By Tim Burkhart, former researcher with the Cohen Commission and Peace River Break Coordinator with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

Braving freezing temperatures and risking arrest, an alliance of First Nations members and local landowners have camped out on the site of the first European settlement in British Columbia to protect the Peace River from destructive land clearing for the Site C dam.

While the camp has rightfully earned significant media attention, few outside the region are aware that it’s located in an area so high in ecological values that the B.C. government recognizes it as worthy of Provincial Park status, and designates it as an Old Growth Management Area.

Travelling downstream along the Peace River from Hudson’s Hope to the site of the camp at historic Rocky Mountain Fort is a voyage through a rare landscape of natural heritage and wild beauty that needs to be protected for all British Columbians to enjoy.

One of the Peace River Islands, an important calving ground for ungulates in Peace-Boudreau. Photo: Tristan Brand.

While the northern bank rolls away in fertile plains and bountiful farmland, the southern bank rises from the life-giving waters of the Peace to encompass a richness of wildlife habitat and unique ecosystems.

Streaming past columns of rock rising out of the turbulent waters of the upper Peace — dubbed “the teapots” by locals — the river flows past towering cottonwood stands and steep cliffs carpeted in spruce and aspen.

This is Peace-Boudreau, recommended for Provincial Park status in 1997, and appearing today on B.C. tourism maps as a star attraction. Yet it has not been formally protected despite decades of campaigning by local communities, First Nations, and scientists, and two recommendations from the region’s Land and Resource Management Plans.

Peace River Valley. Photo: Tristan Brand.

At more than 17,000 acres (7,000 hectares), the proposed protected area hugs the river shoreline, encompassing tributary creeks and aquatic features, such as the lower Moberly River and Boudreau Lake, and would protect high-quality habitat for a diversity of wildlife. The area provides high-value winter range as well as spring calving grounds on the islands for moose, deer and elk, and features a diverse range of wildlife, including grizzly bears, wolves, beaver and bull trout, and a plethora of bird species, such as osprey, eagles and trumpeter swans.

Peace-Boudreau was designed to protect the last remaining intact portion of the Peace River and conserve the Peace Lowlands, a critically underrepresented ecosystem in B.C. Only 0.4 per cent of these lowlands are currently protected, well below the provincial standard, while the proposed park would also provide representation of the moist warm Boreal White and Black Spruce Zone — another important ecosystem identified in this area.

Cliff swallows along the shoreline at the confluence of the Peace and Halfway rivers. Photo: Tristan Brand.

Due to the heavy impact of oil and gas activity throughout Northeast B.C., protecting this region is vital from both a representative perspective as well as for ecological integrity. And yet the Site C reservoir would flood up to 30 per cent of these critical ecosystems, including all the islands.

The B.C. government first identified Peace-Boudreau as a place of special significance in 1969 — a legally binding declaration to conserve it for the benefit of regionally and internationally significant fish and wildlife species. And much of the region, including the Rocky Mountain Fort site, falls within an Old Growth Management Area that recognizes the importance of its magnificent cottonwood groves and wildlife, such as nesting eagles, which depend on the forest for homes and food.

An eagle peeks out from the trees in the Peace River valley. Photo: Tristan Brand. 

By allowing the clear-cutting of this land to proceed unchecked, the government has abandoned its responsibility to ensure Peace-Boudreau remains protected for the benefit of all. The stewards of the land camped out in the cold at Rocky Mountain Fort are stepping up to defend it.

Peace-Boudreau is a place of shared heritage, archaeological richness, First Nations cultural and economic importance and incredible wildlife habitat values combined together in a unique ecosystem that has been wisely reserved from destruction for almost 50 years. It’s time to protect Peace-Boudreau forever, starting with the rejection of the Site C dam.

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The Peace Valley old-growth forest slated to be clear cut for the Site C dam is just as important, if not more ecologically significant, than the Great Bear Rainforest, says the wildlife biologist and retired provincial government manager who wrote B.C.’s management plan for the area.   “It’s more important from a biodiversity point of view because there’s far less of it,” Rod Backmeyer said in a phone interview.   “The boreal forest hasn’t had the high profile [of the Great Bear Rainforest]. You don’t get those classic giant trees with moss covered ground and logs under them that are so picturesque. It’s different here. It doesn’t mean that it has less value. It just doesn’t have that romantic flavour that some of the coastal old-growth has.”   The forest, on the south bank of the Peace River near its confluence with the Moberly River, surrounds an historic fort site where Peace Valley farmers and First Nations members have camped since New Year’s Eve. BC Hydro contractors built a logging bridge across the mouth of the Moberly during the Christmas holidays, but clear-cutting stopped when campers and their supporters, including First Nations elders, began to maintain a constant vigil near logging equipment.

