SUMMER 2001



April 27th: I left New Brunswick pretty early in the morning, around 5am. Uneventful day of driving, except that I had to pick up a boat in Barrie (to take to someone in Prince George), and managed to get there just as it was getting dark. Naturally, the lights on the boat trailer didn't work, so I spent a while in the dark under the trailer rewiring them. Seemed a fitting start to the summer.

April 28th: In the afternoon, I was wondering why I hadn't seen many police cars along the way, and moments later got pulled over. After checking my seatbelt and papers, he asked if there were any drugs or alcohol in the vehicle. I said, "Yes, lots of beer." He then said, "But no drugs? What's that smell?" After a few moments of confusion, he realized that it was the brake shoes. At this point, I was trying to decide if he was going to lecture me on the lack of turn indicators on the trailer, or the lack of registration papers on the trailer, or the broken windshield, or the beer in the back seat (unopened cases, so it was fine), but he just waved me along. Made it to Winnipeg that night. Along the way, I passed through the town of Craik, Saskatchewan, which has possibly the cheesiest slogan I've ever seen: "Craik: the friendliest town by a dam site (by a damn sight)." I didn't see a dam ... maybe they made that part up.

May 1st: Well, the usual problems with planting are starting to strike. One of the other camps had their cook trailer burn down today on the first day of their season.

May 3rd: Our own camp is now set up (mostly) and the planters had their first afternoon of work today. No problems yet, except that I forgot that Vanderhoof is just about the coldest place I've ever worked in. We had lots of hail and isolated snow flurries off and on throughout the afternoon, and pretty fierce winds. Two years ago we worked here for all of May, and only had two days without any snow, including a huge blizzard as we were breaking camp on June 1st.

May 4th: Ok, now things are pretty much back to normal: everything is going wrong. Tonight our shower supply got cut off (not that I really cared, except that it was stressing out the small minority of the planters that actually shower regularly), our reefer lost its cooling unit (that's the big 18 wheeler used to store and refrigerate the trees), our food cooler lost its cooling unit, and during some particularly strong wind gusts (which are a constant here) our huge 32-foot dry tent blew over, and a bunch of tent poles snapped. It's almost midnight, and I'm contemplating a trip in to Prince George to pick up a new food cooler at the shop before the forestry inspection in the morning ... unfortunately, it doesn't really matter during these inspections that food is not going to go bad when the outside temperature is about two degrees above freezing. But I'll probably go to bed and run in at 4am instead.

May 7th: Day off today, so when I went into town after a night of paperwork I expected to run into some of the foremen and planters, and was curious to see if any of them (ie. Bryce) got into trouble anywhere. I wasn't in the office for 2 minutes when one of the foremen (ie. Bryce) showed up, with half of his face scuffed up from an 'incident' outside one of the bars the night before. Then, to top it off, he was apparently out in the field a couple hours after I saw him at the office, and he got chased by a bear.

May 10th: Had a discussion with the cooks today about sandwich bags. The planters like to have them, to take their lunch out to the block. But the cooks didn't want to use any extra plastic, because it's bad for the environment. So I told the cooks that every bundle of 20 trees that we plant has a plastic wrapper on it, about the size of a sandwich bag, which means that after we plant 3.8 million trees this summer, our camp will have sent 190,000 plastic wrappers to various dumps. I think I depressed the cooks.

May 11th: Spent seven hours today setting up the payroll program and entering all the planting data from the first week of work. We pay the employees on a bi-weekly basis after I enter everything into my laptop and then email the payroll database to our office, which is nice (some companies still just give out advances all season and then cut a final cheque at the end of the summer), but it's a lot of work to keep on top of - it means about 4000 entries into the database over the course of the summer, each record detailing how many trees were planted on each pay unit of each block, which species and stock type and age and price they were, what kind of land the trees were planted on, on what date and by whom, how many hours they worked that day, what their camp costs were, etc. It usually takes about twelve hours a week to do it all ... six hours to enter everything, and six more to find and fix the mistakes.

May 12th: Someone asked me what I do all day now that I don't run a crew of my own any more and I just supervise the other foremen. I guess some people assume I have a pretty slack job (actually, it IS a tiny bit easier than some previous years, although the hours are just as long). Here's a quick list of some of the stuff I did today, a fairly typical day (after doing paperwork until 1:00am the night before):

And that's a fairly typical day, although I like to get out onto the blocks more when I can afford the time.

May 13th: Today was the first day of the year that I didn't get snowed on. Of course, the drawback is that now that it's warming up, it's getting less wise to eat mayonaise sandwiches that have been sitting in my truck for five days.

