SUMMER 2006

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

April 23rd: Our first camp meeting took place this evening. It took four hours, and that was an "accelerated version" with only a brief safety meeting, and short-cuts in a few other areas. Next year, I'm going to have to make it a day-long event, with the first-year planters being there for the whole day, and the returning planters just taking part in the afternoon session. The amount of paperwork needed to comply with government and other regulations continues to grow every year.

April 24th: We got out to camp after a late start - just as we were about to leave the compound at noon, we got word not to let any of the vehicles out of the yard. The insurance was wrong on all of them, and all the front plates had to be changed. Another big problem arose after we got to camp: I had asked everyone to make sure that every truck was absolutely full of fuel before heading out to camp. Unfortunately, I forgot to check to see if anyone had brought gasoline for the generators and quads. When we got to camp, we realized that we had about one litre of gas in total, so we emptied out the diesel tank on the fuel truck into the other trucks, and sent Kent (one of our checkers) back into town for another tank of diesel and also for a dozen jerry cans with gas.

April 25th: Stephane (our cook) got up this morning to make breakfast at 4:30am, and realized that Kent hadn't come back to camp with the fuel. After a few minutes of organizing and contingency planning, I headed in to town to look for him, with instructions for Shelley to look after things in my absence and to give everyone instructions on what to do after breakfast if I didn't make it back. Eventually, I found him. Luckily, he hadn't gotten into an accident. He had just gotten completely lost trying to come back to camp, so he waited back out on the highway for me (overnight). After we got back to camp, we had a major safety meeting and pre-work conference, and then got started on the blocks in the afternoon. The first shift is always a painful one, but teaching the new employees about how to plant was fun. It's a long and slow and discouraging process for first-year planters. After a few hours of walking around and theoretical training, and talking about spacing and quality, I finally let them plant seventy trees each. Tomorrow morning, we will be looking at those same trees and identifying a lot of quality faults.

April 29th: Our first day off. I spent the day getting radios fixed and getting better tires on my truck, so I could pull out one of the other trucks that has been sitting in a mudhole for the past couple days.

May 1st: Ah, the first day of May. The month of May reminds most people of grass, sunshine, and buttercups. Of course, our camp woke up this morning to a layer of snow, so we didn't get started right away. Later in the afternoon, we heard a gunshot right beside the block. I went to investigate, and found a pair of hunters. Planting trees can be annoying enough without rifle slugs whizzing by, but things really go downhill when you find out that there is an injured bear running around the woods nearby and all the hunters can find is a sporadic blood trail.

May 4th: Jim said, "You may need a Unimog to get into those blocks, but see if you can try to get in with the trucks, if you have a few days of sun and the road dries up." I had a few days of sun, and tried, and I obviously made the wrong decision. Now I have a bumper ripped off, a dead winch, and another truck buried in the mud again. To add insult to injury, a Plymouth Reliant K-car came out of nowhere on the dirt road, and drove right up to where our trucks were getting stuck. I should have asked the driver to pull us out. What this camp needs is a fleet of sixty dirt bikes.

May 6th: I was driving down a logging road this evening, with the window open, going sixty kilometers per hour. Imagine my surprise when a ruffed grouse flew in through the open window and hit me. At least I didn't go off the road.

May 7th: Today's mid-afternoon snowstorm slowed production down a bit, although most planters managed to keep working through it. The dry tent is working overtime tonight though. It's a good thing we've got a kerosene heater instead of just a propane burner.

May 19th: We have bears everywhere. I would be surprised if I have seen less than a thousand bears in the past month. Driving around the blocks near camp after supper, it is common for me to see at least one bear every kilometer or two, and they are on the blocks with us pretty often. The strange thing is that they are not all skinny like they usually are in the spring. Maybe this is because of the really mild winter this year (or the past couple of years) which is allowing the population to increase. Maybe this is related to global warming?

Click HERE to see pictures from April and early May of 2006.

May 21st: This is unbelievable: even with the industry's strong demand for planters right now, so much so that inexperienced planters are getting job offers easily, I had to turn down two separate experienced veterans today who called me asking for work, both of whom are capable of 200,000+ tree seasons. Unfortunately, I don't have room in the vehicles for them because I haven't had much turnover this season (at least not yet).

