SUMMER 2000
April 27th: Ben Hobbs and I left Sackville today at breakfast. I went to sleep right away so he could drive the first shift, and I woke up outside Quebec City.
April 29th: Got past Calgary just after breakfast - a pretty quick trip so far. Ben went to sleep yesterday in the late afternoon in Ontario, and woke up at dawn in Alberta, completely sleeping through Manitoba and Saskatchewan. That'll teach him to go to sleep when I'm driving. Picked up Kelly in Red Deer and drove to Edson, where we stopped for the night.
April 30th: Met area manager Jim Logan at lunch, and we went out and viewed about 25 blocks outside Edson, Alberta, then drove to Prince George and viewed half a dozen more blocks on the way that we will be planting this summer. Saw about 30 mountain sheep and 30 elk in Jasper Park, and a forest fire. In BC, saw a porcupine, some deer, two caribou (first time I've ever seen caribou in person), a couple moose, and six bears. There was also a forest fire burning in the park along the highway, apparently a "controlled burn" which got out of control.
May 1st: Spent most of the day starting to go over contract information for the summer, and preparing paperwork. In bed by 11pm.
May 2nd: Up at 3:30am, and in a chopper at 4:30am. We flew around for about three hours, which was enough to make me annoyed. It was raining and cloudy, so it wasn't too enjoyable, or warm, for that matter. I spent most of the time holding a digital video recorder in my lap, while one of the local foresters leaned out the back window (hence the reason it was so cold) and used an infared video camera to scan a bunch of the blocks that my camp is going to plant - about 400 Ha (880 acres) in total - on this first two and a half week contract. The slash piles were burned on these blocks last October, and it was dry enough then that the entire surface of most of the blocks actually burned (they had already been logged, so it was just sticks and litter on the ground, which burns quite easily). Anyway, on one of the blocks a lot of bright white spots showed up on the display, so we landed, and he started kicking around a couple of the ash pits and sure enough there was smoke coming out because they were still smouldering underground. So the forester is bringing in a cat excavator in the next few days with a couple fire crew guys to dig up the pits on that block and spread them out and make sure that the fires are out. These blocks are right in the middle of a fairly valuable cedar belt, which apparently can catch fire quite easily, so they're taking a lot of precautions right now since the whole area is so dry. Spent the rest of the day and evening at the office, organizing tree deliveries and scheduling.
May 3rd: I took one of the foremen and one of the checkers out to show them a bunch of the blocks today. We went to the smouldering block and watched the excavator for a while. It was pretty shocking .... the logs that it was digging up were actually bursting into flames when they hit open air. One of the foremen, MTA alumni Andrew Thompson, managed to get a quad stuck, so I ended up in a mud puddle up to my waist wearing town boots. I should have brought my chain saw boots I guess.
May 4th: Today I found a desk in our office that wasn't being used. I managed to convince our accountant to loan it to me by saying that I'd take good care of it. I figured it would come in quite handy in our office trailer. Well, yesterday Kelly took his driving test, and failed. Today he was supposed to rewrite it, so he took my truck and on his way out of the yard to re-do his test, he backed over the desk.
May 6th: Spent most of yesterday packing up our camp, and today bringing it out to the woods and setting up. It was a pretty hectic two days.
May 7th: We had a bunch of meetings with the planters today about safety, filling out employee contracts, and so on. Did a full-scale first aid simulation after supper. At the moment, the camp has about 41 planters, plus myself, four foremen, two quality checkers, and two cooks. Mind you, this changes fairly often ... on the next contract that starts in three weeks I'm losing one of the big crews of fifteen planters to another camp, and possibly picking up two other six-man crews part-way through that contract. At least that's the current plan, but these plans change almost daily. The camp currently has nine females. It's interesting how many people work for our company (Folklore), that have MTA connections: Troy Hicks ('93?) is doing some snag-falling work for us. Debbie Ward ('91) is doing some of the payroll work. Jamie Daugharty ('92) will probably be making a guest appearance as a planter, and Ryan Cresanto and Shawn Cole (both of whom didn't graduate yet) may also make guest appearances. Andrew Thompson ('96) is one of the quality checkers, and Ben Hobbs (2001) and Tucker Innes ('94?) are working here as planters. There are a couple other MTA students that have also worked for our company but in other camps under different supervisors, including Peter Loewen and I few others whose names I can't remember.
Click HERE to see pictures that Tucker Innes took over the course of the 2000 planting season.
