The Magnificent Landscape Of Vancouver's Sunshine Coast | Canada Over The Edge

[Music] [Music] British Columbia's Sunshine Coast it's a world famous collection of islands inlets and communities tracing the Eastern perimeter of Georgia Straight town in forests the Sunshine Coast is blessed with having some of the finest tree growing land in Canada unique marine species they look quite prehistoric a couple hundred million years old and incredible subsea Treasures in a world of shrinking resources we're bringing this one back to life now we reveal the coastlines like never before unlocking the secrets of our Maritime past present and future Canada over the [Music] Ed [Music] north of the city of Vancouver lies the tiny community of Horseshoe Bay it is home to roughly a thousand people marking the end of the Mainland stretch of British Columbia's Highway 1 from here Travelers head to [Music] seea Horseshoe Bay is one of five major Ferry terminals in the province more than 5 million vehicles and 7 million passengers pass through here each year the largest fairies head to Nimo on Vancouver Island and Langdale to the Northwest the vessels are massive measuring 139 M carrying nearly 1500 lb [Music] [Music] passengers smaller vessels like the queen of calano carry just a few hundred Island Hoppers to nearby snug [Music] Cove offshore the islands of how sound lie in the [Music] distance Bowen island is one of four major islands here it is situated near the mouth of the [Music] sound from the summit of Mount Garder dense forests cover much of Bowen Island's 50 square km [Music] further north the Waters of house sound are a bustling Waterway [Music] pleasurecraft frequent these sheltered [Music] Waters [Music] workboats transporting hundreds of logs are a unique site [Music] [Music] here [Music] next gambir island is the largest island in how [Music] sound it is 69 Square km of remote rugged [Music] Coast [Music] the island is home to just over a 100 people with no paved roads and no [Music] businesses gambir Island also offers one unique attraction tucked into the shelter Waters of Port Graves [Music] Bay this is hmcs Anapolis commissioned by the Royal Canadian Navy in [Music] [Music] 1964 it enjoyed a storied career carrying the first toor Ray sonar system and the first mixed gender crew in Canadian Naval [Music] History hmcs Anapolis was decommissioned in [Music] 1996 today the vessel sits waiting to be sunk as an artificial Reef another attraction for divers on a coastline already famous for [Music] Rex British Columbia's Mainland Coast is a rich unique [Music] landscape 1 km west of gambir Island the community of Langdale is identified by its fery terminal and known as the gateway to what many consider British Columbia's best kept [Music] secret the Sunshine Coast the Sunshine Coast measures 177 km of winding shorel line set between the coast Mountains and the Sea it is a collection of Bays inlets and interconnected Lakes stretching Northwest from house sound to Desolation sound it is part of the British Columbia Mainland but isolated from the rest of the [Music] world boats and Float planes offer the only access [Music] [Music] here [Music] All Along The Sunshine Coast spectacular nature is interspersed with iconic communities this is the town of [Music] Gibsons it is enshrined forever as the setting for the iconic Canadian television series The Beach comers but Gibson's also holds a real life reputation the recipient of numerous acclaims from best tasting water in the world to the world's most livable [Music] Community the region is popular for retirees and those seeking a more active lifestyle [Music] residents and visitors are attracted by water kayaking boating and a more recent phenomenon paddle [Music] surfing [Music] the Sunshine Coast is also an industrial hotbed many communities are built around the natural resources sector I think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required there are more than 1.5 million hectar of forest [Music] here with 15 species of trees harvested commercially far below the house sound Pulp and Paper Company is part of that [Music] industry [Music] millions of tons of wood chips are brought here by barge each year a byproduct of the logging and Sawmill [Music] [Music] industry the chips are steamed then ground into pulp using 19,000 horsepower Grinders twice the horsepower of a jet engine finally they are made into paper or newsprint more than 1,000 m per [Music] minute how sounds Mill produces enough annual news print to circle the Earth 12 times [Music] Inland another unique feature of BC's natural resources industry lies below Community forests were established in the 1990s a new approach to balancing industry community and ecology we're in seashell British Columbia um it's on the lower South Coast in the southwest corner of [Music] BC uh the Sunshine Coast is is blessed with having some of the finest tree growing land in Canada uh combination of soils mild Winters long growing Seasons when you when you look back on on the harvesting of Timber in the coast of BC um from an industrial point of view it began in the late 1800s and uh back in the day it was done to the standards but there weren't very many standards and uh by today's standards just simply wouldn't be acceptable what they did then but over the the decades uh things have improved the Sunshine Coast Community Forest is a mix of old growth and second growth trees some are harvested commercially While others are not this Douglas fur that I'm standing beside is uh