SUMMER 2005

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

April 21st: Arrived in Prince George. We have a very early start this year, in Kamloops, working for BCTS. The weather there is incredibly warm compared to places like Vanderhoof, which is where we have usually started working in the past several years. In Kamloops, the snow melts and the ground thaws very early, and we can get a good head start.

April 22nd: I found out that our camp has already damaged a vehicle, and we haven't even started working yet. Curtis was driving a 450 Ford while doing his bush driving safety course, and ripped the drive shaft off the truck. Perhaps the bush driving course should be held in a slightly less harsh environment.

April 24th: Camp setup went slow (as can be expected on the first setup of the year). However, we're adjoining a commercial campground site and RV park, so we have power in the camp around the clock, which is nice. We got some really nice upgrades to equipment this year too. We have a new weatherhaven mess tent this year, and new plastic outhouses, and we're using a mobile cook trailer this year instead of a tent kitchen. Most importantly, we have noise-reduced generators, which are only faintly audible from twenty or thirty feet away.

April 25th: We had our pre-work conference with the Forestry officials this morning. A topic that came up was "rattlesnake safety," which made some planters a bit nervous. Kamloops is such a hot area (semi-desert) that rattlesnakes live in the region. The forestry officers don't think that we'll run into any rattlesnakes on our blocks, since the elevation is a bit too high, but they say that our campsite is in a prime area for these snakes. We asked the forester how often people run into these snakes, and he said that he sees about a dozen rattlesnakes per year, although he's never been bitten.

April 26th: This is the second day of temperatures above thirty-degrees Celsius. It feels like July or August. It's a very strange feeling to be working in such intense heat already. Usually, we're working in snow at this time of the year, and we have problems with blizzards and snow days. Today, almost everybody is sunburned.

April 27th: This is turning out to be a very tough contract to be efficient on. The planting quality standards are high (not the highest I've ever seen, but definitely close to the toughest). However, more to the point, there are a lot of regional policies that go against the grain when it comes to efficiency for the planters and for the contractor. For instance, we are not permitted to have caches on the blocks! All of the trees have to be stored in fully insulated trucks during the day, and can only be delivered to planters when they run out of trees (or the planters are making long walks back to the canopy trucks to bag up). Trees cannot be stored in the trucks overnight, so the trucks all have a major traffic jam at the reefer when we get out to the block in the morning. Also, we're working with four species at once, and the planters must have at least one tree of each species in each plot (the block mix is predominantly by percentage rather than by microsite), so everyone has to plant with four bundles open and the planters need to alternate their species all the time.

April 28th: I was visited at the reefer this afternoon by a pickup with three natives, who had a case of beer on their lap and a rifle in the back. They suggested that they wanted to take a thousand trees or so with them. However, once they realized that I wasn't about to give them any trees, they became quite friendly, and hung around and talked for about fifteen minutes about the "fire.". They said that they planted trees in another camp, but somehow I doubt it. They suggested that I should come down to the reserve with them and drink some beer, but I had to decline. It was only after they left that I realized that we're replanting the big Kamloops fire that was on the national news two summer ago, with the "BC is Burning" slogan.

April 29th: Today was the first day off for the planters. We don't push people very hard at the start, to minimize medical problems like strains and tendonitus, so it feels like we haven't really worked at all for the first shift. We're going to need another full day of planting tomorrow just to break the 100,000 tree mark for the season. Usually, our camp plants almost that many trees per day once we get rolling at full speed in Alberta.

April 30th: There are mice everywhere in camp. Some of the planters have thought about going to the SPCA to get a couple cats for camp. Barrett has been sleeping in his truck, and the mice have even gotten into that. He woke up the other night with one running up his neck, and another under his pillow. Our mousetraps in my trailer have certainly been put to good use.

May 2nd: It feels really strange to be working so close to a major city. One set of blocks is on the other side of the city, so we have to drive right through the middle of the Kamloops North Shore every day. It's a little disconcerting to see meth whores dancing on the street corners at 6am on a Tuesday morning, while we're on the way to the block.