May 19th: Bryce's crew couldn't work today ... a beaver dam broke and washed out the logging road leading to his block, pretty far from the block. Hopefully we can get an excavator up to fix it in the morning (although it's a long weekend, so probably not). We're staying at a camp on a lake on a First Nations reserve right now, and there's a fishing derby going on for the weekend, so there are a ton of people running around. Too bad the winds are about 70km/h on the lake right now, and it's snowing.

May 20th: One of Joe's girls (a different camp) was driving the quad today and it caught on something on the road and flipped, breaking up her arm pretty badly. She ended up being air lifted to Edmonton for treatment. Good thing she was wearing a helmet. Quads can cause a lot of grief even for trained operators.


Click HERE to see pictures from the start of May, on the three contracts in the Vanderhoof area.


May 21st: Production was 72,500 today, putting us over the one million tree mark already for the summer, and a quick start towards my goal of four million. Today was a bit below average for a full day of work, but we often seem to have problems on the "day after the day off". We had about five planters miss work today ... a couple with hangovers or not making it back to camp, and Rich with a nice set of stiches to the face from an incident at the swimming pool the day before.

May 22nd: Every year I come out here and think that nothing new can happen to surprise me, and every week I'm proven wrong. Today, a woman called the office to complain about one of our company buses which threw a rock and marked up the side of her brand new Jeep, and she said she was coming to show us. When she got there, she showed us the rock, and it was the size of my head. Not kidding - it put a hole through her door, including the inside of the driver's side door. If the rock had hit about two feet higher, it would have taken off her head.

May 23rd: A stunning development this morning, as the forces of nature played out a violent confrontation just down the road from our camp, symbolic of a victory of the Canadian underdog against American oppression (perhaps in retribution for the potato wars?). You see, a bald eagle (America's national bird) has been hanging out in a tree down by this certain pond near camp. A beaver pond, to be exact. Need I explain more? Yes, in fact, that busy little beaver selectively logged the eagle's tree - possibly Canada's finest hour. "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" would love this ... that'll make up for the lack of Canadian teams in the playoffs.

May 24th: Started off the day by getting up for work at 2:30am (after going to bed about an hour before), and drove into Prince George with one of the other planters. We had a 4:00am rendezvous with one of the forestry officers for a heli-tour of the blocks that we will be doing on the next contract. I got some pretty incredible pictures to put on one of the photo pages below. When we got back out to the blocks around 10am, things were chaotic, as usual. The block that Chris was supposed to start planting that morning, a pretty substantial one of 80,000 trees, caused a bit of trouble as they discovered that the company we're working for "forgot to log it." So the foremen had to do some rearranging and accommodating, which they handled really well for the most part, although we ended up accidentally planting the wrong seedlot on a block the next day because of that (indirectly). At least we used a compatible stock type, so it wasn't a major problem. Next, we had a challenging series of stuck trucks. Then, to top it off, Kelly's crew had to move off their block because a mother bear was guarding her two cubs and probably their den, and was harassing the planters. According to Kelly, the final straw came when "the bear was hissing and growling at Jeff Johnson from about eight feet away, and pushed a big standing tree over."

May 25th: Spent the day with one of the checkers running a "fake crew" of a few planters from each of several crews, trying to finish up a number of blocks far away from where the rest of the camp was working. Of course, two of the foremen significantly underestimated how many trees would be required to finish their blocks (despite the fact that the allocated tree totals did not lie), so we were out planting until 8pm and still didn't get everything done.

May 26th: Finished our contract today, finally. We ended up the day sharing an overflow block with a camp from Seneca, which was interesting. They were getting paid a tiny bit more per tree, but they also said it was the best block they'd seen the entire season, and our planters thought it was the worst, so I guess everything balances out in the end. I'm pretty happy that so far, out of a camp of 60 people, we've only had one person quit. We have a pretty strong camp this year, and even though it's not even the end of May we've already planted over a million and a half trees. I wish we had work scheduled for August ... I'd love to be able to plant five million trees in a season.

May 27th: Set up the new camp today, about an hour east of Prince George.

May 28th: Had a morning pre-work with Jeremy Campbell, a forestry official from Prince George, and then went to work. This is a pretty green contract (lost of overgrowth and slash on the blocks) compared to what we've been working on for the past three weeks, but Jeremy is a great guy to work with. The camp as a whole is in a really good mood - a perfect environment for rookies to learn in. Some days it almost seems like a real job ... that must mean disaster is about two days away.

May 29th: We just can't seem to get the water systems working in this camp, and we've had problems with four or five pumps. There's got to be something simple that is causing the problems. I guess I should go try to deal with it myself - I've been kind of preoccupied for the last three days with getting the payroll data in on time, without data entry errors. My record as the most accurate person for computer work is at stake here, after I made several minor errors in the first payroll run (nothing too serious, just planter work hours and so on - at least the tree counts were all correct).

