SUMMER 2004

Click here to see information about the people working in or with our camp this season.

April 29th: We arrived in Prince George this morning, after a long night in the Vancouver Airport (during which a security guard evicted us from the boarding area because we were there too long). I then spent the day in meetings with the other supervisors and with some people from the Workers' Compensation Board to talk about new regulations and liability issues.

April 30th: We spent the day with several of the planters going through the S100 Fire Suppression course, and a TDG (Transportation of Dangerous Goods) refresher course. The Fire Suppression knowledge will probably come in handy this summer. The woods are very dry, and there are several forest fires burning in the province already, even though it is only late April.

May 1st: We spent a good part of the day in meetings with the foremen, mostly going through changes from previous seasons. There are an incredible number of changes this year, mostly due to greatly increased recognition of liability issues and risk management. For example, our camp is no longer allowed to smoke or drink alcohol in vehicles. Of course, we were never allowed to drink in moving vehicles, but now even drinking in parked trucks at night while listening to music is off-limits. There are new procedures in place for planters who are working "in isolation" (with reduced transportation or communications capabilities) for any given day. Dogs are no longer permitted in vehicles, except in secured carriers in the back of the trucks. Seatbelt usage compliance is being heavily monitored. Finally, there are a couple dozen more forms that need to be completed daily or weekly, to ensure that we are monitoring other areas with potential for safety deficiencies or liability risks. Folklore is certainly not the only company implementing changes like these. The changes are somewhat overwhelming, and will change the way we operate this year and in the future, but in the long run they will certainly be better for the industry.

May 2nd: Several members of the camp spent the day going through an ATV safety training course.

May 3rd: Stephane, our cook, ran into a deer this morning. It destroyed his windshield and driver's side window.

May 4th: The big event of the day was the initial camp meeting after supper. Everybody in the camp (49 people) showed up, and we spent three hours going over paperwork, safety, and introductory information. We also watched a couple of training videos, one about being "bear aware," and another about planting in site prepared ground. Of course we have also been spending time training the rookies over the past couple days, so they understand some basic theory and practical planting methods. After going through some of the information that I needed to talk about, I've come to realize that it would be pretty easy to have a five-day long "rookie training school" to cover most of the information that first year planters need to start learning, and still not have enough time to cover everything adequately.

May 6th: One of the biggest stories around Prince George this year is that the entire center of the province is a disaster, due to the mountain pine beetle infestations. The beetle infestation has been growing exponentially in the past several years, since there hasn't been a cold enough winter to kill them off and reduce the epidemic. Normally, there needs to be a period of about seven to ten days in a row of -30^o Celsius weather to kill them off, and it has to be early in the winter (before December), before the adult beetles develop defenses against the cold. This hasn't happened in some time. The forests are starting to look bright red everywhere because of the huge number of dead trees, and the logging industry may be hit pretty hard in the next few years. Even worse is the fact that this spring was extremely dry and warm, and the forests are just begging for a big fire. There have already been large fires in the area we are working, which is normally unheard of in April. I predict, from looking at the woods between Prince George and Vanderhoof, that within 2 years there will be a fire that will break all previous records in North America, and burn hundreds and hundreds of miles of BC's forest lands. Once it gets started, nobody will be able to stop it until the winter. It is definitely not a good situation.

Late note, October 3rd, 2004: I just read on the MOF website that the current pine beetle epidemic is expected to peak in BC around 2008, and is expected to destroy as much as eighty percent of the merchantable pine trees in BC.

May 7th: We were running low on drinking water today, so I went to town this afternoon for more. Unfortunately, it is a five hour round trip, and finding a water source is proving to be difficult. Every year it seems to be a bit harder to find a place that will let us fill up with water for free, although most gas stations are still willing to do it IF they have a hose, because they know how much the planters spend on junk food. After searching around Vanderhoof for a while for a water source, I finally got lucky. One of my old planters spotted me while driving through town, and stopped and hooked me up with his brother, who opened the fire station for me so I had access to a high-speed water source. I was starting to worry that I might have to drive to Prince George (another 100 kilometres) to fill the water barrels.

May 8th: Murray Booth (Conservation Officer) visited our camp again today, and gave us an excellent rating for taking proper precautions to minimize wildlife problems around camp. I'm surprised we haven't had bears in camp yet, since we've seen them all over the roads in the area. Production was a bit low today, since we've had to tell quite a few planters to rework areas that they had planted earlier in the shift, to improve the quality. We don't want any of our blocks to have insufficient quality, because it would prevent us from receiving full payment for the work done.

