’t want to lose the important habitat requirements at the periphery of the herd boundary either.”

Logging plans overlap with old-growth deferrals

BC Timber Sales, a B.C. government agency that manages about 20 per cent of the province’s allowable cut, plans to log about 266 hectares of predominantly old-growth forest in the Columbia North herd’s core habitat. Pacific Woodtech, a U.S. engineered wood product company, plans to log about 356 hectares of predominantly old-growth forest in the herd’s core habitat, after recently acquiring the timber licences from Louisiana Pacific, an American building materials manufacturer. 

The most recent population census of the Columbia North herd shows it is bucking the trend across southern B.C., where a majority of southern mountain caribou herds are in decline. The herd added 24 individuals over the past year, for a total of 209 animals.

Seven caribou herds in the Kootenay region have become locally extinct or are functionally extirpated, most over the past few years. The only other herd left in the region, the Central Selkirks herd, is hanging on by a hoof, with just 28 individuals remaining.

Biologists who study the Columbia North herd found the animals occupy low-elevation cedar-hemlock rainforests 30 to 50 per cent of the year, foraging on early winter foods like falsebox, an evergreen shrub, before migrating up into the Monashees and other mountain ranges for the remainder of the winter. The logging plans significantly overlap with the route — referred to as a core connectivity zone — used by the Columbia North animals to move between seasonal habitats.

Some cutblocks also significantly overlap with old-growth logging deferrals announced more than a year ago by the B.C. government. The deferral areas temporarily conserve the unprotected remnants of one of the world’s most imperilled temperate rainforest ecosystems, while the B.C. government, in consultation with First Nations, makes decisions about how to proceed. 

In the meantime, the B.C. government has continued to approve logging cutblocks that overlap critical caribou habitat or require the construction of logging roads through protected areas, granting wolves and other natural predators easier access into disappearing caribou range. 

Earlier this year, Wildsight discovered an approved cutblock in the Wood River basin, north of Revelstoke, in the herd’s critical winter habitat. Petryshen has also documented numerous other cutblocks overlapping critical habitat, many of which were auctioned by BC Timber Sales.

Wildsight notes that any additional logging in the Upper Seymour watershed will place the Columbia North population at greater risk of local extinction, including from predation by wolves that follow moose into newly logged areas, gaining easy access through roads and other human disturbances. 

“There’s been an incredible disappearance of caribou on the landscape,” Petryshen said. “It’s happened so rapidly. That’s the way these things go. These tipping points, they just happen … That’s what we’ve seen with the South Purcells [caribou herd], where largely we were too late. And, in Columbia North, there’s still that hope, but we need to act.”

“Our opinion is that this forest development should not proceed under any circumstance because of its impact on caribou and old-growth and carbon storage and landscape function and connectivity,” he said. 

Rare rainforest facing ‘ecosystem collapse’

B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest is scattered in moist valleys stretching from the Cariboo Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. An inland temperate rainforest is found only in two other places in the world, in Russia’s far east and in southern Siberia. One century ago, B.C. had 1.3 million hectares of inland temperate rainforest. Today, less than five per cent of the core, old forest is still standing. Last year, a scientific study warned that ecosystem collapse in B.C.’s critically endangered inland temperate rainforest is imminent in nine to 18 years if logging rates continue at current levels. 

“Within a decade or two we could really be facing a major extinction event in the inland temperate rainforest,” Darwyn Coxson, one of the study’s nine Canadian and American authors, said when the study was released. “We usually think of things like that happening far away, in the tropical rainforest or in a coral reef — ecosystems far removed from British Columbia,” Coxson, a professor in the ecosystem science and management program at the University of Northern B.C., said. “But this is happening in the inland temperate rainforest … I hate to use the word alarming, but the scientific findings are really quite unequivocal. We have 20 years of science leading to this conclusion.”

On its website, Pacific Woodtech says the company’s engineered wood products use raw materials “sourced from sustainable woodlands.” BC Timber Sales says it is committed to maintaining and enhancing the long-term health of forest ecosystems “for the benefit of all living things.”

In an emailed response to questions, the B.C. Ministry of Forests described the inland temperate rainforest as a “globally unique forest type that provides important habitat for wildlife and biodiversity and stores large amounts of carbon.” 