May 30th: So I passed Jeremy on the highway today, and flagged him over, and went up to his truck (confidently, assuming things were going well) to ask "So, how were things today?". He replied, "So, I guess they [the planters] called you," (they didn't) which of course indicated probable bad news. It was. Paul's crew planted in an area they weren't exactly supposed to. Luckily for me, it wasn't entirely my fault, as my boss (area manager Jim Logan) was the one who actually showed us this specific area to plant. Of course, I have to admit that I should have been smart enough to realize that Jim was wrong, so ultimately, the fault lays with me as I could have prevented the problem. As punishment, Jeremy is making me give a lecture to my camp about the use and benefits of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. I'm going to buy one tomorrow, and learn how to use it to display latitudes and longitudes, which is something all supervisors really should have in camp to assist in map reading and block location. The good point, however, is that at the same time, he is making Jim give a lecture on how Mackenzie accidentally ended up in the Beaufort Sea through mis-navigation. That should be interesting.

May 31st: Day off for the planters. Ran into town early to get fuel and to get the shocks and a transmission leak on my truck fixed, then spent the afternoon and evening trying to locate upcoming blocks and deal with tree shipment and helicopter planning logistics. We just found out that all the trees that Joe's camp planted all spring near Slave Lake burned up yesterday in the fire, which now ranks as one of the biggest wildfires in Alberta's history. It's already burned over 2,000 square kilometres of woodland.

June 1st: Gas is supposed to jump about fifteen to twenty cents per litre tonight at midnight, so the gas stations are just overwhelmed with people today, filling up in advance. There are also a lot of people picketing. Some guy was yelling at me because I pulled in to fill up, saying that I should "protest the price increases by boycotting the purchase of gas." I said that I couldn't, because I had to be able to drive to work. He was quite offended, and started yelling at me. I laughed. I couldn't quite figure out the logic: be annoyed because it costs an extra $10 to drive to work, so skip a day of work and lose several hundred dollars. Hm. I guess it makes sense though if you think about it ... reduce demand, and price will drop. Basic economics. But in theory, I say "good luck."


Click HERE to see pictures from the rest of May, including some nice aerial photos from some work with Vancouver Island Helicopters.


June 2nd: This GPS unit is pretty slick ... battery operated, and it can tell me where I am pretty much anywhere on the surface of the Earth usually within a couple of feet, including latitude, longitude, and altitude. I can put it on the dash of the truck and it tells me in which direction we're going, and how fast we're going within a kilometre per hour, and the neat thing is that it actually matches the truck speedometer.

June 5th: Got called over to a road up behind the MacGregor camp, not far from where we're working, to help Adam Jamieson of Extreme pull out a truck that had slid off the road. It was deceptively challenging. I had a suburban and a Ford F450 pulling on it from straight behind, and myself winching with a 12,000 pound winch from almost straight back, and all that we managed to do was fracture the steel on my winch bumper. I have to say I was pretty impressed with the Warn winch to be strong enough to be able to do that without hurting the winch itself. We never did end up getting the truck out ... Adam had to call in a heavy equipment rental place for help. I felt pretty bad ... my second defeat in 12 years of pulling trucks out of the rhubarb.

June 7th: Well, almost finished the first bare-root block today, which the two biggest crews have been working on for about a week. Bare-root seedlings are much slower and more annoying to plant than plugs or container root stock. The contract that we're on right now isn't great money, but most of it is adequate, and the forester is really helpful and well-liked. But the bare-roots are the major drawback, getting everyone depressed. We're going to have to change the pricing scheme next year to make these trees about five cents more than plugs on the same land to make the money bearable - especially since there are only 120 in a box. And we finally got the showers working today, after giving up on the ninth combination of pumps and hoses we tried. The problem is that the river is about 150 feet lower than the camp, so none of the pumps have been strong enough to carry water up the hill. We solved the problem by bringing in a 1200 gallon tank on a trailer that we can just drive down to the river every night to fill up.

June 8th: After several days of complaints because we couldn't get the showers to work, tonight was the first night with them fully functional and ready to go. And of course, not one person in camp bothered to use them. Figures.

June 9th: I was making fun of Kelly last night because he says he keeps flipping his quad, and I couldn't figure out how he manages to do this so consistently (this is the same Kelly that backed over the desk at the start of last year). So of course, tonight, Murphy's law came and kicked me in the ass. I was going through a deep waterbar, with three foot piles of dirt on each side, and the hole dug about three feet deep between them, and full of water. And of course it completely blocked the road right up to some big cedars in the woods, so I couldn't even drive around the edges of the piles. So I drove through, and gave it some gas to get over the other side. No problem. But on the way back, I went a bit closer to the middle. But of course, the hole was deeper in the middle. I managed to tip the quad over backwards while trying to climb out of the pit, and it landed on me. Now I was wearing a helmet and quite a bit of clothing, and this sort of thing has happened fairly frequently to almost all foremen, so it didn't really hurt or anything - with a bit of practice you kind of learn how to let it fall back without crushing you. Too bad that I was in several feet of muddy water this time. Scirolli sure got a good laugh out of that incident ... sorry, no photos.