May 22nd: Today was the first day of the Millar Western contract. We didn't get started until about lunch because of the pre-work conference. The specs on this contract are radically different from our last contract, and the planters will need a couple days to get used to the differences. For instance, on this contract, planting in mineral soil is an automatic fault, and excess trees in a plot don't cancel out planting faults.

May 23rd: The reefer that came yesterday contained about 260,000 trees. We put in about 28,000 trees yesterday, because it was the first day of the contract and a part-day for planting. However, we realized half-way through this afternoon that the second reefer was scheduled to show up tonight! Whoever scheduled that one was ambitious and has a lot more confidence in our production abilities right now than I do! Needless to say, we made a few quick phone calls to get tonight's reefer delayed by a couple days, since there was no way we were planting 232,000 trees in one day. I'd be happy to plant one quarter of that amount today.

May 24th: We were fogged out this morning. You can usually fly a helicopter in rain or snow, but not in fog. There were a few boxes of trees in the block from the previous day, so about twenty planters made the hour-long walk in to plant those boxes. I took the rest of the camp on a trip to some blocks pretty far away in Timue Creek (the only blocks on this contract that were road-accessible) so we could at least get a part-day in. We managed to get everyone planting by around noon, so we got a half-day out of it in the end. The problem with contracts that are purely helicopter access is that if you get four or five days of rain, which isn't that uncommon in Alberta at this time of year, it is pretty common for helicopters to be unable to fly until about 10am. Wet weather usually means morning fog which has to lift before the machines can fly.

May 25th: We were fogged out again, but this time we were prepared. I went up to the staging area before breakfast to confirm the weather, and then got back to camp before people were ready to leave. Knowing that we couldn't fly to our regular blocks, we drove the whole camp down to Timue Creek again and finished all the road-access blocks there. The problem now is that we're out of "backup blocks" so we're screwed if we get fogged out again.

May 26th: We were fogged out again. Most of the planters made the hour-long walk into the blocks, knowing that we were going to be patient and wait until we could fly. This was a bit painful, but it saved us a lot of time in the long run. When the fog finally lifted, all the planters were already in place, so we were able to start flying trees into the block immediately rather than spending the first hour flying the planters. I'm just happy that we have two helicopters available. Northern is working nearby for Vanderwell, and they only have one machine to get their crew in and out, which must be hurting their production somewhat.

May 29th: I had to dismiss one of the planters today due to a stockhandling problem. Millar Western has no tolerance for poor stockhandling.

May 30th: No surprise here - we were fogged out again. This morning we had a three-hour long game of three-legged baseball on the heli landing, until the fog cleared. We also had a first aid incident this afternoon: we had to fly one of the girls out of the block and take her to the hospital for a dislocated shoulder.

June 2nd: I got a call from the Dodge dealership in Stedtler early this morning. My trucks were supposed to get serviced in Hinton today, but this one in Stedtler (halfway across the province) was wondering where we were. I had called directory assistance earlier in the week to get the phone number for the Hinton dealership, and called ahead to make appointments. I thought it was strange that it had a 403 area code (southern Alberta) instead of 780 (northern Alberta), so I when I called them, I told them who I was, and asked, "Is this the dealership in Hinton?" The guy I was talking to said, "Yes it is, and I remember you from last year." Well, apparently there must have been static on the line when I asked if I was talking to the Hinton dealership so he didn't hear me correctly. It was more frustrating that he said he remembered me, because I've never been to Stedtler! But the most frustrating thing, of course, was that I ended up not being able to get the trucks serviced in Hinton because we had no appointments, which really sucked because Dodge dealerships in this area seem to consistently do much better work than the Ford dealerships.

Click HERE to see pictures from late May of 2006.

June 4th: We started working for West Fraser in Hinton this morning. The first block that I took people to was listed as "2WD" which means two-wheel drive truck access. However, I wish that I'd had time to go out and check out the block last night, because it definitely wasn't that easy to get to. On the way to the block, we had to drive through blocks that we had to use a helicopter to get to last year, and then when we were about a kilometer or so from today's block, the road ended completely, so we had a 20 minute walk-in. The block was nice though.

