The late Glen Alexander Patterson of Vancouver, was born in Calgary, Alberta on September 21, 1921. Glen first laid eyes on Vancouver on a trip from Calgary in 1936 as a boy who traveled with the Calgary Boys’ Band where he played trumpet at the Haywood bandstand in Alexandra Park that still stands near English Bay. He was utterly smitten with the city and its natural beauty. Glen and British Columbia were a lifelong love affair from that moment.
Glen graduated in Commerce from the University of Alberta and then served with the Royal Canadian Air Force, helping train pilots in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan during World War II.
After the war, he eloped with his high school sweetheart, Isobel Farr. Glen secured a job at Kananskis, where they lived in an old prospector’s shack in the woods; Glen timber cruised during the day while Isobel fended off bears from that shack in the woods.
Later, they moved to Vancouver where Isobel worked to support Glen while he took another degree, graduating in Forestry at UBC in 1947.
Jobs in the Forest industry were scarce then and they were thrilled when Glen was hired by Canadian Forest Products (CFP) to work at Woss logging camp in the Nimpkish Valley in Northern Vancouver Island, not as a forester but as a fire warden!
Although his primary duties were as a fire warden, Glen also did forestry work for CFP, tree planting and timber cruising, eventually being hired as a full time forester, one of the first full time foresters in BC.
Glen and Isobel lived in isolation in remote Woss Camp (then only connected to the coast at Beaver Cove by a company railroad) welcoming the arrival of three children. Home was an uninsulated, small company bungalow (the loggers lived in bunkhouses but there were a few houses and a two room schoolhouse for the few families who also lived at the camp). The house was heated by a wood stove sensibly sited on gravel. Dad hauled in soil from the woods in a wheelbarrow and made a garden and lawn on the gravel.
Glen was always a keen photographer, and established his own home photo lab for developing his own black and white photographs at Woss. He also owned one of the first Kodak 8 mm movie cameras. That early movie camera had no battery – it was operated by winding up a spring which moved the film through the camera.
It was while Glen was at Woss, in 1952, that he wanted to document the earlier days of falling giant trees by hand; although by that time the first heavy power saws were being used by fallers in the woods. So Glen recruited some Swedish faller friends – the camp attracted loggers from many ethnic backgrounds, many of them Nordic – and asked them to re-stage the falling of a large Douglas Fir by hand which he filmed with that movie camera.
The resultant film, which did not have the capability of recording sound, though it allowed colour film; was recently digitized by Glen’s three children.
Glen was a lifelong employee of CFP (now Canfor) and his talents were recognized as he was promoted to management, running a sawmill and plywood plant at Grande Prairie, Alberta and then in the last years of his career to his beloved Vancouver as a Vice President, until his retirement at 65; whereupon his love of nature was expressed in devotion to gardening, heavily influenced by the Japanese, giving lectures on gardening and travelling the world in search of exotic species and famous gardens and gardeners.
Glen’s adult children are grateful this film is now available digitally as a testament to the hard work and enormous skills of early fallers in BC’s old growth forests.
See the short film here on Glen’s son’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2VOhMwn7s