May 8th: Day one of planting. We didn't start until afternoon, and it was pretty uneventful. I had my first "up close and personal" run-in with a bear for this season, but it ran away. Pretty early in the season for that: I wonder if that's a good or bad sign?
May 11th: It's been pretty busy here for the last several days, but nothing really exciting has happened. At least, nothing that I think of as unusual. I got up at 4:30am today, a bit earlier than usual, because I couldn't sleep. I had to pull one of the foreman's trucks out of the ditch first thing after breakfast, but other than that there have been no problems. The camp has planted about 150,000 trees so far - we're scheduled for 3.8 million this year, which would be a record for me. I'm also hoping we can pick up some extra work in August, since we have a lot of people that could plant a bit later than normal. I haven't had much August work since I was planting with Tawa up until 1994. The planters are pretty sore right now, but are slowly getting back into shape. I'm hoping that by early next week they'll be up to about 70,000 per day. All of next week will be helicopter access blocks, so I'm going to have to push them pretty hard. They're getting Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday off to rest, so the foremen can get more prepared for the chopper work. It was hot and sunny today, and there hasn't been any snow yet. Last May, we only had two days in the entire month that it didn't snow, so I think that was the coldest month I've ever had in my life. Today was a long day for driving - about 850km on dirt roads while delivering trees and running back and forth between blocks. In the evening, Swaggart (Andrew Thompson) and I were out trying to find a block, but some of the roads marked on the old forestry map we had don't exist anymore, so we hit a couple of dead ends. We found the block just before dark, and checked it out, then started back to camp. Unfortunately, because of the dead ends, we didn't think we had enough gas to make it back to camp the way we had come, so we had to go home by guessing at shortcuts on old abandoned logging roads. We drove the last 80 km with the low gas light flashing - no gas in the jerry cans in the back, and no one from our camp awake and listening to the two-way radio. When we finally pulled into camp, we were deep into the red on the fuel gauge. We were pretty lucky coming back that there were no fallen fully-grown trees blocking the roads (since I didn't have my chain saw), or we would have been sleeping in the truck for the night. It was another crazy day for bears - I saw seven. Swaggart said he thought he saw a dead wolf on the side of the road on the way home, but since we were almost out of gas I didn't stop to look.
May 12th: Well, Ben seems to be in a better mood today. The other day he swore at me, told me he hated me for bringing him out planting, and said that he wanted to quit. At least he didn't cry. I figure it he can make it for two more weeks, there won't be any problems. His speed is picking up a bit already, so once he starts making a bit of money he'll be fine. On a totally different note, this was funny and ironic: after last night's comment about how it would suck if a tree was down across the road, Chris Durupt's crew was planting on that block and during the day, someone cut down (for no apparent reason) a cottonwood tree that was four feet in diameter and dropped it across the road, blocking the way out. The crew had to drive an extra 60km to backtrack and come back to camp by a different route.
May 13th: Saw a bobcat this morning. That was pretty neat ... only the second one that I've ever seen in the woods.
May 14th: Yesterday was a day off, and some of the people went to town to get drunk. Not myself. Apparently one of the foremen ended up in handcuffs, twice, but I haven't heard yet how that happened. Why do people in my camp always end up in the drunk tank? The Christian camps seem to have more accidents than us, but my camp is failing miserably in terms of proper behaviour in public.
May 16th: The last several days have been non-stop ... I've been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Chopper blocks all week. The chopper pilot we've been using is interesting. He took the seats out of the back and the doors off so he can carry five people instead of four, which improves the efficiency pretty significantly. It was kind of strange looking out the side in the back seat with the chopper tilted forty-five degrees, being held in by a seat belt, with a hand strap in one hand and a radio in the other hand, looking straight down on a block three or four hundred feet below.
May 17th: We had a huge tour of Ministry of Forests people from Victoria and Prince George fly into some of our blocks today. That was pretty scary ... a lot of public relations time which slowed down all of our checkers and foremen, but it turned out alright in the end. I think they were impressed with us, and it was a good opportunity for us to show some of the MOF office employees a bit about what happens in the field.
May 18th: Ok, our company has four camps. The other three are Christian camps, so we're essentially the "black sheep" of the company. However, the company is now up to four vehicle accidents so far in less than three weeks (no injuries, just running into other vehicles), and none were in our camp. I'm hoping my camp will once again have an unblemished driving record this season, as we did last year.
May 23rd: Last chopper day - at least for a week or so.
