Charting A Course Short-Term Gain Could Be Long-Term Loss For River

The kayakers bobbing on the Granby River seemed unconcerned and unconnected to the political forces around them.

They had Spit Wally’s Hole to themselves that day in June. They surfed and rolled and played in the thundering waves.

Few of them knew much about the Granby Wilderness Association; only one or two seemed to care.

For the short term, they had all the water they needed.

“Short term” is a buzzword in the forests of British Columbia nowadays.

“Few people seem to be looking down the road more than 10 years,” said Nadine Dechiron in Grand Forks, spokeswoman for the association.

Government doesn’t appear to be in the mood to help. The provincial forestry minister has authorized clearcutting beyond the recognized sustainable harvest in the Granby drainage. The environment minister has signed off on downgrading habitat protection for the province’s most vulnerable grizzly bear population.

Premier Glen Clark has declared open season on environmentalists, calling them “enemies of British Columbia.”

When settlers first straggled to the Grand Forks area during the late 1890s, the Granby was called the North Fork of the Kettle River. The name was officially changed to the Granby in 1915, in honor of the Quebec mining company that built the copper smelter on the riverbanks in 1900.

But the company’s influence in the area was a blink of the eye compared with the life of the river. By 1919, the copper market had collapsed. The smelter was dismantled in 1920, leaving huge black slag piles as an epitaph on the riverbanks.

The dam that had been built to power the smelter was removed in the winter of 1948, freeing the river to run wild again.

Farmers took advantage of the dewatered meadows upstream. Loggers took advantage of all the easy-to-reach old-growth.

Concern over the succession of clearcuts marching up the Granby drainage came to a head early in the 1990s. In an effort at compromise, Granby Provincial Park was designated in 1995 to protect 102,000 acres of unroaded wilderness at the headwaters.

The area is remarkable for its temperate rain forest of old-growth cedar and hemlock unique to British Columbia. The province has four generally recognized rain forest ecosystems. This is the only one that exists in the interior, more than 200 miles from the coast.

At first, the park seemed like an impressive victory for preservation. But soon it was clear the timber industry was pushing hard to run logging roads and clearcuts up to the new park boundary at every flank.

Protection for the Granby River is far from guaranteed.

Granby and other parks were created suddenly with few recreational amenities such as trails. One parks staffer, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “The support for recreation has been seriously hurt. They doubled the land area we have to administer, then slashed our staff by two-thirds.”

A shake-up moved the main offices from Nelson, where seasoned park employees know some of the new park terrain. Authority was moved to Penticton, where exasperated staffers know little about the land they must administer.

“We only have five people to take care of a million acres of parks, and that includes the clerical workers,” the staffer said.

Some people see this as an insidious move to squelch opposition to the onslaught of clearcutting. With few recreational opportunities to create awareness of the upper Granby drainage, industry is more likely to have its way with the surrounding forests.

Wildlife experts are concerned.

“The river system already acts like a big toilet bowl, with a flush of runoff in the spring, leaving little more than a trickle the rest of the year,” said Dave Smith, provincial fisheries biologist in Penticton. “It certainly wouldn’t improve the river for fisheries if we encouraged the water to run off any faster.”

Dechiron helped form the Granby Wilderness Association in 1994, when local environmentalists had only suspicions that plans for the Granby were unstable.

Everyone had a say, at first. The Committee on Resources and the Environment brought the views of various sectors to the Kootenay-Boundary Implementation Strategy that led to creation of Granby and nearby Gladstone parks.

“There was a lot of talk about special management zones for watershed protection and guidelines to be devised with public process,” Dechiron said. “But this hasn’t happened.”

“Buffers were recommended by the interagency committee of government technicians to protect grizzly habitat between the park and the other lands. But those recommendations aren’t reflected in the last version of the forestry management plan for 1997 through 2003.

“The priority for grizzly habitat and watershed protection disappeared behind closed doors.”

Dechiron said political pressure from the timber industry is undoing what little compromise and science has been achieved in the Granby drainage.

“Hundreds of cut blocks have been scheduled, and no one has calculated the effect on the river,” she said. “The upper Granby is pretty much within the wilderness, but all the tributaries east side of the provincial park, including Burrell Creek, are targeted for logging in the next five years.”

Similarly, logging scheduled on the west side of Granby Park will impact Buckskin and Randall creeks, which flow into the Kettle River.

The Kettle flows into the United States and into Lake Roosevelt near Kettle Falls.

Dechiron said the forest industry lobby is an almost insurmountable force in Victoria. Locally, the logging is a difficult subject to approach, with regional mills in Grand Forks and Midway.

“Nobody is addressing what will happen to the jobs when they finish with the Granby drainage,” she said. “This is a very short-term line of reasoning. We know that logging road culverts already have plugged and led to massive landslides right down to the river.”

Fearmongering is common, she said. “Local laborers can’t get themselves to look beyond the mortgage and the next paycheck.”

One exception is Sean Reel, who works at the Skookumchuck pulp mill near Cranbrook.

“We are definitely at the end of the easy timber in many areas of southern B.C.,” said Reel, who sat on citizen land-use committees for more than two years. “We’re moving very quickly to get the rest.

“The Ministry of Forests has calculated the sustainable cut in this region at 4 million cubic meters. But the annual allowable cut is 5.5 million cubic meters.

Grizzly bears and watershed health are no match for corporations, he said.

“You can get the timber companies to agree to plans at the bargaining table, then they spend the next few years lobbying and changing the agreement,” he said. “They have full-time lawyers and strategists working on this. And they have the money.”

He said the outlook for jobs 20 years from now is as grim as the outlook for healthy watersheds.

“I’m embarrassed to be in the labor movement,” he said. “We’re not moving anywhere. We’re asleep.”

Perhaps the kayakers are, too.

Plans for the upper Granby could shorten a paddling season that’s already brief. Other developers are tossing about plans to rebuild the old dam on the river near Grand Forks.

Yet after a day of talking to the local boaters and photographing their paddling prowess, one woman told this reporter, “It was good to have you here, as long as you don’t tell anyone about our lovely river.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color) Graphic: New British Columbia parks