Qualla: Burns Bog

Burns Bog: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY 2.0. During the Second World War, more than 100,000 bales of peat were shipped from a wetland south of Vancouver to Las Vegas, where the United States government used the material to help catalyze the manufacture of firebombs. It is a strange fact to carry onto the same ground now, standing in the quiet with sandhill cranes somewhere out of sight. Burns Bog covers about 3,500 hectares of the Fraser delta in Delta, British Columbia — the largest raised peat bog and the largest undeveloped urban landmass on the West Coast of the Americas. Highways bracket it. A municipal landfill presses against one flank. From a few thousand feet up it reads as a flat green absence where a suburb ought to be, and that absence is doing an enormous amount of work.

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Image: Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Burns Bog: Ten Thousand Years of Almost Nothing

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BurnsBogSociety, CC BY-SA 4.0. The bog began forming as the last ice age released its grip on the delta roughly 10,000 years ago. What started as a depression fed by floodwater and groundwater slowly built up organic matter until its surface lifted clear of the water table beneath it. After that, only rain rea...

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Image: BurnsBogSociety | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burns Bog: The Cattle That Sank

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BurnsBogSociety, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1905 Dominic Burns and his brother bought the bog intending to raise livestock on it, which tells you something about how carefully they had walked it first. The cattle proved too heavy for the ground and sank; some ate plants that poisoned them. The operation moved north, the...

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Image: BurnsBogSociety | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burns Bog: Fire That Burns Downward

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Peat does not burn the way a forest burns. It smoulders below the surface, travelling through dry upper layers where crews cannot see it, and it can outlast a rainstorm that would end an ordinary blaze. In 1996 a bog fire buried Vancouver in smoke and ash for two days, consumed 2...

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Image: Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Burns Bog: What Seventy-Three Million Dollars Bought

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Development proposals first arrived in 1988, and the pushback came from the community around the bog well before it came from any government. A request to designate the bog an ecological reserve was made in 1991 and rejected by most of Delta Council. The Burns Bog Conservation So...

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Image: Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Burns Bog: The Edge You Can Walk

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Most of the bog is closed, and for sound reasons: the ground is unstable, the sightlines are poor, and public access was never the point of protecting it. The exception is the Delta Nature Reserve, 148 acres at the margin, where a boardwalk built by volunteers more than thirty ye...

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Image: Ruth Hartnup from Vancouver, Canada | CC BY 2.0