Reports that government officials broke the picket line in the Castle-Crown wilderness area January 23 were greatly exaggerated, say protest spokespeople.

Gordon Petersen, president of the Castle-Crown Wilderness Coalition, says the protest camp is intact and operational. Petersen says he read a news story on the evening of January 23 about the camp’s eviction. A member of the ad hoc Stop Castle Logging group immediately went to the site to see if the story was true.

Petersen says the false eviction report to the media was “from the government spin doctors, and it’s most irritating.”

He confirmed government officials from the Department of Sustainable Resource Development (SRD) did visit the camp at around noon that day.

“There were four SRD vehicles, a Spray Lake [Sawmills] vehicle, a couple of contractors’ vehicles, a couple of police cars,” says Petersen. Protestors refused to leave the area and continued to block logging vehicles.

“So they went back to the trucks; they had a bit of a meeting there.... All of a sudden they all left, all at once, one big convoy. And they all just disappeared and they haven’t been back since,” says Petersen.

Opponents to a clear-cut logging project scheduled to begin this month in the Castle Special Place of southwestern Alberta set up the protest camp on January 10. They say harvesting timber in the area will hurt the local tourism industry and destroy critical wildlife habitat.