SUMMER 2007
Click here to see information about the people working with our camp this season.
April 21st: I arrived in Prince George, far earlier than I wanted to. After signing out my truck and cell phone and a bunch of other useful stuff in the afternoon, I went to bed early. I'll be taking re-certification courses for the next several days: H2S (poisonous gas) on Sunday, First Aid on Monday, Chain Saw Safety on Tuesday, and S-100 Fire Suppression on Wednesday.
April 26th: The first interesting development of the season has happened already: one of my foremen is missing in action. I hope she didn't crash on the highway when she was driving here from Ontario. She's three days late, and she isn't answering her phone or email, so I'm assuming that she and her crew aren't showing up. That's slightly annoying, but I hired enough people this summer that I'm sure we'll manage fine without her. However, I'll never consider hiring a foreman from another company again.
April 29th: We drove to Kamloops and set up our first camp today. The camp site is fantastic - it's going to be like we're working a real job. While unpacking my trailer, which has all my stuff from last year, I discovered that I have 144 socks. That's a "gross" of socks. And not surprisingly, the socks are pretty gross.
April 30th: We spent almost the entire day having pre-work conferences. The first one (held at the Ministry of Forests) lasted from 8am until noon, with the forester only talking to the foremen and the checkers. After that, we grabbed all of the planters, and had another pre-work with everybody out on one of our blocks. That lasted until about 3:30pm. After that, we sent the vets home, and spent the next couple hours starting to train the rookies in microsite selection, without any trees (since we weren't allowed to plant any trees today). One of the rookies left this afternoon after the pre-work. That's definitely a new record - showing up and then leaving before we started planting.
May 1st: Today was our first official day of planting. The heartache begins. The first shift is incredibly annoying for myself and the foremen, as we try to teach all the first-year planters how to plant properly. I'm going to have so many headaches for the next few days that I'm probably not even going to bother adding anything about planting to this diary for a week.
May 4th: Well, we had our first vehicle accident of the summer today. One of our trucks crumpled some woman's car in the Tim Horton's parking lot (our driver went in and found the woman to tell her what had happened).
May 7th: We've been planting blocks this week that are located right beside the Birken Forest Monastery, which is hidden up here in the woods. It's a bit strange to see monks wandering around in the woods all the time, but they've been very friendly, and actually invited us to tea. Unfortunately, we did not have time to visit them, but it seemed like an interesting place.
May 8th: The last week has been typical. Lots of replanting, lots of frustration (on the part of the foremen), lots of stuff breaking, lots of sore people. Two more first-year planters quit today, bringing the total thus far to four. I expect to lose two more before the end of this contract. We have twenty-five new planters this year, and my vet to rookie ratio is pretty weak (compared to previous years) at 50:50. I figured this year that we'd lose about a quarter of the first-year planters on the first contract.
May 14th: Another accident this morning. Someone spilled a cup of hot tea on someone else's foot, and the tea was so hot that the girl got second degree burns, and the skin sloughed right off her foot. She obviously won't be able to plant for a while.
May 10th: Last week, we did a safety simulation in camp, which was a full-blown practice scenario of a simulated accident/first-aid incident. Afterwards, one of the first aid kits was not secured properly on one of the trucks, and we lost a bit of gear on the highway. A fellow named Bruce Elvins from Mibroc Construction found the gear, tracked us down through the Folklore name on the equipment, and managed to let us know that he found it. To top it off, he even found out where we were staying, and dropped the gear off in our camp. Now that is a good deed - thanks Bruce!
May 15th: One of the rookies got angry at a stick that was in his way today, and swung his shovel at it. The stick bounced back and hit him in the head, and split his head open. Kent called me on the radio and said, "Yeah, I was just driving through Greg's block and one of the new guys just came crawling up out of the ditch, with blood all over his head. I told him to sit down for a few minutes."
May 16th: When I was at the dump today, I got to film a front-end loader crushing a boat. I'm not sure why there was a large boat at the Kamloops dump, but it was pretty exciting for me. Trips to the dump aren't always this entertaining.
