Below are images featuring recent old-growth logging on Edinburgh Mt. near Port Renfrew. It took a 17km round-trip hike up the steepest roads I've encountered on the island to access the area, which is on the mountainside above Big Lonely Doug. What we found were two old-growth clearcuts, totaling 34 hectares (almost 40 football fields) in size. Dozens of old-growth western redcedars - some of them 8 feet in diameter -, yellow cedar, western and mountain hemlocks, and very rare, old Douglas-firs (between 500 to 1000 years in age) have been logged. How much further will the BC government allow this industry to go? Plans for four new old-growth clearcuts, one approved and three pending approval, and an expanded road network are also underway. It would seem that no place is currently deemed too rare or important in the destructive race to log the island's last endangered old-growth forests before we have a chance to see them saved. Ecosystems that have taken millennia to form, erased in a blink of an eye, never to be seen again.
A giant old-growth western redcedar log in a Teal-Jones clearcut on Edinburgh Mt. near Port Renfrew - TFL 46.
Standing among three ancient cedar trees on the edge of new logging operations by Teal-Jones. Edinburgh Mountain is one of the largest contiguous tracts of largely unprotected old-growth forest left on southern Vancouver Island, along with the nearby contentious Central Walbran Valley. It is within the traditional territory of the Pacheedaht First Nation band.
