We both noticed that the lumber yard was full. The mill wasn’t keeping up because of a few glitches with the new upgrade, Dave said. The other possibility — that they didn’t have any buyers — seemed too remote for discussion.
Half an hour down the road, Dave pulled onto a dirt driveway that brought us to a small sawmill and an atco trailer. He hadn’t mentioned this stop. “I just need to talk to these guys for a few minutes,” he explained. Inside the trailer, he shook hands with Adam Castle of Rocky Mountain Log Homes, a Montana-based company that is one of the world’s biggest builders of log homes. After a few pleasantries, Dave started negotiating the sale of timber he’d accumulated over the summer. “You guys need any more wood? ” he asked.
“How much you got? ”
“About 30,000 [cubic metres] on the ground. It’ll be 40,000 by August.”
“Yeah, we can probably take that.”
And just like that, $2 million in timber traded hands. So it went in the red rush. After the transaction, Dave and I made our way over to a small show home close to his truck. It was barren. The logs had not been varnished, and the smell of freshly cut pine was overpowering. “There’s that fungus, eh,” Dave said, pointing to a blue stain running through one of the logs.
“Don’t buyers mind? ” I asked.
“Don’t seem to. These guys gave us most of our work this winter.”
The blue stain is the mountain pine beetle’s calling card, a mark that persists through most of the milling process, long after the red limbs have been discarded. The stain is the byproduct of a symbiotic relationship with a fungus that is vitally important to the bug’s defences, and to the pathology of mountain pine beetle disease.
When a female beetle in search of a nesting site settles on a particular pine, she uses her powerful jaws to bore into the tree, digging until she reaches the phloem, the moist living tissue just beneath the bark that conducts food up and down the tree. Here she sends out pheromones that invite other beetles to join her in her burrow. In response to the ensuing onslaught, a lodgepole pine will try to send sap into the holes in an attempt to force the attackers back out. But the beetles have their own counter for this: a mixture of bacteria and fungus. Once deposited, this blue stew disrupts the movement of fluids inside the tree and plugs its phloem. Unable to produce the sap it needs and overwhelmed by dozens of attackers, the tree bleeds dry.
After mating, the female beetles lay eggs, which hatch into larvae that feed off the phloem over the winter. By May, when daytime temperatures are hitting around 20°C, the larvae have become adult beetles, ready to fly off in search of fresh phloem. Depending on the weather, they can fly for anywhere from two days to six weeks. Most migrate within tree stands, but some — around 2.5 percent, according to the Canadian Forest Service — catch a ride on the strong winds swirling above the canopy and swoop into new stands altogether. In 2002, as many as 30 million beetles soared 400 kilometres from the area around Vanderhoof to the east side of the Rockies.
the rotten stand
After leaving the Rocky Mountain site, Dave and I surged toward Burns Lake. Compared with the rest of BC, the Nechako region is relatively flat, part of the 370-kilometre-wide Fraser Plateau, which fans out in gentle undulations between Prince George in the east and Smithers in the west. When receding ice plugged up the Nechako River during the Fraser glaciation, the area was flooded, rounding off many of its geological features. Rolling hills of red tailed off as far as I could see in every direction.
An hour down the road, we turned onto a dirt path. As we closed in on the stand, the Ford bucked and groaned over the bumps. Dave shut off the engine at a dead end and got out to survey the site on foot.
Up close, an invaded pine tree is a sad sight. Small piles of sawdust lie at its base, and solidified drips of tan sap hang from each of the beetle entry points like blood from a wound. By the time the beetles flee, the tree’s needles, deprived of resin, have lightened to a yellow colour. (Trees at this stage are termed “faders” by foresters.) The needles take on a cardinal-red hue by late summer and become dull red within another year. Three or four years following the attack, the tree will have shed its foliage entirely. Left uncut, it can stand for as long as twenty-five years, a brittle grey skeleton.
Until 2006, the BC government set the stumpage fee for trees like these at twenty-five cents per cubic metre — low enough to encourage mills and contractors to buy dead trees. Then, in April of last year, the province jacked prices up to global market rates. (The hike bolstered Canada’s claim during softwood-lumber talks with the United States that the BC forest industry wasn’t subsidized.) “The mills have to pay around twenty bucks a [cubic] metre now,” said Dave.
“How long before these trees aren’t worth anything? ” I asked.
“Five years ago, I thought we’d only be able to log for another five years,” he replied. “Now I’m thinking we have another five years. It’s tough to say.”
When I first met Dave back in 2001, he had what he jokingly called a “Freedom 30 plan.” He was going to make a million dollars on bugwood by age thirty, sell all of his equipment, and live off the earnings. “I had to bump that up a bit,” he told me when I asked why he’s still working at thirty-three. “It’s Freedom 35 now.”
Near the end of the reconnaissance, Dave pointed to a clump of metre-high grass — the kind that usually grows in roadside ditches. “Now that the trees aren’t sucking up all the sunlight and water,” he said, “this understorey’s growing up like crazy.” Looking around, I was reminded of the rain-soaked forests along the BC coast, with their broad-leaved vegetation bursting up along the ground. I wanted to know if a whole new ecosystem would eventually grow up to fill the void left by the dead pine, but I stowed that question away for later, figuring Dave wasn’t the guy to ask.
“I don’t see any real pumpkins in here, but it’s not bad,” Dave said as we stepped back into the truck. “I’ll stick in a low bid and see what happens.”
On our way back to the farm, I told Dave I was planning to interview Bob Clark, who had recently retired from his post as BC’s “beetle boss.” Dave grimaced. “What does he know? He just sits around at a desk all day. He has no idea what’s going on out here.”
I was surprised at his reaction. Dave’s dad once worked alongside Clark at the Ministry of Forests and Range office in Vanderhoof. “Yeah, but he coordinated the whole provincial response to the beetle,” I said.
Dave snickered. “That worked out really well, didn’t it?”