The ministry said approximately 5,710 hectares of priority at-risk old-growth forest have been identified in the Seymour River watershed. Of that, the ministry said 2,640 hectares are already “protected” — including in the Upper Seymour River Provincial Park — while 3,070 hectares have been deferred from logging with the agreement of First Nations. The area the ministry said was protected includes ungulate winter range for caribou, a designation that can be removed if caribou vanish from the landscape.

The two-year logging deferrals were instituted after an old-growth review panel found biodiversity is at high risk in many areas of the province, particularly in old-growth low-elevation valleys where the biggest trees and richest biodiversity – the greatest variety of life — are found. “More troubling is the future projection, where almost all of the province will be in high biodiversity risk once our current management approach harvests most of the available old forest,” the panel concluded in its 2020 report, A New Future for Old Forests. 

Foresters Garry Merkel and Al Gorley, who headed the panel, called for a paradigm shift in the way B.C. manages old-growth forests. They said old forests have intrinsic value for all living things and should be managed for ecosystem health, not for timber. They also said many old forests are not renewable, countering the notion that old-growth logging is environmentally sustainable because trees, no matter how old, will always grow back.

As a blueprint for a paradigm shift, Merkel and Gorley issued 14 recommendations — all of which the B.C. government said it would implement within three years. But, more than two years later, only one recommendation — that logging be immediately deferred in areas “where ecosystems are at very high and near-term risk of irreversible biodiversity loss” – has been implemented, and not fully, leaving conservation groups and scientists questioning the government’s promise to protect old-growth forests and embark on a forestry transition many believe is long overdue. 

A technical advisory panel appointed by the government identified four million hectares of old-growth forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss. One year ago, the government announced two-year logging deferrals for 2.6 million hectares of unprotected forests with “ancient, rare and priority large stands” of old-growth trees, including in the Seymour River watershed.

In an email, Fernando Cocciolo, a forest manager for Pacific Woodtech Canada Ltd., said the company has deferred logging of “planned old forest blocks in our portion of Upper Seymour until [the] government’s old-growth review process is completed.” Cocciolo said Pacific WoodTech may proceed with logging in “several small, second-growth blocks” in the Blais Creek area, near the southern end of the Upper Seymour. 

The B.C. Ministry of Forests said a public consultation is underway on the proposed transfers of the Seymour forest licences and associated road permits from Louisiana Pacific to Pacific WoodTech. Comments can be submitted until Nov. 30. 

Petryshen said the proposed licence transfer provides an ideal opportunity for the B.C. government to follow through on its commitment to protect old-growth forests and caribou. “If they want to prioritize that, they’ve got to get to work on recovering these caribou.” 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Ecosystem collapse in B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest is imminent in nine to 18 years if logging rates continue at current levels, according to a new study by Canadian and American scientists that classifies the old-growth forest as “critically endangered.” 

“Within a decade or two we could really be facing a major extinction event in the inland temperate rainforest,” Darwyn Coxson, one of the study’s nine authors, told The Narwhal. 

“We usually think of things like that happening far away, in the tropical rainforest or in a coral reef — ecosystems far removed from British Columbia,” said Coxson, a professor in the ecosystem science and management program at the University of Northern B.C. 

“But this is happening in the inland temperate rainforest … I hate to use the word alarming but the scientific findings are really quite unequivocal. We have 20 years of science leading to this conclusion.”

B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest — home to cedar trees more than 1,000 years old and highly endangered species such as woodland caribou — is scattered in moist valley bottoms stretching from the Cariboo Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. An inland temperate rainforest is only found in two other places in the world, in Russia’s far east and in southern Siberia.  

One century ago, B.C. had 1.3 million hectares of inland temperate rainforest. But only about 60,000 hectares of the core, old forest remain, Coxson said. “We have lost most of it. In that context, it’s really disconcerting how quickly we’re still logging those remaining core habitats.” 

Areas of the inland temperate rainforest slated for logging include the Raush River Valley near McBride in B.C.’s central interior, home to ancient cedar trees, moose and grizzly bear. 