June 7th: Another minor disaster this morning. Our fuel truck filled up in town late last night - no problems there. I asked him to top up the tree reefers this morning, since one of them was starting to run low, but then we discovered that several foremen had completely drained the tidy tank early this morning before breakfast. By the time it went into town to fill up the tank again, and got back out to camp, the reefer had run dry (had I realized that it would run out of fuel in those couple hours, I would have turned it off, but the fuel gauge had shown a quarter tank so I didn't think it was that low). Now you might think that's not a big problem, because the trees would certainly stay cool for the hour or so that the reefer was off, and we could just fill up the tank and restart it. However, restarting a reefer that has run dry is a painful process, as I've no doubt mentioned in past diaries since it seems to happen every second year. The fuel pump has to be manually primed, then it still takes a while for the engine to turn over, and the battery usually isn't strong enough to do the job in that kind of a situation so you have to boost it from a truck while you're doing everything else. I really need to put together a page here with photos to show foremen and supervisors how to do it, because it's a tough job if you haven't done it before. Anyway, I got it going again eventually, but I was certainly cursing myself for letting it run dry in the first place.

June 8th: We had a safety audit this morning, and then ironically, had a minor equipment accident this afternoon. Someone was loading a quad into my pickup, and was using an earth ramp instead of tailgate ramps (because it was raining and we didn't want the quad to slip), but the quad ended up sliding somehow on the wet ground and damaged my tailgate.

June 10th: Not everything in these diaries is bad news and problems. Today, three of our crews were on the nicest block that I've seen in about five years - it was perfectly flat with 100,000 beautiful soft mounds. The planters were very happy at the end of the day. At the end of the year, most people will forget all of the bad days and hard land and rain and other problems, and they will remember this block.

June 11th: ... and to balance out yesterday's great day, we got to fill holes on an overgrown winter dessication fill-plant block today.

June 13th: My quad developed a major oil leak yesterday, so I figured that I'd take it to Gateway this morning since there was another quad available on our block, working perfectly. However, when I got back from dropping the quad off (a two hour round trip), I found that a stick had come up under the good quad. The stick bent the shift lever, and snapped the transmission post connection inside the transmission so it couldn't shift gears anymore. Dan & Chris spent the day walking boxes into the block from the truck, so the planters wouldn't have any down time. After that headache was dealt with, Aaron & I took our 5-ton truck (full of garbage) to the dump. We also took a second 1-ton pickup and a trailer, both of which were also full of garbage. However, on the way to the dump, the 5-ton also broke down. The problem was that the brakes were completely shot, rotors worn through and everything. Luckily, I probably won't be blamed for this equipment problem, since I've only had the 5-ton since late last night.

June 15th: We are now done working in the Embarras area south of Edson, and our camp was moved out yesterday. However, I got a phone message this morning from Kent, our head checker. Yesterday evening, I couldn't figure out where he was, but I thought that he was in town watching the hockey game (based on what he had told me at breakfast). It turns out that I was correct, but afterwards, unknown to myself, he went back out to the campsite with another checker (Bronwyn) to pick up some gear that was left behind. They got stuck, and they figured that they would have to spend the night in the truck. Luckily some guys from NGR (Next Generation Reforestation) drove by and saw Kent, standing in the rain in his underwear (so he wouldn't get his clothes wet), trying to dig out the truck. They couldn't pull his truck out, but they did take Kent & Bronwyn to the NGR camp, set them up with a place to sleep in the dry tent, and fed them breakfast this morning. We got the truck pulled out after lunch today. Thanks to everyone in the NGR crew for helping them out! After that, I got word that I had to go bail one of my planters out of jail, because he had just been picked up for lighting firecrackers by the local Esso cardlock station.

June 16th: Another medical problem today - one of the planters was planting and his shovel got caught on a branch behind him as he was walking. When he tried to yank the shovel forward, he separated his shoulder. People with a history of shoulder, knee, wrist, or back problems usually should not be planting trees. Even problems from peoples' childhood sometimes come back to haunt them.