May 24th: Spontaneous day off for the planters, so the foremen and checkers and I can catch up on our work - paperwork, cleaning up garbage, doing quality plots on blocks, moving trees into tomorrow's block, etc. Kelly takes a driving test tomorrow for his class 4 - maybe this will be the day he finally gets a license.
May 25th: Good northern lights tonight.
May 26th: After I dropped the planters off at our block today, I ran into town to pick up a bunch of supplies and get a truck serviced. When I came back, there was a fire burning on the road into our block. It's high-risk fire season out here, so I was pretty surprised, and put it out right away. When I went through the ashes afterwards, there were a couple of punctured lighters, and a partly burned magazine, so someone obviously set it on purpose to try to start a major fire. It must have only happened about fifteen minutes before I showed up, since the magazine was barely burned. Good timing. Anyway, finished the first contract today - 764,666 trees now in the ground. Tomorrow is a major paperwork day, wrapping up the reports for forestry, and then Sunday will be spent driving to Alberta, and then quite a few hours getting our safety program paperwork and union cards in order. On Monday we set up the next camp, and check out access to a few potential chopper blocks, then the planting will start again on Tuesday.
May 27th: Had my second shower today. Of the summer.
May 28th: Here's something interesting for people from conservative provinces on the East Coast: the liquor store in Edson (Alberta) is open until 1:30am on Sunday night.
Click HERE to see pictures from the first contract for MOF Prince George.
May 31st: I blew out the clutch on my chain saw today while building bridges (so the quads could cross over some small streams, to get into a couple blocks off the main road). And I've already lost over 20 pounds.
June 1st: Ruby's day-pack went missing this afternoon, but Paul happened along just in time to chase after a wolf (on his quad) that was trying to drag it off. We had to get rid of a bear that was causing problems in camp today, which was unfortunate.
June 2nd: We go through a lot of gas out here. Swaggart went into town at 5am and bought $480 of fuel (about four drums) so the trucks could work during the day, and he had to go back in and fill all the drums again after supper. The planters are also going through three or four 45-gallon drums of water every day. One interesting sight on the drive to the block this morning: a mother moose and a baby moose were running away up the road, being chased by a hungry black bear.
June 3rd: Paul had a flat tire today on his crummy. Flats are fairly rare these days since we've got brand new leased vehicles with new bush tires - not like ten years ago when we drove old wrecks, and had a couple dozen flats every summer. And one of our dogs got killed today.
June 4th: Apparently this area had four and a half feet of snow during May, and a storm of 30cm two weeks ago. But it was so hot on the block today that the lodgepole pine cones were cracking open - they usually only open during forest fires, when the temperature gets to about 43 degrees Celsius. However, the ground of the cutblocks gets extremely hot on sunny days, often fifteen to twenty degrees above the normal air temperature.
June 5th: Day off for the planters. We had to get rid of about eight pickup trucks full of garbage, since we didn't have time to go to the dump all week and production was pretty high (about 344,000 trees this week, which is about 1400 waxed cardboard boxes).
June 6th: Stephan, our cook, was filling the big water reservoir (pumped from a neaby river) at the cook shack today and went away, forgetting that the pump was still running. When he had returned, he had flooded half of the camp, with my office trailer centered almost directly in the middle of the flood. The problem with this was that there was a large colony of carpenter ants living in the ground around the trailer, and when their home started to flood, they headed for high ground. Of course, this meant my trailer. So every couple of minutes right now while I'm working on paperwork (and this website), I have another inch-long black ant diving in through the sunroof. The invasion of the ants kind of reminds me of an old semi-horror film from the 70's, "It Happened at Lakewood Manor."
June 8th: Today was another really miserable day for the planters. Lots of rain, lots of mud, and quite a few planters had to fix the quality of their trees from the past couple of days (for free). Paul's crew got one truck stuck in the middle of camp and left their other vehicle behind on the block after it slid off the road. And we have 35 millimetres of rain forecast for tonight ...
June 9th: How much mud do we have? Swag's dog, Angus (who is generally regarded as less-than-intelligent as far as dogs go) just stopped in the middle of camp, glanced around with an annoyed look, and then crawled across three dozen metal fire-packs to avoid walking through 20 feet of mud to get to his dinner bowl. I spent half the morning pulling trucks out of the mud, and then had to take my quad to town to get fixed (luckily, my block was already well-stocked with trees for my crew). Somehow, a bunch of wires for the electronic shifter got ripped out, and a CV boot was punctured. Gateway Honda in Edson must love us - we send about three quads in for repairs every week. After that, I had to go to IGA for the cook. I got some strange stares walking through the grocery store, decked out in full rain gear, dripping mud and water everywhere, with a big bag of flour over my shoulder. And it's not supposed to stop raining for several more days, according to the visiting checkers. I wonder how the NBA and NHL playoffs are going, or if they're already over? We do get radio stations out here, but rarely listen to them.