The study, to be published this month in the peer-reviewed journal Land, is part of a global project led by scientists at Griffith University in Australia to examine the state of the planet’s dwindling unlogged forests, also known as primary forests. 

It comes as a trio of independent scientists who used to work for the B.C. government warn that less than three per cent of the high productivity old-growth forests — forests that contain the greatest biodiversity and are home to the most endangered species — are left in the province, which markets itself as the “Best Place on Earth.” 

The governing New Democratic Party promised during last year’s provincial election campaign to implement the recommendations of an old-growth strategic review panel led by foresters Al Gorley and Garry Merkel, who concluded a paradigm shift is needed in the way B.C. manages its forests, saying old-growth must be managed primarily for ecosystem health and not for timber values. 

Yet little has changed despite the recent appointment of a technical panel to help inform government decisions about future old-growth logging deferrals — Merkel and Gorley recommended that logging immediately be deferred in old-growth forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss — and protests to protect old, irreplaceable forests are taking place around the province. 

Civil disobedience continues near the Fairy Creek watershed on southwestern Vancouver Island, with more than 440 arrests since April. A blockade also went up on a forest service road near Argonaut Creek in the Kootenays where, following a public outcry, the B.C. government deferred planned logging of an old-growth inland temperate rainforest in critical habitat for the endangered Columbia North caribou herd. 

“Canada is losing an important part of its natural inheritance,” said study lead author Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist for the California-based organization Wild Heritage, which aims to protect and restore ecosystem integrity and safeguard biocultural diversity around the world.  

“We’re talking about trees that can live for over 1,600 years, the antique cedars. There’s just so few of them left.”

DellaSala and his colleagues used remote sensing imagery, government databases and published information about different species to assess primary forest conditions across B.C.’s 16.4 million hectare interior wet belt bioregion, which stretches along the western flanks of the Canadian Rocky and Columbia mountains.

The bioregion includes the inland temperate rainforest, which is thought to have the highest concentration of rainforest lichens in the world and is home to the full suite of carnivores, such as grizzly bear and wolverine, that have roamed through the old-growth valley bottoms since the end of the last ice age. 

The scientists used globally recognized criteria for ranking the status of ecosystems, finding that B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest is among the most imperilled in the world. 

“That is a distinction that I think any nation would not want to have,” DellaSala said. “Nobody benefits when an ecosystem collapses.” 

Authors of the study classified the interior wet belt region as endangered, finding that the rate of logging has almost doubled over the past 50 years and is increasing as ​​forestry companies push into upper elevation spruce forests and the biomass pellet manufacturing sector expands. 

Study co-author Michelle Connolly, director of the Prince George-based group Conservation North, said the B.C. government has endorsed more primary forest logging in the endangered interior wet belt for saw logs and bioenergy, while promoting these products as clean, green and renewable. 

“They’ve just gotten more clever packaging what they are doing as low carbon and green and being good for the climate,” she said. 

Connolly pointed to a 2015 report from B.C.’s auditor general, which said the provincial government needed to manage the cumulative impacts of development on lands like the interior wet belt. But the government didn’t follow through on the auditor general’s recommendations for improvements, Connolly noted in an interview. 

“For this ecosystem, we’ve basically done the government’s job for them. What we’ve found is that if degradation — primarily road-building and [logging] cut blocks — keeps going, collapse is imminent.” 

Ecological collapse would come in the form of rapid biodiversity loss in a rainforest that has taken 8,000 years to develop the properties and characteristics we see today, Connolly said, including carbon storage, natural beauty, water filtration and habitat for an abundance and diversity of species. 

“When we degrade these habitats, when we punch roads into these areas, when we stake cut blocks in these areas, we basically reduce the quality of these places for those species and sometimes we outright kill them.” 

Coxson said certain plants, animals and fish have adapted to depend on old-growth forests, and many are highly sensitive to exposure to new forests or to logged areas. As core old-growth is lost, he said species dependent on old forests will become critically endangered. 

“They’ll just start to disappear one by one, and the ecosystem as we know it will be greatly impoverished in the future. And some will be visible. Many of the mountain caribou herds are disappearing very quickly. Other organisms like the cryptic paw lichen that I study — maybe nobody but my lichen colleagues and I will recognize it, but that’s still a critical loss.”

