Editor:
A not so funny thing happened on the way to Lone Owl Lake…
Two weeks ago, while on a hike to Lone Owl Lake west of Homesite Creek Recreation Area, I stumbled upon one of the sorriest sights of my entire hiking life.
Industrial logging machines had been left as so many witnesses on what looked like a crime scene. Gaping craters had been dug in rock, leaving deep ponds like burst boils on each side of the road; hundreds of felled trees – some very large in diameter – were lying about, like corpses after a massacre; the whole place looked like a killing field.
Since then, I learned that another section of forest designated as “HM50 cutblock” near Trout Lake is being “harvested” as they say, and that another one – “HM70” – will know a similar fate as part of a 2022 spring logging campaign planned, sold out and permitted by what is cynically known as the “Sunshine Coast Community Forest.”
Never was a name more misleading.
The SC Community Forest is a logging operation, not a benevolent agency out to steward our forests.
“HM70” is a beautiful area with high recreational potential and harboring an essential link to a vast forest ecosystem. Our forests in our own backyard – providers of clean air, peaceful hiking grounds, CO2 sequestration, habitat to elks, wolves, bears, songbirds, mushrooms and rare orchids – are being senselessly destroyed for a quick, short-term gain. What a mess. What a very sad state of affairs…
P. Caillé, Sechelt
