The 2026 Edition of the Haller Grinder Ride is Just Under 3 Weeks Away!

This Years Date is May 30th and 31st

People will start arriving Thursday or Friday at Haller Rec Site.  The weather looks like it will be good, but don’t forget rain gear. 

We will camp at Haller Rec sites  and do daily rides into the Edge Hills or across the road into the Marbles.

This site accommodates tent camping, campers or trailers.  There are pit toilets and lots of room at each one.  

Rental horses and guides come from Charlie and Jenn at the Coldwell Ranch.  Rental costs are $200/day. Give me a call at 604-230-4225 or an email to conservationrob@gmail.com if you need some help.

If you have your own horses and are able to get them there and care for them, you are encouraged to do so. 

There will be a potluck at my camp Saturday night, so keep that in mind. It’s fun time to sit around, eat and tell some good lies!


I look forward to seeing a bunch of you there!

Where Is The Ride Happening?
 For anyone who doesn’t already know where we go, here are the details:

The closest town to where we ride is Clinton, BC, just north of Cache Creek and south of 100 Mile House.  The area  we ride is to the west of that, close to the Fraser.  You can find both of our potential camp sites off the Jesmond Road, which you access via the Kelly Lake Road or the Big Bar Road.   The red circle is the area where we do our rides. 

We are camping at Haller this year.  The Kelly Lake/Jesmond Road route is shorter, and the first 17 kms or so are paved.  Turn left as soon as you come to the village of Clinton, as indicated on the map, and look for the turn off to the camp on your left just a couple minutes after you pass through the Circle H Mountain Ranch.

The Big Bar Road route is longer, but it was just graded on Tuesday, so it might be a preferable route for some people.  

Potluck
 

One of our favourite gatherings (social distanced of course) is the ever so wonderful potluck.  Our potlucks are fun casual affairs and as anyone who’s attended them knows, we don’t overthink them. 

As always, an open invitation to cowboy poets and music!l

Questions?
 

If anything is unclear or you have any questions you can contact Rob directly at 604-230-4225 or by email at rob@robchipman.net 

I was recently chatting with a buddy of mine and we discussed a presentation made by NSF&G club member Dr. Ken Ashley at the 2024 BCWF AGM where he talked about the effect of climate change on small lakes and what that means to anglers. My pal mentioned that he was seeing a lot of green matter in lakes that he fished and I suggested that it might be a result not only of climate change, but also logging contributing to higher water temperatures that throw lakes out of balance and make it much tougher on fish.

Now, full disclosure: neither my buddy nor I are smart, well informed people, but my friend didn’t think there was much logging in the Chilcotin, and that if there was a lot of it was probably salvage logging.

As we all know, salvage logging is something we have to do, right? I mean, we can’t just leave those beetle or fire killed trees standing and going to waste, can we?

Eddie Petryshen has a different opinion. I know Eddie from X, but in the real world Eddie is a conservation specialist who works with Wildsight in the Kootenays. You can find him on Wildsight’s webpage here and on X here.

Eddie works to improve logging practices on the ground and at a provincial level as well as on old growth protection, caribou recovery, recreation and land-use planning. He’s an East Kootenay local yokel, a conservationist and a human and coffee powered adventurer fighting for the land, water, and critters.

What follows is one of his recent X threads, reprinted with his kind permission:

SALVAGE LOGGING IN BC

The climate is changing rapidly here in BC. As climate chaos continues to become more extreme we will see more fires and more forest disturbance from insects like bark beetles. But let’s talk about what happens after fire or beetles. Let’s talk about salvage logging.

The

@bcndp recently further incentivized and prioritized industrial salvage logging. So what’s the problem and issue?

Salvage logging is logging that takes place after a natural disturbance.

This logging is heavily subsidised as logging companies will pay low stumpage rates for the trees logged. The province incentives logging as companies are on the hook for reforestation and the province wants to maximise getting burnt timber to mills + pellet + pulp operations.

