Editor:
In the Dec. 4 edition, a letter appeared from John Dafoe (“Value mushroom culture”) about a Sunshine Coast Community Forests (SCCF) block in Halfmoon Bay designated HB50. It caught my eye due to our organization being concerned about another SCCF cutblock in which the forest provided excellent conditions for mushroom harvesting. That was the Chanterelle Forest, but unfortunately it was logged down to the ground and now sits devoid of any life forms.
ELF called up John and he took us for a walk, through what he’s calling the “Halfmoon Bay Mushroom Forest.” A few years ago he harvested 500 lb. of pine mushrooms across this area! The block is within the Trout Lake Watershed drainage, a back-up source for Halfmoon Bay residents. We entered along the “Locomotive Trail” into a lush mature forest with a well-established understorey of plants and mosses. The trail has a sign describing the early logging history of the area and that the trail lies over an old railroad bed which makes for excellent hiking.
The irony is that the sign was a joint project of SCCF and the Sunshine Coast Trails Society and if the clearcutting goes ahead, the trail will be transformed into a ditch transporting water until it pools up rendering the trail unusable. We saw several varieties of mushrooms and some that elk had eaten as a food source. Dafoe has been harvesting mushrooms in the Halfmoon Bay area for decades, but has seen many prime sites vanish before his eyes due to persistent low-elevation logging. It would be a sad day if the “Halfmoon Bay Mushroom Forest” is subject to the same fate. Protecting intact forests should now be considered a health issue as logging them destroys a part of our collective, life-support system. We ask SCCF to drop this block.
Ross Muirhead,
Elphinstone Logging Focus
