It can be very hard to figure out who owns what without a GPS and a dozen maps. However, the land in question is indeed Crown Land. The land above Cake Walk is mostly park.
The private landowner you speak of is indeed very cooperative to biking. He recently logged a vast chunk of his land, and nobody peeped because, well, it was his land, and we're luck to play on it. Same thing with the Merrill-Ring owned land over by Cliffs and Robs Corners. In fact, the private landowners have been among the most cooperative actors in the forestry world. The riders in Squamish know this and are grateful. However, we expect better from our own government.
There are signs everywhere at the current cut-site indicating BCTS. Also, anything with Section 57 on it can only occur on Crown Land, so that's a dead giveaway. So, apparently BCTS has come in to "investigate". What a fcking joke. BCTS has a mandate to harvest and sell logs. They are the Ministry of Logging. These are the same f8cktreads that came up with the plan to log the backside of the Chief, right under the new Gondola, and only backed off when the town nearly went thermonuclear on them. It is an utter and total conflict of interest for them to be "investigating" their own contractor. They'll spout some placating bllsh*t about how standards were followed and so forth, but numerous NGOs have already pointed out the obvious COI in what BCTS pretends to do.
Squamish Mills is merely the contractor that bid on the job. That being said, they're also the wads that plowed and blasted through the road, caused the slides, and the ones that will probably do a half-assed job of cleaning it up. Make no mistake. This will be a legacy of erosion and unsightliness. The whole area is permanently fracked. Instead of water naturally percolating down the mountain and keeping soils moist, we now have a few sparsely spaced culverts blasting deep channels down the hill. Think it sounds bad or looks bad now? Give it a heavy snowpack, a nice erdoing freshette, and a few years of falling trees and dislodged rootballs, and we can have a couple of real good slide zones. Hey, maybe we can all ride our bikes indoors now! Any idiot, or forest planner, could have and should have figured this out in advance. Look below the clearcut and what do you see? Half Nelson, AM, Recycle, P-Nuts Wild Ride, Lowdown, Macleod, Hybrid, Pseudo Tsugas, Panda and so forth.
Next up is the big chunk of forest over by IMBA-Smart. That'll be nice. I really look forward to seeing these big jigsaw chunks missing from the hillside. I was sick of that view up towards Atwell Peak. You know the one that thousands of tourists take pictures of. I really think that our visitors from the other 5 populated continents will enjoy the debris flows through the woods, the site of a sea of stumps as they pedal up to Half Nelson, and the replacement of our unique and forested trails with just a bunch more clearcut, hardpacked, washboarded, dumbed down, semi-jump trails that are indistinguishable from the bulldozed dirt-jumps behind the supermarket in their hometown.
Yup. Thanks BCTS. Thanks BC Government. Glad you haven't evolved your view of the resource base since the Royal Commission of the 1950s.
As for feeding the family, the owners of the forestry companies around here are not missing any meals. I've seen their houses. Their workers, them I support. I support logging in general. Just not ass-hat logging right in the dead-center of the most valued recreational infrastructure in the town. We have cutting go on up the valleys, up and down the sound, and on private land. There was no need at all for them to go after this chunk.
