Manning Park: Pine Beetles and Marmot sentinals

Written June 17th in Manning Park.

I'm at Manning park, choosing to spend a few days here as it was convenient to the route I wanted to take to Vernon and because of it's reputation as a bit of a wilderness paradise. When glaciers covered what is now BC many thousands of years ago, the area that is now Manning park was left exposed. As a result, the biodiversity here is pretty amazing. It's also seriously off the beaten path. Just getting here involved a very long climb up sweeping mountains. I've decided to stay close to my base at Lightning Lake, mostly to conserve gas so that I can comfortable make it to the next town.

Being here I've been able to see a very concrete example of global warming damaging an exquisite space. The forests here are mostly Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar and are one of the few large-scale virgin forests in BC. That is, they have never, ever been logged. Most of the forests in BC have been logged at least once in the past 300 years. What is referred to as "old-growth forests" have generally not been logged for at least 100 years. The forests here are therefore pretty special, and they are being ravaged by Pine Beetle. They literally peel the bark off the trees from the inside. This pest used to be kept in check by long, cold winters which would kill of most of the population. Those winters have stopped happening and the beetles are systematically stripping the bark from every second pine tree on most of the slopes here. The lake I'm camping next to is surrounded on all sides by towering pines, dropping right to the lakes edge. I can only imagine how much more dramatic they must have been a few years ago when they would have been a wall of green, not checkered with dead brown trunks. I'd been told about how bad the pine beetle problem was and how much of an impact it was having on the forestry industry, but to see whole mountainsides destroyed and to walk amongst so many dead trees has made it really sink in.

I walked the 9km trail that circumnavigates the lake today and came into a pretty green meadow. I was greeted by a dozen curious brown heads, spotted with shiny black eyes, standing meerkat-like staring at me. These are (I believe) some sort of marmot, but smaller than marmots I've seen before. They seemed to think I wasn't much of a threat and went back to their grazing pretty quickly. Then a couple of hikers with a golden lab came into the clearing and right away I heard a high pitched chirping, followed by all the marmots instantly disappearing into their burrows. The chirping continued and I saw that it was coming from a lone sentry marmot, standing up on a hillside at the edge of the clearing. He'd been there all along, keeping watch over the small herd.

I'm loving mountain lakes. Manning Park is about 1400 metres from sea level and feels very much an alpine forest. The lake I'm camped next to is as clear as any tropical bay, brilliant blue under the sun at a distance, and deep turquoise close to the shore. I put my ear to a tree and listened to the tattoo of a woodpecker high above me reverberate down the trunk.