May 3rd: Jim was cursing on the radio today about someone in a beat up old truck that cut him off in downtown Kamloops. Then, all of a sudden, he yelled over the radio, "That idiot has one of your stickers! There's a Replant.ca sticker in his back window! Who is that? Why are you giving stickers out to people who can't drive!?" That made my day - I now feel that every penny I spent distributing bumper stickers was well worth it!

May 4th: Strict quality guidelines continue to slow down the planters, but other than that, the contract is running fairly smoothly. The planters had heard ("word on the street") that the foresters here were incredibly difficult to work for, from other planters who have worked here in previous years, but we haven't found that to be the case. They certainly have high expectations, but that's not unusual in a lot of places. We just have to make sure we're meeting all of the various safety and contract rules & regulations, and stay one step ahead of them.

May 6th: As if to remind us that the weather in the mountains can be extremely unpredictable, we had two crews planting today in temperatures of 3 degrees below zero, with light snow, and the other two crews planting an hour away in sunshine and temperatures of about 18 degree Celsius.

May 8th: The contract is not going well. There are just too many rules which prevent us from doing things in the efficient manner that we're used to, and planters are wasting too much time. As an example, we get up for breakfast at 5am, leave camp around 5:40am, arrive at the High Country Cold Storage facility to pick up trees at 6am, load up then drive for an hour to get to the blocks (arriving around 7:30am). Once we're there, we unload those trees into the reefer that is parked by the blocks and re-load the trucks with mixed boxes of trees (oldest trees have to be planted first), which takes until about 8am, then planters don't get onto their pieces until 8:30am. That is a total of three and a half hours from getting up until the first trees go into the ground. That is ridiculous - in Alberta, we usually have breakfast at 6am and start planting by 7:15am. If we even bother to bid here again next year (which I seriously question), the bid price is going to have to be increased by between 17 and 19 percent, to address the problem of the inefficiencies. Our company is definitely losing a lot of money on this contract this year, and the planters aren't making as much as we had hoped for them to average.

May 10th: A week ago, one of my checkers fell on the block and thought she might have broken her wrist/hand. It was uncomfortable for her all week, so tonight she finally decided that maybe she should go into the hospital to get it X-rayed. She was right - it was broken. Her wrist is in a cast now, although she's confident that it won't slow her down much while she's working.

May 11th: One of my foremen quit today, out of frustration with the rules here and with the fact that he can't make any money because of them. Foremen are not allowed to plant, period. Unfortunately, most of my foremen have five-man crews, and their entire compensation scheme is based upon them getting commission from their five people, and then planting for the other half of the day to top up their wages. For this particular foreman, between not being allowed to plant and his commission from the planters being so low because of all the downtime, he wasn't even making minimum wage. Some of the other foremen have coped with the problem by temporarily pairing up crews (two six-packs combine, and one foreman acts as foreman and the other foreman acts as a planter), but it has been a pretty awkward situation for all of them. This is the first time in all my years as a supervisor that I've ever had a foreman quit.

May 12th: Our camp production is incredibly low still, with only 55,000 trees being planted today between 47 planters. That average is pathetic, considering our camp has often averaged over two thousand trees per person per day on other contracts in previous seasons. I wouldn't feel so bad if the prices were higher, but these are definitely not high-priced trees.

May 14th: I saw a small group of wild bighorn sheep near one of our blocks today, which was a first.

May 15th: I've been spending a lot of time in the reefer lately, mixing boxes of trees for the planters, so all the blocks have the right ratios of the four species that we're planting. It also speeds up efficiency and production for the planters, so they don't all have four partial boxes on the go all the time (which would be impossible anyway, with everyone having to work out of the canopy trucks rather than out of caches). I get a lot of strange visitors while I'm in the reefer. Today, about nine groups of people stopped by to ask where to pick mushrooms, or mistook me for a mushroom buyer. Even more abnormal was a person who stopped by to talk to me for about ten minutes. He didn't seem to be interested in mushrooms, so I asked him what he was doing. He said that he was working on the new Harrison Ford film, and was checking out places around Kamloops (presumably to film scenes for the movie). I don't know if he was serious or not, but he didn't seem as crazy as most of the people who stop by to talk.

