{"id":24521,"date":"2018-08-09T00:05:19","date_gmt":"2018-08-09T07:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_quick&p=24521"},"modified":"2022-01-31T10:59:57","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T18:59:57","slug":"old-coast-new-coast-campbell-river-british-columbia","status":"publish","type":"custom_quick","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/article-short\/old-coast-new-coast-campbell-river-british-columbia\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Coast, New Coast: Campbell River, British Columbia"},"content":{"rendered":"

When brothers Wallace, Harper, and Jack Baikie first laid eyes on an undisturbed stretch of the Campbell River estuary, halfway up the east coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, they likely saw a tantalizing opportunity. It was the 1950s, the Vancouver Island logging industry was booming, and the brothers\u2014who already owned a logging company\u2014were in search of a site to set up their own lumber mill. As they scanned the property, they may have appreciated a stately great blue heron fishing from a rock, the puff of a seal\u2019s exhalation, or the flick of a salmon\u2019s tail. But nature wouldn\u2019t make them money. Not unless it was in the form of trees\u2014felled, planed, and shipped away to lumberyards.<\/p>\n

The site had a critical component for the Baikie brothers\u2019 mill: water. The most efficient way of transporting logs was to float them down rivers and across the salt water. Rivers all over the island had become timber highways, and bays and estuaries were the timber parking lots, where logs awaited processing. Despite the ideal location and the brothers\u2019 early success once their mill was built, they sold the property in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n

Other owners completed the site\u2019s industrial transformation. They expanded the mill, dredged a pond, and cut a channel into the land that connected a peninsula (speciously named Baikie \u201cIsland\u201d) to make it easier for large log booms to pass. The industry boomed, and the mill prospered\u2014as did the city of Campbell River, which grew to the third largest on the island\u2014but the heavy industrial use took a toll on the estuary.<\/p>\n

At one point, the Campbell River was one of the most important chinook salmon-producing rivers in the Strait of Georgia. By 1993, the chinook run had fallen to as few as 219 fish, down from 8,000 in 1965. The salmon had been hit by a one-two whammy: hydroelectric projects farther up the river had reduced spawning areas by 80 percent and the estuary itself had become a muddy mess, littered with industrial gravel and wood debris. The damage to the estuary effectively eliminated a crucial stopover area for incoming adult salmon seeking rest before heading to spawning grounds and for outbound juvenile salmon in need of shelter before heading out to sea.<\/p>\n

The logging industry eventually cooled, and 1998 marked the end of the era of sawmills at the property. Once again, ambitious people looked at the site and saw opportunity\u2014this time to restore the estuary to its preindustrial grandeur. The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) purchased the land, and after years of extensive planning, began the exhaustive work of reverse engineering an ecosystem. Workers carved out two new backchannels to aid water flow; constructed a marsh to expand crucial salmon habitat; hauled away and replaced contaminated soil; and planted native flora, from salmonberry bushes to western red cedar trees.<\/p>\n