May 17th: Today was a day off for the camp. I had a pretty easy day. I had a truck servicing appointment at 8am, then Mark Josefson and I loaded a reefer and a 5-ton truck full of trees (by hand, of course), then I took Foreman Dan out to show him his blocks for tomorrow, and I dropped off our first aid trailer at the blocks. Those jobs took me until 10pm, then I went home and went to bed.
May 18th: We're starting our last shift of the contract. There have been a lot of injuries so far. It used to be that people just worked through their injuries, or quit. However, too many people are taking time off to heal. It's obviously necessary for some of the more significant injuries, but it's really hurting our production, and costing us a lot of overhead because of the non-productive seats in the trucks. And I'm still getting tons of reports of shortages of workers in other camps and companies.
May 19th: Today was one of our best suppers ever: BBQ hamburgers on a nice sunny day, with a whole bunch of different salads and sides. I had seven quarter-pounders for supper. I can't understand why I felt hungry again just an hour later. Everyone (including myself) is losing weight pretty quickly, despite how much they're eating. Shelley was saying that she cooked 210 eggs the other morning, and that was just a tiny portion of what the camp ate for breakfast. On a separate note, two of the planters had to go to the hospital tonight for hand infections. One was put onto an IV immediately and the doctor cut open his hand. After he was released a few hours later, he decided he wanted to run back to camp instead of waiting for a ride. He ran about five kilometers up from the Kamloops hospital toward camp before we picked him up, and he had so much energy that he was bouncing around in the truck. I wonder if I can order a round of IV drips for everyone in camp?
May 20th: I got some good video footage of some wild bighorn sheep on the way to the blocks this morning, and again on the way home.
May 21st: We meet some really strange people while we're out working on our blocks sometimes. The other day, I met a girl from the University of Calgary who was doing research near our blocks, looking for one particular endangered species of bird. She turned out to be quite interesting to talk to, and very normal, which is a rarity. But I believe in the law of averages, so after meeting her, I fully expected to run into someone really strange quite soon thereafter. And it didn't take long. Today, a black pickup with some hillbillies drove onto our block, and stopped to say hello. Their next question was, "Um, have you seen a bathtub out here anywhere? We left it here at the top of a gully about ten years ago."
May 22nd: Well, we finished planting our Kamloops contract today. Things wrapped up nicely at 5pm, with both blocks finishing up perfectly on a nice sunny and warm day (actually, we haven't had rain yet in the three weeks that we've been working - just a tiny bit of snow and hail). In fact, everything went so smoothly today that Murphy's Law is bound to strike soon. Actually, the whole season has been going pretty smoothly so far - prices are up, people are making a lot more money than last year, and even the first-year planters are already starting to have some decent daily averages. I hope this is an omen of things to come for the rest of the summer.
Click HERE to see pictures from April and May of 2007.
May 23rd: Murphy's Law certainly struck. As we were leaving Kamloops, the five-ton truck broke down in the campground. Then, while I was trying to fix that, the forester called to tell me that there was a section of one of our last blocks that he wanted to see replanted, so he was hoping that I could call some of the planters back from Alberta to fix the trees. We don't like leaving a contract on a bad note, so one of the foremen got hold of some of the planters who were on the road, and told them to come back to Kamloops to fix the block. It was painful, but it had to be done.
May 26th: We started planting on the West Fraser Hinton contract today. Congratulations to Mark Josephson on Greg's crew, who planted his millionth career tree today, in only his sixth year with Folklore!
May 27th: We finally had a bit of light rain today. And we had some more logistical problems - we discovered that two of the blocks that were assigned to us have already been planted. This was pretty humorous though. We were asked to plant the same two blocks last year too, so we already knew that they had been planted.
May 31st: Someone hit a deer (with their truck) at the entrance to our camp today. That's always good for the appetite when you're driving home for supper - getting the opportunity to watch a crow eat the ass out of a mangled animal, while driving your truck through a field of spilled intesines.