June 10th: I'm starting to get a lot of phone calls from veteran planters that work for other companies, looking for additional work. A lot of the smaller companies either don't have a summer season, or have a short break of one or two weeks between the spring and summer seasons (over the days leading up to June 21st). The summer plant isn't called that just because of the equinox ... a lot of contracts are purposely scheduled to start on June 21st every year, for reasons unknown to myself. Anyway, that's one good thing about our company ... even though the prices are sometimes not top dollar (although usually pretty decent), we are kept a lot busier than we would be with a smaller company, so the extra days more than make up for things for most people.

June 11th: Didn't do much today ... just drove about 1,100 km. I had to go back and forth between blocks, town, and camp several times (we're pretty spread out, as you can see), moving trees and chopper fuel around and doing other errands. That's one of my biggest challenges: trying to schedule errands and jobs for a minimum of driving time, since it eats up so much gas, and takes up so much of my day.

June 13th: I've been very, very busy for a few days. A crew from one of the other camps was here to help us for five days, and they did a heli block with a bunch of bare-roots. It wasn't that big, but it was just enough that if my normal camp had to do it on top of everything else, the planters wouldn't be getting any time off between the spring and summer. As it is right now, the crews will be lucky if they get a four day break. It's just about midnight now on Wednesday night, and I've only gotten seven hours of sleep since Saturday night - just finished the payroll, which I have to get in to our office tomorrow morning as a top priority. I'm looking forward to trying to get two crews moved out onto new blocks tomorrow, getting into town briefly, then coming back and getting the rest of my paperwork done that has fallen behind while I was trying to balance the payroll. We're spread pretty thin right now ... of my five crews, Kelly is starting our contract at Mostowich in Alberta, Bryce is finishing our contract in Vanderhoof, and Chris is helping Extreme finish some work. Now that the Christians have taken off, it's going to be pretty quiet here for a couple days with only two crews left.

June 14th: After several days of things running fairly smoothly, it was a typical day for disasters:

But dinner was good.

June 15th: I was in town for a short while in the afternoon, and left the truck running for a minute outside Auto Magic. When I came back out, the guy from the shop next door (Prime Rentals) was washing it for me, just for something to do. I think I'll try leaving a bag of laundry there tomorrow.

June 17th: Everyone is getting really tired, and so the complaints are growing. Some of the people that stayed here (Purden Lake) are complaining because other crews got to go to Vanderhoof to finish up, and they think the money is way better there (it isn't - I balanced everything out so people would make the same on average in both places). I sent Chris' crew to Vanderhoof yesterday to avoid keeping too many people in camp because of WCB first aid regulations, so they were annoyed at that (despite complaining a few days previously about having to stay here and plant bare-roots). The people in Alberta are complaining about the rain and mud. And to top it off, Bryce, who is in Vanderhoof, called and left a couple messages today complaining about the blocks over there and saying that I should send more people to help, despite the fact that several days ago he wanted to go there and finish it by himself. I can just see it now: people will be complaining (are complaining already) about having such a short break of only about 5 days between these contracts and the next one in Fox Creek, and yet they'll all be complaining on July 15th when we finish our season and they want more work. It's impossible to keep people happy at this job. Everyone always thinks the grass is greener on the other side of the fence .... but I guess if complaining to me makes them feel better, they can go right ahead. At least the money is usually pretty good at Mostowich, so I hope a few days rest and some faster ground will recharge them.

June 18th: Yup, more complaints this morning. But at least we'll finish here at Purden Lake tomorrow, which is making people happy. Then I have to run off to Alberta and try to fix the mess there.

June 19th: Got a message from Bryce saying he finished at supper in Vanderhoof. Got a message from Jim saying that things are going better in Alberta. It looked like things were wrapping up nicely here in Purden Lake too, and the trees got finished at suppertime - then we discovered the battery was dead on one of the trucks, far from camp, and the jumper cables were in another truck. But other than that, things closed up really well and with good timing everywhere. The crew are out sitting around a fire having a few beer right now (12:30am), and I'm just finished doing some payroll entry ... I have to go to bed fairly soon, since I have to be up at 6am. No rest for the wicked. Oh yeah, and my dog (the black lab, not the golden lab) got run over by the quad and trailer today and had to go in to see the vet (apparently the dog's fault; it was out on a block with one of the girls, and I was working elsewhere so I didn't even know about what happened until supper). Planting camps are really hard on dogs - it seems that every year one gets run over and killed, so I usually recommend that people don't bring pets (although our camp had eleven dogs this season, so I guess that got ignored). Luckily, the dog is in pretty good shape after today's accident ... if planting doesn't kill him, it'll make him strong.