May 21st: We've had some pretty long days for the last several days, trying to get wrapped up. The next week is going to be especially tough. Tomorrow morning we get up at 6am (in the middle of a busy commercial campground that has several hundred visitors for the long weekend), load camp into the reefer, get all the personal stuff loaded into the crew trucks, then hopefully meet at 10am at the cardlock in town (with nine company trucks, five trailers, and a dozen personal vehicles). Next, we have to drive for eleven hours (not counting food/fuel stops) to a place called Red Earth Creek, which is an hour north of Slave Lake in Alberta. Hopefully we'll get there by midnight, if none of the vehicles break down. The following morning, we get up early and set up camp, go to the pre-work conference, and set up the blocks for planting, and then the following morning we have to start planting. At that point, it gets "easy" - we only have to plant 800,000 trees in eight days with 39 planters, with difficult quad/rolligon/helicopter access. It sounds pretty challenging, even to an optimist like myself. However, I guess if this job was easy, everybody would want to do it!

Click HERE to see pictures from April and early May of 2005.

May 22nd: The Queen was in Jasper today. So was I. There's no real significance to that, since I didn't see her. However, I did see quite a few elk and bighorn sheep in the Park.

May 23rd: Well, we managed to get camp set up today and go through our pre-work conference. For a while yesterday, I didn't think that we'd ever make it. The office sent us a special truck to move our cook trailer to Alberta, and just before we left Kamloops, we discovered that the truck had no brake controller (necessary for hauling such a large trailer), no spare tire, and it wasn't even insured to be driven in Alberta! It was quite a headache to fix those problems on the Sunday of a long weekend. Thank goodness there was an insurance agent and a Canadian Tire open in Kamloops. Usually, our office tries very hard to pre-plan so that big screwups like this don't happen, but this time, the truck got sent out without a proper pre-inspection to look for problems. Mel, our reefer driver and shop assistant, certainly was a huge help to us in getting things fixed. We finally managed to get away from Kamloops a little before 3pm, so we didn't arrive in Slave Lake until early this morning.

May 24th: This contract is going to require a major mental adjustment by the planters. The planting specifications on this contract compared to the one in Kamloops are almost polar opposites. In Kamloops, we needed to have full 12" bare screefs with the seedlings planted in pure mineral soil. Here, we aren't allowed to screef, and we aren't allowed to plant in bare, exposed mineral soil - that would be an automatic fault. The fine for a tree dropped accidentally on the block or for a tree planted too close to a roadway (less than 6 meters) is $50 per tree (compared to $2 in most other places)! Also, the fine for excess over 5% is the bid price plus $1.00 per tree, which is FAR more harsh than what is assessed under normal planting standards.

May 25th: The planting is going fairly well, with most of the camp starting to feel comfortable with the new planting standards. Attrition and employee turnover rates haven't been too bad either: out of the original 17 rookies that started in our camp exactly one month ago, 14 still remain, and we haven't lost any vets.

May 27th: I made a great find while taking empty tree boxes to the dump today - a whole big bag full of sponges, which the planters can use in their planting bags to keep the seedling roots moist. We also got a new truck in camp today - the Unimog. It is a Mercedez-Benz truck that was built in 1963, and it is quite a sight to behold. It seats two in the cab, and there are seats and seatbelts in the open back for another 14 people. The dashboard is all labelled in German. It's got six forward and two reverse gears, two or four wheel drive, and another shift lever that I don't even understand. I'm not sure yet how it will work out. I took it for a test drive with Greg (our mechanic) today, and the top speed is around 24 km/h. However, it will carry a lot of boxes, so if it doesn't get stuck in the mud (and the tires are about four feet high), it might be a great alternative to using quads on long trips down seismic lines.

May 28th: Another rookie quit today. However, before he left the block yesterday, he found a fairly new wolf carcass. He cut the head off it, and put it in a plastic bag, and took it with him on the bus when he left. It's no wonder that tree planters have such crazy reputations ...

May 30th: One of the foremen broke the light on the driver's side mirror of his truck today, and got a replacement priced at Ford. They said that it would cost $400 to fix! However, aside from that little shocker, the Slave Lake Ford dealership did an excellent job of servicing and repairing about eight of our vehicles today.