June 11th: Chris came in tonight and said, "here's my quad," as he handed me a drive shaft. By the way, for anyone who doesn't know what a quad is, it's one of the little four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, about the size of a large ride-on lawnmower, but which can pull a truck or can go 80 km/h on flat road. Apparently, his quad is broken in two (well, it's still attached at the seat). And Paul's truck needs transmission work ASAP, and Swag's truck needs a new u-joint on the drive shaft. My truck (my brand-new leased Ford F350 one-ton, not my personal truck) already has 10,000 km on it in one month, mostly on dirt roads and mud.
June 12th: It's been raining for days. And days. We're living in a world of muck. Just wait until the next set of pictures ...
June 13th: Wow, did things ever fall apart yesterday. One truck lost the u-joint on the drive shaft. Quads had problems. And to top it off, Kelly was towing a large trailer through Edson, on the Yellowhead highway, loaded with about 1000 kgs of rotten garbage, and an axle fell off the trailer in the middle of town.
June 15th: Yes, it's still raining. Other than that, not much exciting. Our dry tent (powered by a large propane blower) which is used to dry planters' clothes overnight, blew down in the wind last night. The planters fixed it at breakfast, but it blew down again during the day. I suspect we have a shortage of qualified engineers in camp.
June 18th: Another contract finished, sort of. At least the trees are planted (1,103,125 of them on this contract, so we've planted 1,867,791 so far) but we still have to clean up camp and I have about four days of paperwork and a ton of equipment to get fixed before we set up the next camp next Saturday.
June 19th: I went to do paperwork last night and left Swaggart and Paul in charge of the camp breakdown and cleanup, as they promised they could get it done properly, and no garbage or equipment would be left behind. Went out today to pick up the office trailer and fuel barrels that belonged in my truck, only to find that for some reason all the trucks drove to town with empty tanks, yet the fuel barrels left behind were full. Naturally, they didn't leave a gas pump behind, which would have let me lighten the barrels by putting some gas in my truck. Let me just say that it's pretty difficult to pick up three 450 lb. fuel drums and put them in the back of a pickup by yourself, so I had done a lot of cursing and sweating by the time the barrels were all in the truck. I ended up having to lay one end of each barrel on the hitch of my trailer and then lift the other end up onto the tailgate of the truck, then wiggle each one in that way. Necessity breeds invention.
June 20th: Jim (my boss) and I went out to camp again, this time to pick up the cook trailer. Afterwards, he asked if camp was clean, and I replied that I was confident that Swaggart and Paul had done a good job combing the area for garbage and missing equipment. But Jim went on tour anyway, and an hour later I was quite embarassed that he had rounded up three planting shovels, two fire shovels, and three fire axes that were left behind. And some garbage. I guess I'll have to spray paint all the handles of the fire shovels and axes with neon orange paint so that doesn't happen again.
June 22nd: It's midnight right now, and I'm quite happy that we just finished the last of the paperwork from the last contract (the computer has been in use about eighteen hours a day for the last four days). Tomorrow I have to put a new door and running lights on the office trailer, do some random errands like fixing my camera and paying some bills around town, then we start moving all the camp equipment up to the camp site in Fox Creek. The next contract is a small one, only half a million trees, so it will probably only last a week, but I'm sure I'll have some more stories then ...
Click HERE to see pictures from the second contract at Weldwood Hinton.
June 24th: The foremen and I spent most of the afternoon and evening flying trees into our blocks for the next few days. Kelly was using Chris Durupt's quad that had just been overhauled by Gateway Honda to the tune of $954. Too bad they didn't fix the brakes. He hit a waterbar at full speed about two minutes after he started driving, not knowing that the brakes were bad, he flew over the handlebars and knocked out part of a front tooth.
June 26th: A long hot day. Most people had four litre jugs of water for the day, and they generally ran out around early afternoon. Since we were on chopper blocks and couldn't afford a bad production day, I ran to town to get a bunch of water jugs that I then sent out with trees that were being slung into the blocks in the late afternoon. It's amazing how important it is to have enough water, and how often some planters don't take enough and get caught on hot days.