June 5th: Finally, some REAL rain, the kind that makes rookies cower in terror, and makes foremen lock the doors of their trucks so people don't sit in the trucks all day. It sounds cruel, but really, it's in their best interests. They don't make any money if they're sitting in the trucks.
June 7th: I had to have a camp meeting this morning to remind people not to take gear with them that they see just "lying around" in camp, which doesn't belong to them. This was after someone took the blue water jug from the handwashing station beside the outhouses, to use as an extra water jug on the block. The water can't have tasted very well, considering that it was full of sanitizer.
June 12th: It was an exciting night. We got a new shower trailer in camp, instead of tent showers. The trailer has four shower stalls built within it. We put a big water reservoir beside the showers and fill it from the creek with a gasoline-powered pump. When people are showering, a second pump takes water out of that water reservoir, feeds it through a pair of propane heaters to warm the water, and then runs it into the stalls in the trailer. The next thing you know, we'll probably have laundry facilities in each camp!
June 14th: The guy who delivers our food orders is quite a character. Today, he was asking Shelley if she'd had any problems with any of her eggs in the past week. Shelley said that she hadn't, and wondered why he asked. He said that another camp somewhere had gotten a delivery of eggs and when they went to cook them, they were all full of little chickens. Shelley didn't really know quite what to say to that.
June 15th: We had to plant a block at extremely low density today. We normally plant blocks with a target of between 1000 and 2000 stems/Ha. Generally speaking, any density of about 1400 stems/Ha or above is pretty easy to achieve consistently with occasional plots throughout the day, but 1200 stems/Ha or less gets pretty difficult and requires the planters to spend an excessive amount of time throwing plots on themselves. However, this block called for a section with 400 stems/Ha, or two trees per plot. If you've never planted before, this probably doesn't seem that hard. However, we quickly found out that it was very difficult.
June 16th: We officially finished our spring trees today, four days ahead of schedule. Things have been going extremely well this season, and the planters are much happier with our prices and blocks so far. However, we do have some "early summer" hot-lifted stock to plant in some tougher ground, which we are doing immediately (before the mid-season break), so we don't have any tough trees to come back to right after the break. Getting those trees done should take another six or seven days.
June 17th: We had a logistical headache today: I called the Whitecourt dump yesterday to ask if they were open on Sundays, because I wanted to take a 5-Ton load of garbage to the dump today. They cheerfully said that they were open from 11am to 5pm on Sundays. However, when Sharon drove up there today (a six hour round trip on a "day off") she found that it was closed. And in fact, they are closed every Sunday. We think that the Telus operator gave me the number to Whitecourt's Waste Transfer Station, not the number to the Landfill. So that was a problem, since we had planned to use the 5-Ton to move trees this evening, and we had to use all of our canopy trucks instead. And then, while we were moving trees later in the evening, Alice's truck broke down (the steering just suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason). We had to get the truck hauled off by Roadside Assistance. That's going to make things tricky for the next few days, since we haven't had many people quitting this year, so we don't have very many empty seats in the trucks.
June 18th: Dan's crew has been having problems with planting excess on a few of their most recent blocks, so he read them the riot act this morning. When the forester came into their block early this morning, he said he was quite pleased to see planters throwing plots everywhere, and he didn't find any excess problems. Unfortunately though, they were all "playing it safe" and planting slightly under the target all day, because they were scared that the block would come in with an excess fine. In the end, the block took about 15% less trees than allocated, and the plots came out with an average density of 990 stems/Ha, compared to the target of 1200 stems/Ha. Because of this, it got caught in the "no payment for density that is 10% below the target" clause. So after all the plots they threw, they're still going to have to go back into the block tomorrow and plant a couple thousand more trees in it, in order for us to get paid for the block.
June 19th: Everything is breaking down. Alice's truck is still in the shop, and Ford hasn't even had time to look at it, let alone start fixing it. Greg's truck has a problem with the drive shaft. Anna's truck has electrical problems so it won't run properly. Two of the quads are dead. The propane doesn't work in the new shower trailer, so we have cold showers at the moment. We have a couple of flat tires that need to be repaired. And finally, I have no idea when I'm ever going to get time to replace the back window in my truck.