May 11th: This was a day off for the planters, but a busy day for me. I towed the garbage trailer into town in the morning, but there was something wrong with the doors, which popped open about forty times on the drive in. Luckily, the trailer wasn't too full, so I only had to back up to pick up garbage a couple times. After we got the trailer emptied, Greg did some work on it in the shop later in the day, so the doors wouldn't be such a problem. Troy's camp (we are sharing our current contract with his camp) was also on a day off today, and one of their trucks ran into a deer on the way into town, doing a couple thousand dollars of damage to the truck.

May 12th: We have never seen so much wildlife in past years as we have on this contract. This morning I saw three bears, five moose, a bald eagle, and a bobcat, all before 8am. It may be due to the usually warm spring, I guess. Barrett was driving his quad this afternoon and a stick came up into the shifter, and destroyed it. This has happened dozens of times to us in the past, but usually it was just the shifter that got stripped off the post that goes into the transmission. However, this time, the shifter is still firmly attached to the post, but the post appeared to have broken inside the transmission, so the quad is permanently stuck in reverse. That could be a costly thing to fix.

May 13th: Lloyd's Reforestation showed up at our campsite in the afternoon, with a full trailer camp and sixty planters, and expected to camp on our spot. They said that they had reserved it with the Ministry of Forests several weeks previously, and wanted us to move out of their spot (moving a camp takes about a full day). I declined, since we were working for the Ministry and we had also gotten approval for the camp site before setting up. I felt kind of bad for them, since it is usually difficult to find a good stream (to use as a water source) beside a flat area to park all the trailers, and they needed to have the camp ready to start a contract the following day. It's too bad they weren't starting three days later, when we would be gone to Alberta.

May 14th: While driving out to some new blocks today with Byron's crew, I stopped his ETV about three kilometers from the block on the edge of an abandoned air strip, because the road was starting to get really soupy and I didn't want to take a chance on the ETV getting stuck. While turning the ETV around on the airstrip, so it was facing toward town in the event of an emergency, Lowell backed over a big rock that was hidden in the grass and dirt. He bent the exhaust system badly enough that it was rubbing directly on the forward u-joint on the drive shaft. I managed to temporarily separate things with a couple of rachet straps, but I decided to limp the ETV back to town to get checked over, in case any of the transmission components also got shifted when the truck hit the rock (there were some big gouges on the tranny casing).

May 15th: Shafted! The Lloyd's camp up the road (the Dark Side) came for a visit sometime between 2am and 4am, and used whipped cream and honey to leave messages all over our trucks and on the tables in the mess tent. Nothing was damaged, just some harmless fun. Some members of our camp want to plan a retaliatory visit, but there isn't really any time - we've only got a couple days left, and we're too busy making money. The funny thing was that they must have walked the four kilometers to our camp to do it, since their supervisor took all the keys to the trucks that night (it was a night off for them, with some kegs of beer in camp). Our camp's daily production is up to around 70,000 to 80,000 trees per day now.

May 17th: We broke camp in the morning, and started the move to Alberta. By the time we got to town (flat tires, lack of room for everything, the usual stories) we only had time to spend an hour or so in Prince George and then had to start driving to Alberta. Again, the amount of wildlife was incredible. In the three hours on the highway between Prince George and Mount Robson, we saw at least fifty bears, and at least a hundred moose and a hundred deer.

Click HERE to see pictures from the first half of May in 2004.

May 18th: We met at 11:30am in Edson, and were just getting ready to head to camp when the Commercial Vehicle Enforcement people pulled Paul over for a broken tail-light and no brake lights. He got off without a ticket, but went and got the lights fixed right away, before he left town.

May 19th: We had a pre-work conference with ANC in the morning, and then headed out to the blocks in the afternoon. We stopped on the way to see some blocks that our camp planted in 1995, and some of the trees were over fifteen feet tall. By the time we made it to the blocks, we only had a couple hours to start learning to plant bare-roots. It's going to be a slow start. We only have 220,000 bare-roots, but it will probably take us about five days. We're hoping that we can plant the bare-roots at least half as fast as normal plug stock seedlings, but I'm a little nervous since very few people in our camp have experience with bare-roots.

May 20th: Oh, this is going to be a painful week. Our production today was only 27,000 trees with the whole camp working. It takes us more than three hours to get to the blocks from camp (120 kilometres through 4x4 access road with mud ruts over a foot deep in many places), and then on top of that, most of the crews have a 35 minute walk into their block before they can start planting. People have very little experience with bare-roots, except for about eight of us, so the average earnings today were about $94 per person, before camp costs. At this rate, it will take us about nine days to finish the trees that we were supposed to finish in four and a half days. This could be a huge problem, since the reefers of trees for our next contract are scheduled to start to arrive on Monday night, in just four more days.

