Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, in a rare step earlier this month, wrote British Columbia Premier John Horgan with “grave concern,” admonishing his government for not consulting with the city on a B.C. logging project some 125 miles away from Seattle at the headwaters of the Skagit River.
To understand why, you must trace the river to its root.
Begin at Puget Sound, and follow a braided tangle that twists through a shorebird-filled marsh. Upriver, the Skagit carves through a farming valley abundant with dime-sized blueberries and commercial flowers. Continuing east, chinook salmon, local orcas’ favorite food, wiggle through glacial runoff spilling through mountain gorges. Higher still, those waters churn past three dams, pumping electricity to Seattle in view of summer’s tourists. Above the Ross Dam, the water pools deep and cold, perfect for bull trout.
Just above the 49th parallel, out of mind to most Washingtonians, is where the Skagit forms. In British Columbia, the stream is clear to the bottom seen from 2,500 feet above. Eighty-foot fir trees layer mountaintops. Higher, avalanche chutes slice through alpine meadows and remind summer visitors that snow piles up by the meter here.
But amid the greenery, brown polygon cutouts of freshly felled logs emerge. They’re at the center of Durkan’s concerns — a controversy over a decades-old treaty involving two countries, loggers, miners and conservationists.
Logging, she wrote, was “inconsistent with the spirit and intent of the 1984 Treaty,” and urged Horgan halt immediately plans for more.
“Why the full assault by logging?” said Shaun Hollingsworth, a member of an international commission dedicated to the valley’s conservation.
Much of the Skagit’s headwaters are protected by Canadian parks. But, to preserve historic mining rights, the B.C. government set aside a forested area the size of Manhattan that’s surrounded by parkland. It’s known now as the “donut hole.”
Crews this summer began to fell trees inside the donut hole at the behest of British Columbia’s government. Conservationists who once fought to keep Seattle from flooding the area now worry that B.C. will allow the valley to be hollowed at its center.
Logging could threaten Ross Lake bull trout and disrupt possible grizzly-bear recovery efforts, some say. They fear logging, and road construction, will open the door further to mining, which they argue represents a grave threat to Puget Sound salmon on the horizon.
The B.C. government office that auctioned areas for logging says the cutblocks represent a small fraction of protected lands in the watershed.
As tensions rise, the Upper Skagit Valley is proving again that history rarely rests for long and faded intentions are sometimes tested by time.