June 18th: We finished our spring trees today, three days sooner than I had originally anticipated. That's a pretty good feeling - not one that I'm used to. However, we now have about six days off before we start our camp's next official contract, another short one for Millar Western. A few people have been bugging me to try to find extra work.

Click HERE to see pictures from early June of 2006.

June 19th: I have been coerced into taking a crew to the Spray Lakes contract that one of our other camps is planting. Jeremy Remple is the supervisor for that contract. Apparently, it is not going well - they are planting eight year old fill blocks, and it is an obstacle planting contract so each tree has to be about six inches to the north-east side of an "obstacle." The "obstacle" is supposed to protect the tree somehow when the chinook winds hit it in the winter. I guess that maybe the obstacle prevents the snow from melting around the tree, and therefore the seedling isn't exposed to winter dessication and frost? To top things off, the planters are being asked to screef completely through a very thick grass mat. I have a few vets who will find this ground to be very easy, but this should be a good "character builder" contract for all the first-year planters that I have with me. They have only worked on easy, low-priced ground so far this year, so they'll learn a lot about planting on tougher ground, and hopefully it will make them appreciate site-prepped ground a lot more.

June 20th: Today we found out that the Spray Lake planting specs were even tougher than had been rumoured. To top it off, the blocks are an hour's drive from camp, and then a two to three kilometer walk-in, so we're leaving camp at 7am and getting to our caches at 9am. On a positive note, everybody managed to plant at least one box of trees today with pretty reasonable quality. However, nobody is going to get rich here.

June 22nd: We had a cattle drive come through our block today, complete with cowboys and everything. It was pretty exciting, but it was definitely tricky to get my quad up and down the quad trail after all the cattle had walked up it. And not to so fun have cow shit flying up into my face all afternoon - hopefully I don't catch pinkeye. The access here is fairly difficult, so it's a good thing that everybody is planting such low numbers. I was looking after 15 planters today and I travelled a total of 92 kilometers on the quad throughout the day while bringing trees to them.

June 23rd: I saw a wolf today from about 30 feet away, the first time that I've seen one in years. This area is loaded with wildlife. In the few days that we've been on this particular contract, we've seen dozens of coyotes, several large owls, and many domestic oddities on local farms including elk, bison, and llamas.

June 24th: We finished our pair of blocks at Spray Lakes this afternoon, and then packed up our gear. It was good to be moving on, although some of the planters enjoyed the harder style of planting in the end. It had also been good to see all the guys on Greg Mancuso's crew who worked in my camp last year under Byron Dohms. After we got packed up, I drove from Sundre back up to Edson to get ready for flying trees at Millar Western tomorrow.

Click HERE to see pictures from the Spray Lakes contract.

June 27th: Most of my camp (except for the people who went to Spray Lakes) are now working for Millar Western in Whitecourt. We're doing a short job out of a hotel for a few days, before our main contract starts up again on July 1st down in Hinton. Millar Western is an interesting company to work for. I enjoy it, but they have the absolutely strictest stockhandling rules in the industry, as far as I am aware. The foresters at Millar Western can put other legends like "242 George" (Dawson Creek and 100 Mile) to shame. Anyway, we made it absolutely clear at the pre-work conference that everyone had to have sponges in their planting bags, to keep the plugs on the seedlings moist and cool while the planters are carrying them around. Today, Paul was checking bags and got to one rookie in particular. I shall spare that planter the embarassment of world-wide publicity and call him by his new nickname, "Sponge Bob." Paul asked Sponge Bob if he had any sponges in his planting bags. Bob quickly replied, "Yes, I certainly do." Paul then asked if the sponges were moist. Bob said, "Yes, they definitely are." Paul then asked to see the sponges. Bob confidently took his silvicool inserts out of his bags, and then pulled out the sponges, which were UNDER his inserts, instead of inside the inserts with the trees. I guess this is one of those stories that you can only really appreciate if you're a tree planter.