May 21st: Apparently, one of the buses for Coast Range (or a big crummy - the story is still unclear at this point) was heading east past Jasper yesterday, and somehow ended up flipping into the ditch. There may have been as many as seventeen people aboard, from what I've heard so far, although luckily it appears that there were no fatalities. However, I believe that there were some pretty serious injuries, including broken backs and so on. This kind of thing can happen to any vehicle in any company - remember to wear your seat belts, and tell other people in the vehicle with you to buckle up.

May 22nd: Well, the weather has gotten worse, and there was a foot of snow on our blocks this morning. Luckily, Jen George (the checker) went out to our blocks extremely early in the morning, and called us to warn us about the storm before we were too far out of camp, so we didn't have to do the whole three hour (each way) drive to the blocks. This setback is going to make the Weldwood startup even harder to deal with. On top of that, I found out that someone must have run into the back of my truck sometime between 8pm last night and 6:30am this morning, because the tailgate has a new dent that wasn't there when I got home last night, and the hinges are now broken. Production climbed to 36,000.

May 23rd: Tim and Sumaya kept their crews out planting until 8pm, to finish a pair of blocks, which meant that they didn't get back to camp until 10:20pm. Tim wasn't too popular, but he definitely saved those crews from really having a screwed up and unprofitable day tomorrow, and they may have cut the number of days remaining on this contract from three to two. The first Weldwood tree delivery was postponed until Thursday night.

May 24th: Disaster strikes! The hard drive on the laptop has failed, so the last two weeks of payroll data (due to be paid in three days) cannot be recovered. We have to get a new laptop shipped to us from Prince George tomorrow, and then spend Thursday and Friday re-entering all the data, and email it to the office on Friday night, so that Irm (our accountant) can come in early Saturday morning and try to process it so that it can be direct deposited into the planters' bank accounts on Saturday afternoon. Production was 38,000 - if we have a big day tomorrow, we can finish the last 42,000 bareroots a day earlier than we had expected a few days ago. I'm really glad now that Tim's crew stayed out late yesterday.

May 26th: We got up quite early today, to try to get a head start so we can completely finish the bareroots today. We managed to leave camp shortly after 6am, and the last trees got planted at 6pm. The bareroots are done! On a less positive note, we had our first rookie quit today. At least he stuck it out to the end of the bareroots, although it's too bad that he didn't stick around for a few more days, now that the planting and money should start getting much better.

Click HERE to see pictures from the bareroot contract at Alberta Newsprint.

May 27th: More payroll setbacks. A brand new high-end laptop computer arrived this morning so we could start to re-do the payroll, but unfortunately, the payroll program was incompatible with the computer for unknown reasons.

May 30th: Things have been really busy for a few days. Our average production is up to about 100,000 trees per day. We finally got the payroll re-entered and balanced tonight, so hopefully the paycheques (which are now two days late) can be processed and issued and direct-deposited to our accounts within 24 hours.

June 2nd: The planters were on a day off today, and several commented that their paycheques hadn't ended up in their accounts. I found this strange since the office had said that it was in peoples' accounts already. As it turned out later, it was only the people with Royal Bank accounts who were missing their money, because of RBC's nation-wide screwup of transactions. Nonetheless, I'm sure that some of these people still probably think that it is the fault of the office somehow.

Tim and Sumaya were driving the Triton (a dual-axle trailer) into the dump today, which was about half full of camp garbage, and when they arrived at the dump they noticed that one of the wheels had fallen off the trailer somewhere on the trip into town.

June 3rd: I spent most of the day taking truckloads of trees to the foremen, and helping them get garbage off their blocks. After supper I took most of the foremen down to their next area to show them the blocks they would be planting in upcoming days. I got a flat tire at about 10pm right on the landing by the biggest block, so I made them each plant a box of trees while Barrett & I changed the tire. It stays light out here until almost 11:30pm right now.

June 4th: What a horrible day. I talked to our Weldwood silviculture officer (Shannon) before lunch and decided that I had better take the quad to go check out some blocks that our camp would be doing by helicopter over the next couple days. I spent about an hour touring through a bunch of seismic lines and checking out blocks, and when I got back to the truck, I looked back and saw smoke. I thought that was pretty strange and I couldn't think where the smoke would be coming from, so I took the quad back out to check it out and found a big fire raging where I had gone through the seismic line only an hour ago! It was too big for me to fight effectively by myself, so I immediately started to make some phone calls. The Forest Service quickly got a helicopter dumping water on it, and a fast-attack crew was flown in. The fire was out by nightfall, but it was a pretty stressful afternoon for me. Our company has insurance for incidents like this, which is good because the cost of fighting the fire must have easily been ten thousand dollars. The initial investigators believe that the hot exhaust from the quad must have somehow caught the semi-dry grass on fire when I was quadding down the seismic line, even though it wasn't a particularly warm day, and it had been raining off and on for about three days before today. In the end, I guess I can be thankful that it happened to me instead of one of the few smokers in our camp, since everyone knows that I'm a non-smoker and therefore it wasn't started by something stupid like a discarded cigarette. The fire ended up covering about an acre and a half (0.34 Ha), but luckily it didn't escape into the standing timber.