Scientists around the world are urging governments to act swiftly to address the accelerating global biodiversity and climate emergencies. “We need B.C. to do its part while there is still time to save this unique bioregion,” DellaSala said. 

DellaSala’s interest in B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest was piqued after the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement was signed in 2016, protecting a large swath of old-growth on B.C.’s mid-coast. 

The rest of the province’s unprotected old-growth forests, including the much rarer inland temperate rainforest, subsequently became a logging “sacrifice zone,” said DellaSala, the author of a book about rainforests and more than 200 science papers on forest and fire ecology, conservation biology, endangered species management and landscape ecology.  

“They were getting hammered.” 

In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, said it cannot comment on a study that has not yet been published. 

The ministry said it takes its commitment to science-based decision making for forestry management seriously, pointing to what it called a “partnership” with the new technical panel “to ensure we’re using the best science and data available to identify at-risk old growth ecosystems and prioritize additional areas for deferral.”

The ministry said it will have more to share in the near future.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Dave Salayka has been a professional forester and tree faller for most of his working life. He’s laid out cutblocks, worked in Alberta’s oilsands and is part of a crew clearing the right of way for the Trans Mountain pipeline. But the rare inland temperate rainforest in British Columbia’s Raush Valley — home to 1,000-year-old cedar trees, moose and grizzly bears — is one place Salayka doesn’t want to see logged.

Salayka, a long-time resident of Dunster, in B.C.’s central interior, is joining forces with local ranchers, business owners and conservationists to try to save the old-growth Raush Valley, 250 kilometres southeast of Prince George, from planned clear-cutting that would entail building a logging road through a provincial protected area. 

“It’s a pristine valley,” Salayka tells The Narwhal. “It’s wilderness. We still have every wild creature … There’s huge biodiversity. It’s completely representative of wild places, and there are very few of them left on the planet.”

“It’s such a waste to take trees that are hundreds and thousands of years old and turn them into lumber.”

The glacier-fed Raush River, flanked by the northern Columbia Mountains, is the Fraser River’s largest undeveloped and unprotected tributary. Its name is an abbreviation of Rivière au Shuswap, drawn on early maps as R.au.sh, referring to the Secwépemc or Shuswap peoples who have lived in the region for millenia. The valley contains four different biogeoclimatic subzones, the rarest of which is dominated by a cedar-hemlock forest known as the inland temperate rainforest.  

B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest is scattered in moist valley bottoms stretching from the Cariboo Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. Other temperate rainforests, far from the sea, are only found in two other places in the world, in Russia’s far east and southern Siberia. 

Thousands of years ago, coastal species like cedar and lichens hitchhiked to the interior as seeds and spores, flourishing undisturbed in the sheltered dampness of valleys that kept fire at bay. Today, some of the oldest trees in the inland temperate rainforest are as ancient as their coastal big tree cousins, which generally command a much larger share of public attention. 

Dave Salayka, who has been a tree faller and professional forester for most of his working life, doesn’t want to see logging in the Raush Valley. The valley is home to old-growth cedar and hemlock and is a haven for wildlife, including lynx, wolverine, grizzly bear, caribou and mountain goat. Photo: Katharina McNaughton / The Narwhal

In 2005, following a land use planning process, the B.C. government designed a protected area at each end of the Raush Valley, a wildlife corridor that connects Wells Gray Provincial Park to the Fraser River watershed. Together, the two protected areas, called the Upper Raush and the Lower Raush, cover about one-fifteenth of the 100,000-hectare valley. Most of the valley, spread out between the two protected areas, remained open to industrial logging but nothing has happened until now.

Logging rights to the Raush are held by Carrier Forest Products Ltd., a B.C.-based company with mills in Prince George and Saskatchewan. Carrier can only access its Raush Valley tenure through private ranch land or by building a logging road through the 1,280-hectare Lower Raush Protected Area, a piece of land about the size of three Stanley parks that provides valuable riparian wildlife habitat. 

The Raush Valley is 250 kilometres southeast of Prince George. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Any road through the protected area would also have to run through a privately held grazing lease for horse and cattle. 