June 20th: We thought we were finished everything in BC and most of the planters had left for a couple days off, when we got a phone call from the Ministry of Forests: "We just found 19,000 more trees, can you plant them?" The few people who were still around looked like they were ready to cry.


Click HERE to see pictures from the start of June, finishing our MOF Prince George contract.


June 24th: I'm getting a lot of phone calls now from experienced planters from other companies, hoping for work. Unfortunately, our camp is much too strong, so I probably can't hire anyone else ... I'm worried that we're going to start having part days because we're going through trees too quickly. I think we've already easily got the potential for 100,000+ trees/day in the faster ground at Mostowich, and based on the shipments we can only put in about 72,000/day without eventual down-time.

June 25th: The Mostowich contract seemed to get off to a good start today, except for a few minor things: Bryce thinks his arm is broken (thinks it has been for a couple weeks), it's pouring, and I lost a brake-line on my truck today. I guess I'll have to get that fixed pretty soon.

June 27th: Got the brakes fixed. That made life easier.

June 28th: Today I learned to appreciate just how big a moose really is, after swerving to avoid one by about two feet, and nearly having it topple onto me while on the quad.

June 29th: Whether it's good or bad, we're not planting as fast as I'd hoped. We only put in 81,000 today with 42 planters, so I guess we're in no danger of running out of work too quickly. We've got some really long walk-ins (some over 4km) which hurts production. Luckily, we should be done all the worst access blocks by tomorrow or the next planting day. We had a few planters from other companies join us for a few days this week ... it's too bad they didn't get to see some of the better ground before they left.

July 1st: Bryce's picture is on the cover of this month's "Bike" magazine, one of the premiere magazines for professional mountain bikers. It shows him driving across a chasm on a narrow bridge that he built for a trail on Vancouver Island.

July 2nd: Well, everyone was hoping for a big day today after the day off, but it was not to be. I decided that it would be better off to try to finish all of the bad land everywhere, and wrap up the loose ends, so that's what we aimed for. Not completely successful, but most of the bad stuff got finished today. Morale is a little low, but I realized (again) a good point of management strategy: there's no point trying to paint a rosy picture when the land/price/situation is shit. People tend to ignore rhetoric. So today was mainly spent sympathizing, acknowledging that yeah, we've been doing some pretty tough work, and the checking has been quite a bit tougher than we're used to. But I have a gut feeling that things are just about to change a little bit for the better ... I hope I'm not wrong. Tomorrow should be just about our last day planting big plugs, and a few lucky people will get into nice easy little trees by the end of the day, which should be a bit of relief. Also, three of the crews are now out of the area with the long walk-ins today, and the last two crews will finish there tomorrow. So starting on the 4th, we should be able to bump up production, and I think things will go well for the rest of the contract. It's time to concentrate on getting some trees in the ground again.

July 3rd: Better production today, despite the temperature hitting 35 degrees. Jill came back to camp with her foot in a cast this afternoon after a trip to the hospital. Her quote was, "Jim is going to kill me. Here I am doing the PIR (safety) audit, and I got drunk and broke my ankle!" The funniest part is that she just found out this afternoon, but it happened three days ago on the night off. She was too embarassed to get it checked out until today - what a trooper! Also, one of the dogs broke its leg today.

July 5th: Ripped the brake line off my truck again. If there are any Chevy engineers out there reading this, please let your associates in the brake design division know that I think they're idiots. Today's production was 102,000 trees (with help from a crew from one of our other camps). Also, a depressing message came on the phone tonight ... we have this project that a lot of our top planters go to work on after Folklore's season ends every year, but we just found out that a lot of rain has postponed some of the work from July/August to next spring, so now there are only 200,000 trees there instead of 800,000. This is pretty bad, because I like to keep my planters working as long as possible, even if it isn't with our own company - makes for better seasons overall, which keeps them happy.

July 6th: Our camp in Slave Lake is way behind schedule, so Joe's camp, working for Millar Western in Whitecourt (just down the road from us) is driving up there tonight to give them a hand for two days, and try to catch up a couple hundred thousand trees. I hear they're having some real tough access problems there.

July 7th: A few more people quit today and yesterday. Everyone is getting pretty worn out. I figure right now that with the loss of some planters (we only have about 35 now) and the slower production, we'll be working here until the 18th of July instead of the 14th. But at least the planters that are working are averaging a little over 2,000 trees per person per full day, or around $200 (well, at least when they're not on old fill blocks). And I also found out that even if there isn't any more planting for our camp after this contract (that's still up in the air - maybe the Slave Lake camp will need some help?) the office is trying to get us some girdling work for a few weeks.

