Bob Udell - Looking Back Moving Forward - FRI 2011-2012 Annual Report

In 1991, we were approached by—we being at Weldwood, Don Lashley and myself—by Dennis Quintillio and Ross Risvold from the Hinton Training Center. At that time, the federal government had announced this Green Plan, and one of the programs under the Green Plan was the Model Forest Program. So Dennis and Ross thought it would be a really good thing for us to put in a joint proposal to have a Model Forest established at Hinton. Don and I agreed that that would be a good thing to do, and we went forward from there, with Dennis and I co-chairing the committee that developed a proposal and submitted it. We were successful in getting one of the 10 model forests.

Well, I think what set Foothills apart at the beginning was that the program was organized under the direction of a board of directors, and the board of directors was pretty much comprised of the agencies that had responsibility for resource management within the core study area of the Foothills Research Institute, or Foothills Model Forest at that time. So because the board had these senior managers sitting on it, they were being advised by their practitioners who were doing the management work on the ground. They were more interested in immediate issues that required research, and that was the direction that the program went.

Well, I think it's been successful because we stayed focused on developing answers to questions that were front of mind for the people that were prepared to put money into the research program.

Well, I think the issue of climate change is going to be increasingly important in this area, and I really salute the work of the Foothills Growth and Yield Association for starting to grab the bull by the horns and embarking on that research before any money was dedicated to it by the Foothills Research Institute.

In the late 1990s, there were a number of companies that were working in the lodgepole pine forested part of Alberta, specifically nine forest companies with large lodgepole pine holdings. These companies all had a common need to develop information on the growth and yield of lodgepole pine in order that they could prepare management plans that would be meaningful and would ensure sustainability. So these companies got together and tried to form a growth and yield co-op using volunteer foresters from the companies to head the program, and that didn't work too well because all these foresters that were trying to organize the work also had company responsibilities. Sean Curry from Weldwood was chosen as the first coordinator, and he was deep in the work of a management plan at the time; he couldn't spend the time that he needed on that project, nor could the other companies. So eventually that kind of fell apart. Then in the late 1990s, the Foothills Model Forest got a larger grant from the Environmental Enhancement Trust Fund, and we decided that we'd take part of that money and set it aside to help organize the growth and yield co-op in lodgepole pine. So we approached Dick Dempster to see if he would be prepared to work with us and help get that organized. There was a strong interest in the original member companies in doing that work, so Dick left his job with Olympic Resource Management in Vancouver and took the helm as the first coordinator of the Foothills Growth and Yield Association. The memorandum of agreement was signed in 1999 or 2000, and the rest is history.

Which I really enjoy.

Yeah, the program started in 1996. At that time, the company I worked for, Weldwood of Canada, was approaching its 40th anniversary of the first bale of pulp to run off the pulp mill. So as part of that celebration, I thought it would be worthwhile to do a history of the company's forest management program in Alberta, which is exemplary—or was exemplary—and has been highly recognized within Canada and internationally. Yet no one had taken the time to write that history down. So I decided to do that, and I approached the board of the Foothills Model Forest to see if they would support that as one of the projects in the Model Forest program. Dennis Quintillio was on the board at the time, and he asked if I would consider expanding the terms of reference for that history project to encompass all the lands within the Foothills Model Forest core study area, which I did. The result of that was our first look in the series called 'Learning from the Forest.' This book was extremely well received, not only within Alberta but—Gordon Baskerville at the time was the dean of forest management at University of New Brunswick; he wrote a frontispiece for this, and he said that book should be required learning for every forestry student in Canada. Similarly, Mary Widow was the woods manager for Louisiana Pacific in Manitoba; he took this book to the government of Manitoba, gave them a copy, and said, 'This is what you should be doing in Manitoba.' Although we thought that both of those citations were very heartening to us in the program.

Michael Dan Otter was a grad student at U of A at the time, and he did a master's program looking at the evolution of adaptive forest management in the National Park system. This began a series of various short projects within the Adaptive Forest Management History program. Then our next big project was the development of a book called 'A Hard Road to Travel,' which is now almost out of print. That book was primarily written by Peter Murphy, Dr. Murphy, a retired associate dean of U of A's forestry program. The genesis of that book was a chapter in 'Learning from the Forest' looking at the forest management programs in Alberta that predated the arrival of industrial forest management here at Hinton. That was of such interest to Peter, based on his background and interests, that this book 'A Hard Road to Travel' evolved from that interest, with considerable support from Tom Peterson here in Hinton, who was the senior advisor on the project.

'A Hard Road to Travel' is the early history of this area. It looks at the interaction between man and the landscape in the west central part of Alberta from the retreat of the glaciers right up to the present, with strong emphasis on the dates prior to 1955. It's lavishly illustrated with pictures and reproductions of art because this area was the host to many distinguished artists who passed through here in the 1800s, people like Paul Kane, Jeffries, and people like that, who left a record of what the area looked like in those days. That record is useful to us today as we look at the evolution of fire and its impact on the landscape.

