Lost Valley home to “pocket rainforest”
The rainforest filters, regulates and cools Lost Creek’s waters.
St’at’imc survey team takes a break by an ancient rock shelter in Lost Valley pocket rainforest.
Few visitors would expect to find a coastal rainforest in the rainshadow of the Coast Mountains near Lillooet, where dry pine forests and grasslands predominate. But countless generations of St’at’imc have relied on hidden pockets of rainforest for sustenance, full of coastal wildlife and plants that occur in high mountain hideaways throughout their territory. Here one can find a source of redcedar bark and medicine plants as well as other rainforest products that are rare in the dry interior part of their territory.
These small pocket rainforests are not easy to get to. They occur primarily at the lower end of hanging valleys, often perched atop cliffs 500 metres or more above the Fraser River, or Anderson and Seton Lakes.
Regardless of their difficult access, the St’at’imc have used pocket rainforests for millennia as their ancient trails attest. These forests, chock full of harvest and shelter sites are now store houses of archeology. Their natural resources, like cedar and coastal plants, meant that the St’at’imc could obtain many important products without having to trade or make long journeys to the coast. Luckily, many of these pocket rainforests were protected from logging in recent times due to their relative isolation and inaccessibility, or simply because logging companies did not know of them.
Now however, as easily accessible supplies of timber run out, logging companies are building multi-million-dollar government-subsidized roads into these economically valuable, but isolated oldgrowth forests. After the pocket rainforests have been logged, many of the animals that inhabit them quickly perish because they literally have nowhere else to go.
A joint St’at’imc/Wilderness Committee week-long survey of the valley identified 125 plant and 42 bird species including the endangered northern spotted owl. Signs of grizzly bear, cougar, wolf, wolverine, mule deer, moose and mountain goat were also noted by the survey team. The Lost Valley contains amazing pocket rainforests in its lower reaches. One minute the hiker is walking through a dry forest of ponderosa pine and interior Douglas-fir, and then all of a sudden is entering a cool emerald world of redcedar and hemlock. Closer inspection reveals redcedar trees scarred by aboriginal bark and wood harvesting going back generations. An ancient trail winds through the rainforest, past cache pits used by hunters long ago to store their meat prior to their return home, to lodges located in the proximity of where you find the modern day villages of Seton Portage and Shalalth.