July 8th: I'm taking over Kelly's crew tomorrow. About five or six days ago, he was driving the quad and ran over a large stick that somehow flipped up and smacked him in the helmet, and just about gave him a concussion. So he had a quick trip to the hospital to make sure he was ok. Then, about three days ago, he was driving the quad across the block again, and somehow didn't see a stump which one of his front tires drove up on, flipping the quad. He managed to jump off it safely quite easily, but as he was trying to regain his balance, he subsequently tripped and impaled a stick into his neck. Another trip to the hospital. He now refuses to drive the quad anymore, so I'll be handling his crew for the rest of the year.

July 9th: Midnight, Monday night. I'm trying to think happy thoughts right now, and pretend that I don't hate my job. We're fairly far behind on the trees right now, and we don't have quite enough storage in the shade tent, or tarps to cover the extras. I just spent four hours doing a trip to Whitecourt to pick up an extra shade tent from Joe, who was sending one of his trucks to meet me with it. But he forgot it, or lost it, or something like that. A huge waste of time, and now I have about five hours of paperwork due at the office tomorrow morning if we are going to be paid on time this weekend. It looks like I'll be up all night ... I wish there was an all-night Tim Horton's in Fox Creek. On top of that, we have our annual safety audit tomorrow morning, and our pressure pump blew up today so the cooks have no water system until I can buy another in Whitecourt tomorrow, and we have a reefer coming at 7am, so we'll have another 200,000 trees sitting on the ground, which should really piss off the Mostowich checkers once they see we don't have another shade tent. On a positive note though, I saw one of the best lightning storms I've ever seen while I was driving back from Whitecourt just now. There were lightning strikes every twenty to thirty seconds, directly in front of me on the highway, and a sunset behind (sun sets at about 11:20pm here right now). The show lasted for almost an hour. I wish I'd had my video camera with me. Ok, time to start working ...

July 10th: Alright, got the payroll finished just before breakfast, and convinced Canadian Tire to take my Visa number over the phone and send a brand new pressure pump to Fox Creek on the Greyhound. Then, in the afternoon, Joe dropped off the missing shade tent to save the day. And Kelly's crew (mine now) seems to have suddenly gotten motivated today, so the tallies are way up. With no sleep last night, I'm pretty tired, so I'm going to bed now (at 10pm - for me, that's really early).

July 11th: Had a huge wind storm that flipped the mess tent in camp, and flipped the shade tent at the Mill Yard. It also looks like a tornado touched down twice on the side of the highway outside town, and snapped several dozen pretty big trees.

July 12th: Paul got a stock-handling fine today - our camp's first fine in three years. Ironically, I had meetings with most of the crews yesterday and put signs in the trucks reminding people to be careful about stock handling in three specific areas, but we got the fine because of something completely different (a bundle dropped on the quad trail).

July 13th: Production was about 88,000 today for 41 people. I don't know why some of the planters are complaining. The tallies were pretty bad at the start of this contract, partly because the land seems to have had a lot more slash this year than last, and partly because the checking standards were pretty tough (and partly because we were walking several kilometers to get to the blocks). The people who are still here seem to have finally realized that they can plant half decent numbers - but I still agree that the ground isn't great, especially since there aren't any spectacular high tallies (considering the number of highly experienced people we have). A few people who were really unimpressed with this contract have left, but the rest of the camp seems to be just plowing through the ground, trying to get things finished and get out of here as soon as possible. We got a few extra trees, so we probably won't be done until the 19th now. I had a planter quit a few days ago, and heard that he just went into the office in Prince George today and told them that I was organizing a conspiracy against him, using the checkers to persecute him. Hm - that kind of took me by surprise, considering that he's only had to fix trees once this year, and he's worked for me off and on for seven years now. Maybe he's having a mental breakdown? Jim and Drew once had a guy disappear from camp in Quesnel, and the RCMP showed up several days later to interview a bunch of the planters because the missing employee had gone in to complain that Jim and Drew were running a slave labour camp.

July 14th: The cook came out to the block with my crew this morning so she could borrow my truck for a few hours to pick up a grocery order. About seven hours later, as I was on my way back to town in another truck, I passed her on the side of a block just up the road - seems she got a flat, then found that the first spare tire was also flat. Then when she got a second spare, Jonas put it on backwards, so they thought for a while it wouldn't work. So she gave up on getting groceries today.

July 16th: First day of the last (?) shift ... we could finish on Thursday if things go well, so we probably won't finish until Saturday. I predict a week of rain, and lots of trucks stuck in the ditches.