The forest around the Rocky Mountain Fort site is so ecologically important that the B.C. government gave it three different protective designations. It is a designated Old-Growth Management Area, with centuries-old poplar, spruce and cottonwood trees that offer prime habitat for at-risk species like the fisher, which moves its young from nest to nest in tree cavities.   The area is also considered to be critical habitat for moose, and carries an official designation as Ungulate Winter Habitat. It provides increasingly rare winter habitat for the moose population, which is in such sharp decline in the Peace and elsewhere in B.C. that the provincial government has commissioned a five-year study to probe reasons for the die-off.   “You’re going to lose a lot of the critical winter range,” Backmeyer said of the planned logging. "We’re going to lose all of that lower slope and the big timber in the valley that’s the thermal cover and the security cover during those big storm events. It’s going to be gone.”   In addition to the old-growth and ungulate winter range designations, the area targeted for immediate clear cutting was set aside by the provincial government in 1969 as part of the South Peace Land Reserve that aims to protect unique wildlife values, including habitat for the elusive and at-risk wolverine.   The reserve contains some of the “highest wildlife values in the entire Peace,” according to the management plan that Backmeyer wrote in 1992 while working as a consultant. He was subsequently hired by the B.C. Ministry of the Environment as a wildlife biologist and later managed major projects for the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.   Even though the area around the Rocky Mountain Fort site is not slated to be flooded until 2024, B.C. Energy Minister Bill Bennett has said clear cutting must take place by this March 31, before songbirds return to nest.   Canada is a signatory to the Migratory Birds Convention Act, which prevents migratory birds from being killed or their nests from being destroyed.   Myke Chutter, a bird specialist with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, said mortality is significantly reduced if logging takes place before “the empty forest comes alive” with birds building nests and hatching their young. He said it is also illegal under the B.C. Wildlife Act to log trees with active songbird nests.   The land reserve provides important nesting habitat for four at-risk songbird species found nowhere in B.C. but in the Peace River Valley, according to the South Peace Land Reserve management plan.   These are the Black-throated Green Warbler, Connecticut Warbler, Mourning Warbler and Canada Warbler. (Since the management plan was written, the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of British Columbia has confirmed sightings of two of these species, the Canada Warbler and Mourning Warbler, in a small zone to the north of the Peace Valley.)   B.C.’s Conservation Data Centre, which maps known locations of at-risk species and ecological communities, lists the Canada Warbler and Black-throated Green Warbler as occurring around the Rocky Mountain Fort site.

Canada Warbler. Photo: Garth McElroy/Vireo from the Audobon Society.   The Canada Warbler, a small yellow and grey songbird with a white ring around its eye, is one of five migratory bird species whose sustainability could be threatened by Site C, according to a BC Hydro submission to the Joint Review Panel that examined Site C for the federal and provincial governments.     That review panel concluded that the Site C dam and its huge reservoir would likely cause “significant adverse effects to migratory birds relying on valley bottom habitat during their life cycle and these losses would be permanent and cannot be mitigated.”   Environment Canada, in its submission to the Joint Review Panel, said it agreed with BC Hydro that the dam and its reservoir would pose “significant residual adverse effects” to at-risk migratory bird species.   The federal department went on to say that these adverse effects are potentially of greater magnitude than BC Hydro concluded, that a broader suite of migratory birds will potentially be affected by Site C than BC Hydro reported, and that the loss of nesting habitat to migratory birds and species at risk “has not been fully assessed.”   The land reserve, including the area around the Rocky Mountain Fort site, has such high environmental values that the majority of it was slated to become a provincial protected area.   The 7,000-hectare Peace Boudreau Protected Area was set aside in the 1980s but was never formally been designated by the B.C. Cabinet.   In 2015, the B.C. government assured the Saulteau First Nation it would protect Peace Boudreau as part of a Site C impact benefits agreement that was reached but not signed.   Up to one-third of the proposed protected area would be destroyed by the Site C reservoir, including the forest and river flats around the Rocky Mountain Fort site.   Backmeyer said the Peace is unusual because it is a low elevation valley that supports starkly different ecosystems and wildlife.   “It’s so unique in that you get almost semi-desert on one side of the valley and you get old growth spruce right across the river. You don’t find that anywhere else in B.C., that’s for sure.”

Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife

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