is quite a typical Douglas fur for a tree that's probably in the order of 70 to 80 years old uh it'll probably be in the order of 150 ft tall very typical of the type of trees uh in this stand that we're standing in but also uh uh with the the great growing sites that we have to grow trees here on the on the Sunshine [Music] Coast this tree right behind me is an old growth Douglas fur magnificent specimen of a Douglas fur uh it would be uh in the order of 500 plus years old uh perhaps 800 years old uh it's about 8 ft 8 to 10 ft across at the in diameter and we would leave the old grow standing uh we wouldn't be harvesting trees like this one behind me um we would leave them standing in [Music] perpetuity Community Forest basically is any Forest that is managed um or owned by a community or or to you know with much more community direct input and and more appreciation for Community Values here in BC uh it was in the the late 1990s that uh they really brought forward the community Forest tenure [Music] system in terms of what we're trying to accomplish I mean we are running a business um Community Forest is is a business and I think uh uh starting this year I think our economic return back to the district of seash Shelt will improve and uh at the same time increase in dollar value there is also a community aspect to the community forest with broad consideration given to public use for these lands aside from the economic we also um do consider and take into consideration uh a wide variety of feedback from the community it can be any one of a number of values whether it's Recreation whether it's promoting ecotourism whether it's promoting any one of a number of things but uh uh the three most important we're trying to consider economic and social and ecological values and balance those [Music] three there's literally hundreds of kilometers of trails on the coast here this particular stand that we're standing in here now big tree is uh is a set aside Recreation site by the ministry of forest a very popular site um easy Trail access you can drive relatively close and then walk in on the trails to uh to enjoy being in a forest as magnificent as this one and I suspect there will be more of these kind of sites in the future there's there's a very strong um mandate within the community Forest to try and develop more recreational values and and provide more economic um benefits from the community Forest not just from Timber harvesting but through other uh initiatives as well be it ecotourism or or other types of outdoor recreation that uh would bring tourism to the Sunshine [Music] Coast [Music] British Columbia Sunshine Coast is a remote Coastal gym the region has been a home to First Nations for thousands of [Music] years today it is a year-round residence for many for others a cherished summertime [Music] Retreat just kilometers from the Sunshine Coast Community Forest the community of seashel lies [Music] ahead it is built on a narrow 1.2 km ismos dividing seashel Inlet from Georgia Straight the name sea Shelt comes from the coastal Salish language translated land between two [Music] waters the region was later settled by Europeans in the 1860s by the 1880s it was established as a logging and fishing community it is a legacy that continues today on seashel [Music] Inlet Justin Henry is general manager for the world's first Fraser River white sturgeon caviar production facility right now we're on the shores of sea Shelt Inlet on the Sunshine Coast Co in British Columbia caviar is made from the eggs of sturgeon mixed with a small amount of salt that creates caviar we're growing the Fraser River white sturgeon so far the only ones in the world to do [Music] that using fresh cold water from the surrounding Hills Henry and his team grow mature sturgeon from eggs the start of the process is really with a mature fish where we'll take a female and spawn that fish together with a couple of males we'll do a cesarian and remove the eggs and then we'll fertilize those eggs and incubate them in [Music] jars this is the incubation building and due to biocurity restrictions uh we won't all go in there but I'll go in I'll get some fish and bring them out so that we can take a look at how big they are and what they look like at this stage after just 6 days in the dark confines of the incubation building the fertilized eggs hatch these are the white sturgeon they're a few weeks of age you can see that there are different sizes of fish in the jar these are all coming from one tank the fish grow quite rapidly at this stage where they are doubling in size every week or so we'll grow them till they're about 5 GS in that building and then move them out to larger tanks it is a complex but environmentally conscious operation just meters from seashel Inlet these are the filters for an outdoor resarch system so water's coming through here through a drum filter we're taking out the solid waste which go goes to be mixed with wood chips to make compost then the water is pumped through this biological filter where we grow bacteria they consume the ammonia and then the water just gravity feeds back to the tanks so we have about 99% recirculation on these tanks here we can take a look at these uh fish they're one year older than the ones that we just saw the sturgeon grow for 3 to 4 years once the sex of the sturgeon is determined males are sold for food while females continue to grow white sturgeon is native to the west coast of North America it's the largest freshwater fish in North America the white sturgeon