July 17th: I guess I shouldn't have said anything with yesterday's entry. Pouring rain all day ... both of Jonas' trucks had to be left behind tonight because they were in the ditch, one also with a flat tire. The funny thing is that Jonas was driving both of them as they got stuck. And my winch is broken, so I have no idea how we'll pull them out. The road is pretty slick, so I have a feeling we'll be leaving both trucks there for several days, until things dry out.

July 18th: Pouring rain again. Jim came up to Fox Creek this morning to try to get the trucks out with his winch. He managed to get them both out after a couple hours, but somehow destroyed his transmission in the process, so Scirolli had to tow him to town afterwards.

July 19th: Pouring rain again. The RCMP told Amoco and Chevron to evacuate all their employees from the oil fields (we work in the middle of the oil patch) because of tornado warnings. We had some pretty strong winds again, too.

July 20th: Pouring rain again. Jeremy Fabian, one of our foremen, was hit by lightning last night while running trees in Edson. He got out of the hospital this morning, and luckily he wasn't hurt too badly.

July 22nd: Well, we finally finished the Mostowich trees today. What a painful end to the season ... the last overflow block was a two hour drive from camp, with a 7km walk into the block, working in a grassy old fill plant. I don't know why Mostowich does't use choppers more often. Miller Western had another of our camps working from the same landing that we based from this morning, and Miller Western was flying the planters from that camp to their blocks, which were only HALF as far as Mostowich was making our people walk. This was the end of the season for quite a few of the planters, but there are about fifteen left that I'm taking to help Joe's camp out at Miller Western. Joe has about 900,000 trees left, and there will be about 70 people there, so the work should only last a week before we go girdling. Right now our camp is leading in production with about four million trees in the ground this summer, although Joe's camp is going to jump ahead of us in a few days since he has a bit more work left.


Click HERE to see pictures from late June and early July, working for Mostowich.


July 24th: Had our pre-work talk for Millar Western today, and then sat around for a couple hours waiting for the fog and rain to lift so the choppers could fly. No luck. At lunch we gave up on planting for the day, and I spent the afternoon finishing up payroll entry from Mostowich, then after supper went to town to pick up fuel, and to try to fix a truck that had water in the fuel tank. The weather has been rainy here almost non-stop for a couple weeks, so Joe's camp is really having problems getting trees in the ground, since all the blocks on the contract are heli-access.

July 25th: More fog, but we managed to get the choppers going int the afternoon. We planted from 1pm until 3pm, then the weather started getting bad again so we got evacuated from our block and flown into Jon Remeirsma's block, and planted there for another hour or so before they just gave up and started flying everyone home before the fog rolled in.

July 26th: Another late start due to the fog and rain, but we got fairly close to a full day of work in.

July 27th: A full day of work, finally! Production for the camp was really big, over 150,000 trees for the day. We've now got planters here from almost every one of Folklore's camps, helping to finish up this contract. It shouldn't take long with this strong a camp, if the weather holds.

July 28th: Well, we got off to a normal start, but it started pouring almost as soon as we got to the block, and the choppers got shut down for most of the day so it was really awkward considering that we started running out of trees at some caches. I went for a long walk at mid-day to explore and see if I could find a way to walk out in case we got stranded at supper (my radio was dead, from the chopper blowing it into a mud puddle) and met a cute girl on a quad several kilometers from my block. She was a checker for Silvaram, and must have thought that I was crazy, just walking around, out in the middle of nowhere.

July 29th: More fog, more rain, more mud. Another day without work. Now I remember why we always took such long walks to the blocks at Mostowich ... half the time the choppers can't fly in this miserable weather. I spent the afternoon working on this website and fixing some payroll problems, while the planters all went to town.

August 1st: Finished planting yesterday, and broke camp today. On the way out to town, the adventures started when my camper trailer got a flat tire and then the wheel immediately separated from the axle. After the trailer got hauled into town on a flat-deck, I headed to Fox Creek to meet with the Mostowich checkers, and of course got another flat on my truck within 10 minutes. Despite thinking that I was prepared with three spare tires and two star wrenches and two jacks, I found out that the only spare tire that actually fit was the one under the truck, which was locked into place, and of course the bar to unlock it didn't come with the truck. So I had to radio Brent to bring me a spare.

August 2nd: Spent most of the day fixing things ... finally got the brake line replaced on my supervisor's truck, got two trucks serviced, got several flats fixed, got a u-haul trailer shock fixed, and even managed to get my poor camper trailer loaded onto a flat deck to bring back to PG to get a new axle put on. Of course I had to rent a caterpillar "picker" machine to lift it onto the flat deck. After lunch, everyone started limping their vehicles home to Prince George. Joe had to pick up a 150 lb. first aid box (with full stretcher, oxygen bottle, and so on) that the RCMP found on the highway outside Edson ... it blew off one of the ETV's (yeah, that's about as safe as it sounds). Then, outside McBride I stopped to help some nurse from Calgary whose car self-destructed. Brent and I ended up towing it into McBride for her, and got her into Prince George at about 2am.