June 30th: Thanks to some really rooty ground and problems with open holes, our three day contract turned into five. We finished the block today, but it took a huge effort. Earlier in the season I had been pretty impressed that all of our "last day of the contract" situations had resulted in all the trees getting finished by 5pm. Not so today .... the earliest of us left town for the block at about 5:20am to get an early start, and the last trees got planted at about 8:30pm this evening.

July 1st: We're back to work for West Fraser Hinton again today ... it was pretty tiring for me, since I didn't make it back down to camp and get settled in until almost 2am last night, and I had to be up at 6am this morning. We have somewhere around two and a half million trees left to plant in the next four weeks. That could be pretty challenging, since we've barely planted that many so far between April 24th and the end of June, a space of about ten weeks.

July 3rd: Aaron, one of my foremen, wisely left his truck at Jerry Ford in Edson to get serviced during the break, and told them that he didn't need it fixed for four days. However, he forgot that we started work again on a Sunday, so when he came back to work, he had no truck - it was locked up at Jerry Ford for the weekend. We did some rearranging of the vehicles and used a checker's truck to squeeze everyone in for the five days at Millar Western, so he was able to get through the week without his truck. However, when he tried to retrieve the truck again a couple days ago for the West Fraser contract, he foolishly realized that it was still locked up at the dealership, and it was a long weekend! We have had to drive people out to the blocks in shifts for the past couple days. Anyway, the story is retarded enough already, but it doesn't end here. Aaron finally drove in to Edson this morning to get his truck back, and unbelievably, Jerry Ford hadn't serviced it! That dealership has given us the worst service I have ever encountered, and I've had a lot of truck problems over the years.

July 4th: Fire season is definitely upon us. The Planting Company had a fire start near one of their Blue Ridge blocks last week. West Fraser Hinton has already had two major fires on their license so far this year, and there may have been another one near our camp this evening from what we could see. We also found out today that three of the blocks that we planted on the Millar Western contract at the end of May just got burned up today. We're going to be planting some more wildfire burned blocks here at West Fraser within the next couple weeks. We've had 30 degree plus weather and hot sunny days for about ten days straight now, and we're getting lightning storms through the area almost every evening, which are starting more fires. There is a constant haze in the air right now from all the wood smoke in the area.

July 5th: I got a flat tire this afternoon. The interesting thing is that we are "five-for-five" so far this month, with one flat tire every day. The good old Cooper STT's are taking a real beating.

July 6th: Jim called me at about 9:20am this morning to ask how things were going. I replied, "So far today, we've had a bear tear up a cache and scatter things all over the main Amoco haul road, we've had another bear chew up the seat on Tim's brand new quad, we've had our sixth flat tire of the week, and the ETV is being pulled out of the ditch right now by a backhoe because it is so badly stuck. Aside from that, things are going pretty good so far." Half an hour later I got back out to one of the blocks with a second truckload of trees, to find that the planters had been evacuated to another block because of H2S problems (a poisonous gas that leaks from some of the oil leases we work close to).

July 7th: Jeremy Rempel's truck and quad got stolen last night, right out of camp. Stolen trucks are getting to be a bigger and bigger problem every year. I've heard through the grapevine that Summit had a couple trucks stolen already with a lot of planters' gear, and I'm sure that other companies have lost trucks too. We're going to have to start chaining the quads into the trucks at night in camp, and locking the trucks and pulling the fuses too.

July 9th: We finally broke the eight-day long "flat tire streak" today - we went a whole day without getting a flat on any of the trucks. However, we managed to accidentally lock the keys inside of a truck today. It's a good thing that I've learned to break into a locked truck in an average of less than sixty seconds (if it has electric door locks). Of course, that doesn't say much for the security of your $60,000 SUV, does it?

July 10th: Aaron's truck slid into a ditch yesterday because the roads are so greasy. Going 20 km/h is considered to be "too fast for conditions" on some of the roads here when it is raining, especially if they don't have pre-made ruts to keep the wheels on the road. Anyway, I went with Kent today to go pull his truck out of the ditch, and found out that Aaron had locked it and forgot to give us the key. I'm not sure why he bothered to lock it - the odor coming out of his truck should be an effective anti-theft device.

