DATE OF BIRTH: July 29 1947

PLACE OF BIRTH: Vancouver B.C.

Gord Barney moved to Ladysmith on Vancouver Island at a very young age. His father George was a faller for MacMillan Bloedel, at Copper Canyon, and Nanaimo River camps for 31 years. Gord went to work in the woods at age 16, as did a lot of young men around Ladysmith at that time. The jobs were many and he chose the forest industry. He started work punking whistles and then worked on the riggin', moving upward until he was a machine operator. He logged up and down the West Coast of British Columbia, on the Queen Charlotte Islands and in many of the small logging camps on the Central Coast. He always drew cartoons as a young man and then put them to use, drawing caricatures of his logging buddies and made fun of some of the woods bosses. Throughout the years he also wrote down stories that he heard in the bunkhouse on scraps of paper and then later copied them on to a computer disk. His attempt at making a book, Timberbeasts of the Great Bear Rain Forest, was a great hit with all the loggers who have read it. Gord worked in the forest industry until he retired at age 55. He lives in Ladysmith, near his two sons, Clay and Martin. He has drawn many logging cartoons and submits written material regularly to the IWA Green Gold Newspaper.

BOOKS:

Camp Inspector: Tales Of B.C. Logger (Fir Grove Publishing 2007)

Haywire, From the Cookshack to the Tailblocks (First Choice Publishing 2011) More Tales of a B.C. Logger

Glossary of Logging Terms of British Columbia (Cobble Hill: Fir Grove Publishing 2012) $18 plus $4 postage

[BCBW 2012] "Forestry"