Those summers in the floating camps on Mabel Lake are where I learned the secrets of my ancestors, fathers and sons who spent their lives felling timbers, a history knitted into our bones. The inland rain forests my family had logged seemed indestructible, the big old trees the keepers of the communities. What mattered was that loggers once stopped and carefully gauged and evaluated the character of individual trees to be cut. Transportation by flumes and rivers kept cuttings small and slow, whereas trucks and roads exploded the scale of operations. What was the timber company of the Lillooet
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