Trees along Highway 10 are being cut down in Riding Mountain National Park as part of a long-term project dating back to 1990.
What’s going on now is part of a three-year program to reduce the risk of wildfires close to Wasagaming.
Reade Tereck, the fire management officer, explains what people see when they drive through the park.
“We removed about a hectare of plantation this year in two locations. Both close to the compound road and Ta-Wa-Pit Drive. They’ll notice some logs yarded out that we’re going to be using for firewood for the park.”
The trees are being limbed, bucked into 12-foot lengths, and then put through a wood splitter to make firewood.
Tereck says the trees were planted initially either as part of the former milling or to make the park look good for visitors.
The white spruce plantations were originally planted on native grasslands between 1940 and 1960. They were also planted very close together.
“The project really has two benefits of removing high-density plantations, that’s highly flammable, and would be very hard for us to work on if there was a fire within it. So it gets rid of the fuel loader around the townsite. But it also allows us to restore some of these grasslands.”
In areas where Parks Canada finished clearing white spruce, they see a good uptake from natural seed sources that were under the plantations.
They are restoring prairie ecosystems, like this, to an ecologically healthy state, expanding a rare and unique ecosystem in western Canada.