June 5th: Wow, I just heard a crazy story through the grapevine, about the owner of one of the other big Alberta planting companies. I'll keep his name out of this - he's probably embarassed enough about the situation as it is. Apparently he backed a truck up into the spinning blade of a helicopter a couple days ago. Luckily, nobody was hurt, although I bet there was probably about a quarter million dollars worth of damage to the helicopter.

June 6th: A long, wet, rainy, painful day of helicopter work for us. At least we kept our trucks far away from the chopper blades.

June 7th: One of our trucks died, and we had to call Roadside Assistance to get them to tow it into town.

June 8th: Paul and I took Byron's truck back to camp for him in early morning, to pick up a second load of trees to keep him going for the day. On the way, we came across a fresh accident where one of the oil & gas companies lost a pickup over the side of the road. It was about a forty foot high bank where the truck rolled, so I was surprised that the driver was standing there with no injuries - this just goes to prove once again that seat belts save lives.

Once we got back to camp, I figured it would take Paul and I about ten minutes to load up and get under way again. However, the new reefer that got dropped off this morning had no side door, and the trees that we needed were at the very front of the reefer (opposite the back doors), and we had to pull out about 130 boxes to make an aisle to get the trees we needed. Then, to make matters worse, after dragging a truckload out from the depths of the reefer, we had to reload those 130 boxes since we couldn't just leave them sitting in the sun for a day. It took us almost two hours to do this, and while this was happening, Byron ran out of pine trees, causing problems since he was supposed to be planting a 50:50 mix of pine and spruce.

In the afternoon, another big problem arose - our food order had been scheduled for delivery to camp at 5am this morning, and I got a call at 2:30pm from someone in Edson saying that all the food was sitting on his loading dock, and that he was closing in one hour. There was no way I could make it to town that fast, even if I had a truck, so luckily the owner of the loading dock said that he would bring it out to camp himself to help us out (for a small fee, of course). I couldn't understand why the Sysco driver would just drop our food off in town on a nice sunny day, when he had promised our cook the previous day that it would be delivered right into our cooler in camp.

Finally, just to make the day complete, I called Jerry Ford in Edson, which is where our truck got towed to the previous day, and asked them if they had fixed it yet. They said that they hadn't bothered to look at it, since it didn't have an appointment! Unbelievable. I would have thought that Roadside Assistance meant that they would try to assist you (presumably fairly quickly) if the vehicle need repairs. This is about the third or fourth time we have had customer service problems with Jerry Ford, so we have recently started taking our trucks to get serviced at Griffiths Ford in Hinton instead, whenever possible.

June 9th: I got a phone call from Jim saying that Stephane was stressed out because there was a bear in camp. I went back to camp, and didn't see anything, but we called the Conservation Officers anyway and asked them to bring a cage-trap out.

June 10th: The bear got caught in the trap today, so the Conservation people removed it and released it somewhere far away.

June 11th: Tim got his dual-wheeled Big Box truck stuck down a 5km long road that is practically impassible now that it is raining again. I was able to get my single-wheel truck down the road to pick up his people, but there was no way I could pull out his truck. I had to use my winch just to get off the landing that his truck is on. It isn't steep, but the mud gets incredibly slick when it rains here. I predict his truck will be there for about four days, since we'll need two days of sunshine before we can get in to pull it out.

June 12th: I had to make trips into and out from Tim's block to ferry planters and gear back and forth, and kept getting stuck on the last trip back out to good roads in the morning. At one spot, where I was winching my truck out of a mudhole, the tree I was hooked up to ended up getting pulled down onto my truck. Luckily, the hood just got hit with branches, so there were no dents or scratches. However, when the tree toppled, the winch cable ended up being embedded in the wood and buried under the trunk, so I had to call Paul to bring my chain saw in and help me out.

June 13th: This was to be the last official day of spring. However, we had run out of blocks, and it turned out to be another rough day. We were given an overflow contingency block to plant the rest of the trees, but as usual, the overflow was a bad block. This one was almost all covered with big round rocks, and was unprepped even though we thought it was supposed to be mounded, and we ended up having to plant it at a density of 800 stems/Ha rather than the 2000 stems/Ha that we had hoped for. On top of that, it was another cold and rainy day, and Byron got a flat on his quad trailer so he had to really hustle to get trees to the planters quickly. Then, to top it off, the block wasn't big enough to hold all of the extra trees!

