DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Canadian park service does an amazing job of maintenance on its properties. I have seen a great many regional and national parks in the US and Canada — Zion, Bryce Canyon, Point Reyes, Yosemite, Olompali, Armstrong Woods, Banff, Jasper, Annadel, the place with the microwave tower whose name I can’t remember… but the parks on Vancouver Island are the only two in which most of the public hiking trails are raised wooden boardwalks.

By keeping tourists on a raised path, rangers can be sure the damage to the parkland is limited — fewer crushed plants, less soil compaction, minimal habitat destruction. The trails become slightly more accessible, so a wider range of the population can enjoy the scenery. But the maintenance expense would seem to be a lot bigger. And the liability would seem to increase, too.

We met one of the official park carpenters. He was in the parking lot at the Schooner Cove trailhead, loading a sack with a chainsaw and several planks of wood, preparing to head 1km down the trail to repair a broken support beam. The guys in this crew spend as much time hiking as they do on maintenance. There are 19km of boardwalks in the park, and only three carpenters, one of whom has been repurposed to assist with building a new information shack or something. So the other two guys hike 10km a day just to inspect their territories.

They source the lumber from the forests themselves. Many old-growth cedars were felled in the 1950s but never pulled out, due to the expense. (One would hope that loggers would have had a plan for extraction before knocking down ancient forests, but in fact they did not.) This past eco-crime can now be made right, in a small way, for these wasted trees now provide useful raw materials at the site where they’re needed.

Cedar is naturally resistant to rot, so the the park service doesn’t treat it. Earlier boardwalks (and the ones on Mount Washington) are pressure-treated, but such wood leaches arsenic into the environment. “Live and learn,” as the carpenter said.