Devanee Cardinal, whose family owns the grazing lease and 600 hectares of ranch land at the mouth of the Raush River, says family members will not grant Carrier access to their adjoining properties, where four generations have lived since her grandparents homesteaded in the 1960s. 

“When I grew up, the ranchers were not environmentalists,” Cardinal says in an interview. “It was very black and white. There were the loggers, and then there were the tree huggers. Now it’s not really like that. There’s hardly anyone who doesn’t recognize that the Raush has this unique ecological blueprint that is undisturbed — and that is now becoming so rare within B.C. The loggers recognize that, locals recognize that and we as ranchers recognize that too.”  

JD Cardinal is Devanee Cardinal’s son. Four generations of the family have ranched on land at the mouth of the Raush River. A proposal to log the intact valley would entail running a logging road through the family’s grazing lease and a provincial protected area. JD, who runs 100 head of Angus cross cattle, says logging would open up the intact valley to lots of people and hunting. “Ecologically, I think it’s going to have a huge impact on the land and old-growth. It’s a protected area for a reason. I’m not a tree hugger or a greenie or anything. But they’ve logged the piss out of every other side valley here [in the Robson Valley]. The Raush is the most unique place in the valley.” Photo: Katharina McNaughton / The Narwhal

The Raush Valley lies in the territory of Simpcw First Nation, Lheidli T’enneh First Nation and the Canim Lake Indian Band. 

In an emailed statement, Kerri Jo Fortier, natural resource department manager for Simpcw First Nation, said the nation does not support cutting permit applications in the Raush Valley and that adequate consultation has not occurred. The Narwhal reached out to the other nations but they were unable to respond by press time. 

Rancher Rodger Peterson, who is Devanee Cardinal’s uncle, describes the Raush Valley as a fragile ecosystem with fir, pine, balsam spruce and cedars so old it would take three or four people to encircle them with arms outstretched. The valley is home to a plethora of wildlife, including at-risk species such as mountain goat and fisher, a fierce mustelid that dens only in old trees. 

“I’ve travelled extensively throughout the province, and I’ve seen a multitude of valleys,” Peterson says. “I would challenge anyone to come up with one as unique as this valley. And I suspect if they could, it may already be preserved and if it’s not, people don’t know about it.”

Peterson says he only learned about Carrier’s intention to log the valley from the local newspaper and is disappointed that he and other stakeholders were not notified directly. “They’ve started right off by excluding information that the public may be interested in knowing.” 

Rodger Peterson on his ranch near McBride, B.C. Peterson’s family, who have ranched in the area since the 1960s, is opposed to planned industrial logging in the old-growth Raush Valley. Photo: Katharina McNaughton / The Narwhal

Rob Mercereau along the Raush Valley Road. Mercereau, who co-owns a small portable sawmill, is among the Dunster residents who don’t want to see industrial logging in the intact Raush Valley. Photo: Katharina McNaughton / The Narwhal

In an emailed response to questions, B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy confirmed that Carrier applied for an investigative parks use permit on March 19 to explore potential road options in the Lower Raush Protected Area.  

The ministry said Carrier will gather data for an assessment, which will include an inventory of plants along the proposed logging road and offsets for any values potentially lost in the area. If the investigative parks use permit is approved, the information will be used to support a parks use permit application for a road, the ministry stated.

Normally, parks use permit applications are public, but the ministry said Carrier’s application has not been posted because staff are still reviewing it. The ministry could not say if there have been any other parks use permit applications to build logging roads through provincial protected areas.

A Carrier Lumber map shared with The Narwhal shows the proposed logging road will cut through the lower protected area on the west side of the glacier-fed Raush River, to log a pie-shaped section of inland temperate forest wedged between the river and the boundary of the protected area. 

“How is it protected if the logging can go through the grazing lease, through the protected area and they can still haul logs out of there?” Cardinal asks. “To me, that means it’s not really protected.” 

The Carrier map also shows cutblocks in patches throughout the valley. The logging road cuts through the valley, then hairpins west to cut blocks that adjoin the Upper Raush Protected Area, which provides critical habitat for the endangered Wells Gray southern mountain caribou herd. 