June 14th: All of the foremen went out, with just a few planters, to finish off the rest of the trees that we had hoped to finish yesterday. It was almost sunny, so it was a slightly better day. That's a good thing about planting. No matter how dismal the weather or conditions seem, a few days later you'll wake up and it will be sunny and things will start to go more smoothly. You just have to be pretty positive-minded to handle this job during the frequent bad periods.

June 15th: Pouring rain again. Luckily, I was able to spend most of the day inside the trailer, working on the final paperwork for Weldwood to summarize the spring contract.

Click HERE to see pictures from the spring portion of our Weldwood contract.

June 18th: We managed to get Tim's stuck truck pulled out today. It came out pretty easily, now that we've had two straight days of sunshine. It was stuck there for seven days. Bad for Tim, but good for fuel economy.

June 19th: One of my foremen, Matt, was visiting some of his crew members in Calgary during the couple days off. While outside their house, he got mugged at knifepoint and beat up. Rough neighbourhood! Maybe I'll have to have a camp safety meeting about the dangers of city life.

June 20th: We started our summer contract today. All but two of our blocks are supposed to take either just spruce trees, or a 50:50 mix of spruce and pine, which therefore have to be planted simultaneously. However, due to the particulars of the delivery schedule, our first tree delivery last night had an excess of pine trees, and it appears that we will be receiving so many pine trees that we are guaranteed to have to put at least 50,000 of them into an overflow block. Therefore, even though it is the first day of the contract, we ironically had to start two crews working on our summer overflow block this afternoon, after we started and then completely finished finished the two blocks of straight pine before lunch.

June 21st: I finally finished the contract wrap-up paperwork for the ANC contract today. For the first time in about six weeks, I am caught up on paperwork! I will try to start catching up on my website diaries tonight since I haven't touched them in about five weeks. Although it looks like I write these website updates on a nightly basis, I actually recreate them from my daily handwritten supervisor's log book - this happens pretty often because planting-related obligations definitely take a priority over the website.

June 22nd: I actually got to take some time off tonight, after supper. I spent the day making sure that all the foremen were fully aware of the game plan for tomorrow, and would be able to set blocks up without my help tonight, then took off for Edmonton for a few hours with Stephane, the cook. The bar that he works at (the Likwid Lounge in Edmonton) was having a special event, so I went to work a special celebrity shift as a busperson. The event was awesome - it was the Tragically Hip's album release show, and their first live concert anywhere in the world in almost a year. Tickets were very hard to come by with only a couple hundred people allowed to attend, so I was very lucky to be invited - thanks Stephane and Terry! Click here to check out the photo gallery I took that evening. Even though many Canadians have really come to appreciate the band, and their fame is certainly growing, I still think that the Hip are one of the world's most under-rated groups.

June 23rd: Matt sleeps in his car at night, and awoke this morning to see a bear trying to pull off his bumper. Then, this afternoon, he was driving his quad and got attacked by a ferocious "prairie chicken" (ruffed grouse). He's definitely having a rough week.

June 24th: I spent most of the day working with one of the crews that was planting some of the NSR blocks. These blocks, which are designated as Not Sufficiently Reforested, have patches on them which did not grow properly after the first plantation. Accordingly, we have to go in and plant trees in ribboned patches (sort of like a fill plant) so there are no gaps, known as holes, in the forest in the future canopy. They are really painfully hard to plant. The competition from brush and grass means that we are usually fighting through a lot of greenery to get the trees in, and it seems that most of the patches are at the back of big blocks which no longer have quad access, so the planters often have to walk for ten to twenty minutes just to get to the edge of the patch that needs to be planted. To make it worse, this way that this contract is bid, there is just one single overall tree price for the entire contract rather than bid prices tailored to each block, so we get paid the same amount for these really hard blocks as we do for the nice, easy, mounded blocks.

June 25th: One of our vets quit today. That's a fairly rare event, but she is the second experienced planter to quit this year, citing low prices and being tired with the job.

June 28th: The licensee checkers called me to say that they had become concerned of a possible problem with J-roots on one of our blocks. If the roots are not planted straight up and down, it is considered a planting fault, which can lower our payment if it gets to be a significant issue. I spent a couple hours worrying about how bad the problem was, but then they called me back to say that they had crunched some numbers on the block and it still came in at 94%. Anything about 92.6% quality means full payment for us. Nonetheless, J-roots are the most frightening type of quality problem to have to fix, in my mind, so we'll have to have a camp meeting about this tomorrow to talk about ways to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

June 29th: One of our top experienced planters is now out for the rest of the season with what he thought was tendonitus. However, the doctor said that it was probably tunnel carpel syndrome. Either way, he can't plant anymore without aggravating his arm and wrist, so he's packing his tent. We offered him a job as a checker, but he declined it.