June 2nd: Today was the last day of the Alberta Plywood contract. I was supposed to pick up Paul's crew in the Unimog today at 12:30pm, but when I got back from the dump at noon, I discovered that thew Unimog had a flat tire. The tire change looked pretty intimidating, considering the size of the tires, but with Greg's assistance we managed to get it changed in only half an hour, and I was able to pick up Paul's crew around 1:30pm. However, when I got back to where the pickups were parked, I discovered that my truck was all crushed in on the driver's side. It turned out that the checker had driven into it.

June 3rd: We got up at 5:30am to finish packing, and after we pulled out of the camp area, we went back with rakes and leveled out all the ruts that we had made. I took pictures afterwards, under the assumption that we always get in trouble after we leave campsites for one reason or another, and I wanted to prove that we had cleaned up absolutely everything. After that, we drove from Red Earth to Edson, then set up camp and had our prework for the Weldwood contract. And by Weldwood, I mean West Fraser, who bought Weldwood in January. It's going to be hard not to talk about Weldwood all the time for the next month and a half.

June 4th: Today was the first day of planting at Weldwood, and in the afternoon we ran out of one of the seedlots that we were using. That's been a problem in the past, because we go through trees so quickly here when things go well. One thing that I really like about Weldwood is that we've worked here for so many years. We know all the planting areas very well, we know where all the good seismics are for accessing blocks, and we're used to all the little idiosyncracies that planters experience when working with any particular licencee. I wouldn't say that working for Weldwood is any easier than anywhere else. Weldwood is actually a very challenging place to work in terms of stock and prescription logistics, but Folklore and Weldwood have become very natural business partners over the past six years and we're a lot "higher up the experience curve" than other newer companies. I think that a lot of other BC planting companies, if they came to work at Weldwood for the first time, would just run into one disaster after another. The usual challenges that we face here are very different than what a company faces on a BC contract.

June 5th: I got in trouble today because the Unimog's engine was apparently "destroyed." I'm not sure how that happened, since it worked fine when I gave it to our mechanic at the end of the Alberta Plywood contract a few days ago, and I filmed the mechanic driving it up onto the flatdeck trailer to haul it back to BC. I thought it was a pretty handy vehicle in the end, and I would have liked to keep it for other contracts. I also noticed today that my winch had been stolen. All in all, it was a rather frustrating day.

June 6th: I went out to visit Ben's block this morning, and when I got there, he was looking for oil. He said that his quad had starting to make a funny "chugging" noise and so he shut it off right away and checked the oil, which was low. The quad ended up taking four litres of oil, which is FAR more than a quad should ever need. I chewed Ben out for not checking his oil frequently enough, but he said that he had checked it earlier in the day. That sounded puzzling, so I investigated further. I quickly discovered that a stick had just ripped off an oil line. Ben's fast reaction when he felt the engine starting to slow down probably saved him from roasting an engine.

June 7th: I stopped into one of the stationary stores in Edson today to see if they could photocopy a set of about 100 pages of notes that I had to mail to someone. I asked if it would take long, and she said that she thought she might be able to do it in a week or so. Hm. I said not to worry, that I'd just copy a set out by hand in the meantime. I think she missed my sarcasm.

June 8th: I was driving the quad today and hit a bump and somehow bit off part of the side of my tongue. It was a surprisingly painful experience.

June 10th: I still can't talk on the phone properly, and have to keep hanging up on people because of my tongue. I hope it heals quickly. I would like to recommend that anyone trying desperately to lose weight should just cut their tongue open because it certainly keeps you from wanting to eat anything. I'd better not though, in case some idiot reads this website and actually tries it, and then sues me.