June 27th: Another hot day. One of the planters got a case of heat stroke (chills, vomiting, bleeding nose) so we flew him out of the block and got him to the hospital, where they made him stay overnight for observation. I think that it was the first time in ten years that an employee I was responsible for was emergency-evacuated to the hospital with a problem that could be potentially life-threatening. It was only about 24 Celcius out according to the radio, although it was probably hotter than that on the blocks without a breeze, close to the ground. The planters are finally used to planting in the rain, so now they're thinking this is pretty hot. After another week of the sun though, they should be able to work on 33-35 degree days. Tim Adekola, who spent a lot of time in his childhood working on farms in Nigeria, has been planting in two sweaters and a touque, and laughing at everyone who complains about the heat.
June 28th: Ben quit this morning. He said he couldn't handle it any longer, so he packed his stuff and I dropped him off at the bus station at breakfast. It's too bad he didn't stick around a little longer - we're just starting to get into the fun things about this job, like heat and mosquitos and black flies and hornets. It's the first time since 1994 that I've had a rookie on my crew quit. I guess I've been pretty lucky all these years ... Paul has lost six people already, this season alone. After supper, we had another major safety meeting to prepare for a safety audit. Ironically, shortly after the meeting, Christy Robitaille was showing someone how to turn on the heater for the showers, and a propane leak apparently ignited, blowing up in her face and burning off her eyebrows and burning one eyelid. Another trip to the hospital. Luckily, this wasn't life-threatening, just a bit scary. After two days of hearing complaints about the long days with the choppers (they were long), I let everyone sleep in a couple hours this morning and quit an hour early at supper, and then because we had some screwing around trying to get trees into the next blocks, I got a lot of complaints about the planting time being too short to make any money. Therefore, tomorrow I shall work them like dogs.
June 29th: Today was the first day of the safety audit. Ironically, or perhaps not, on the way to the block a rock came through one of the windows of Bryce's ETV and a piece of glass cut open a blood vessel in the eye of one of the planters. Three days, three trips to the hospital. So much for our safety record.
June 30th: Jim and I spent several hours lost today, while we were trying to find some of our upcoming blocks.
July 1st: I went into town this morning, and tried to send a package through Greyhound. Unfortunately, the package needed one piece of tape to close it, so the woman wouldn't let me send it, or have a piece of tape. She said that they sold rolls of tape, but she wouldn't take my Visa, only cash (strange, since I could use my Visa to send the package). I think she just wanted to take the cash herself, so I'm writing a letter to Greyhound to complain. Then, after that, I went to the Bank of Montreal (the only one within 250km, and we're in a fairly populated area of northern Alberta) to transfer some money to my over-abused credit card. When I got there, the bank was closed. Not for the holiday, but gone completely. So I called the bank and set up a telephone banking account, to pay off my credit card, and half an hour later found out that the only transfer that wasn't possible was on to my credit card. Today made me very annoyed with society, and I was happy to get back out into the woods.
July 2nd: Today was not a good day. Five planters in the camp took the day off, some of them because they continued the Canada Day festivities a little far, and so production was poor. I have a feeling that this day is going to come back to haunt us when we're trying to finish up the trees in a couple of days. I had eight times that trucks went in the ditch and needed to be pulled out before 11am (oh yes, it's raining, and the mud roads are extremely slippery). Luckily, Mike, the Mostowich checker, was extremely helpful and he was the only person driving a truck that day that didn't go into the ditch once. Of course, on the way home, when we finally got our packed trucks out to the good stretch of road at 8:20pm and had everyone rearranged comfortably in our dual-wheeled vehicles that had been left behind on this road, Mike's truck died. I ran into town and brought back some fresh gas and some methyl hydrate (gas-line anti-freeze) because it sounded like a fuel problem, but that didn't help. Shortly after this we noticed that the dash lights were flickering strangely when trying to turn over the starter, so we decided that it was an electrical problem, and then a few seconds later some plastic wiring started smoking under the engine. We left the truck behind to be fixed the following day. Oh, and near the end of the day, it sounded like a pack of coyotes must have killed a deer or something just a few hundred feet into the woods beside where some of my crew was planting. There was a crazy commotion for about thirty seconds, which was pretty eerie sounding. Ruby and I saw a coyote shortly afterwards, on the road.