July 1st: I got back to camp at supper to find out that I just barely missed "the worst rain and hail storm in the history of tree planting." Stephane pointed out a pan containing three inches of rainwater, which he said had been empty an hour and a half earlier, before the storm started. Many of the planters' tents were flooded, and parts of the road near camp were starting to wash out. Several cubic metres of snow and hail had collected and were hanging in the fabric of the mess tent. Happy Canada Day!

July 2nd: Somebody rolled and totalled a truck in one of our other camps today, although there were no serious injuries. I need to have yet another talk with all of the designated drivers in our camp to remind them to be especially careful on the roads. My camp hasn't had an accident with one of our company vehicles since 1992, short of trucks being run off the road by logging trucks or Oil & Gas guys. We've been extremely lucky over the years, although picking the right drivers plays a big part in that. At the end of the season in 1991 though, when I was working for Tawa, one of the floater crews (that had been working in my camp for just a couple days) got into a terrible accident on the way back to Prince George. The driver fell asleep at the wheel and had a head-on collision with a family of four, and both vehicles burned. Three of the planters and all four of the other people in the accident were killed.

July 8th: We took the day off today, due to heavy rains and wind. The rain by itself wasn't a complete disaster, and we're pretty used to working when it is pouring, but the winds were causing mature trees to snap and creating a major safety hazard. We're a bit ahead of the game in terms of production right now, so it wasn't hard to come to the right decision and postpone work for a day. Some of our other camps further north aren't in the same position, and were forced to try to work through the rain today. I hear that Nathan Maier's camp has crews that have to walk in 3.8 kilometers to get to their block, through three feet of muskeg for most of the walk in. Also, rumours are that Trent's camp just got three trucks stuck last night until midnight, blowing the transmission in one of them, and a Cat was required to pull one of them out. They are using a hovercraft to take trees into their block since it is so soupy.

July 9th: Nigel's truck got stolen today. In other news, we had tornado warnings for the area we were working in, although we didn't see any. However, a tornado did touch down near Grand Prairie yesterday, and threw some cars around and did some damage to some buildings.

I saw what looked like a Great Horned Owl after lunch, on a seismic line near the block. It was enormous.

July 10th: You know, as I look at some of my entries in this diary and some diaries from past years, I think to myself that a lot of city-folk who read this must think that no job can be this ridiculous, and I'm making up a lot of this stuff. Believe me, these diaries are all factual accounts! It's funny, because anyone who has ever planted trees for very long just reads these diaries and says to themselves, "Yup, sounds about normal."

July 11th: This was a typical day for running trees at Weldwood. The contract is fast and easy (but very low-priced ground) for the planters, but for the foremen and tree-runners, the logistics can be very difficult. Today I burned three tanks of gas in my chain saw, doing courderoy work through 3 kilometers of mostly soupy seismic lines. There was one place where we had a short bridge of 16-inch logs that was floating in a swamp, for the quads to drive over.

July 12th: Byron came running into my trailer this morning at 6:30am, vowing to finish the pine tonight, no matter how long it took. The other crews were all planting spruce. After I got everybody set up, I went into Jerry Ford around 2pm to pick up our ETV. It looked like it hadn't been moved yet. I went to the counter, and the lady there asked me what the problem was with the vehicle. I said, "The problem is that the vehicle has been in here since last Thursday [4 days] and apparently, nobody has even looked at it yet." At least that exchange kick-started the service department, and they brought it in to fix it right away, and promised that they would try to have it done by the end of the day.

Byron managed to hold true to his vow, barely. The crews planting spruce finished around 7pm, and Byron's crew finished the pine and got back to camp at 10pm. I hate having late nights to finish a contract, but at least it got done, and the weather was good.

July 13th: We got up early and got camp packed and moved out. Everyone left by noon, except for me. I stayed behind in my trailer to work on the payroll for an extra day, where it was peaceful and quiet. In theory, that is.

At 8pm, another thunderstorm came through. I watched it for a while, since it was so strong, then noticed that there were clouds around the entire clearing that I was parked on, and the wind was blowing them all in a completely perfect circle around the clearing. Lighting was hitting a few hundred meters away, so I started to worry about getting electrocuted or hit by a tornado. I unplugged the computers from the generator, just to be safe, so they wouldn't get fried so easily if the trailer got hit by lightning. I filmed the clouds for several minutes, in case I did get hit by a tornado, so I could show the clip on one of those home movie television shows and make some money. In the end, however, there was no tornado, but I got some beautiful video footage of about thirty separate close lightning strikes before the camera started got too wet to keep filming.