June 11th: One of the trucks got stuck today on a very dicey road. We wouldn't have gone any further up the road once we saw how bad it was getting, but it was far too narrow to turn around on by the time that we got to that point. The truck started to slide into the ditch, and luckily the driver stopped it in time before it flipped. We looked at it for a couple hours, and I pretty much gave up on it and thought it would be there until the roads dried out in a few weeks. There was certainly no way any other trucks could get around it, or even do any pulling or winching - the road was like a ten foot wide band of oil. I called Jim and told him that we'd probably need to rent another truck for several weeks. He told me that it was his day off, and I'd better come up with a plan to deal with it myself, and that I wasn't getting another truck. A couple hours later, after looking at all of our options, we came to the conclusion that we could probably tow it out backwards if we could just figure out some way to keep it from sliding back and forth, sideways and into the ditch. I came up with an idea - I figured that if we dug some huge ruts into the road itself, under and behind the tires for about forty meters, we could possibly keep it from sliding around until we could pull it back onto safer ground where it could then back out the rest of the way on its own. Surprisingly, after a couple hours of digging, the plan actually worked and we were able to back it out under its own power without even towing it. It was a pretty impressive recovery, especially considering that the truck had been so close to flipping earlier that one of the wheels was actually sitting up in the air, raised off the road, the whole time it had been sitting there on the edge of the ditch.

June 12th: Paul, one of the planters, told me that he didn't want to plant today. I asked why. He said, "Well, I could blame it on my infected finger, or I could blame it on my broken zipper on my tent, but really, it's just because it's raining too hard." I had to laugh - at least he was honest about it! Today was our first real hard rain day of the season. Three more people quit.

June 13th: Greyhound in Slave Lake told me today that there was a package sitting there since May 30th. They said that they hadn't called me about earlier since it had the wrong phone number on it. Too bad we're working out of Edson now, four hours away. Ironically, Greyhound in Kamloops called me fifteen minutes later to tell me that there was a package sitting there which had arrived on May 21st. Timely of them to call.

June 14th: We had to use helicopters to get to the blocks today. I spent the day sitting out at the truck, listening on the radio and directing traffic and loading slings. I met the angriest trucker in the middle of the afternoon. The road to where we were staging from was pretty rough, to put it mildly - we had barely gotten through it in four-wheel drive with the pickups. Anyway, the trucker had apparently gotten stuck coming in that road, with a low-boy and a Cat backhoe on back of the low-boy, and had to unload his Cat to pull his rig through the road to where I was parked. I had to break the news to him that the road was deactivated just up ahead, and that he'd have to turn around and go back through the muddy section that he'd just come through. He was not impressed - the road used to be a shortcut to legally get into Hinton for oversized loads, since he couldn't take the highway.

June 16th: The last big block on the contract, which we are supposed to be planting tomorrow (132,000 trees), is supposed to be prepped. However, the mounder broke down, and the site prep guy was trying to fix it today. It didn't look like he was having much luck, so I have a feeling that tomorrow is going to be a pretty rough day, since the grass is about two feet high everywhere on the block.

June 17th: We got out to the big block today, and the site prep was all done! The site prep guy must have fixed his machine and worked all night to have it ready for us. A big thanks to him - we can plant mounds at least fifty to sixty percent faster than unprepped ground, so there is no way that we could have finished the block if it hadn't been prepped.

June 18th: Today was a part day, the last day of the spring contract. However, on my way out to the block, my truck died. It looked to me like I was losing electrical power for a few minutes before it died, but it also seemed to be losing engine power. Once I realized that it was going to quit completely, I tried to quickly back out of the awkward road that I was on (the same road we had all the problems with a week ago), but I managed to slide into the ditch. Ben hooked up to my truck and we quickly pulled it out and I got the truck free, about thirty seconds before it finally died. I was counting my blessings, because that was one of those spots where, if it had died where it was stuck, nothing short of a Cat could have pulled it out. Anyway, I suspected that the alternator was dead, so I boosted the truck and managed to get it started again. I was able to drive about ten kilometers back towards town before it ran down again. We kept boosting it and driving it in little bursts until we finally got it to town. Sometimes it would work for two minutes with no problems, and other times for fifteen, before all of a sudden the voltmeter went from full charge to red-line in seconds, and then the truck would power out about three or four minutes later. The Dodge dealership in Hinton agreed to look at it, even though it was 2pm on a Saturday afternoon by that point. I told them how important it was to have the vehicle working, and what I thought was the problem, and said that I was worried that they wouldn't be able to find anything wrong and would send me on my way with an unreliable vehicle. They said not to worry, and two hours later I had a brand new alternator in the vehicle, no questions asked, under full warranty. I will definitely be using that dealership to service everything from now on, since we've had such big problems with some other dealerships in the past.

