The Sundre Forest Products Public Involvement Round Table (SPIRT) group recently met in Rocky Mountain House. There had been planned a tour for earlier in the day, but due to the wet weather it was cancelled. The first presenter was Kris Heemeryck who is the Forest Health Officer for the Clearwater Region of Sustainable Resource Development. He provided an update on mountain pine beetle. SPIRT contains community members, including representatives from the Town of Sundre and Mountain View County.
The government has been actively engaged with industry in various activities and strategies to deal with the threat that mountain pine beetles pose on the pine trees within Alberta.
Recently there has been evidence of the beetle jumping from lodgepole pine trees to Jack pine trees.
The lodgepole pine trees tend to be found along the eastern slopes while Jack pine are found in the northern and more easterly portions of the province. The concern with Jack pine is that it is found throughout the boreal forest which stretches across Canada. If the beetle starts to aggressively attack these forests the impact could be felt across the country. Minister Knight has asked for support from the other provinces and the federal government to fight the population which is found in Alberta.
The cold temperatures resulted in high rates of mortality for the southern beetle population, but did not have such good results in the north.
It is important to note that controlling the existing Alberta population is very important, but Alberta will continue to be on a high alert for attack until the population subsides in B.C., which is not forecast to happen until 2016.
There has been a decline of the population in some areas of the province, but in the areas immediately to the west of Rocky and Sundre it is still increasing. By the year 2016, 59 per cent of the pine trees in B.C. will have been killed by the beetle.
To date the equivalent amount of trees that could have been used to build about 29 million houses has been killed. Some of these trees were salvaged and made into lumber, but vast areas were also not salvaged and they are now potential sites for devastating forest fires because of all the dead/dry fuels.
The next presenter was Jim LeLacheur who is the Chief Forester for West Fraser's Alberta operations. Jim presented on the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA). This is an agreement between nine environment organizations and 21 forest companies across Canada.
The goal is to strike a truce between the two groups. Both the environmental groups and the forest industry were hit hard by the recent recession. The environmental groups have an interest in seeing their issues being dealt with and the forest companies want to try and keep their operations going during this slow period.
Under the agreement, six goals were agreed upon with emphasis on protecting wildlife to support for the industry being proactive.
Ed Wassink, a planner with Sundre Forest Products, talked about the Falls Creek Road. This road used to be owned by BP Amoco and Sundre Forest Products has recently acquired the road from them.
The northern portion of the road was reclaimed because Sundre Forest Products was not able to use it to haul logs as the grade of the road was too steep. The company will be doing some construction to make the road more safe and efficient for hauling logs.
As such the road will be closed to public traffic. Signs and newspaper ads will be put out to alert the public to this change. Construction is expected to start on August 2nd – right after the long weekend.
The company is going to be using the road for the next few years and then will not require the road again until the second pass of trees is removed. As such the road will be deactivated (not open for access) during the interim period.
Due to this the company talked to various stakeholders and plans have been made to move the staging area out of the current site and to move it somewhere off the road system.
The company is also looking to access the areas in between the North and South Ram Rivers. Several possible options are being explored and evaluated at this time.
At this stage the company will not need to access this area until about 2016, but wants to explore the various options with stakeholders well in advance of the road construction starting.
Tom Daniels, Forestry Superintendent for Sundre Forest Products then presented on the proposed Meadows Road construction project. The company had explored the option of building new access into the Trout and Lewis Creek compartments.
The new access would possibly mean closing part of the existing Trout access road near Meadows cabin. Though the new route provided some advantages for access control, safety and log haul efficiency there was not overall stakeholder support for the new route. Due to this the Meadows Road option was taken off the table.
Recently, grizzly bears were listed as being a threatened species in Alberta due to the low population numbers. A population of 45 bears was determined for Bear Management Area 4 which includes the area west of Sundre and Rocky.
The population number has stimulated a lot of discussion and debate among various groups and individuals that work and/or play in the backcountry. With this listing the government developed a recovery strategy for the bears, components of which have been endorsed by senior government officials.
Access control has been an important component to the recovery strategy as several bears have been killed near or on roads.
Those bears were killed by direct hits by vehicles which were mainly along Highway 1 through Banff, and several bears have been indiscriminately killed by individuals, and this was mainly in northern areas. For the area west of Sundre and Rocky there have been few if any reported kills of grizzly bears due to these reasons.
The recovery strategy recommends access control on roads and thresholds for road densities to be set for areas within core and secondary grizzly bear areas.
Sundre Forest Products wants to ensure that either of these strategies have minimal impact on the company's operations. It is worth noting that it is not the roads that are killing the bears, and it is the people using the roads that must be managed.
Also, the research on grizzly bears found that cutblocks are a positive for bear habitat and so if the mortality near roads can be controlled and logging continues then the outcome for bears should be positive. The positive impact of logging on bears is seldom brought forward except by industry players.
There has been a large amount of debate about the horses that are free running on crown land in the forests along the east slopes. The area west of Rocky and Sundre contains some of the largest population of these horses found in the province.
There is some really good evidence that these horses are feral and their population started from horses that escaped or were released from logging camps, guides/outfitters or people recreating in the forested area. Whether this population is considered to be “wild” or “feral” is really secondary with the primary concern being that the population is not being managed and is continuing to increase.
The horses are very good at protecting themselves from predators and so their population is not kept in check. Australia is facing similar issues with feral camels that are estimated to be at a population size of over a million. Discussions and strategies are required in order to determine what thresholds are going to be put on the horse population so the Australia situation does not occur here. This discussion can be heated depending on what side of the table one sits, but it must be held.
Trisha Stubbings, Area Forester for Sustainable Resource Development finished up the meeting with notification that several trails will be closed indefinitely in the Bighorn Area. They are being closed due to the wet weather and the damage to the trails that is being created in result.
The next meeting of the group will be on October 16th in Sundre. Please contact Tom Daniels toll free at 1-877-638-4482 (ext 211) should you have any questions.