Click HERE to see pictures from the summer portion of our Weldwood contract.

July 16th: We made it to our next contract in Fort St. James. We'll be finishing out the season here again this summer, the same place as last year, although this time I have my whole camp instead of just two crews, and this year we have 900,000 trees to plant instead of 330,000. The ground doesn't look as green as last summer, although the planting is still slow. The planters are so used to easier and faster ground at Weldwood that they were very depressed after fighting through some real BC ground today. Ironically, after having such a successful season in Alberta of minimizing the number of times that we got trucks stuck in the mud, two of the foremen got their trucks stuck on gravel roads this morning.

July 17th: Production is going very slow. We're only putting in about 45,000 trees a day right now. We aren't allowed to plant seedlings under the driplines of tall trees or even chest-high bushes on the block, but since the blocks are so green and there are bushes everywhere, that rule wipes out a lot of ground.

Brent Stewart emailed today. He only planted in the spring season, and then got an engineering job in Iraq. He reports, "Planting is still harder than military life, but it is pretty hot here at 45^oC out. We are on an air force base in north-eastern Iraq, surrounded by desert. This is my second day in Iraq, and only one bomb has hit the base so far."

July 18th: Production actually dropped today, to about 40,000 trees. Everyone is frustrated with the tough quality standards. Personally, I don't think the rules are that tough considering how strict BC planting usually is, but the style is so different from what we have been doing for the past eight weeks that the planters have a legitimate problem in adjusting to different rules. We had a lot of people going back into their pieces to fix quality problems today. For the rookies, this is their first experience with untreated ground, believe it or not. There are some people that haven't planted raw ground all season up until this contract!

July 19th: We got a real wrench thrown into the works today. The forester, Anthony, is so concerned that we meet target densities that he is calling missed spots in plots that are under the target spacing, regardless of whether or not a true "hole" for a missing seedling exists, so long as the missed spot would not conflict with the minimum spacing rules. He relayed this news to our checkers this afternoon, and they are pretty worried, because there are a lot of places where the planters are only getting five to seven trees in a plot (the target density is eight trees per plot).

While Anthony and Paul were walking around, Drew & Nathan & I watched a healthy standing aspen tip over on the block, despite a lack of wind. Shellagh was planting only about twenty feet from the tree at the time, so maybe she disturbed the soil and/or roots, which is what made it fall over. Luckily, it fell away from her instead of onto her.

After Anthony left, we got hit by a mini-hurricane. It had been sunny only ten minutes before, but then a huge cloud blew in from over the mountain behind the block, and suddenly a huge wall of wind hit the block all at once. It was just like a tidal wave, except that it wasn't water. I watched almost a dozen more trees fall on the block, and most of the planters immediately ran off their pieces once they saw the danger. A couple minutes later, the rain started, and it poured for twenty minutes. The storm ended as quickly as it started, and the planters managed to get back onto their pieces for another box each before supper.

July 20th: Things are still going very slow, with many veteran planters making less than $150 per day before camp costs. I went to look at some of the upcoming blocks this afternoon, including one that is over three hundred thousand trees (the biggest block I've seen in years), and luckily the upcoming ground looks a lot easier than what we're doing right now. Three people quit on this shift, but I don't expect anyone else to quit once they see the next block. A big part of the problem isn't just that the ground is green and the contract has tough quality standards, but also that our camp just does not have enough practice at this kind of planting. I had a camp meeting and said that a good analogy is that we're like a group of professional downhill skiers entering a cross-country event: we're excellent planters when it comes to fast Alberta planting, but we need a lot more practice before we'll be good at tougher BC ground.

July 21st: Today was a day off for most of the camp, but since I four new planters arrived last night, I took them out to work today. They were working for other companies for the first part of the season, although I planted with a couple of them in the past, both at Folklore and also at Tawa many years ago. Their presence will certainly boost morale a bit. It is pretty nice to see new but familiar faces near the end of the season, especially when the contract is this tough.

July 22nd: There was another strange truck in camp this morning. It turned out that when Paul drove into Prince George to get the food order yesterday, his truck developed transmission problems and is now at Ford in Prince George getting fixed. Visa Truck Rentals quickly fixed him up with a replacement vehicle though. Apparently, FIVE of our Ford trucks are at PG Motors right now for major transmission repairs, and nobody is very happy with the Fords this year.

July 23rd: Today was a more interesting day than most. We only have one quad now shared among the four small crews (which only add up to eighteen planters in total right now), since there was a quad in the truck that got left in town with the transmission problems. To make things easier, I took the quad and I'm now running trees for all four crews - this is fairly easy since everybody is sharing a huge block with easy access, and it certainly is more useful than having me wandering around looking for things to do. Byron is working on the other half of the block, with his own quad and his own fourteen planters.