July 11th: We had a hectic day today. We planted the last few thousand trees on one side of our West Fraser summer contract, broke camp, moved camp, set up camp, and even got some trees planted on the new side of the contract, all in the same day. However, when looking through the maps tonight, I realized that we're in for some serious punishment over the next couple of weeks. We have 18 days to plant about two million trees, and it appears that we have about 180 separate blocks and/or treatment units to complete, spread out over 2500 square kilometers of area (south of Hinton and Edson). As a hint of some of the challenges that we'll be facing shortly, we discovered this afternoon that one of our first blocks was already planted by another crew or company (we learned this after we arrived to plant it), and we also found out that we don't have maps for sixty of our blocks.

July 12th: We still have ten reefer loads of trees to plant in the next couple of weeks - that alone will generate about 10,000 cardboard boxes that have to go to the dump. That should be enough garbage to fill about 20 canopy trucks. Unfortunately, the nearest landfill that can take the boxes is 150 kilometers away. Next season, I have to find a local farmer near Edson or Hinton with a ranch or homestead and offer him $500 to dump all of our empty cardboard boxes on his land throughout the summer, and then he can have a big bonfire some time during the winter to get rid of them.

July 14th: We had our first real vehicle breakdown of the summer today (I'm very surprised that we made it this far). One of Ben's trucks got a flat tire (surprise) while at the back of a very inaccessible block. He tried to change it, but the outsides of three of the lug nuts were stripped, so the flat could not be removed. He then had to call Roadside Assistance to pick up his truck, but of course, the tow truck would not go into the block, so he had to drive the truck out over a bunch of waterbars and deactivation, ruining the rim of the wheel in the process. Ford RoadSide Assistance towed the truck to Kal Tire for repairs (that shows just how bad the service problems are at Fords in this area), but it will be a few days before they can get the wheel and the lug posts replaced.

July 17th: The planters' love affair with West Fraser Hinton is starting to lose its shine. They like working for the company, but we're planting some really green older blocks, instead of the faster creamy blocks that we had based our bid on. On some of these blocks, the planters are trying to find mounds in hay and fireweed up to their chests, and of course the prices are the same as if the blocks were bare. The next couple weeks are going to be very difficult.

July 18th: I just found out that a helicopter working on a Northern Reforestation project crashed yesterday, but luckily nobody was hurt. There have been four helicopter crashes in this area in the past three weeks. I was thinking earlier this summer about getting my rotary wing license, but maybe I should re-consider that as a career change.

July 19th: Our problems with Ford in Alberta just keep coming. One of our other camps just had their ETV up on a hoist at the Ford in Slave Lake, and somehow it fell off. Needless to say, that truck is now broken.

July 20th: I was driving Max's truck down an old "goat trail" this morning and heard a big thump underneath. I looked behind the truck and saw that the truck had somehow unearthed a buried stump that had been in the road. I stopped and moved the stump off the road, and didn't think anything more of it. A while later, I drove down a long and narrow winding road into a block, and walked around for a bit. However, when I tried to leave, I discovered that the truck wouldn't go into reverse anymore. I got underneath the truck and found that the stump had put a huge dent in the transmission pan - I'm surprised that it had kept going forward without any problems. Anyway, I spent most of the rest of the day towing the truck out of the block and getting it in to Edson for repairs.

July 21st: Another truck problem tonight - Sean's truck had a blown out steady bearing. Luckily, we were able to limp it to town at about 25 km/h.

July 22nd: Several people missed work again today due to heat stroke. Heat stroke has been our biggest "injury" or cause of lost time this season.

July 23rd: Map problems continue to plague us. We had two crews go into separate blocks today, only to find that they were already planted. We normally try to investigate all of the blocks ahead of time to minimize problems with screwups like this, but with so many small blocks here, and several crews doing more than one block per day, it is very difficult to find the time to check them all in advance. We also killed a quad today after its oil line got ripped off by a stick - the engine is probably seized now because the damage wasn't obvious until the quad died suddenly. Naturally, the dead quad was at the very back of a very inaccessible block, so it took well over an hour of five people pushing and a second quad towing to get the dead quad out to the road. On a positive note, it poured while we were towing the quad out. That's actually a good thing - today is the first day that it has rained (during daylight hours) since June 23rd - an entire month. So many people have had heat stroke in the last few weeks that nobody minded the rain.

