Hiker saves trail
A quick response from a hiker with the right tools has saved a portion of a popular walking trail at Inland Lake.
Robert Francis was out for his daily walk around the lake when he saw smoke billowing up from a small ground fire. He tried to phone the caretaker’s number on the park’s bulletin board, but no one answered, said Francis. Park caretakers do not stay at the park over the late fall and winter offseason. He ran back to his truck to grab his emergency gear.
“I do a lot of work in the bush and I enjoy being there,” he said. “I usually carry an emergency kit in the truck with an axe, a bucket, a rope, a shovel and a first aid kit.”
Grabbing his shovel and bucket he started digging up the fire and pouring buckets of water on it. “I must have put 20 buckets of water on the pit,” he said, “and about 50 or 60 on the whole area to get it out.”
Francis said the fire was located beside a trail where volunteer work crews had been building park benches. Piles of cut wood were stacked neatly beside the pit where the fire had spread from. In the pit were burned wood scraps from the bench construction. Francis was concerned that the stacked wood may have caught fire if he hadn’t been there at the time.
Model Community Project for Persons with Disabilities constructed a 13-kilometre wheelchair-accessible trail around Inland Lake and crews of volunteers help year round to improve the trail.
“It would have made a large area black and taken part of the trail out,” said Francis. “It would have been a mess.” That part of the trail is built on a corduroy road, logs laid in the ground to stabilize the trail. He said that when he dug down to them he saw they were already blackened by the fire.
With all the rain falling recently, Francis didn’t worry that the fire would spread to the trees, but he was worried that it might spread into the peaty soil around the area. Peat fires are notoriously difficult to extinguish.
“It’s a safety issue,” said Francis. “I can’t understand why the fire was left unattended.”
BC Parks is looking into what happened. “I’m happy that the volunteer was happy to get to it and put it out,” said Dylan Eyers, BC Parks area supervisor for Sunshine Coast. “Conservation officers were brought on the scene to have a look and take pictures. This is not an ongoing problem, but we are investigating the cause.”