BC’s ecosystems evolved with disturbance. Our remaining primary forests are a result of the complex natural + diverse disturbance regimes. From wet ancient stands that evaded fire or large disturbance for 1000s of years to open forests and grasslands that burned every 3-5 years.

It’s important to acknowledge natural disturbance is about survivors, it’s about a legacy of living organisms and dead materials. It’s about variability even in severe burns. I think the concept of complex early seral forests is an important piece of the puzzle.

Naturally disturbed forests provide complex early seral environments with more species, complexity, snags, greater biological legacies and unique understory vegetation. Salvaging removes that habitat complexity, which is not recovered with replanting.

There is a growing body of evidence that salvage logging interferes with natural ecological recovery (see the linked paper here).

The authors of that report ^ describe salvage logging as a tax on natural ecological recovery.

Salvage logging can degrade the soil’s ability to retain moisture and regulate temperature, which limits regrowth and encourages erosion, sedimentation and even landslides. The impact on fish-bearing streams can be catastrophic.

It’s a question about how we want to treat water. This study quantifies just how much we impact water quality by salvage logging. “For all parameters evaluated, salvage-logged catchments were more heavily impacted than either burnt or unburnt catchments” (paper here)

Finally, is salvage logging an effective strategy to mitigate endemic bark beetles outbreaks?

Increasingly we’re realising that burnt forests and the ecosystems they produce while they recover are incredibly important. If ecosystem resilience is the priority we should let these forests recover on their own for the most part.

Thanks for letting us share this, Eddie.

If anyone wants to see the original X thread with comments you can find it here.

We will be screening “Soul of the Fraser”, the companion documentary to “Heart of the Fraser”, June 7 at the Royal Canadian Legion in North Vancouver (123 West 15th, just west of 15th and Lonsdale).

Admission is free. Executive producer and club member Ken Ashely will conduct a Q&A.

Spread the word!

Every Junehttp://this pc pictures

I was fortunate recently to travel to the Interior with three BCWF staff members, Jesse Zeman, Neil Fletcher and Tobias Rohr, to meet with elders and staff of a First Nation that BCWF has collaborated with in the past.

A 4:30 wake up call was in order so that we could make it to the band office by 10:00, and like most trips to the Interior the first half hour or 45 minutes sucked, but once we were on the highway and driving through the Valley everything looked better.

We looked at two different sites. The first was a high altitude lake whose surrounding are had been very over-grazed and whose shores had been damaged by cattle. A good solution in this case is to reduce the amount of cattle in order to leave some food for ungulates, and failing that, fencing all or most of the lake to protect the shoreline. Another issue is that much of the water from the lake is utilized for irrigating hay crops. This can be bad for fish because it can lower the level of the lake further than normal, exposing spawning beds.

With so many competing interests a lake like this is hard to rehabilitate. Ranchers need water and grazing and restricting that costs them real money and hardship. They have range leases and water licenses and it’s hard for conservationists to overcome those challenges.

At this lake we met with the band elders, some of whom had lived on this site in the 1950s.

You can see at the top of the picture a cattle guard removed to restrict access, but that doesn’t stop cows, only drivers. The cows just walk over the fences, go down to the lake to get water, and destroy the shoreline.

The second site was much better. It is completely contained within a parcel of private land so there is only one person to make the decision about whether we can do something on his land (and he is supportive). He has a large field that is bordered on one side by a river and on the opposite side by a hill. Along the base of the hill is a secondary watercourse that takes floodwater and groundwater from the river for a length of a few kilometres before emptying back into the river.

The plan is to deepen the watercourse and add dead end branch stems whenever possible, and feed it from an intake on the upstream side on the river. We’ll connect the hillside watercourse to the river by way of a ditch across the field. During high silt flood times we’ll close the intake to prevent sedimentation, and re-open it when the water clears up again. The picture above shows where the intake would be placed. The picture below shows the field that the water already crosses during floods, but which we’ll manipulate to have a constant, controllable flow (and by “we” I mean all member clubs of BCWF).

