Red Rush

The drive along Highway 16 from Prince George to Vanderhoof, a town of 4,800 in the geographic centre of British Columbia, should be a straight one-hour burn. There are plenty of passing lanes, and the $50,000 Ford F-350s nearly everyone drives roar past the black-spruce-encircled moose swamps and pipe-cleaner-thin evergreens at well over the 100-k.p.h. speed limit. But every summer, drivers must spike their brakes at some point along the way, brought to heel by a woman in a reflective vest. The “flag hags,” as they’re called in trucker parlance, make menacing sentries, with their cigarettes dangling and stop signs waving to protect their road crews from traffic. On a trip to Vanderhoof last summer, I leaned out my window and asked one of the women how long the delay would be. She answered at foghorn pitch: “A while!”

A few hundred metres beyond, a column of swaying translucent heat rose above the new asphalt ribbon that was inching toward us. After twenty minutes, the lineup stretched well back: flatbeds stacked with freshly milled two-by-fours, housewives returning from the Prince George Wal-Mart, dog owners pulling their panting hounds to the ditch for a roadside piss. But then the sentry flipped her sign and the convoy began to move. The tar-caked paving crew watched, water bottles in hand, as the line glimmered by under the midsummer sun.

Highway 16 is also called the Yellowhead, after Tête Jaune, a blond-haired Iroquois trader and guide who opened up the first pass through the Rockies to what is now Prince George for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the early nineteenth century. From Tête Jaune’s time through to the 1980s, the ground in this region stayed reliably solid during the winter. For much of the twentieth century, this allowed loggers to manoeuvre hydraulic machines of up to forty-five tonnes through the bush between October and April without fear of sinking into the soupy local soil. Come April, the Cariboo clay, a blanket of muck deposited during the Fraser glaciation 12,000 years ago (and cursed by locals for nearly as long), would thaw, sucking in the workboots and truck axles of anyone foolhardy enough to venture off the region’s paved paths.

But the winters here are no longer as wintry as they used to be. In the last twenty years, the average temperature has gone up by around 2°C, and during winter the ground now shifts between the consistencies of granite and Silly Putty. This has led to a rash of incidents featuring half-buried logging machines, embarrassed operators, and livid bosses. It has also meant no shortage of work for road crews, who smooth out the blacktop’s latest slumps and heaves.

I’ve seen the paving crews along this stretch of the Yellowhead every summer since 2001, the year I quit university in Victoria to go north and fill my wallet with logging dollars. Back then, I thought political pork explained the constant presence of the crews — a reward to the Prince George–Omineca riding for voting solidly Liberal in the 2001 provincial election. Returning to Vanderhoof five years later, I see it as something else: part of the escalating war between industry and a warming planet.

For resource-dependent hinterland towns, global warming could mean ruin. The salmon stocks of Canada’s west coast are migrating north to Alaska. The Prairies seem to flirt with drought every year. And one of the country’s most valuable resources — the pine forests covering much of BC’s Central Interior region — is falling victim to a tiny beetle made virtually immortal by the warm winters of late. To study Vanderhoof, situated in the middle of that blighted pine forest, is to study the troubled future of rural Canada.

red forests forever

About twenty minutes past the paving crew, Vanderhoof ‘s billboards began to appear. One welcomed drivers on behalf of more than a dozen local churches; another proclaimed Vanderhoof the 2000 Forest Capital of British Columbia. But for one peculiarity, this could have been any resource town in northwestern Canada. As far as I could see, brick-coloured trees lent the Nechako Valley the look of the Adirondacks in autumn. But this was evergreen country in summer. Those red trees were dead trees.

When I first saw Vanderhoof nearly seven years ago, the trees were just starting to turn red, overwhelmed by the mountain pine beetle. Politicians and foresters still mused about defeating the bug then. All we need is one cold winter, people said. They’re still waiting. In recent years, everyone around here has noticed the balmier winters. Guides and trappers have come across the corpses of moose drowned in lakes whose winter ice was once plenty thick. Forest fires are getting worse. And locals have spotted new bird species in town, while Canada geese, I was told, don’t seem to head south for the winter anymore.

But global warming has brought a less visible and much more problematic pest than the geese and their plentiful turds. Since 1993, the population of mountain pine beetles in the Central Interior has been exploding. They now number in the trillions. No bigger than a mosquito, the beetle nests in live pine trees during the summer. By the time its offspring part almost a year later, the host tree is dead. BC’s mountain pine beetles have thus far nested in an area nearly twice the size of the United Kingdom, killing some 500 million cubic metres of lodgepole pine — enough timber to build a modest-sized house for every person in Western Canada. The BC Forest Service estimates that 90 percent of the province’s pine trees could die by 2016.

Why is this happening now? Every one in town has an explanation. Some blame government, some blame industry, others cite the natural life cycle of forests. But it is undeniably the case that the bugs, which have been around for two thousand years, are normally held in check by persistently cold winters, and persistently cold winters are a thing of the past. By 2070, average temperatures across Canada are expected to rise by another 2 to 7°C. The flora and fauna that have thrived in the relatively stable climate of the 10,000 years since the last ice age will be forced to migrate, adapt, or die. Those last two options will go for small towns whose economies rely upon flora and fauna as well.

You wouldn’t know it to drive into Vanderhoof, though. As I coasted down the southern slope of the Nechako Valley overlooking town, great plumes of steam billowed from the stacks of two mills to the west. Fords dieselled past me at a constant rate, the men inside gripping Tim Hortons cups, their truck beds carrying bright-red Tidy Tanks filled with fuel destined for the skidders, feller-bunchers, buttontop loaders, and other hulking machines of the forest. They were part of a dash for the remains of an unprecedented ecological disaster.

The consolation for the destruction caused by mountain pine beetle disease is that a dead tree retains some value for ten years. The Mountain Pine Beetle Action Plan, a glossy twenty-page pamphlet outlining the government’s bug strategy, states that one of the province’s main objectives is to “recover the greatest value from dead timber before it burns or decays, while respecting other forest values.” Essentially, this means that all $50 billion worth of dead and soon-to-be-dead pine in the province is up for grabs.

The government’s plan has set off a red rush, if you will, to cream as much value as possible out of British Columbia’s once-mighty pine forests before they rot. It was just such a fever that attracted white people to this region nearly 150 years ago. Back then it was the lure of gold; now it’s dead wood. In place of pick and pan, today’s prospectors use tracked hydraulic machines worth upward of half a million dollars. Each one is capable of whacking, stacking, and hauling huge swaths of forest in a single day.

One of those prospectors is my old boss, Dave Stephen, a logger whose fortunes have mirrored those of the entire industry. My first stop in Vanderhoof was Dave’s parents’ farm. A sixty-five-hectare piece of valley flatland, the farm had few cattle, and its hay crop looked like the hide of a mangy dog. Its primary purpose had changed over the past five years from agriculture to forestry. Dave and his brother Scott were using it to park their logging machines, a collection of iron, steel, and hydraulic oil they’d paid about $5 million for.