Lumberjacks celebrate Canada Day in Vancouver

 Vancouver is certainly a long way away from Canada's capital Ottawa, but that doesn't mean that west coasters here don't know how to celebrate the nation's birthday.
This city each year plays host to the largest Canada Day party outside the capital, with more than 300,000 people coming down to Vancouver's waterfront for the annual July 1 festivity.
Here, folks who live among the forests, mountains and ocean, marked the country's 147th birthday in their own way by holding traditional lumberjack competitions.
The forestry business is still one of western Canada's largest industries.
In front of a crowd, a group of lumberjacks showed spectators how the trees used to be cut down in the good old days before heavy machinery took over.
At one lumberjack show, the two teams of lumberjacks hacked, sawed, climbed and even balanced on a log in the water. They also impressed the crowd with a few carving tricks with their chainsaws, which are still a fixture throughout the province's vast timber forests.
Lumberjack Darren Dean told Xinhua that falling trees and chopping wood are among Canada's toughest jobs.
"A lot of it is pretty physically demanding. So the hardest event that I do in the show is our springboard chop. Which you saw is going up a couple boards high there. It's pretty tough, you've got a lot of balance that you have to look after while you're swinging high with a six-pound axe nine feet in the air, so, it's pretty tough."
Another lumberjack, Nick Hall, said the key to winning a chainsaw race "would be a quick start, get the saw into the wood as fast as you can and then not put too much weight on the saw. Let the saw do the cutting and not try to push it past what it can do."
The lumberjacks weren't the only source of pride among revelers during the Canada Day celebrations in Vancouver. Among the big crowd, many people held national flag on their head, shoulder or in hand.
A Vancouverite said he was proud to be a Canadian because of the diversity of the country, the people and the land
"It's the greatest country on Earth and we have a lot of pride and unity and we're big on hockey." another young man said.