June 21st: One of my crews set a camp record today. We've all been planting a lot of 512's this year, which are much bigger trees than usual, and so there aren't as many in a box as usual. In fact, most of the boxes have between 108 and 132 trees apiece, compared to the 270 to 400 trees that we might get in an average sized box of "small" trees. And to top it off, these are "extra large" nineteen inch boxes, which are harder to handle since we can only fit about forty boxes into a canopy truck, compared to almost sixty boxes of the regular size. As you can guess, these trees are a major logistical headache, since we can only fit about 4000 trees into a truckload, and the camp is used to planting over 100,000 trees per day. Anyway, one of my crews today (a single crew!) planted a staggering 326 boxes of trees in a single day. That's not a record number of trees by any means for a single crew, but that definitely is a record number of boxes. For any crew bosses or tree runners reading this, imagine trying to quad 326 boxes of trees through muddy quad trails into a block, in a single day. Time to break out the "Preparation H."
Today was the last day of the shift for the planters, so it's the night that everyone sits around and has a few drinks, and then they get to sleep late the following morning. They decided to have a Summer Solstice party since it was the longest day of the year, so they set all the trucks up in a ring, turned on the hazard flashers in each truck, set all the radios to the same frequency, and then people took turns DJ'ing on iPods, broadcasting from one of the trucks that had an FM radio transmitter. I was up doing paperwork until 2am, and when I went to bed, a lot of them were still up dancing.
June 22nd: I tried to get my back window fixed today, but they said that by the time they got my headache rack taken off, the window fixed, the rack back on, and allowed several hours for the glue to set, I wouldn't be able to use of the truck for about eight hours. That wasn't going to work, so I made an appointment to get the work done on July 9th, which should be the next day that I think I'll be able to give up the truck for that long.
June 25th: It was absolutely pouring out again this morning, which was kind of fitting for the last day of work before our mid-season break. We probably could have been finished by 2pm if it had been sunny, but the rain made the access so difficult that we didn't finish the last boxes of trees until just after 6pm. Anyway, it was pretty nice to finish the season knowing that we only lost one veteran planter throughout the entire spring (due to a knee injury).
Click HERE to see pictures from the West Fraser job, taken in late May and June of 2007.
June 26th: We're supposed to be on break for six days starting today, but I'm taking a small crew of vets up to the Millar Western job to help out there for three or four days, and Dan is taking a large crew of people who want extra work down to the Spray Lakes job. It was a pretty hectic day, trying to deal with service appointments on five trucks, getting the garbage and camp cleaned up, getting the crews all reorganized and gear packed, driving to the other contracts, and getting set up to plant the following morning. But we did it, somehow.
June 27th: I spent the morning supervising three crews that were planting some old fill blocks for Millar Western. The blocks had been logged in the 1970's, so we were basically planting in a deciduous forest with sixty-foot high trees, and it was where the Virginia Hills Fire had burned through in 1999, so it was "not your typical block." As usual for Millar Western, it was foggy in the morning, so we couldn't start flying people in to the blocks until about 11:30am.
June 29th: Yesterday went pretty smoothly, and we actually got a full day of work in. However, we had more weather-related helicopter problems today, so we didn't get started until about 1pm.
June 30th: Today it was raining so hard that we couldn't even get our trucks up the road to the blocks, so we just gave up entirely. All in all, in the four days that we were at Millar, we got to plant one full day and two half days. Typical. The one really neat thing about these past four days though, is that one of our helicopter pilots was Chris Bergen, who used to work in my camp just a couple years ago. He says that he enjoys flying a helicopter a little bit more than planting trees. That's probably the understatement of the year. It's really nice to have a pilot who completely understands how planting projects work.
Click HERE to see pictures from our short stay with Alec Johnston's camp on the Millar Western job.
