METRO VANCOUVER - From his perch 10 metres up a tree, a lone protester held the last vigil on Burnaby Mountain, alternately taunting police and asking them not to Taser him because he’d fall out and hurt himself.

For hours, Jakub Markiewicz held not only the police at bay but also survey workers from Kinder Morgan, who want to puncture the mountain’s tough skin to find out if they can bore a new oil pipeline through it.

It was at this place that Kinder Morgan’s hopes for a new Trans Mountain pipeline has met the fiercest public opposition. The company has applied to the National Energy Board for a permit to twin its Alberta-B.C. line, and wants to carry out exploratory drill holes.

If Kinder Morgan wished for a less controversial place on which to literally stake its ground, it couldn’t have chosen a more public one. Opposition to the line has been galvanized against it to the point that it even flavoured recent civic elections, and in September the location of the test holes on a sensitive part of the mountain became a rallying point for a protest camp.

Burnaby police, tasked with upholding an injunction granted to Kinder Morgan on Monday by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Austin Cullen, waited patiently for several days in the hopes protesters would disburse. But early on Thursday morning, as some protesters were still in their sleeping bags, they moved in.

In the clearing where Markiewicz sat high above the ground, at ground zero where Kinder Morgan wants to work, police were stumped at how to get him down. Emboldened because the standoff was being live-streamed by a member of conservation society Sea Shepherd Vancouver, he defied their orders, and later their entreaties, to come down peaceably.

“There’s only 18 officers here. Double that number and come out,” Markiewicz shouted at the videographer, imploring activists online to rally at the mountain. “Triple that number and come out.”

At one point Markiewicz shouted down to police that he wasn’t harnessed to the tree, so if they used a Taser or a bean bag shotgun he would likely be hurt, falling out of the tree. But police didn’t appear to consider that option anyway.

Mounties patiently expanded the cordon so that the public theatre of live streaming couldn’t take place anymore and then scaled the tree. Two officers with bolt cutters joined Markiewicz and removed a chain he’d used to fix his neck to the trunk.

His arrest was perhaps the most elaborate of more than two dozen that punctuated a day of high drama on the mountain. What began at around 8 a.m. with a small force of officers moving in stretched into an ugly and tense standoff fuelled by social media calls for people to “defend the mountain.”

Police arrested anyone who stood their ground in defiance of the injunction. When by 9:30 a.m. five had been taken away, others retreated to an area outside of the taped-off camp. Wiping away tears, protester Emily Cook said a friend, whom she did not identify, was arrested outside of the injunction zone just as he was telling an officer he didn’t want to be arrested.