Over the past four decades, three-quarters of the Incomappleux River valley in the southeastern interior of BC has been logged. The valley’s last 1000 hectares of commercially loggable intact old-growth forest is all that remains.
by Art Joyce
Imagine hiking into a ‘land that time forgot’, where the stillliving ‘dinosaurs’ are ancient groves of Western Red Cedar and Hemlock. Where beards of moss slung from elbowed branches whisper a primeval peace increasingly unknown to the modern world. A silence made all the richer by the continuous shush of glacier-fed creeks and rivers. The youngest of the large trees here were saplings when the first Europeans were landing on the eastern shores of North America 400 years ago. The oldest trees were young in the dying days of the Roman Empire, nearly two millennia ago.
The Incomappleux River valley — stretching roughly north-south from the upper reaches of Arrow Lake near Nakusp in the southeastern interior of BC — is that land. Or what’s left of it. Over the past four decades, three-quarters of the valley, an area roughly 35 square kilometres, has been logged. The steep terrain cradled by the confluence of the Battle Brook and Incomappleux rivers contains the valley’s last 1000 hectares of commercially loggable intact old-growth forest.
The Incomappleux is part of a well-watered ecosystem known to biologists as the world’s only inland temperate rainforest (ITR). Half of all the Coastal Temperate Rainforest in the world is in a narrow strip from Alaska down to Oregon. Inland Temperate Rainforest is even more rare. It occurs nowhere else in the world but in the central and northern interior Wet Belt. It embraces part of the West Kootenay, extending southward into Washington, Idaho and Montana, and as far north as BC’s Robson Valley near McBride. This unique rainforest is home to populations of wolf, lynx, wolverine, grizzly bear, cougar, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, mule deer, white-tailed deer, mountain goat, and the endangered mountain caribou.
The western slopes of the Cariboo, Monashee, Selkirk, Purcell and central Rocky Mountains capture moist air as it moves inland from the Pacific Ocean. It creates the only rainforest in the world where a major part of the precipitation falls as snow. This makes for a unique mixture of plants that includes species from coastal, interior and boreal zones. Stands of Western Red Cedar and Western Hemlock do not occur together inland anywhere else in the world. Normally they are found only on North America’s west coast and in the Far East.
Lichenologists have discovered rare or endangered species of flora in the Incomappleux River valley, normally present only in coastal rainforest. One of these, a phosphorescent pale green moss called ‘Goblin’s Gold’ is found only in the moist underworld of fallen root stumps. Spores of this ancient flora have been found in our oldest known fossils. Farther south in the valley, in the Kelly Creek marshes, is found an endangered species known as the ochroleucous bladderwort, a ‘carnivorous’ plant that catches small underwater insects in a bladder- like traps on its leaves.
Craig Pettitt, who works as a forestry technician with the Valhalla Wilderness Society, leads small parties of hikers into the Incomappleux as part of the Society’s campaign to generate awareness of the unique global treasure to be found in the inland rainforest. “In nearly 40 years of working in forestry I’ve never seen another old growth forest of this size, with trees of this age, in southeastern BC,” he says.
Now imagine that the rare intact oldgrowth rainforest stands could be lost forever to logging. The Incomappleux valley is part of a tree farm license held by Pope & Talbot (TFL#23). Mother Nature has already weighed in with her verdict. Last fall a large rock slide buried a bridge on the logging road, forcing the company to postpone its logging plans and temporarily close the road[See “Inland Rainforests and Common laws,” by Tom Prior, Watershed
Sentinel, Nov-Dec 2005]. Damage to the support structure for the bridge will be costly to repair, making it potentially unprofitable to log. According to Pope & Talbot’s woodlands manager Geoff Bekker, due to the current slump in timber prices, and uncertainty over the outcome of the softwood lumber dispute with the US, the company says it’s in no hurry to log the area.
“We have agreed to put a large part of the Battle Brook area into an Old Growth Management Area (OGMA), including some low elevation areas on the east side of the river,” says Bekker.
However, according to Pettitt, there are substantial areas of talus slope and cliff face in the OGMA shown on Pope & Talbot’s maps, making the OGMA look far larger than it actually is. This OGMA also omits substantial areas on the west side of the river with old growth forest containing some trees up to four metres in diameter and sensitive wetlands.
“Our position is, we want to see the whole area set aside and protected, not broken up into fragments,” says Pettitt. “The majority of this forest by Pope & Talbot’s own definition is inoperable.”
Any logging of the old growth forest, he warns, will open up the forest canopy, allowing more winds and drying that will destroy the moist rainforest ecology. Valhalla Wilderness Society (VWS) has been working with a coalition of interior environmental groups on terrain mapping of the entire ITR range with the Craighead Environmental Institute. Dr. Lance Craighead and Baden Cross have spent countless hours on GIS mapping to provide digitized scientific data on wildlife habitat, forest cover, clearcuts, roads and forest development plans. According to Craighead, at least 50% of the range must be protected if wildlife populations are to have the necessary travel corridors to survive.
The Incomappleux is part of a proposed extension of Bugaboo Provincial Park put forward by Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WCWC). Currently the VWS is studying the area on its GIS mapping to locate the high-value forest habitat and areas needed for connectivity. Ideally, the Incomappleux in addition to some other key forest stands, should be added to Glacier National Park, whose boundary lies some 10-15 kilometres to the north of Battle Brook.
Due to jurisdictional issues, Parks Canada is unable to act unless the BC government is prepared to remove the Incomappleux from its TFL. Susan Hall of Parks Canada’s Revelstoke office agrees it would make an excellent addition to the park system but that it’s not considered a high political priority at present. She hastens to add that federal biologists are also studying the area’s unique flora closely.
This rainforest represents such a rare ecosystem that logging it would result in an incalculable loss to the world’s biodiversity storehouse. We must turn to the international community if the government does not protect the Incomappleux soon.
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Art Joyce is the author of two books of West Kootenay history, A Perfect Childhood, and Hanging Fire & Heavy Horses, as well as a 2005 collection of poetry, The Charlatans of Paradise (See www.artemporium.ca). He has been writing for environmental causes since 2003 and has been a freelance journalist since 1990.
