Big Boots and a Raincoat: A Bio-Regional Education
t he University of British Columbia Mal- colm Knapp Research Forest has a history of change in settlement, industry and social values. Traditionally, the Katzie First Nation used the area on the western slopes of the forest as summer hunting grounds where groups would make temporary camps in the hills to hunt deer. The forest was typical of the area, mainly old growth Western Red Ce- dar, Western Hemlock, and Douglas Fir. Al- though the climate of the forest is quite wet, large fires are the main natural disturbance of the area, naturally re-occurring approximately every 200 years. There is still evidence of a major fire that swept through the western half of the forest in 1868, during an unusually dry spring and summer. As settlement grew in the early part of the 20th century, so did demand for the natu- ral resources of the area, primarily timber. Between 1920 and 1931, a large logging op- eration, run by the Abernathy and Lougheed Logging Company, cut a large amount of old growth timber in the eastern half of the forest. Logging methods common at the time used two men hand-sawing while standing on springboards that were inserted into the base of the tree. The logs were then transported by steam donkeys and a steam powered rail system established in the forest. An estimated 2800 hectares of high volume, old growth stands were harvested (within the current boundaries of the research forest) in this eleven-year period. In the summer of 1931 a fire, supposedly started by the wood-fired steam engines and fuelled by large amounts of dry timber throughout the forest, blazed through this area, including the western half of what has now been established as the research for- est, bringing a halt to logging there. Large charred and notched stumps along with small pieces of equipment and steel cables stand today as evidence from this period.
Greg Piccini
To increase awareness of the immediate physical world that surrounds us, this project proposes to expand the regional knowledge of Vancouver urbanites and suburbanites living between the mountains and the ocean: a trail becomes a classroom at the scale of the landscape as it winds through a west coast temperate rain forest. With conditions ripe for experiential learning, the educational journey proposed by both this 22km trail system and various interventions within the Malcolm Knapp UBC Research Forest promotes aware- ness of the Georgia Basin bioregion.
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architecture and land
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