gets up to 1,600 lb in the wild so it's an enormous fish you can see the skuts on the outside of the fish they're little little bony plates on the outside internally the sturgeon have no bone but externally they have some bony plates the fish are a couple hundred million years old so they look quite prehistoric and in fact they are they were here since the beginning of the dinosaurs when the fish are fully grown the caviar is extracted in a carefully monitored sterile operations room this is the caviar room when the caviar is removed from the female it comes through an opening in the wall into this room and we process just one fish at a time it's a very simple process yet it takes a lot of expertise to do it just right so this is the final product after so many years of work we finally have a great product at the end of it we've had tremendous feedback on on our caviar it's been very uh positive some of the top chefs have tried it and just L the product and it was rated as one of the top five sustainable caviar in the world we've just started on the caviar Scene It Takes such a long time to grow the fish the fish that we're about to harvest this year are 12 years old so it's been a long time building the business and we've just really made it to the Starting Gate in terms of the caviar heading offshore the islands of Georgia Straight are a remote Wonder this is teda Island it is 50 km long the largest island in the [Music] [Music] straet it is sparsely populated with long stretches of barren [Music] coastline texada's history is rooted in natural resources first with the discovery of gold in the 1800s then copper and [Music] iron it was later a fishing Outpost a center for whaling operations long [Music] ago [Music] today Texada Island is considered to hold one of the most significant mineral reserves in [Music] Canada more than 4,000 Acres on the island are devoted to Limestone quaries it is the second largest operation of its kind in Canada up to 7.3 million tons of limestone are extracted [Music] annually the limestone is blasted crushed and shipped around the world from texada's Deep waterer loading [Music] facility some say there is enough Limestone here to continue operations for more than 200 [Music] [Applause] years returning East we explore the isolated waterways of the Sunshine Coast revealing incredible subsea [Music] [Music] Treasures the Sunshine Coast is a formidable stretch of Marine perimeter featuring Rolling Hills inlets and Jagged shorelines 5 km east of Texada Island spectacular waterways lie [Music] below this is Lois Lake it is 14 km long and 141 m deep while it is called a lake it is actually a reservoir formed with the construction of a hydroelectric Dam decades [Music] ago it flooded nearly 2500 [Music] hectares today water is forced through gates in the dam spinning a massive turbine and producing 34.7 megaw of [Music] [Music] energy but the most unique aspect of Lois lake is found underwater flooding here has left thousands of trees perfectly [Music] preserved now a new brand of Forestry is being revealed harvesting these submerged forests it is a phenomenon that exists near hydroelectric dams all over the world presently there are 60,000 hydroelectric project projects that have flooded uh some volume of forest worldwide almost always these trees have been [Music] left the next challenge to any uh harvesting operation for us or remediation project is to then look at the asset and figure out the right way to go about doing it and like a lot of Forestry like a lot of landbase Forestry you begin with a lot of planning about how you approach cutting those trees down and and uh bring them to the surface and and turning them into into useful wood products the Deep Waters of Lois Lake became a testing ground for Peter keys and his team they patented their own unmanned underwater harvesting system they call it the sawfish the sawfish is where this technology began for our company so it's an ROV remote Opera vehicle that uh can go to really virtually any depth this is a tethered piece of equipment that starts on a barge um and a pilot actually flies the ROV the sawfish uh down to the depth finds the tree inject airbags into it cut the tree the tree floats the surface and it's it's [Music] collected [Music] while that ROV is on the bottom of the lake it then moves over 2 m 5 m wherever it finds the next tree and cuts it and that's I think the special trick is its ability to to harvest a tree every 2 3 [Music] minutes uh the tree is perfectly preserved uh in a freshwater low oxygen environment uh without bugs to attack it um the a tree either a softwood or hardwood tree will last indefinitely in recent years the team has explored reservoirs with much shallower Waters using an even newer subsea tree Harvester they call it the shark [Music] the the concept came from the engineering and operations group within the group and they and they formed from that ground up this concept of uh developing technology that would be an efficient Harvester of a Shallow Lake Reservoir and and that was born the uh the shark um the shark is an amazing piece of equipment for us it's a combination of Forestry and Marine technology that we we've harvested together in efforts to Be an Effective uh and efficient Harvester of the resource uh going down to a depth of about 25 27 M this new technology took them to Ghana and the tree infested waters of Lake [Music] Volta Lake Vol is the largest man made Reservoir in the world approximately 850,000 hectares so with a with a really