July 3rd: Today was possibly the most annoying day in a long time. My crew went in to assist Bryce on his block for a few hours before going to finish their own block in the mid-afternoon. But there were a lot of trees left. Paul and Chris' crew showed up at supper (much to our relief), and by 10pm, the last trees had finally been planted. Or so we thought.
July 4th: Finished the Mostowich trees this morning. We've now got 2,318,171 planted this summer. Bryce's crew didn't finish their block yesterday, so my crew had to go help them finish the trees this morning before the pre-work meeting for the ANC contract at 11am. I had promised my crew they could sleep in after staying so late to finish up the day before, so they were pretty choked at having to help Bryce's crew, who had all quit earlier the previous day. It was a classic day for complaints: some of the people on the two crews who were planting were complaining because they had to finish the trees by themselves, while some of the people on the two crews in camp were complaining because they didn't get to go planting and make some money (they had to do a bunch of free work in camp cleaning up instead). Everyone is really cranky because they're so tired. The planters need a few days to rest, but we can't afford much because of the way that the tree deliveries are scheduled. I figured that the poor production on the day after the day off would cause problems. But enough complaining. The ironic event of the day was that one of the "blocks" we planted today belonged to Mostowich on one side, and ANC on the other side, with a pipeline in the middle for a boundary (extremely rare that a "block" is shared by two companies). Anyway, even more ironically, this pair of blocks was the one which we finished the Mostowich trees on, and had the ANC pre-work on (well, I did plan for this to happen). So because of the timing, this was the first time ever we've managed to move from one contract to another in about thirty seconds, instead of the usual two to four days. And boy, the new blocks are ugly.
Click HERE to see pictures from the third contract at Mostowich, Fox Creek.
July 8th: The last three days have been more helicopter access. I think there will be a major trend in our industry that we're just really starting to see, towards more helicopter work, especially in Alberta. As the blocks that are being cut are becoming more remote from the roadsides, and environmental concerns are becoming stronger (like trying to avoid driving quads and vehicles through creeks), it makes more and more sense to use the choppers, although the costs are ridiculous. As I'm sitting here typing, it's the middle of the night (as usual), and I'm just about through all the paperwork that I can stand for tonight. And there's a raging thunder and lightning storm outside, which I'm enjoying. With a generator, there's not the usual worry about the power getting knocked out (except when it runs out of gas every six hours).
July 9th: We were all prepared for a big chopper day to almost finish the trees at this campsite, but it was not in the cards. The weather was still bad, and the chopper was fogged in at Whitecourt, so we had no transportation. A few (about a dozen) of the keenest planters walked and used the quads to get in the roughly six kilometres to the chopper blocks, but the rest gave up. My whole crew worked, and were on probably the worst block I've seen in years. Kelly and Ruby and Oisin each worked a full, long day and managed no more than 675 trees each. The entire block was a swamp (waist deep in places), covered by sticks, then covered by grass matting. Perhaps the lack of stumps should have indicated to someone that this block probably shouldn't have been planted. The other crews are also on a block which is pretty green ... it should make for a painful day tomorrow, even IF the chopper can fly. I wish Ben was still here - THIS finally would have been the day that made him break down and cry.
July 10th: Another chopper day, another letdown. At least the whole camp got to experience a nice invigorating early-morning walk-in, to wake them up. And then another day of rain, to keep things cool. But the fog cleared enough at lunch that the chopper made it out for the afternoon, to fly people out at the end of the day. The high point of the day was when a few of us were walking over a river through the block, across a floating log for a bridge. I heard a yell and a splash, and turned around to see Kelly's boots sticking above the surface. He took it quite well, probably because we were all completely soaked already.
July 11th: More trucks in ditches - us, checkers, you name it. And then, as we were moving the camp from Fox Creek to Edson, Ruby was towing the office trailer with my truck, and got a flat on the trailer (which had no spares). Everything was closed (it was evening) so we couldn't get a spare, and we needed the trailer moved that night, so we ended up spending $200 to get it towed to our camp. The tow truck driver laughed when he dropped it off and said that it was the worst piece of garbage he had ever moved in his 21 years as a tow truck driver. Then, as Ruby came back to camp in my personal truck (following the tow truck), my exhaust system fell off.
