Lakes, bugs & logging in the Merritt high country

Posted On October 13, 2009

Yesterday my brother-in-law and I drove 3 hours to their cabin in the high country above Merritt, BC, and did some exploring. It’s a beautiful area but the devastation being caused by the mountain pine beetle (dendroctonus ponderosae) and the efforts to deal with it are heart-wrenching.

This is the scene along the road up into the mountains, for mile after mile after mile. This wood isn’t going to a mill, it’s just stacked for burning over the winter. I’ve scanned a lot of the material on the Ministry of Forests and Range Web site but don’t see an explanation of why so much is being wasted. In the Yukon, a single pile would be worth a couple of thousand dollars as firewood. A truckload of 20 cords (a stack 8x8x40 feet) costs $2,600 in log length, $4,400 cut to stove lengths. Seeing thousands of truckloads burned is enough to make a man cry.

This view of the lake, a few feet from the cabins, is lovely (the low water level is normal in the Fall) – but doesn’t show the high percentage of trees that have been killed by the beetles. About 1/3 of the trees on the property are dead, and most of those are being felled, to get reforestation started and as a fire precaution. It seems to me that a biomass generator here could now provide very low-cost heat and electricity for the area. You might have noticed that all of my references to the location of the cabin are very vague – that’s being done on purpose due to security concerns.

I had to show you the shower that’s been built for the cabin complex – with instant-on hot water, it’s a wonderful creation 🙂

Removing the trees certainly does improve the mountain views, though! The high stumps (about 15 feet high) are left on purpose – known as “pecker poles”, they will become home to woodpeckers and other tree-burrowing birds.

Cameras don’t seem to do a very good job of showing the dead trees on a broad scale but perhaps you can see that along this backroad, about 90% of the trees are dead. This area is now flagged for logging.