July 3rd: I'm back with my own camp now, and we're doing a short project for Alberta Newsprint for the next five days. Unfortunately, the blocks are about a two hour drive and fifteen minute drive from camp. That's pretty expensive in terms of fuel, and eats up a lot of our planting time, so we are doing breakfasts an hour earlier, and suppers an hour later this week to make up for it. The camp is working in the same location after these five days, and since it would take two days to pack and move and set up camp near the ANC blocks, then two more days to move it back after we are done, it makes far more sense to just stay where we are and do the long drives.
July 4th: We did a helicopter block today that was a couple kilometers away from the road. We walked the planters into the block while we were flying the trees in, to save time, because we only had one small helicopter available (a Jet Ranger) and forty people working on the block. They flew out at the end of the day - the first time that most of my first-year planters had flown in a helicopter. In all the years that I've worked out here, I've never gone a summer without having to resort to using helicopters for at least part of the season. We'll have more helicopter work over the next couple days, but hopefully we'll get a larger chopper (an A-Star) so we can move people and trees a lot faster.
July 7th: Dan's crew returned from the Spray Lakes contract last night, so I have my full camp working again today. Ana reported that while they were at Spray Lakes, one of the blocks that they planted was covered with rotting pig carcasses that they had to plant through.
Click HERE to see pictures from our work on the Alberta Newsprint project.
July 12th: Kent took his truck into the Cardlock for fuel this evening, and got attacked by a swarm of bees. However, he knew he needed fuel, so there was no option to cancel the mission. He retreated for a few minutes, then put on several layers of clothing and jackets and towels and gloves, and went back for a second [successful] try. Good work, Kent.
July 13th: What a heat wave. We've been working in weather of thirty degrees or higher all week. I've been out on the blocks constantly, and I've been drinking about 20 litres of water, gatorade, and other fluids per day. That's about FIFTY pounds of water each day, just by myself. Everyone is constantly soaked in sweat, and several people have had to miss days already this week because of heat exhaustion.
July 14th: We're still working in really high temperatures. I had the strangest thing happen today. I was standing beside my truck and I heard a popping noise, and I turned around to see a fountain of gasoline spraying up into the air out of a jerry can in the back of the truck. It was so hot outside that the jerry can just ruptured spontaneously. Good thing that I don't smoke.
July 15th: If anyone is reading this and notices that the parking lot and landscaping at the Renford Motel in Whitecourt is suddenly a lot nicer than it was earlier this week, it is courtesy of the planters at Summit.
July 16th: Another disasterous day. Dodge trucks need the air filters replaced very, very frequently - when they start to get dirty, the engine can be really seriously damaged. Anyway, we thought that Kent's truck got serviced on July 9th when it went in for tire repairs, but apparently, they didn't do the servicing after all, so the last time it was actually serviced was a few weeks before that. In the meantime, a squirrel started to build a nest in his air filter, and the truck broke down because of the nest, and now the truck probably needs a completely new engine. And Greg's ETV also died tonight, plus his quad died today. We're having equipment carnage everywhere. I should have known that hings were going too smoothly up to this point.
July 17th: Today was an incredibly long day. I was really backed up on paperwork last night, and I had to be up extremely early this morning, so I ended just staying up through the night last night. I'm used to working eighteen to nineteen hours per day, seven days a week, for weeks at a time, but 5am one day to midnight the next day is a little much. I need to get a sponsorship from Red Bull. Actually, there is a product called "Red Rain" or "Red Rave" energy drink available at CostCo and Cash & Carry places out here for about ninety cents a can, which is an exact imitation of Red Bull, but at a third the cost. I'm sure that I must have gone through about four or five flats of that stuff so far this summer, since I'm not a big fan of caffeine.
July 18th: We had really nice weather all day, except for a freak hail and rain storm for about forty-five minutes at supper. The rain was so bad that I couldn't see to drive on the highway, and then when we finally got back to camp, the hail started. The hail then punched two holes through the skylight of my camper trailer and broke a truck windshield.
