Dirk van Nus was a logger on Vancouver Island for 25 years for MacMillan Bloedel and is used to seeing logging sites and trees felled.

But he’s wondering why a 2.2-hectare site in the UBC Research Forest had to be so close to Loon Lake Resort.

Van Nus, now a school bus driver, had to explain the site to a group of students he was taking to the resort recently.

“I love walking through that area.

“There must be good money in logging,” he said, noting most of the trees are three-quarters of a metre across.

“Why do they put it that close to that resort?”

Van Nus is worried the research forest is cutting more than it’s growing in the 5,200-hectare site north of Maple Ridge.

“It seems to me there’s only one area of first growth left in that spot.”

However, research forest manager Paul Lawson said the forest only cuts between half and two-thirds of the annual growth a year. “So we’re basically building up a large reserve of timber here over the years.”

Lawson said about half the wood from that site, about the size of the Coquitlam Ikea store and mostly Douglas fir, is processed into high end “appearance beams,” fireplace mantels and posts used in interior construction.

The other half of the wood harvest – fir and hemlock and cedar – go to other mills in southern B.C.

The trees that were cut down are about 140 years old, which grew after the forest fire of 1868. But one cedar survived the fire back then and loggers left it standing about 40 metres over the cleared ground.

It’s hoped that tree will help in the regeneration of the site, Lawson said.

But van Nus said a tree isolated like that will be blown down in a high wind. That’s happened to trees in Cathedral Grove in Vancouver Island after the surrounding forest was cut.

Technically, the logged area is not a clearcut because the shadow of a tree at some point always touches the cleared area.

The area will be used replanted next spring with third-generation experimental Douglas fir, said Lawson.