Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park
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Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park
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 The Carmanah Giant , a Sitka spruce in the park |
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| location | British Columbia (Canada) | |
| surface | 164.5 km² | |
| WDPA ID | 67039 | |
| Geographical location | 48 ° 39 ' N , 124 ° 38' W | |
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| Setup date | July 24, 1990 | |
| administration | BC parks | |
| particularities | Back Country Park | |
The Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park , or former Carmanah Pacific Provincial Park , is a 16,450-hectare Provincial Park on the west coast of Vancouver Iceland in the Canadian province of British Columbia . The park is located approximately 20 kilometers as the crow flies north of Port Renfrew in the Cowichan Valley Regional District . Only the Pacific Rim National Park separates the park from the coast of the Juan de Fuca Strait .
This provincial park is a so-called back country park . These parks usually have no direct connection to a real road and can only be reached via gravel roads or lumberjack roads or on roads not at all. Here, the official park entrance can only be reached by long drives on gravel roads and logging roads from Port Alberni or Lake Cowichan .
investment
The park is located in a relatively rugged area on the edge of the Seymour Range , a sub-chain of the Vancouver Island Ranges . The local mountains are not particularly high, the highest only reach around 1000 m , but sometimes rise steeply.
In addition to the mountain range, the park is criss-crossed by various rivers and lakes. The main rivers are Walbran Creek and Carmanah Creek, and the main lakes are Glad Lake and Anderson Lake.
The park is a category II protected area ( national park ).
history
The park was established in 1990. The park was founded due to considerable public unrest in 1988, when logging companies "inadvertently" had clear cuts in the area of the large and old and therefore very valuable trees . Today the park name is made up of two parts. On the one hand there is Carmanah , after the most important stream in the park, whose name in the language of the Ditidaht is rendered as “canoe landing in front”, which in turn meant a (former) village at the mouth of the river. So this part of the name reflects a village name, while the part Walbran goes back to John Thomas Walbran, a Canadian hydrologist and author of a book about the origin of place names, river names, etc. on the Canadian west coast. The park changed its name over time, originally called Carmanah Pacific Park , as well as its status and its boundaries.
However, as with almost all provincial parks in British Columbia, it is also true that long before the area was settled by immigrants or became part of a park, it was the settlement and hunting / fishing area of various First Nations tribes , here mainly the Ditidaht of the people the Nuu-chah-nulth , was.
Flora and fauna
The year-round mild and humid climate creates ideal conditions for the development of extensive epiphytic communities in the treetops. An equally large piece of this temperate coastal rainforest contains twice the biomass of a tropical rainforest.
Within the ecosystem of British Columbia, the park area is assigned to different zones, here the Coastal Western Hemlock Zone with the Very Wet Hypermaritime Subzone , the Montane Very Wet Maritime Subzone and the Submontane Very Wet Maritime Subzone .
A large-scale forestry use did not take place in the park. Therefore there is still a lot of primary forest here . As a result, there is a relatively large number of plants in the park. The trees are mainly of the widespread species such as Sitka spruce and West American hemlock as well as the giant arborvitae and Douglas fir . This biodiversity continues in the undergrowth with numerous mosses and ferns.
The 1988 protest also saved a special group of Sitka spruces from impact. This group of spruce trees has reached an age of up to 1000 years and is also considerable. The largest of these spruces, the Carmanah Giant , has reached a height of around 96 meters and has a circumference of around 9.5 meters at chest height. The tree in the southwestern part of the park is therefore the largest in Canada and the largest Sitka spruce in the world. North of the Carmanah Giant is a group of also large Sitka spruces known as the Three Sisters .
The detectable animal species correspond to the location of the park. Various predators such as the American black bear , the puma or the spruce marten can be found in the area . Although wolves are also found in the park , they are almost never seen. There are also various species of red deer in the park, such as the elk and the mule deer . Furthermore, the golden woodpecker , the fire-head sap licker and the gnome pygmy owl occur here, partly because of the old trees . The park is an important breeding and habitat for endangered species such as the spotted owl and the Marmelalk . The various rivers, streams and lakes provide habitat for king salmon and silver salmon as well as cutthroat trout , dolly varden trout and rainbow trout .
activities
The park only offers a few prepared tent areas and only has very simple sanitary facilities.
The park's tourist attractions are the tall and old Sitka spruces, especially the Carmanah Giant , the Three Sisters and Heaven Tree . The hiking trails to these trees / groups of trees are partly designed as raised wooden walkways. The entire existing tourist infrastructure is located in the western part of the park. In the eastern part of the park, the park does not offer any tourist infrastructure and none should be established by the park administration.
Although various short hiking trails and tent areas have been created within the park, the park administration officially discourages visitors from visiting the park. This is to protect the park and its ecosystem.
Web links
- Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park . In: BC Geographical Names (English)
- Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park . In: English language website of the park at BC Parks
- Information park on britishcolumbia.com (Engl.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ World Database on Protected Areas - Carmanah Walbran Park (English)
- ↑ Jan Peterson: Port Alberni. More Than Just a Mill Town , Heritage House Publishing, 2014, p. 240.
- ^ Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park - Purpose Statement and Zoning Plan. (PDF; 320.13 MB) British Columbia Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks , September 2003, accessed January 18, 2013 .
- ^ Ecosystems of British Columbia. (PDF; 9.85 MB) British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations , February 1991, accessed on January 18, 2013 .