July 13th: Day off for the planters. Yesterday, my personal crew members were all thinking that they would be keen to work today, to earn a little extra cash, but this morning the remnants of last night's festivities proved to be their downfall. Brent and Kelly were complete write-offs, and I was happy that Oisin actually made it out to plant a couple of boxes, although he was slightly sick during the first box. "Go hard or go home," that's what I say. Hearing the rumours today (most of which are unprintable), I guess most of the camp was "nauseated" today, and had a great time last night. We're camping behind the Nojack Motel right now, which is probably a mistake for this camp since the motel has a comfortable little bar with pool tables. It's really a nice place to stay, compared to most of the mud pits that we usually stay in. The motel and bar is run by a middle-aged Scot named Robbie Robertson (and his wife), who is obviously a tolerant character to be putting up with 40 of us camping in his backyard.
July 14th: Bastille day, although I don't think we have many French planters here, so it went by unnoticed. I forgot to mention that two of our canopy trucks went down yesterday on the same day, which presented problems (one lost its transmission, and the other had a locked steering column). Since we are working about an hour and ten minutes away from camp right now (the usual average distance is about 25-35 minutes), and we didn't want to make extra trips if possible, it was a tight squeeze getting all the planters, gear, leftover trees, quads, and garbage into the trucks when we left the blocks this evening to move to a new section.
July 16th: Things can go from good to bad pretty quickly. The day started out with the normal sort of problems: over-density planting, excess fines, helicopter stress, etc. Then, at 3:09pm, while leaving to pick up another trailer load of trees to fly in for the following day, the truck got stuck. Tried to rock it out.
3:12pm: Decided to stop before I dug the truck in too badly, and just use the winch.
3:15pm: Pulled the tree down that I was using.
3:16pm: Got the truck out, tied to unhook the winch cable. Discovered that the cable was dug into the tree, and tied into a knot that was under the full weight of the tree, on another piece of wood.
3:17pm: Walked back to the landing to get the chain saw.
3:23pm: Found out that the chain saw was dead, and wouldn't start.
3:26pm: Decided to pull the entire tree up to the road, to see if I could get the knot out there.
3:27pm: Snapped the winch cable, freeing up the truck so I could leave finally.
July 17th: I walked up to Ruby on the block today to see how her land was coming along, and she said, "Can you get Koko to come work with me? I've got a pack of coyotes sitting 20 feet away from me watching me plant, and it's making me nervous." I only saw three of them, though. In other news, TR's crew thought it was a bit hot today (it was), so they decided to plant with no clothes on. I guess the ANC checker, who is overseeing our production, came on to their block and the first thing he saw was two French guys wearing nothing but logging boots and sunglasses, and rubbing sun-tan lotion on each other. This was enough to startle him, but when a group of four guys and girls walked by with nothing on, he decided he'd be safer working on another block. Sorry, I didn't take any photos today.
July 18th: Paul's crew planted on the wrong block today, after the helicopter pilot accidentally landed them in the wrong area. In most places it would be pretty obvious when we get put in the wrong block, but we're working in the Chip Lake burn salvage area, which is where there was a big forest fire two years ago. There are tons of little blocks cut out where we're working, many of only a couple thousand trees each, and we accidentally got put into one of those small blocks that didn't belong to ANC.
July 19th: I went to town today to wash up the truck and try to fix some of the borken equipment, and something broke in the steering column, so now the truck key can't be removed from the ignition, and the Ford dealer can't fix it for several days. We also had to spend a couple thousand dollars doing more quad repairs today.
July 21st: We are planting in a block where we don't have to worry about bringing a lunch. There are so many wild strawberries and raspberries around that it's tempting to stop planting and just start picking berries. And it's over 33 degrees today, so it's pretty warm.
July 22nd: The temperature continues to warm up - 38 degrees today on the block according to my thermometer, with very little breeze. It's hard to work non-stop all day in these temperatures, unless you've conditioned yourself to the heat over a period of weeks. I got an interesting resume today from a person who listed "thinking and breathing" among their interests. This job attracts some pretty crazy people. Mind you, I got an application at the Pub once from someone who answered the question, "Do you participate in any extracurricular activities?" with the following: "No, but I would like to if any became available." As of today, we're now down to our last half million trees for the summer (in theory).
July 25th: Day off for the planters tomorrow, so they decided to quit early, around 4pm, to get to town earlier. What they didn't count on was that we would get SIX trucks stuck in the mud as we were leaving, and I would have to send for my personal truck in camp to assist with another winch, after breaking the winch cable on my supervisor's truck eight times (there's now about two feet of cable left on it). However, we got everyone home by 10pm, so we didn't break any records for a late return there.