According to the 2005 Raush protected areas plan, the alpine and subalpine areas of the Raush River are extremely important for mountain goat populations, while the valley bottom offers important winter range for moose and deer and summer range for bear and other species. Salmon spawn several kilometres downstream from the Lower Raush Protected Area and native fish species such as bull trout, rainbow trout and mountain whitefish are found within both protected areas. 

In its email, the B.C. environment ministry pointed to the 2005 purpose statement and zoning plan for the Upper and Lower Raush protected areas, which allows for “future forestry road access.” The 2005 plan also says the protected areas will be reclassified as parks when the road corridor “is no longer necessary.”  

But that’s no comfort for Cardinal and other local residents like Rob Mercereau, who lives in Dunster and co-owns a small portable saw mill. 

“I’m adamantly opposed to them building the road through the protected area,” Mercereau says. “I’m opposed to them gaining access to the valley at all.”

He points to the contiguous park system in the interior that includes Wells Gray Provincial Park, Caribou Mountains Provincial Park and Bowron Lakes Provincial Park, noting the Raush is the only valley and watershed to connect the parks system to the salmon-bearing Fraser River. 

“No other place in the Fraser watershed connects completely,” Mercereau says. “That alone to me would signify a need to protect it. We need to have those wildlife corridors if we have any hope for the future of wildlife in northern B.C.” 

Dunster resident Rob Mercereau believes the old-growth Raush Valley should be left intact and is opposed to the construction of a logging road through a provincial protected area. Photo: Katharina McNaughton / The Narwhal

Carrier president Bill Kordyban says the company understands the concept of social licence and is happy to talk to local residents and come up with a plan that works for everybody. 

“On the other hand, I have a sawmill that needs wood and when we bought the timber licence the Raush was part of the timber supply base,” Kordyban says in an interview. “We have obligations to get in there and to do some harvesting. We should do it in a way that doesn’t upset too many people … but to say leave it totally alone, well that, de facto, makes it a park.” 

The company hopes to begin road-building in the lower part of the Raush Valley late this year or early next year, depending on the permitting, and proposes to cut just over 100,000 cubic metres of wood over the following two to three years. After that, Carrier’s operations would shift to the upper part of the valley, taking out approximately another 500,000 cubic metres of wood over a 10 to 15-year period, Kordyban says.

Spruce, pine and fir will go to the company’s dimensional sawmill in Prince George, while the cedar will be shipped locally to BKB Cedar Manufacturing in McBride and Cedar Valley Specialty Cuts in Valemount and as far away as Gilbert Smith Forest Products Ltd., in Barriere, north of Kamloops. The hemlock will be taken to a new mill owned by the Valemount Community Forest. 

“We try to find homes for all the species,” Kordyban says.

A sawmill near Prince George. Carrier plans to send lumber from the Raush Valley to its dimensional sawmill in Prince George. Carrier president Bill Kordyban says the cedar will be shipped locally to BKB Cedar Manufacturing in McBride and Cedar Valley Specialty Cuts in Valemount and as far away as Gilbert Smith Forest Products Ltd., in Barriere, north of Kamloops. Hemlock will be taken to a new mill owned by the Valemount Community Forest. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Carrier’s application comes as the BC NDP government drags its heels on implementing recommendations from an independent old-growth strategic review panel it commissioned in 2019. The panel, led by foresters Al Gorley and Garry Merkel, made 14 recommendations that the BC NDP promised to implement  during last fall’s provincial election campaign if re-elected. 

In the April 12 Speech from The Throne, which lays out the government’s blueprint for the current legislative session, the NDP government appeared to backpedal on its election promise, saying only that it will “continue to take action on the independent report on old growth.” 

Critics assert that very little has been done, with the Ancient Forest Alliance and two other conservation groups assigning the government a failing grade in a recent report card that examined progress on implementing the panel’s recommendations, submitted to the government one year ago.

In one recommendation, Gorley and Merkel said the government should immediately defer development in old forests “where ecosystems are at very high and near-term risk of irreversible biodiversity loss.” 

“If I were the forests minister, I would be conserving old-growth,” Salayka says. “If I were [John] Horgan as the premier I’d be saying ‘We’re going to phase out logging old-growth, because it should be conserved.’ It’s more valuable standing for all the values it provides. We do have second growth forests that can be logged, but old-growth takes centuries to grow.”