This will create what some fish nerds and wetlands nerds refer to as “frog water”. When you find the kind of water where you’d imagine finding frogs it’s often great habitat for coho. Good habitat can increase coho fry density by a huge factor.

The images above show the in-grown watercourse. An excavator will spend about 20 days cleaning these out, making them at least 3 feet deep and adding branch stems for more habitat.

This is the end of the rearing channel, where the water taken out of the river a little upstream feeds back into the river again.

A long time, very experienced fish nerd, Sean, explains that not only will coho use this channel to rear fry, but will most likely return to spawn. In the picture with Sean is Jesse Zeman, Executive Director of BCWF, and First Nation member Keith. Although the nation’s elders accompanied us to the second site as well it was a long walk and most of them stayed back at the ranch buildings.

The total cost is expected to be somewhere between $125,000 and $200,000, and the habitat could easily add 200,000 fry each year, so it’s good value for the money. In fact, the project is so good that when I asked Neil Fletcher to rate it on a scale of 1-10 compared to all the other projects he does he gave it a 9.5.

What’s interesting about this project though, really, is the collaboration. The BCWF, the rancher and the First Nation are all going to be hands on in making this happen. The First Nation will provide some funding, equipment and staff to work on it. It’s unlikely that their members will ever catch any of the coho, but even if they do there is no question that non-Indigenous saltwater anglers like our club members will get a crack at them first, and probably land a few.

Overall it’s a great example of how consultation and reconciliation is good for conservation.

The Southern Interior Mule Deer Project is an outstanding event.

I say “event” because “SIMDeer”, as it’s known, is more than just a project. I became aware of it through BCWF, and attended a presentation by Dr. Adam Ford and Dr. Mark Hebblewhite on it at UBC Okanagan several years ago.

The project itself consisted of collaring mule deer does and setting camera traps in the woods to find out who was around. Our club, North Shore Fish and Game, provided funds for one of the collars. Over the years lessons were learned and fawns were added to the collaring program.

But one of the coolest characteristics of the study was that the data would be shared with a network of universities and wildlife bios across western North America. This commitment to sharing data came with the benefit that scientists at UBCO would, in turn, be given access to data that the other scientists at other universities were collecting. The synergies are amazing.

BCWF has done multiple webinars on SIMDeer, and there have been multiple podcasts done on it as well, but a partnership with Telus led to a great documentary entitled “Community for the Wild” that ran on Telus TV for an extended period of time before moving to YouTube.

The documentary is now available to watch online!

https://youtu.be/PCd36Yzk6Dk

A huge thanks to all our supporters that made this project happen, and still allow it to continue (note our club name in the credits!):

Forest Enhancement BC

Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation

Okanagan Nation Alliance

Bonaparte Indian Band

BC Timber Sales

Vernon fish & game club

Summerland Sportsmens Association

Kelowna Fish and Game Club

Oceola Fish and Game Club

United Bowhunters Association

Kamloops Fish and Game Club

Grand Forks Wildlife Association

Southern Okanagan Sportsmen’s Association

Kettle Wildlife Association

North Shore Fish & Game Club

Clinton Fish & Game Protective Association

Keremeos-Cawston Sportsman Association

Mission & District Rod & Gun Club

Abbotsford Fish and Game Club

Pemberton Fish and Game Club

Region 8 Okanagan BCWF

As a result of the Yahey decision the BC government has proposed some very poor solutions to the problem of industrial activity in Treaty 8 lands. They have abandoned the work done by Together for Wildlife, are ignoring previous policy, abandoning science and proposing a solution that Blueberry River First Nation did not ask for.

It’s important to let your MLA know that this is not the solution. Please print, sign and send the letter below to your MLA. This is a link to a PDF version of the letter.