LONG weekend campers going to a provincial park can't bring booze, but they can learn about clearcutting of forests there.

Volunteers with Wilderness Committee Manitoba, a citizen organization fighting to preserve forests, are setting up information booths at the entrance of Nopiming Provincial Park to raise the issue. In future weekends they will move to other parks.
The organization will have signs that say: "Welcome to Clearcut Provincial Park -- Manitoba's shame" and hand out information detailing how much logging is being done in some of the province's provincial parks.

"We'll also be handing out maps so people can do some exploring and see where the clearcutting is being done," Eric Reder, head of the Wilderness Committee in Manitoba, said on Thursday.

Clearcut area
"In some cases it is a small 250-metre walk through forest to the clearcut area. And when you're at the clearcutting area near the Manigotagan River, a world-renowned paddling river, you can stand on the clearcut and see the river."
The provincial government has agreements that allow the clearcutting of more than 60 per cent of timber in Duck Mountain Provincial Park, 62 per cent in Nopiming, and about half in the Whiteshell.

Dan Bulloch, a provincial forestry branch spokesman, said logging is allowed in the provincial parks because of history.

Bulloch said Nopiming, Duck Mountain and the Whiteshell were logging areas decades before they were designated provincial parks. He said Hwy. 307 in the Whiteshell was actually two logging roads joined up.