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Tree cheers for Burns Lake bike trail cleanup

Kager Lake Trail gets picked up after blowdown
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A storm can snap hundreds of trees, but can’t take the wind out of the sails of Ride Burns.

The local mountain biking community had some of their prime trail system on Boer Mountain smashed like matchsticks when a fierce weather system blew through in late fall. Volunteers have been the muscle and blood of establishing those trails, and much of it was connected to cleaning out standing dead pines killed by the mountain pine beetle epidemic, so the club has a history of working the forest to establish their routes. But these trees were green and hanging every which way, which added dynamic dangers to any ideas of restoring the wounded network around Kager Lake. This was no place for volunteers.

Ride Burns has always had strong allies in the local forestry community. These wrecked trails were on the land of the Burns Lake Community Forest, in spots designated to never be harvested. Past trail design work had been done by equipment operator Shawn O’Meara. Chainsaw safety had been taught to club volunteers by professional faller and forester Chris Paulson. The two of them led the repair work that happened in December so the reopening could kick of the new year. Board member and Burnt Bikes store owner Dave Sandsmark put his back into the labour, and plenty of helpers came out to do the followup work in the wake of the professionals.

“Our most popular and accessible trail, Kager Lake Trail, is only three kilometres long and had over 100 trees down,” said Sandsmark, as an indication of the heavy work involved.

“There was never any intention to harvest those areas, because there was such strong recreational value,” said Paulson, who is an outdoor enthusiast of all seasons. “But then when you get a wind event - and these trees also had root rot, tomentosus, with probably the whole hillside there infected, so in the next few years it could all go - the best thing for all involved, and the forest health, is to clean it up and do silviculture and get it back going again.”

Paulson did the chainsaw work to remove the danger trees, relieve the tension in all the downed green timber, clean the limbs off (those were burned in small fires so as not to become wildfire tinder later), and buck them into saw-log lengths for milling.

O’Meara used his mini-excavator to tiptoe through the windfall, pushing and pulling whatever the human machine couldn’t muster.

“Shawn is a real artist. He’s a world-class trail builder,” said Paulson.

Part one was getting the blowdown off the trail and out of the area so the otherwise healthy forest could carry on its natural cycles while the humans pass quietly through on cycles of a different kind, unmotorized and in balance with the landscape.

Part two, though still remains to be completed and Paulson is starting to wonder what the hold-up is. He knows from extensive experience that there are no nesting birds, right now; the spruce bark beetle hasn’t swarmed in, yet but come spring it will; there’s frost presently in the ground so machinery can haul it off; and the leftover wood is prime for saw logs, all laid out for hauling away with ease. Now is the time.

“All that wood should have been at the mill by now,” he said. “If you’re trying to manage for all values, and you have markets, and we have dwindling volumes, and mills are shutting down because they’re in need of fibre, it just all lines up. I sure hope there’s no one in a (Ministry of Forests) back room who’ll hold this up.”

The Burns Lake Community Forest funded the cleanup, and Paulson said the resulting logs “probably wouldn’t pay for everything, but it would sure offset a lot of the costs,” so there’s nothing but red tape that would get in the way of a win-win-win-etc. situation.

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Frank Peebles

About the Author: Frank Peebles

I started my career with Black Press Media fresh out of BCIT in 1994, as part of the startup of the Prince George Free Press, then editor of the Lakes District News.
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