Dave Salayka is a professional forester who lives in Dunster, B.C. “It’s such a waste to take trees that are hundreds and thousands of years old and turn them into lumber,” he told The Narwhal. Photo: Katharina McNaughton / The Narwhal

Kordyban says Carrier will work with any new rules for old-growth logging implemented by the province, pointing out that the old-growth strategic review panel’s recommendations are still just a plan.

“There’s been a commitment by the government that they’re going to implement it. The devil is always in the details. We’ll live by whatever the rules become.” 

He says the government ought to designate areas of working forest where a primary goal is timber production, instead of the current “piecemeal” approach. 

“Then we can avoid situations like what’s happening in Fairy Creek or here, when a company starts to develop an area and then ‘nope nope, you can’t.’ Because then we go on a valley by valley basis. It’s not good for anybody. It would be nice to have some certainty. What is the working forest? What areas are protected? What areas are off limits? Once and for all, it would be nice to delineate what can be done [and] where.”

Michelle Connolly, director of Conservation North, a science-based non-profit group based in Prince George, says the Raush Valley is among the areas in the province at the highest risk of biodiversity loss that Gorley and Merkel recommended be immediately deferred from logging. Logging will target the high-value old-growth first, Connolly notes. 

“It’s a true wilderness area. It’s intact. As far as I understand it’s never had any kind of industrial activity in it. There’s been hunting in it, there’s been traditional use in it. I’ve seen aerial photos of a deeply incised wild valley with a river running through the middle. It looks heartbreakingly beautiful. We have so little of this in the central interior. We have to keep it for nature because the rest of our region has really become sacrifice zones.” 

Michelle Connolly, the director of the science-based group Conservation North, sits in a burnt slash pile in B.C.’s interior. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

A 2020 independent study by B.C. ecologists who previously worked for the provincial government found that less than three per cent of the province’s old-growth remains. 

In January, Conservation North released an interactive map that reveals what little remains of B.C.’s original and ancient forests, depicting logging and other industrial human activity as a vast sea of red. 

Conolly calls roads into wilderness areas like the Raush the “beginning of the end.” 

“If you allow a road to get punched through an area it’s vulnerable to a lot of things. You get a lot of motorized recreation. You get more people, you get risks of fire. You get invasive species potentially. You get habitat fragmentation.”

B.C.’s old-growth forest nearly eliminated, new provincewide mapping reveals 

But Kordyban says another way to look at things is that the company will be providing public access to an area that has been relatively inaccessible because the current road access is private. 

“If we were forced to walk away from the Raush, what we’d need to do is then say, ‘okay, where can we go?’ Part of the reason why we’re looking to develop the Raush is because there’re so many constraints on the land base from a forestry perspective.”

Roy Howard, president of the Fraser Headwaters Alliance, says there are many compelling reasons to leave the Raush Valley intact and wild. 

“Any old growth in the province at this point is becoming extremely valuable for carbon retention, for wildlife habitat, for water values,” Howard says. “It’s a big wilderness, which we’re losing all the time. I think we want to hang onto the wilderness values as much as we can but also the old-growth values. It’s incredibly important for carbon [storage] to leave those old forests intact as much as we possibly can.” 

UBC researchers have found that B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest is one of the wettest zones in the province and has the highest diversity of tree species. The inland temperate rainforest also stores high amounts of carbon in its forests and is exceptionally important for freshwater provision, in addition to being a hotspot for nature-based outdoor recreation. 

The cedar-hemlock forests that characterize the rainforest have the highest density of overlapping carbon storage and freshwater provision hotspots in the province, the researchers found. “This makes the region a high priority not only to protect this globally rare ecosystem, but to secure fundamental needs for people,” says an April brief on the research published by the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

“When it comes to the Raush, it’s not possible to overstate how much is at stake,” Connolly says. “We’ve violated so much of the land in the central interior. We can’t let that happen in the Raush. If we lose the Raush, we’ll have lost ourselves.”

The environment ministry said parks use permit applications are subject to public and Indigenous consultations and the time span for conducting the work for both parks use permits could take 18 to 24 months.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.