Ladder leading to higher platform in main research Sitka
The upper Carmanah Research Station
Dismissed by a former B.C. Forest minister as "tree houses", the wooden platforms that are strapped "not nailed" into the canopies of five Sitka Spruce tree in the upper Carmanah are serious research installations--the first of their kind in North America. Common in tropical rainforest research for many years. In 1989 fixed research platforms in northern temperate were a brand new concept.
The brain wave foe constructing the platforms was Shane Kennedy's. Now a Vancouver publisher and filmmaker, Kennedy spent nearly 15 years in many of the world's tropical rainforests helping to establish remote scientific research stations.
He proposed that the Wilderness Committee erect similar platforms in the upper Carmanah. It was just when the fight to save 6700-hectare Carmanah Valley and the spectacular Sitka Spruce trees there--including the tallest known living tree in all of Canada (95 metres or 312 fee)-was at its peak.
Under Kennedy’s guidance, a volunteer crew from the committee pre-built the first platforms in Vancouver, then loaded them onto the back pick-up, ferried them across the strait of Georgia to Vancouver Island, and hauled them along a series of logging roads in the dead of night in the middle off winter to the headwaters of the Carmanah. A boardwalk and rustic base camp were banged into place and the first platform was strapped into tall Sitka spruce.
Information booth at research base in Upper Carmanah
"There I was dangling from a rope 160 feet in the March," remembers Joe Foy from the Wilderness Committee, "trying to cinch a series of four-foot long right-angle braces to the ancient Sitka spruce with canvas truck straps. I might as well have been trying to hang giant Christmas tree ornaments. It Was Wild." From these daring beginnings emerged four more canopy platforms, a series of swaying Burma bridges that link the various platforms at various heights--the highest slightly over 60 metres (200 feet) off the ground--and the launch of research of undertakings which are proving to be major international significance.
The Wilderness committee has begun grove of Cedars in the nearby Walbran valley and is planning to construct one in a grove of ancient white spruce along the peace River in placed by Alberta. Already traps placed by Alberta WCWC research team indicates that many new insect species will be found here too, indicating the biodiversity and complexity of this ecosystem is much greater than previously thought.