We found out this afternoon that Trent's crew somehow lost 200,000 of their trees at the Sundance contract in Alberta, and are out of work now. They'll be moved over here to help us finish. This will make some people happy (the ones who want to get out of here as soon as possible), but will really annoy the others who were hoping to work until August 8th or 10th.

July 24th: This was a super hot day. Our camp has had rain for weeks, so they are not used to hot weather. The sun wiped out about half a dozen people today. I had a meeting with everyone at the end of the day and told all the planters to go jump in the lake for ten minutes, under mandatory order. The effects of heat stress are cumulative, and I'm worried that some of the people will think they are fine, but if it is hot again tomorrow, some of them might suffer from heat stroke, even if the temperature is a few degrees lower than today.

July 25th: Yup, more heat, and a few more people down. Even Byron, with all his years of experience and working in hot conditions, was throwing up today from working so hard. I know the feeling, since I've had the same thing happen to me a few times over the years. I should have made all the foremen go into the lake last night too, not just the planters.

I had to run into town for water this morning, so I scheduled someone else to deliver trees while I was away. When I went into Fort St. James, I was surprised that the staff at the Overwaitea (or IGA or whatever the main grocery store is), had never heard of Gatorade juice crystals before. When I got back to the block, and checked the density, things were mostly good. However, I had to tell three of the planters to go back into their pieces and fix their spacing.

Apparently, there was a black bear running at Tim this afternoon, potentially to attack him, but Sumaya and Andy saw it and yelled and made it stop. The three planters spent about ten minutes slowly backing away from the bear, while it sized them up, but it didn't charge again after the first time. At about the same time, another large tree on the block fell and almost hit Jana Baugh, this time due to the heavy winds. Those Baugh sisters really seem to attract the trees. I'm starting to think that maybe the Alberta hard hat rules aren't so useless after all.

We wrapped up the day with a July 25th "Christmas" dinner that couldn't be beat.

July 26th: Anthony is making his "missed spot" quality rules a bit more flexible now, which seems reasonable since we are hitting very close to the target density.

July 28th: We had a WCB inspection tonight after supper, and a reefer full of trees arrived (the last one of the summer!), and Trent's crew showed up in camp [click on the link for photos of his camp]. All in all, it was a pretty eventful evening. Surprisingly, we found out that Trent and one of the planters on my crew (Jeff Finley) started out planting together as rookies on Rob Seaman's crew at Tawa in 1992, and were very surprised to see each other in camp tonight. Even more ironically, Jeff's mother used to own the restaurant that I own now in New Brunswick, and his parents now live in Nova Scotia, in a house behind my parents. It's a small, small world!

July 30th: I got up at quarter after five to help Stephane unload propane bottles for breakfast, and things went smoothly all morning. We got a good early start, although my whole camp is on another tough block right now so I don't expect very much for production today.

August 1st: Today was supposed to be the last day. Trent's people had to put in at least 27,000 trees, and I expected us to put in a bit over 40,000 (we have more people than he does right now). I promised my camp that I thought we would be done by 5pm, however, that did not prove to be the case. Trent's crew left at about 5:30pm after squaring up their land, having put in several thousand more trees than they were supposed to. Strangely though, we kept going until 8pm. I was really frustrated, because I was sure that we were planting a lot faster than I had anticipated, and I couldn't figure out why we had to work so late to finish things up. We didn't get back to camp until 10pm, with the block being so far from camp. When I collected the tallies just before midnight, I found out that we had planted more than 60,000 trees today, not including Trent's production. Something doesn't add up here, so we must have made a mistake in the numbers last night before dividing up the remaining trees.

August 2nd: We packed camp today, and ran into town for a camp dinner and goodbyes in Prince George. Aside from the three people that quit during the first shift of this contract, almost everybody showed up, so it was a good way to end the season. We're done for another year!

Click HERE to see pictures from the Fort St. James contract, which wrapped up our season.

Late note: We finally figured out this morning (August 3rd) why we had to plant so late on Sunday night. My initial guess of 5pm probably would have been very accurate, IF we had as many trees as we thought we had. However, the nursery made a mistake with the invoices, and they shipped us over FORTY THOUSAND more trees than they had initially let on. It's a good thing that I keep boxend stickers! Of course, I still have to take moral responsibility for 8pm wrapup. If we had an accurate count of the remaining boxes the night before, we would have known that there were far more trees than we were led to believe "by the numbers". However, the boxes were spread out between three blocks and six trucks, so I didn't get a good count, and I miscalculated our wrapup time. Live and learn ....