July 19th: Another hectic day - I drove about 800 kilometers today, running between blocks to deal with equipment problems, and trying to get quads fixed. Both Dan's and Andy's quads broke down today, and each also got a flat tire, plus we had three dead trucks. When it rains, it pours. Janine and Leanne, the summer staff at West Fraser, came out today to see how things were going. When they realized how many problems we were trying to cope with, they took a bit of time and helped fix one of the flat tires. Thanks ladies!
July 20th: Jim tried to pull our first aid trailer out of camp, but our driveway is in pretty rough shape, so he broke the hitch right off the trailer. One more thing to get fixed.
July 22nd: We needed to use a helicopter today, to try to tidy up some of the blocks with the worst access. However, we got so backed up that we couldn't fly all the planters into the blocks. Greg's crew ended up walking six and a half kilometers, with full bags, to get into a block. That was definitely the most painful walk-in that we've had in several years, but they had to do it so they didn't end up sitting until lunch waiting for a turn on the chopper. With a camp of this size, it's impossible to have a normal day unless we're using at least two helicopters at a time, and that wasn't possible this time.
July 24th: I got stung a couple times in the corner of the eye and eyelid by a wasp today. I'm not sure what was worse - the stings, or hitting myself in the eye to try to kill the wasp when I realized what was happening.
July 25th: Another day with a few typical challenges. I was looking after a few people on a fringe block today. There was a missing bridge on the road into the block, so we had to walk and quad trees about five kilometers to the back of the block, plus the quad died at the end of the day so we had to push it back out to the trucks, and we got a flat tire on the truck too. Gorgeous day though - sunny and cool and windy, and we were planting really close to the base of the Rockies, so the scenery was absolutely beautiful.
July 26th: Today was the last day of the season for a large part of the camp. This was the earliest finish to our "regular season" that we've ever had.
Click HERE to see pictures from our work on the summer portion of our West Fraser project.
July 27th: Tim Bachiu, who was one of my foremen last year, is working as a geologist somewhere up in the Arctic Circle this summer. I just heard that he's been running into polar bears, and he had a helicopter crash in front of him earlier this summer, which left him stranded overnight in the middle of nowhere. So Tim, maybe tree planting isn't that bad by comparison?
July 28th: We drove to Lac La Biche (north-eastern Alberta) this afternoon, to do a few days of work on a small contract to end our season. Unfortunately, I had to lay off half of my camp, because I was only allowed to bring 23 planters to the contract. However, this is a hotel contract for us, which is a nice way to end the season (except for the challenge of putting together our own meals and lunches).
July 29th: It's amazing how much time we always seem to lose on the first day of a contract. We had to be up and have breakfast and lunches ready early, so we could leave the hotel for the blocks at 6am sharp. By the time we got to the reefer, loaded up with trees, drove to the planting compartment, had a safety talk, had a pre-work, had another pre-work/safety talk with the helicopter pilot, and then finally drove out to the blocks and let the planters get bagged up, it was noon. Having that much downtime on a start-up day doesn't feel so bad when you're doing a contract that is going to last for several weeks or months, but when you're working in an area for as little as three days, it is really frustrating.
July 30th: Planting trees on a mounded block with grass up to your chin can be somewhat challenging. At least there are literally tens of thousands of raspberries along the ditches beside the main block, so I don't need to buy a lunch any time this week.
July 31st: We had some great entertainment today. Three jets, which I think were maybe CF-18 Hornets (from nearby Cold Lake), were doing training exercises and simulated dogfights over our block for the better part of an hour.
August 1st: Our last day of planting! Surprisingly, things went incredibly smoothly. The weather was cloudy in the morning, but turned cool and sunny by lunch. We finished all the trees by 2pm, the quality and density of the last few hours of planting was excellent, and nothing broke down. Everybody was in a good mood, and since the only people on this contract were the ones who really wanted to be here, there wasn't the usual feeling of a mad rush for the exits to get things done. I couldn't think of a better way to end the season ...
Click HERE to see pictures from our work on the Vanderwell contract in Lac La Biche, and a few photos from Prince George at the end of the season.