very strong relationship with the government we began a process of securing a con a concession uh that is 350,000 [Music] hes uh we've been cutting trees since the middle of uh 2011 we've put a sawmill in and converting the round logs into lumber products starting in September of 2011 and and that's our business we we we believe fundamentally that that we're talking about a reclaimed resource that that uh until we bring it up is worth nothing uh we think a reclaimed resource is is an amazing story we don't think there's anything better than a reclaimed resource and we convert that to make World make into a variety of wood products lumber products and and it's remarkably well received there really is there's a inexhaustible supply of resources around the world of reservoirs around the world that have been treed and almost never have those trees been cut down so our our our our business and when we talk about sustainability is that you know after we after we clear these trees out of reservoir it's gone however the sustainability issu is there is countless resources in front of us uh uh there are 75 projects on the books today around the world that are uh that are either designing or building a hydroelectric project you know we believe we can contribute to the solution of of those trees that almost always are never cut down before the flooding I think the today's environment is crying out for products like that because in a world of shrinking resources we're bringing this one back to [Music] life [Music] west of Lois Lake the city of Powell River is the last major Community along the Sunshine [Music] Coast it is a traditional home to the Coast Salish peoples and a stopping point for gold prospectors in the 19th [Music] century Powell River was incorporated a century ago built around its Pulp and Paper Mill once the largest of its kind in the [Music] world the Sunshine Coast is home to 48,000 residents spread along one of the world's most scenic shorelines just Inland far from civilization the landscape begins a magnificent [Music] ascent this is cartoom Lake featuring Serene pristine Waters a signature of this [Music] region measuring 300 hectares the lake is surrounded by the rising Summits of the coast mountain range [Music] sh [Music] Beyond haam sound is a sheltered Waterway lined by Rolling Hills covered in dense [Music] forest the waters here are the deepest on the west coast descending 732 [Music] m [Music] to the Northeast Beyond Mount Calder Jervis Inlet lies [Music] below it is one of several major inlets along British Columbia's western coastline Jervis Inlet extends 77 km Inland deep into the coast mountain range [Music] the waters are lined with steep Granite Cliffs and soaring mountain peaks the Deep waters are used by the Canadian and American militaries for submarine and sonar [Music] testing the inlet is divided into three sections or reaches first surveyed by the HMS plumper in 1860 the reaches were named in honor of Queen Victoria's family Prince of Wales reach Princess Royal reach and queen's [Music] reach it is a remote Waterway with no Road access from the outside world near the Northeast extremity of Jervis Inlet one final display of natural beauty in one of the province's most remote Coastal [Music] locations this is Princess Louisa Inlet it is located 50 km from the nearest Road a Haven for recreational boers attracted by secure Anchorage calm Waters and unbelievable surroundings [Music] princess Louisa Inlet is 8 km long 300 M deep and 800 M wide at its widest point thousands of years of of glaciation has carved this Gorge leaving the inlet nearly surrounded on all sides by towering [Music] [Music] Cliffs on the shoreline a shower of pristine water marks one of the natural gems of Princess Louisa [Music] Inlet it is James Bruce balls considered to be the highest measured waterfall in North America and one of the top 10 in the [Music] world [Music] it flows 840 M down winding Rock faces [Music] throughout much of the Year dozens of waterfalls Cascade down these Cliffs to princess Louisa Inlet [Music] below their secret lies in the Towering Peaks [Music] [Music] Beyond [Music] massive mountains of ice like Mount Albert and the glacier known locally as Sun Peak line the edges of the [Music] inlet they stand more than 2 km High holding an unimaginable supply of water [Music] but they measure just a fraction of the glacial ice covering the British Columbia landscape more than 25,000 Square km of spectacular ice fields and icy [Music] peaks it is truly one of the most majestic Landscapes on [Music] Earth from the towns of Gibsons and seash Shelt along British Columbia's Sunshine Coast to its Serene interconnected Coastal lakes and the awe inspiring reaches of Jervis Inlet princess Louisa Inlet and [Music] Beyond British Columbia Sunshine Coast is one of the world's great remote Wonders It is a wealth of Natural Resources [Music] a safe passage for recreational [Music] boers and a treasure Trove of unimaginable riches [Music] here on the edge of [Music] Canada [Music]

Channel: TRACKS - Travel Documentaries

Views: 101,768

Keywords: Vancouver, West Coast, backpacking adventures, biking routes, breathtaking views, camping spots, coastal living, coastlines, communities, cultural diversity, eco-tourism, islands, must-visit locations, natural beauty, photography spots, travel photography, travel tips and tricks, travelogue, undiscovered places, wanderlust

Id: 4k5qFgycTHc

Length: 50min 58sec (3058 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024