East Creek & Klaskish Valleys
Northwestern Vancouver Island

Eye Witness Account of Logging by Joe Foy, Director of the Wilderness Committee.

On 19 July 19 and 20 July 2003 a Wilderness Committee Expedition investigated logging and road building operations in the upper East Creek, a pristine watershed and ancient forest just north of Brooks Peninsula.



This is what we saw . . .


East Creek is being rapidly and brutally roaded by Lemare Lake Logging Company, a local subcontractor of Weyerhaeuser.

A 2003 Western Canada Wilderness Committee Expedition recorded the clearcut logging of the Klaskish and the new logging road being blasted into the pristine East Creek Valley. The Kaskish was one of a handful of remaining unlogged ancient rainforest valleys on Vancouver Island when in 1997 Interfor (International Forest Products) began its operations here thanks to the timber rights it had been given by the BC government. In only five years, from 1997 to 2003, Interfor and its subcontractor Lemare Lake Logging gutted the rare and precious ancient ecological integrity of the Klaskish Valley.

"Though the forestry workers whom we met were very courteous, the logging we saw in the Klaskish shocked us. When we saw how the Klaskish had been butchered it made us even more determined to see logging road construction halted into the East Creek Valley." Expedition members reported that the road building crew is working to extend the East Creek logging road 7 days a week from 7 am until 5 pm. The road is now about 1,000 feet above the East Creek Valley floor. Ancient red cedars litter the side of the road (left).

Huge red cedar stumps are left beside the East Creek
logging road as casualities of the war on the forest

The East Creek logging road leaves the Klaskish Valley
and snakes up the steep hill into the old growth remnants

Lemare trucks, bulldozers and front end loaders are at
work seven days a week on the East Creek logging road

Lemare road building crew and two drill rigs working
on the logging road into the pristine East Creek forest

Lemare Lake Logging Company, a local operation
based in Port McNeil that contracts out to Interfor

Lemare Lake Logging Company blasting a logging road
into the intact wilderness forest to enable its destruction

The very end of the road is about 1000 feet above
the floor of the pristine East Creek Valley

Ken Wu sits on the corpse of a logged ancient yellow
cedar tree at the end of the East Creek logging road

The still pristine forest at the end of the East Creek
logging road that is soon to be sacrificed for industry

Entrance to the forest destroyers, International
Forest Products (Interfor) logging camp at Klaskish

Interfor's Klaskish logging camp: the reviled destroyer
of big trees invaded Klaskish Valley in 1997

Interfor blasted a logging road from one end of the
Klaskish Valley to the other for no purpose but ravage it

After building the industrial road, paid for with public
funds, Interfor logged the hell out of the Klaskish

In huge areas only big stumps remain, silent witnesses
to the glorious forest that not long ago was still standing

Some of the Klaskish clearcuts are so huge that
even an enormous Grapple Yarder seems small

Interfor gutted the Klaskish like a fish, leaving a legacy
of destruction from which the forest will never recover

Here and there some of the arboreal giants of the
grand Klaskish Valley remain, but not for long

A big Sitka spruce is reminder of the pristine forest that
five years ago still existed in the Klaskish Valley

Note: Photos and reporting by Joe Foy and Ken Wu © Western Canada Wilderness Committee

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