July 24th: One million trees to go, and I'm hoping that we can finish them in just eight more planting days. I'm obviously going to have to ask our office for extra help, since the blocks are very, very poor considering the prices.

July 25th: Ben came in at supper to say that he had just had his worst day ever as a foreman. Among quite a few other problems, he lost a box of trees out of his truck on a logging road, and a logging truck ran over them. I told him that the day wasn't over yet, and it could always get worse.

July 26th: On a good note, the quad that we towed out of the block the other day does NOT have a seized engine, and the repairs were very minimal. On a bad note, the quad that we used when we were towing the dead one is now screwed - it is belching blue smoke constantly and needs a ring job.

July 28th: Some of our company's other camps are finishing up now, so hopefully my camp will have some help shortly. People are starting to get worried because I told them last week that we should be done on August 3rd, but then the blocks took another turn for the worse and we've gotten slowed down again.

July 30th: My camp is now really getting to be quite full. We have four guest crews here now, bringing the camp up to about eighty planters. It's valet parking only, and the inside of the dry tent looks like a terrorist attack on a Chinese laundrymat.

August 2nd: The last couple of days have been absolutely crazy with so many people here. Despite the tougher blocks, we've been chewing through the trees pretty quickly. We've also had four more quad breakdowns, several more blocks that were already planted when we arrived on them, and a couple dozen other minor headaches to deal with. It's been fun though, in a sort of sadomasochistic way, to keep the logistics organized for so many people. And despite all the problems, things HAVE actually gone pretty smoothly this shift. Stephane has been pulling his hair out though: the new crews are all mostly male, and our food consumption per capita is much higher than it was with my original core camp.

August 3rd: I gave a big pep talk this morning. The camp is back down to normal size now, because the guest crews have left (to keep things sane as we wrap up). I told the planters that we had to put in about 110,000 trees to finish today, with forty-four people planting, and almost everybody wanted to finish today even if it meant a late dinner. Everyone left camp in a good mood, revved up and ready to pound. Too bad we all got stopped by a train for half an hour as soon as we left camp. The crew I went with today also managed to get a flat tire on the way to the block. Then, to put the icing on the cake, once everyone was set up and planting, I decided to drive a few boxes of trees into the back of one of the deeper sections of the block to make things easier for the planters there. I made it about 100 meters into the block before a stick came up through the footrest and almost broke my foot, and then it ripped the front left tie-rod end out so that the wheel almost fell off. I cursed for a minute, then turned the quad around to see if I could limp it back out to the road, and immediately another stick came up and punctured the front right tire. That's the funny thing about planting - no matter how badly things are going, you can always count on things to get worse.

August 4th: Done. We finished pretty much all the trees yesterday, except for a few boxes that the foremen planted this morning. Camp got broken today, and those of us that stuck around to clean up were finally out of there by 4pm after some really creative packing and a whole lot of swearing and jamming gear into all of the trucks. We got into town and cleaned up so that everyone could have a final meal together at 7pm at Boston Pizza. On my way to dinner, at 6:58pm, I got a call from Kent. He had been off plotting while we broke camp, and his truck was broken down in the woods, and he wondered if I could come rescue him ...

Click HERE to see pictures from the West Fraser summer (July/August) contract.

Final Notes: This year we had another fairly successful season. Not our best, but by no means our worst. The contracts were pretty decent up until the middle of June, although our July contract was quite disappointing compared to what we had expected. We ended up with about eighty planting days, and put in about 5.3 million trees during that time, with our top rookie planting about 111,000 trees and our top veteran planting about 218,000 trees. The industry as a whole started to see some minor price increases this year due to the labour shortage and the excess amount of planting to be done (pine beetle, etc.), and I think next summer we'll really see some improvements. Yes, I'll be back again in the summer of 2007 ...