July 26th: I guess some people were trying to pull out the last truck today from yesterday's fiasco (a personal 4x4 vehicle that got left behind). There were two tow trucks in there working on it, but both were completely stuck themselves when we last heard from them. I'm surprised that they even tried to go in to that muddy road.
July 29th: It's starting to get dark at night again. For part of the middle of the summer, "night" is just a deep blue sky, since we're a bit further north than most people are used to. But now, we're finally able to see a full sky of stars again, and satellites are easy to pick out. Planting in really northern places like Fort Vermillion and Fort Nelson around the summer solstice (June 21st) is always interesting, as it never really gets very dark then.
July 30th: Hay fever is at a peak. And the temperature today on our thermometer lying in the sun in the ditch, with no wind, hit 49 degrees Celcius at the hottest part of the day. Thirty-three in the shade. This is my favorite time for planting: when it's extremely hot, sunny, and a good wind. Today, however, we were missing the wind.
July 31st: Driving past a block today on the way to work, we were talking about a white albino bear that we saw in that same spot two years before. Ruby then commented that we hadn't seen a bear in several weeks, and of course, two minutes later we drove past one. We were then planting on a block that we had started two years ago, so it was good to finally finish it. Hot again today.
August 2nd: Finished planting today. I wonder if this will be the end of the season, or if we'll find more work in the next day or so?
Click HERE to see pictures from the ANC contract.
August 5th: Well, about ten people from our camp went to plant in Saskatchewan for a few weeks, and there are about fifteen of us now working on a girdling contract outside of Prince George, still working for Folklore. I'll have some stories about this new job in a week or so ...
August 7th: We like this job. Killing trees is much more fun than planting them. And everybody works in a big group instead of in separate areas, so everyone just gossips all day long, and it's much easier than planting.
August 8th: Drew Kingston, who has been a supervisor with us for years and years, officially retired this year, and got married today. And if you'd like to send me some stories about the white-haired bastard, I think we could fry him pretty badly here on the Internet! I for one am curious about why he called a couple days before the wedding and asked me to bring his gun back to him in PEI. Good luck Drew, and best of luck especially to your new wife ...
August 12th: Not much to say here. This girdling is pretty easy, but nothing crazy is happening like it seems to when we're planting. All we do is take putty knives that we've sharpened the edges on and bent with a welding torch, and use these to pry the bark from around the base of poplar and aspen trees. This way, these trees will die in about a year, but they die slowly so a bunch of new shoots don't grow up, like they would if the trees were cut off with a chain saw. This leaves the pine and spruce (the "crop" trees) on the blocks with a lot more room and sunlight, so they in turn will grow better. We finish this job in about three more days, and then we've possibly got a few days of chain saw spacing work, or maybe some more girdling, or maybe some herbicide application work? That's the 'fun' part of this job - plans change every couple of hours.
August 20th: We finished the regular girdling job last week, and now we're doing a chemical girdling job. We wear coveralls and heavy gloves and lots of protective clothing, and walk around the blocks carrying a 40 lb. backpack of herbicides, and spray this stuff on the base of the specific trees that we want to kill. On this block, we're killing Aspen, Cottonwood, Willow, Alders, and selected sizes of Birch, and trying not to hit any of the Spruce, Pine, Fir, or Maple (or a few other minor species). The herbicide, which is diluted in mineral oils such as canola oil, has a bright red dye that we add to it so we can see traces everywhere that we've sprayed it. The active ingredient in the herbicide is triclopyr, a plant hormone that causes plant cells to grow too quickly and then they rupture and die. It's not very harmful to mammals or birds ... it would take about a 60 gram acute dose to be lethal to the average 150 lb. person (compared to 45 grams for straight Aspirin), and has no chronic effects as it does not bioaccumulate in animal tisse (it gets fish intoxicated, though). The mineral oil is more of a problem, as it causes some peoples' skin to dry out, and causes rashes or blisters in some people with allergic reactions.
August 23rd: Another rain day. This is about the only forestry job there is where we can't work in the rain, as the herbicide washes off the trees before it has a chance to get absorbed into the bark. We've had a lot of rain in the past week, so I've spent a lot of time doing paperwork at the office, and not much time herbiciding.
August 28th: Well, it's been drizzling pretty much non-stop, so I've had to give up. I have to be at work in New Brunswick on September 1st, so I guess this is the end of my season. Koko will take over the herbiciding contract. See you all next year ....
Click HERE to see a few more miscellaneous pictures before you go.