As places for rich sensorial and symbolic experiences, forestry recreation sites provide contact not only with biosphere ecology, but with tropes and values expressed through managed ‘nature space’. Articulating these tropes and values reveals that ‘nature’ itself has been socially constructed and conceptually intersects with power, including rights of access and production of capital. By bringing multimodal research-creation practices into contact with my own production of place-based knowledge in the forests of my hometown in Mission, British Columbia, I assemble a situated account of spatial narratives and ideological work taking place in managed, recreational forests of the Fraser Valley. In so doing, I also demonstrate ways of provoking reflexive interplay between sensory impressions, poetic meanings, dominant narratives, and knowledge. After forming analyses through documentary research, situated encounters, creative process, and critical theory, I present the two overarching arguments of this project: 1) ideological work around jurisdiction and enclosure takes place in rural communities through managed nature reserves and ossified narratives in ‘natural zones’ and 2) multimodal creative research can be used to notice ways that sensory and poetic meanings of a site are entangled with knowledge and power structures and to illuminate occupations and construction of space, place, and imagination.