'The Resilient Forest' was a very interesting study for us. It's not so much a book as it is a rather large report. In the early 1970s, there was an environmental campaign targeting the forest management program here at Hinton, and there was a chap that went around looking at early stages of cutovers and predicting all sorts of devastation and catastrophe that would arise from the type of practices that were underway at that time. The forest service appointed their head of silviculture to go out and find the photo points that this environmental guy had taken his pictures at and established the status of the regeneration, which was adequate at that time. But 35 years have passed since then, and I guess the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So we went out and relocated all of his photo points and looked at the status of those cutovers today as compared to the predictions that he was making back in the 1970s. As it turns out, his predictions were wrong, universally.

This book we cannot claim that we wrote it, in fact, but we can claim that we edited the book. Jack Glenn was a Dominion Forestry Branch ranger who arrived in Entrance in 1920 and worked for the Dominion Forestry Branch there and saw the transition between the Dominion Forestry Branch, which evolved into the Alberta Forest Service with the Transfer of Resources Act in 1930. As all Dominion forester rangers did in those days, he was required to keep a journal and take photographs as he traveled around. He kept his journal, and then when he retired, he wrote his memoirs of his experiences in Entrance. Those memoirs were produced as a series of stories in the Western Producer magazine back in the 1970s. Pete Murphy's secretary made copies of all those and kept them on file. So we found those copies—or Pete had them—and he had produced a small, bound book of those memoirs without any pictures. We contacted Jack Glenn's descendants, his son, and his son had Jack's photo collection, so he provided that to us. We supplemented those photos with photos from the Alberta Forest Service historical collection, primarily Dominion Forestry Branch and Alberta Forest Service photos, and then used those to supplement and illustrate Jack Glenn's memoirs. We edited his memoirs to ensure that they were consistent and then produced this book.

The current project is the 'Northern Rockies Highway Guide and Ecotour,' and this book just came out in May of this year. The book is in some ways a summary of many of the findings in the earlier books, but it also includes a lot of original investigation by the lead author of the ecotour, and that is Fred Pollitt. Fred Pollock is the retired Director General of Science of the Canadian Forest Service in Ottawa, and he's worked with us—myself, Pete Murphy, and Tom Peterson—for the last three years to pull this book together. Interestingly, Dr. Pollock has donated all of his time that was spent working on this project, which is several months of time by a consulting management consultant who can charge a lot of money for his time. But this is his passion, and he has done a lot of these ecotours, and this is the one that he has the greatest pride in, I would say, at this point.

The 'Northern Rockies Ecotour' is presented in three chapters. Chapter one is Highway 40 from Grande Cache down across Highway 16 to Cadomin and south to the Cardinal Divide. On that route, it covers various points of interest in the landscape that talk about forestry, endangered species, climate change, mining, fire, Native people and their role in the landscape, and things like that. Chapter two is from Hinton to Valemount, and it covers some of the same subjects, but it also delves specifically into Parks Canada's mandate and management of Jasper National Park as well as Mount Robson Park, and deals with a lot of issues in history on that landscape, including current issues such as mountain pine beetle and its impacts on British Columbia and potential for incursion into Alberta, and some of the efforts that are being taken to deal with that. The last chapter in the book is the Icefields Parkway from Jasper to Lake Louise, and there again we talk about early explorers, geology, climate change particularly surrounding the issue of the ice fields and how they are retreating at rates that are unprecedented in history. We particularly talk about some of the early explorers of the area, such as David Thompson and his pivotal role in this area, establishing what would become the de facto Trans-Canada Highway from 1820 to 1860.

We have a number of projects underway right now in the Adaptive Forest Management program. Two of them are being done by Peter Murphy: one of those is the history of logging up the Whirlpool River in Jasper National Park, and the other one is the re-establishment of the route of the original Columbia Trail through this area. So Pete and Tom Peterson are working on both of those projects. In the ecotour-related part of the program, we're now developing an app for the tour. This app will be used by people with their smartphones or their iPads or other devices as they travel through this landscape, and it will provide them electronic information, guides, maps, videos, and audio talking about this landscape that they're traveling through—not only the history of the landscape and the people that contributed to that history, but also some of the current projects and issues that are being dealt with through the program of the Foothills Research Institute. I think that will expose a lot of people to the program of the Foothills Research Institute who would otherwise never have heard of it, particularly tourists who are traveling through this area. Also, we are in the process of figuring out how to transform this 'Northern Rockies Ecotour' into an e-book, and when we perfect that, I think our next project will be to take 'A Hard Road to Travel' and turn that into an e-book as well, because the initial run of 'A Hard Road to Travel' is virtually sold out now, and we're not planning to print anymore.

Foothills needs to continue to be connected with the land and the resources that sustain the program. Foothills needs to continually bear in mind that it is a natural resource research organization, and that the real foundation of natural resource management in Alberta—and the forested part of Alberta—is the forest itself. So we need to stay focused on the forest and all those issues, impacts, and resource values that comprise the forest, and how they can be better managed.