This weekend we visited a place known as Cypress Creek! In traditional settler fashion, it was named after a natural feature the place once had right up until the point when my people arrived (at which point we promptly destroyed it). In this case the feature in question was thousands of old-growth Nootka Cypress trees, a sub-variety of the almighty cedar.
I gather this valley was logged indiscriminately during the early part of 20th century, which means no truly-big trees remain here; but eventually some conservationists managed to secure its status as a protected public park, and that’s why we can walk today amidst newer & smaller but still very nice flora.
From 1918 to about 1923 there was a sawmill nearby, commissioned by this capitalist dude named Nasmyth. Its purpose was to make and sell roofing materials according to the following process:
First they chose a nicely-maintained yet supposedly-abandoned patch of forest in the area we named ‘Cypress’. Then they sought out every big/old enough tree they could reach, cutting it down and splitting its trunk into large chunks of rough timber. They’d send each chunk down the mountain along a human-made waterslide called a “flume”, which they supplied using water from nearby streams. At the bottom of this flume stood the sawmill, and inside the sawmill they had a large industrial machine (which was also water-powered!) plus a workforce that knew how to use it very quickly. These workers would split the rough timber into smaller standardized pieces called “shingle bolts”, then they’d send each bolt down yet another waterslide (towards a second mill at the base of the mountain that’d cut the bolts into individual roofing shingles).
Owing to that era’s temporary abundance of extremely-old cedar that people could cut down in any quantity for any reason (an abundance that’d last for maybe 2 decades), these nice cedar roofing shingles were fantastically affordable. And in some sense that affordability is where Vancouver’s much-talked-about ‘neighborhood character’ actually comes from (as well as the ‘neighborhood character’ of countless other places, since a good number of these roof shingles got loaded into box cars and shipped far away).
This kind of tree grows slowly enough that our 20th century style of house building could never be sustained; there simply isn’t enough of this wood at a low enough price point (nor is there enough of this wood even at a very high price point). I think it’s safe to say that no one on this planet will pay so little money for such good cedar ever again.
The creek at which Nasmyth built this mill didn’t wind up flowing consistently enough to keep the machinery running, and so the gang had to work out an ingenious system of canals that could divert water from numerous other sources at different times of the year. But even so, the operation proved too difficult to continue past its fifth year: between the high cost of hauling shit up/down the mountain plus dealing with 7-12 feet of winter snow, primary sources suggest that the operation swiftly became more trouble than it was worth.
At that point some Scandinavian guys would encounter the remains of the mill and repurpose it to create the area’s first ski lodge (though they had to disassemble the building and carry its pieces further up the mountain to a spot where, in the 20th century at least, we used to get very deep snow). I believe this winter our city received zero snowfall for the first time 40 years… so I guess one could say that as settlers, we continue to really make a difference here on Cypress Mountain.
I also read a memoir in which this 1930s guy built a log cabin near the site of the Nasmyth mill and actually reclaimed some of the nice wooden planks from the abandoned flume as part of the process (he used them as building materials for the cabin… good cedar planks never remain idle for long). He said that in the ’30s there were numerous people just sorta going up the mountain, knocking down a few of the remaining huge-ass trees, and then erecting a log cabin next to a bunch of other recently-made cabins. His was the last generation of settlers able to do anything like that.
This guy noted that he experienced a LARGE number of bear encounters while living up there, but that he only met a mountain lion once.
If you hike just beyond the terminus point of the official Cypress Falls Trail you can glimpse a particularly-massive waterfall in the distance. There’s a rock formation at its base that to me resembles the face of an old man:
Here’s a portrait of me on this day, as captured by Lanna:
