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• Message from the CEO
• Corporate News
• Operations
• Log Harvesting
• Safety Stats
• Forestry Engineering
• Mill Report
• Environmental Mgmt. & Fire
• Information Systems
• Millworks
• Calendar

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By Ken Matthews, Forestry ManagerForestry & Engineering

Spring planting at Cataract Lake and in the Toquart Valley is well underway and should be completed in the next few days.  This spring, Ron Sorensen is supervising planting of 215,000 trees, primarily cedar and hemlock.  This program will ensure that Coulson has fully completed its obligation to reforest the areas logged under the Coulson and Echa-Peh licences.  As part of the program, Ron needed to go back and replant a couple of areas which were initially planted several years ago but for some reason failed to grow as expected.  Ron will now set up surveys for the next five to ten years to follow-up and ensure that all of these reforested areas grow as planned.

 Completing the planting program shows a strong commitment to long term sustainable forestry and maintaining a solid performance in the forest industry especially considering the difficult operating and financial conditions we face this year.

 As a result of the forest industry slowdown and resultant downtime with our logging and milling programs, engineering for future logging has also been slow. Since late 2008, the engineering group has cleaned up and redefined some of the work and harvest areas we are now logging in TFL 54.  It now appears that Gary has a workable logging plan for the next six months.

 Looking forward, Wayne has asked us to do a current assessment of options for work we need to do to be ready for a logging program through the fall of 2009 and on through 2010. Everyone is hopeful of a market turn around so that operations in logging and milling can get back to a normal pace. It takes six to twelve months to get new areas assessed, engineered and approved by the Forest Service to be able to build road and harvest the timber so we need to have some approved wood on hand at all times to deal with market shifts or other issues. On the other hand, having this work done costs a great deal of money so if we are unsure of the market, we cannot get out to far ahead with an inventory of approved cutting permits.

The good news is that we have some options and will be able to have timber approved and ready to log when we finish the current program.  Some of the things we are considering at the current time are:

 ·        TFL 54 areas are complicated and even more constrained at this time as we work to stay away from some area which is now part of a Treaty land selection offer to one of our First Nations business partners in MaMook.  We are also reviewing options to see if we should apply for more cutting permits in TFL 54 before we return to Cataract and Toquart.

·        We are now in a new cutting period in our Cataract Lake, Echa-Peh licence, and can return to harvest there again in late 2009 if we choose to do so.

·        Coulson’s Toquart licence will start a new cut period in 2010 and we can return to that licence to harvest any time in the year 2010.

·        In all of this, we need to be sure we have a balance of species, helicopter and conventional logging, as well as low and high elevation options so that we can get some timber out during the winter. 

We are looking at taking some decisions on moving forward with new layout before the end of
May with work commencing soon there after. We will be ready when this market
turns around.