Re: “Ways to boost wild salmon stocks on meeting agenda,” Jan. 9.
The article lists eight strategies that could be employed. One more could be added: Banning high-elevation logging.
Five days earlier, the Times Colonist featured photos of the Little Qualicum River bursting its banks and probably washing millions of salmon eggs to their deaths at sea. The two are connected.
The hilltops along the Cameron River (which feeds the Little Qualicum) have been stripped of the timber that once slowed the runoff, covered and shaded the winter snow, kept it frozen and saved it to feed the river during the summer lows.
Skeptical? The summer of 1967 was one of the hottest on record for the Island. It was 30 C on Aug. 16, while the Taylor River fire threatened Alberni.
That summer, as a college student, I was cruising timber for the government on a long ridge, high above the Englishman River. We were working with special permission from the Forest Service (during a complete forest closure) because under the tree canopy, we were walking on one metre of frozen snow.
The timber on that ridge has also been stripped, so it is no mystery why the Englishman River, like the Little Qualicum and many others, exhibits extreme seasonal flooding (and it is not global warming). It is the salmon that suffer most from these extremes.
Michael Fall
Cassidy
