Last chance to save Windy Bay
The Story of Windy Bay
By Ken Lay, Wilderness Committee Director, who visited the Queen Charlotte Islands for the first time in November 1986, and spent nine days in Windy Bay.
Breathless. Was it the wild beauty or the several hours of hiking in Windy Bay? You don't have to be a professional biologist (I only have high school training), to tell that Windy Bay is an ancient old growth forest. Besides the obvious - giant trees, trees of all different sizes and the absence of stumps with flat tops - there is a raw jungled look about the arrangement of everything. Trees which have grown from the rotting remains have grown from the rotting remains of their ancestors, are all placed and shaped just right, naturally fitted to that particular piece of earth.
It's not just ten, twelve, fourteen foot diameter spruce and cedar that make Windy Bay breathless. It's the surprise around every bend of the creek and every moss-draped windfall. Each section of the stream is unique. Here and there are dwarfed and twisted hemlocks that have been sculptured by the shifting patches of light missed by the giants towering above. How old was the one I sat under? Thirty feet tall with a trunk only a few inches in diameter, worthless to a logging company. Is it two hundred, three hundred or more years old? Will it ever grow to be a giant?
Questions - the unknown - the irreplaceable diversity and complexity - that's what the wilderness is.
Unnamed Windy Bay Creek Tributary
What is the nature of the virgin forest on the Queen Charlotte Islands; its age distribution, species composition and nutrient recycling rate? Why does the Windy Bay temperate rainforest have one of the largest living biomass (the greatest amount of living matter by weight per unit area), of any terrestrial ecosystem in the world? How old does a tree have to be make it more valuable left standing than cut?
These are not my questions. They were posed by Marion Parker, a world famous tree ring expert. No one knows the answers...yet. Our Committee sent him to the Queen Charlotte Islands a few months ago, the first dendrochronologist to take samples there. In the Charlottes for only a few days, he examined the tree stumps and logs left behind in the clear cuts. He didn't even get as far as North Moresby. But he did find lots of ancient trees. The oldest specimen was a 1,294 year old yellow cedar, now a two-year-old stump rotting near Yakoun Lake on Graham Island. It survived 52 human generations before, in a matter of a few minutes, a chain saw brought its life to an abrupt end. No one suspected the antiquity of the tree when it was cut. According to Mr. Parker, trees over a thousand years old are extremely rare; they are an irreplaceable and invaluable resource telling us about climate and atmospheric conditions in the past, and relating them to the future as the tree continues to live and grow. How many trees over 1,000 years old live in Windy Bay?
Why did I go to Windy Bay when the days are short and the rains long and hard?
At the edge of a clear-cut at the southern boundary of the Windy Bay watershed
Clear-cut abutting Windy Bay Watershed to the south
Our Committee had heard that logging was imminent despite the international acclaim that Windy Bay had achieved. According to an inside informant, all that was left to do before Forest Service approval to log would be given, was for the government Ecological Reserve Unit to "walk on the line" establishing the final boundary of the company leave-strip option "B" reserve. The company plans to push a road along this line in 1988. The road would forever sever the hope that Windy Bay would be preserved whole.
Option "B", according to the company, "protects" ten percent of the valley and most of its biological "values". But it doesn't protect the essence of the valley and most of its biological "values". But if doesn't protect the essence of the valley - its salmon stream. All the time I hiked Windy Bay Creek it stank of rotting fish, remnants of a massive salmon run returning nutrients to aid the next generation, and I saw salmon still struggling up the stream long after the Federal Fisheries census taker had left. He visited Windy Bay Creek only once to count fish in 1986, on October 6, and found 34,400 spawning salmon.
Option "B" reserve won't even protect the trees left in the leave-strip around the mouth of Windy Bay Creek. I hiked to the edge of the clear cuts that now surround Windy Bay watershed and saw the blowdown, hundreds of trees at the edge of the clear-cuts pushed over by the wind. If it is already happening at the edge of the watershed, it is certainly going to happen in the proposed leave- strip reserve. Giant trees which have grown their centuries-old lifetime in the shelter of other trees just don't have the root or limb structures to withstand the southeastern storms, reputed to have the highest winds of any in Canada.
Despite the recent assertion by the Minister of the Environment, Honourable Stephen Rogers, that "Cabinet approval" is required before logging goes ahead in Windy Bay, I found plenty of evidence that, in fact, the decision has already been made. The logging company must believe that it is going to be logging Windy Bay in the near future, for thousands of dollars worth of engineering work has already been done. Proposed roads were clearly marked with ribbon and blaze marks. The most recent ones were dated September of 1986.
Logging Poised to Enter
Everywhere I went in Windy Bay there was evidence of Haida use of the forest - especially cedars with test holes in them. No doubt the whole watershed was a prime spot for taking individual trees for Haida canoes totem poles. It's a shame that none of this heritage has been documented. The studies haven't been done but the bulldozers and logging trucks are ready to roll.
If there is to be any future for our planet, I believe place like Windy Bay MUST BE SAVED. As a last resort, I will place myself in front of those who are constructing the first road into Windy Bay. I hope reason prevails and it doesn't come to this. But if it does, I know I won't be alone.