June 19th: We've had quite a few problems in past years with guys who work for the oil companies - we've seen them stealing planting bags off the roads, and have seen some serious driving safety issues with oil patch pickups on the roads, and some of our planters have had run-ins with oil rig guys in various towns. Today, an oil patch guy came into camp and asked to see the boss. I was a little nervous to see what he wanted - I thought he was probably visiting to complain about our planters parking on an oil lease or something. However, he pulled a wallet out of his pocket that belonged to one of our planters. Apparently, he had found it on a dirt road quite a few kilometers from camp. That was really nice of him to spend the time driving around trying to find us, so he could give it back.

Click HERE to see pictures from June of 2005.

June 20th: We're starting three days of work for Alberta Newsprint Company today. We're working out of our existing camp, to save the hassle of a camp move, but it means long drives of over an hour each way to and from the blocks each day.

June 21st: One of the small crews had to use a helicopter to fly into their blocks today. It was a bit of a hassle, since they had a total of about 13 blocks to plant in one day, just doing the roads and burnpiles on blocks that had been planted in previous years. I was on the radio all day directing traffic, since the chopper was in the air for a significant part of the day. I was very surprised in the middle of the afternoon to hear a call on the radio from our cook, considering that we had to drive almost 150 kilometers from camp to get to the blocks, and considering that I was having problems hearing the crews on the blocks who were using handhelds. Stephane just called to ask me to pick up three tubs of ice cream on the way home!

June 22nd: Another frustrating day. We knew that we had to plant a lot of trees in order to wrap up the ANC work today, and that it would be a long day. The planters on Sumaya's crew weren't impressed when they walked two kilometers into a new block to find that it had already been planted the previous year, and ANC didn't know that it had already been planted. The rest of the day went fairly smoothly, until it started to rain at about 4pm. We didn't finish all of the trees until 7:30pm, which was a bit frustrating. After the long drive back to camp (stopping in town for supper on the way through) we discovered that our shade tent in camp had collapsed again during a wind storm. The shade tents with wooden frames just don't seem to hold up to nature.

June 23rd: I must have gotten about 70 phone calls in the space of one hour this morning. My phone was so busy with incoming calls that I couldn't keep it charged, and it was plugged in the whole time. I would hate to see my phone bill.

June 24th: More helicopter work today. This is the "spring break" for our camp, but I've got a dozen planters working in Swan Hills for Millar Western for two days, finishing up a section of roads & burns that is not convenient for Aaron's camp to finish.

June 25th: We finished up the Millar Western work today with no hitches, and tomorrow I should have a day to devote to catching up on paperwork before the planters start the Weldwood summer trees on the 27th.

June 27th: We had a tough job getting everyone to the blocks this morning. Lowell had gotten his trucks serviced on the days off, and the Dodge dealership was supposed to leave the truck outside, with the keys in the fuel cap, so we could pick it up yesterday (Sunday afternoon) when they were closed. However, they forgot to leave the keys, and Lowell had forgotten to cut a spare set, so the truck had to be left in town for the night. Luckily, between my truck and the checker's truck and Byron's trucks, we had enough extra seats to fit everybody. Later in the day, we finally picked up Lowell's truck, but my truck got stuck and had to be left on the block overnight since we didn't have sufficient equipment on the spot to pull it out of the ditch.

June 29th: The last few days have been pretty cold and wet and rainy, and the blocks have been small, spread-out, and green.

June 30th: One of the planters got hit by a falling tree today. It was one of the large aspen trees that got left behind on the block on purpose, for wildlife or something like that. Luckily, it wasn't a direct hit, as it would have crushed him. The branches still cut his arms up enough that he needed a first aid attendant to bandage him up, but he was more shaken by the near-miss than actually hurt.

July 1st: We've got big problems. The K&C Nursery in Red Deer can't give us our trees that we need for the next few days, because the weather has been so miserable lately that the seedlings haven't hardened off. We did some major rearranging with the schedule for the upcoming weeks, delaying the plans for the K&C trees and picking up trees from other nurseries early. However, the problem is that the trees that are available now (from other nurseries) were intended to be planted from a different camp near Hinton, on a different set of blocks. We're going to have to move camp to Hinton tomorrow to make everything work out for the planters.