Click HERE to see pictures from the end of July, on the Millar Western contract.


August 3rd: Spent the morning starting to unload equipment from the vehicles, and then took my new girdling crew out to a pre-work conference at lunch, and spent the afternoon girdling. This year's blocks (so far) look a lot easier than last year's - we only have to kill one dominant species of tree (Aspen) which are easy to see and kill. And the access is much better than last year.

August 6th: Ok, so girdling is pretty easy work, and training is minimal - a pack of rabid monkeys could learn how to do it in about five minutes. But it is even more boring than planting (that's according to the crew - I don't find it that bad). They've already gone through every riddle and word game imaginable - we work in a big group, so it's a pretty social work environment. They even started playing "I Spy" today, but that kind of stalled after about the 43rd repetition of "I spy something that is green ..."

August 7th: After we finished work at supper, I drove to Alberta with three planters to pick up three trucks that we left behind in auto shops in Edson and Whitecourt. The planters stayed the night before driving back to PG, but I turned around and drove back right away, so I could be back in PG for work in the morning. No rest for the wicked ....

August 8th: The quote of the day: "When I drove across the country, there were some times crossing the prairies where I was really tired so I'd just have a nap for five seconds on the straight stretches ... it seemed so rational at the time." - Brent Stewart

August 9th: The girdlers have moved into high speed, and are starting to chew through ground pretty quickly. Rumour has it that Kelly Duduman, sucker for punishment, is coming back tomorrow, refreshed and invigorated, to join us for more suffering in the bush (maybe he's willing to come back because we don't need to use quads).

August 15th: Hank is in pretty rough shape today. It seems that he had a few drinks on his night off, and got confused while trying to break into his apartment because the door wouldn't open - turns out he was at the wrong apartment. The RCMP came, and ended up working him over and throwing him into jail for resisting arrest.

August 19th: My dog, Forest, doesn't seem to be afraid of fire for some reason. He was lying beside the campfire tonight while everyone was sitting around talking, and a bunch of sparks landed on him. I guess that you'd call this a "Forest fire".

August 21st: Nothing exciting happened today. That's how girdling goes.

August 25th: I was GPS'ing blocks today, and ran into several bears. The closest one kind of startled me - it jumped up out of the raspberry bushes, about 10 feet in front of me. After it checked me out for a minute, it left me alone: I guess the raspberries were more appealing for supper. The only real problem was when the dog got wind of one of them, and got pretty excited. I may have to start carrying bear mace, just to spray the dog so it doesn't try to attack a bear and get eaten.


Click HERE to see pictures from August, while we were girdling.


August 26th: I was washing my truck today, spraying out the engine with the pressure washer, with the truck running at the time. When I stopped, I went to get back into the truck to turn it off, but the doors were all locked, and the dog was sitting inside with a stupid smile. Lesson: you can never leave your keys in the truck when you have electric locks and a dog. Anyway, I managed to break into the truck in about ten minutes with some pieces of scrap metal I found in a dumpster, and thought everything was fine. Two minutes later, the doors were locked again - at least this time I had rolled a window down in case the dog did it again. Then, as I was driving away, they locked on me a third time ... it turned out that when I was washing the truck, some water was shorting the switches in the door locks, and it wasn't the dog's fault at all.

August 27th: Driving in past the scales just over the Highway 97 bridge, I saw a logging truck which broke a fork and lost its load of logs all over the road, about fifty feet in front of the scale house. I can't think of a much worse place for him to have lost his load ... the DOT looked like they were having a field day inspecting his truck and writing up fines.

August 28th: Well, we just got offered some more girdling blocks today, so Nic Grenier is going to come from Edmonton and take over my crew, since I have to leave at the end of the week. Girdling seems to be a job for "celebrity appearances" by my old crew.

August 29th: Did more GPS'ing today. For those that are unfamiliar with GPS technology, it uses a system of 32 satellites to determine your longitude and latitude and altitude, anywhere on earth, to within a couple feet of accuracy. We use GPS units to assay blocks, and then dump the data into a computer for processing to print off extremely accurate maps. Taking the readings is a fairly easy task, but involves a lot of walking around with a handheld GPS unit. In one day earlier this week, I took 1971 GPS readings while walking 25km on two blocks covering 230 hectares in size, in order to map out the boundaries (and thus determine the size) of 53 separate patches of Aspen trees that we girdled.


That's all for another year. I had to get back to New Brunswick for the start of another year at the University, so I left Nic Grenier in charge of the remaining girdlers. Click HERE to see some final random pictures from various parts of our 2001 season.