The Clearcut

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The Clearcut

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Words: Scott Secco
Photography: Mike Zinger
Video: Aaron LaRocque

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My grandfather is 93 years old. He stands straight, and unbowed, like the trees he still loves. He has the wiry physique of a man who spent his life outdoors. And for 40 years that’s just what he did. He was a forester, logging thousands of hectares on Vancouver Island and later branching into the interior of British Columbia. The forests were good to him, he was successful enough to hire multiple employees and feed and clothe his family. It was a necessity to take from the land and though he felt pangs of conscience it seemed like an insignificant dent in an otherwise endless supply of timber. It was a different, simpler time. A time before global warming and mountain pine beetle and carbon sequestration were buzzwords, back when clearcuts were a memorial to industriousness - the triumph of man over nature’s unruly sprawl.

My grandfather flew for decades. He was a navigator in the Second World War, flying over the Atlantic as part of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Later, he flew recreationally. He flew over the places he’d logged, barren hummocks of dry dirt and stumps, brown smudges breaking up the vast green wilderness like a river carving out a sandbank; slow, but inevitable, destruction spreading outwards like faulty dendrites in Mother Nature’s brain.

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Along the west coast of Vancouver Island and up past Sooke, if you follow Highway 14, you’ll find Jordan River. Jordan River is a small logging camp. It's been logged since the 1880's and managed by Western Forest Products since 1934. It's not a tourist destination, although surf bums pass through, en route to China Beach, Sombrio Beach, or the Juan de Fuca Trail. The modern highway and scalped hillsides are dual by-products of resource extraction in BC.

Clearcuts are not beautiful. The trees are cut, stripped, milled, then shipped off to China, America, or maybe your local Home Depot. Leftover branches are burned. It’s not uncommon to see mountainous piles of slash waiting trepidatiously for a match and gas can. But logging is essential to the way we live. From the paper we write on and the houses we live in, to pulp mill jobs or Big Mac containers – trees sustain our lifestyle. But it begs the question, how many tons of Co2 must a tree sequester before it’s considered valuable? What about aesthetics, do they count? How do we rationalize this contradiction, this duality between need and want, business and beauty?

In August 2011 I lived for a week in a clearcut near Jordan River. It was still an active logging site but we were squirrelled away, far from the cacophony of trucks and saws. Aaron LaRocque, Brendan Howey, Mike Zinger, and I spent eight days digging, camping, and filming; all for a 4:43 freeride mountain bike video. Freeride is simple. There are no rules, or scores, or times. Freeride is the ultimate extension of individuality – dig and ride what you want, when you want, where you want. The only requirement is a bike. For us, freeride meant jumps, drops, and creativity, so we explored with shovel and rake in hand. We dug. We dug until skin blistered and sweat blinded and sun burned and dust crusted in nose, and eyes, and ears. We dug until bleary-eyed, and Jello-armed we passed out back at our campsite.

The ground was dry in the dead zone, mummified stumps and branches all that remained of this once mighty empire of trees. The dirt clutched in their roots exploded when Howey's tires tore through our handiwork. Night after night we harvested gold. Backlit swirling dust diffused the last gasps of dying August sunsets. And then it was over. After eight days, as the sun made its way down into the Salish Sea, we packed up and left. Crunching through shotgun shells and gravel, the scent of cedar still clinging to us.


I revisited the clearcut recently. It was a recon trip, ostensibly to check on the stunts we’d left, but really I wanted to see how the land had changed since I’d last seen it. Most of the jumps had vanished from erosion; perhaps loggers had torn them down for fear of liability. But the ground was different - a thick, sucking, intractable bog. There were no trees to drink the water. It sat stagnant, pooling in the hollows and bowls left from trucks and skidders and steel-toed work boots. But there was still hope. A minor rebellion was playing out, staged by small green weeds ready to take back their land.

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My grandfather knows nothing of mountain biking. We’re separated by 71 years and a lifetime of experience, but still, his eyes sparkle when he watches what we’ve made. Maybe freeride isn’t just about the bike. Maybe freeride transcends that. Maybe it’s just a love of nature, a deep unending passion for the beauty and adventure of being at home in the wilderness. Maybe even clearcuts can be beautiful.

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Words: Scott Secco
Photography: Mike Zinger
Video: Aaron LaRocque

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