July 3rd: Our checker got a flat tire on the camp move. Unfortunately, because of the mud tires, the axle jack wasn't big enough to jack up the truck, and before the people in the truck figured that they could have dug a hole under the tire to change it, they called Roadside Assistance. A tow truck driver came and changed their tire, and advised them to re-tighten the lug nuts on the wheel after 20 kilometers, but they didn't check it until 80 kilometers later, in Hinton. Unfortunately, by then, two of the nuts had worked loose and stripped, and the posts were ruined, so the truck had to be left at the dealership for repairs. That will be an expensive mistake, since it was our own fault.

July 4th: One of our new planters was told by Rachel, our checker, that her trees were bad. The planter said, "I'd like a second opinion from the person who actually does the pay plots." Rachel said Ok, then paused for a second, and said, "Alright then. I'm the pay plotter, your trees need better screefs, go fix them." I thought that was pretty funny, and the planter reworked the area with no further argument. The planter did admit afterwards that her trees had in fact needed improvement, after she went over them. We try to be pretty careful about meeting quality standards here.

July 5th: We had problems today on a chopper block where the block didn't seem to match the map properly, in terms of treatment in certain sections. There was a lot of discussion in the afternoon, trying to figure out what was going on, and at the end of the day we ended up being unable to finish the areas indicated on the map. It turned out later that there was a small problem with the map, but it worked out fine in the end even though it was frustrating not being able to wrap the block up in the one day.

July 8th: Yet another tree disaster - the Woodmere Nursery forgot to lift our trees for tomorrow's delivery, and we're almost out of trees in camp. When the truck driver showed up to pick up the trees this morning, they said, "What trees?" We got on the phone and pointed out the order, which had been attached to an email that they had received already, and they realized that they had screwed up. After some quick planning, they agreed to lift the trees overnight tonight, and have them ready for shipping by 7am tomorrow, and the truck can probably pick them up and have them to us on the blocks by about noon. With any luck, we'll only have about an hour of down-time before the new trees arrive.

July 9th: Well, the truck with the trees arrived three hours late because the idiot truck driver stopped for a lunch break in Grand Cache, because the dispatcher hadn't told him what a rush we were in to get the trees. He wondered why everyone was so pissed off when he finally showed up, not realizing that 50 planters were sitting waiting for trees at the time. We won't be using that trucking company again, a small independent company that we haven't used before. The downtime will probably put us back half a day at the end of the contract, which could eventually cost us at least $4000-5000 since we're on such a constrained schedule right now. We're in the start of a ten-day stretch during which we have to plant 1.2 million trees, and then we have one day free to break camp and move it to BC to start our last contract. I don't think the trucker fully appreciated the cost of the downtime, until I said that we would have been just as badly off if we had run one of our pickups into a brick wall today.

July 12th: Gateway Honda in Edson has been saving us from a major disaster, by keeping our quads running. We've only got four quads in camp right now for the four crews, and it seems that every day or second day, sometime happens to one, so I've been running back and forth to Gateway a lot in the past two weeks, and crews are sharing quads to keep things flowing. Today, a shifter came off a quad, and we had to keep it running in 2nd gear all morning to deliver trees until I finally had time to break free and run to Edson to get another shifter.

July 14th: I spent part of the afternoon trying to pull Lowell's truck out of a sandpit. One of his crew had driven it down a road that I told them not to drive on, and of course it got buried in the sand.

July 17th: Shelley got stung by a hornet today, for the first time in her life. She didn't realize that she was allergic to stings. She felt fine at first, but after about fifteen minutes she collapsed on the block. Luckily, Paul (a level three first aid attendant) was working beside her and dealt with the problem immediately. After a couple hours, she was fine, but she is always going to carry anti-histamines and an epi-pen while planting from now on, in case she gets stung again. It was a bit of a surprise, since she's a third year planter. Today was the first day for major stings in camp - half a dozen people got hit since it was the first really hot and sunny day in quite a while.

July 18th: The Hinton landfill just raised their prices on disposal of wax cardboard (tree boxes) from $10 per ton to $200 per ton!! That's crazy. We borrowed the five-ton truck from one of the other camps nearby, and filled it to the roof with flat empty boxes, and trucked it to the Edson landfill (which was pretty fair, since most of the trees were planted on blocks around Edson). The people at the Edson landfill said that it was the biggest single load that they have ever seen come through. Next year, I'm going to look for someone with a farm or ranch just outside of Hinton who would be willing to store all the wax cardboard out of sight somewhere, and then just burn the pile in the winter. Surely someone will be willing to do that if we offer to pay them $500 for their assistance.

July 19th: We finished up yesterday with the work for Weldwood. The project was completed with relatively few major hitches this year, thankfully, and we managed to get done in time. Tomorrow we drive back to British Columbia and get ready to start a contract for Forestry, working in Vanderhoof.

Click HERE to see pictures from early July of 2005, working in Alberta.

July 21st: The reefer showed up at 5pm to unload our first load of trees, but got stuck while turning around. It took four hours, three pickups, two tow-ropes, and one winch to get it out.

July 22nd: We had a big camp meeting this morning about stockhandling, to start the contract off. Standards are quite a bit different here than in Alberta, so it will take a bit of adjustment by the planters to do things properly here. However, there are only two blocks on the entire contract, which is interesting. One is about 260,000 trees, and the other is 600,000 trees. That will certainly streamline things, since the truck can deliver reefer loads of trees to a shade tent that is set up only half a kilometer from one of the blocks.

July 25th: Our camp got our first stock-handling fine in six years today, and I had to fire our second-fastest planter for improper stock-handling procedures. Not a good way to leave a good impression. However, we did have a good "Christmas in July" turkey dinner celebration this evening, and some of the crews exchanged small (and silly) gifts.

July 28th: A hummingbird flew into my truck this morning while I was working on paperwork, and landed on my hand. That was pretty strange. It was pretty tiny - its actual body was only about as big as my thumb, although it looked bigger when it was all filled out with feathers. I took some pictures, then opened the window wider and he flew away.

July 30th: One of our trucks got towed into town the other day because it wouldn't start. I suspected it was a fuel problem, and I was right: water in the fuel. I've had about four camp meetings this year to discuss the importance of keeping covers on all the jerry cans and fuel barrels, but people are forgetful. It's too bad that it takes a major problem like this, when they can't get to work because their truck is dead, to make some of them realize how important these issues are. Of course, it's worse that it is usually the foreman who are the root of the problem because they are the ones who usually deal with fuel.

August 1st: We finished our trees today, exactly on time! It was nice, after a lot of thunderstorms in the past couple days, to be able to break camp in the afternoon, not in a panic, with the sun shining.

August 2nd: Well, I should have known that things were running too smoothly this season. One of my crew's Big Box trucks got stolen this morning, from behind Moxie's in Prince George, along with two quads that were in it, and a lot of personal belongings. The RCMP didn't sound too optimistic - stolen vehicles are a big problem here in Prince George. They figured that we might get the truck back, but there is little chance of recovering the quads.

August 3rd: This was ironic. One of my planters (Shellagh) was driving to Edmonton and called her foreman to say that she saw a Folklore truck on the side of the highway in Willow River, with nobody around it. She thought that was strange, since she thought that none of the camps were still planting. The foreman called us, since he knew that we'd lost a truck. We went out to take a look, and it turned out to be our stolen truck! Of course, the quads were gone.

August 4th: Well, we wrapped up the paperwork today and turned in my truck, and got ready to fly back to New Brunswick. The stats this year were pretty impressed - our camp planted a record breaking 6,288,938 trees this summer. Our top planter put in 222,000 trees, and nine of our planters put in over 150,000 each. Most impressively, our top rookie planter was female, and four of our top seven planters were female! I can't wait to see how things pan out next year ...

Click HERE to see pictures from late July of 2005, working in Vanderhoof.

August 20th: Andy MacCallum sent me a bunch of photos that he took over the summer. They were taken with a better camera than my digital camera, so the quality of the photos is somewhat better. The focus is on planters from Tim and Sumaya's crew. These photos were taken at various points throughout the summer, not just on one or two contracts.

Click HERE to see Andy's photos from the Summer of 2005.

Check back here next year for more planting diaries, once the Summer 2006 planting season gets underway.