SUMMER 2008

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

April 28th: I got to Prince George yesterday, a Sunday, so today was my first day at the office. There were tons of people wandering around, trying to get things organized, since three of our camps were to leave for Kamloops today. Since people are required to wear high-vis vests while working in the yard compound, there was quite a huge demand for them. At one point, Jim was looking for a milk-crate full of vests that had gone missing. I said that it probably wouldn't be hard to spot them.

April 29th: Our first day in Kamloops. This year is turning out to be unlike any in at least the past two decades. The amount of snow coverage across British Columbia is incredible, and it is the worst that most planters (and supervisors) have experienced. Most companies are experiencing startup delays of at least a week to two weeks or more. I know of one company that was supposed to start on April 8th, and they just had to move a reefer full of trees to the local curling rink because their startup blocks are still covered with snow, and every facility in the city is overwhelmed with trees that were supposed to be planted already. Our original startup date was supposed to be tomorrow, but we've gotten moved back three days (so far). One of our other camps, which was also supposed to start tomorrow, probably can't plant for at least a week because there is still half a meter of snow covering their blocks. And right now, to make matters worse, it's snowing in camp. Even if we had warm weather in camp (close to Kamloops), our blocks are at higher elevations in the mountains, so a warm day in camp may still be sub-zero on our blocks. I'm prepared for a lot of downtime in the next two weeks. This weather could potentially devastate the silviculture industry across the province, if foresters start cancelling planting programs because they get delayed for too long and the seedlings experience mortality after their initial thaw requests.

April 30th: Sunny weather! But that doesn't mean that our blocks are thawing. For my camp, we have enough ground thawed to keep us going for about four days. We're crossing our fingers for a lot of warm rain between now and the next day off, so we have more blocks to plant after our first day off.

May 1st: Tomorrow was supposed to be our first planting day, but because of the snow, we just got delayed again until May 5th.

May 4th: The planters are getting extremely bored, waiting to get started. We held extensive safety meetings and a first aid emergency simulation in camp today, and that was the highlight of the day for most people.

May 5th: Our first day of planting. The day went really smoothly, surprisingly. We've been able to use the last several days off to train our six first-year planters, so they are far more prepared than any first-year planters that we've ever hired before. We've done training sessions in camp (spacing practice and planting theory) and sessions on the block using a box of trees that we picked up at one of the PRT nurseries.

May 7th: We've finished all of the thawed blocks already, and we are now looking at a couple more days off, waiting for warmer weather to melt the snow. We barely managed to get done today, however, because of snowstorms on the blocks. When we got back to camp, we discovered that the power had been out in several parts of Kamloops for the past three hours.

May 10th: Back to work, finally. We should have had about 10 planting days by now, and we've had three. We managed to get a few extra blocks from one of the other camps working in the area. They are all fill blocks, which is strange. Usually, treated ground (trenches) will thaw out faster than unprepped ground, but that's not the case now. If it wasn't for the fills to keep us busy, we'd probably have to take several more days off right now.

May 12th: Today was a day full of typical problems. One of my new foremen got his truck stuck on a road that he shouldn't have driven down. A second foreman tried to rescue him, but the second truck got stuck. A third foreman (with a winch on his truck) attempted to go rescue the first two, and he got stuck. I went to try to rescue all three, but when I got close enough to them, and almost had the first truck pulled out, I realized that there was a stump blocking it and I stopped since I didn't want to do any body damage to that truck. I then turned around and tried to get out myself, but I ended up having to winch myself about 500 metres before I was on firm ground. I'm not sure how I'm going to get all three trucks out of the mud, unless I wait for a month for the road to harden. Also, we had snow and sleet on the block all day - not great weather to help thaw the ground. Or to plant in.

May 13th: Our day was a bit short - because of the stuck trucks, we had to do some shuttling to get everyone out to the blocks. But once the last planters finally got working, the day started to improve. I ended up hiring a D6 Caterpillar to pull out the three trucks. It wasn't cheap (I'm guessing a couple thousand dollars) but at least we didn't end up doing any damages to any of the trucks or winches. The Cat was pretty slick - I wish that we had one in camp all the time. It hauled the trucks out of the mud like it was picking up a pop can. What's surprising is that this is the first time in 19 years of planting that I've actually had to hire outside help to pull one of our trucks out of the mud. We had snow and sleet on the block all day today, again. Even our forester was shaking and his teeth were chattering when he left the block today. However, we had a great ham dinner when we finally got back to camp.

May 14th: Today is a day off, but it looks like it's going to turn into at least two days, as we wait for snow to melt. It's finally supposed to be hot tomorrow and the next day (30 degrees or more) so maybe we'll finally have some bigger sections of ground available by the weekend.

May 15th: Yup, another day off, waiting for snow to melt. Some of the crew built a catapault in camp. I think their intent was to be able to launch empty beer cans and roadkill toward one of the other planting camps that we were sharing the campground with.

May 16th: Today was a fairly uneventful day. The radiator cracked on the 5-ton, putting it out of commission, but Jim Logan was in town and said that he'd deal with it. And then later in the morning, I turned off the reefer while fueling up, and it took me more than half an hour to get it started again. I think maybe there was a problem with the back-check valve on the fuel supply line. Oh, and Kevin's canopy truck died, so we had to tow it out of the block at supper. But other than those things, yeah, it was a fairly uneventful day.

May 17th: I had a camp meeting this morning to remind people about seatbelts, among other things. I've already done seatbelt checks on several trucks in the past week, but a planter got killed on the Kluskus FSR outside of Vanderhoof yesterday, and she apparently would have survived if she had been wearing a seatbelt. Needless to say, everyone is pretty stressed about that. It's funny how fast news travels, good or bad, despite how remote we all are at times.

May 19th: Dan's truck died today. His block was pretty wet, and he said it "might be water-logged" after having driven through a fairly substantial puddle. Thankfully though, he shut 'er down before any substantial damage arose. Or so he hoped.

May 22nd: I spent most of today pulling trucks out of the mud. Strangely though, they were mostly all stuck in the middle of the forest service roads. They don't make roads like they used to.

May 24th: Ruffed grouse are birds that rely on their coloring as camoflage to protect them from predators. Because of this, they stay very still when threatened, and hope that the predators don't notice them. I drove past one on the road today and decided to stop and get a photo. I got out of the truck and started walking toward it slowly. The bird eventually let me get my camera to within twelve inches of it, and it just stood there in the road, "hoping that I hadn't noticed it."

May 28th: The Kamloops contract is almost done. We're starting an overflow block today. We took a long, hard look at the block (which was pretty big) and negotiated what we thought was a fair price for the block - 21 cents per tree. We probably could have gone lower, but based on the high quality expectations of our local forester, I was worried that we were significantly under-bidding the land. After a bit of discussion with the foremen, we eventually decided that since the block was not very uniform, we would ribbon off different sections and divide it into zones - one third of the block at 17 cents, one third at 21 cents, and one third at 25 cents. But wow, the 25 cent land sure was ugly. Trying to plant trees in absolutely 100% mineral soil, on a block that is covered with eight to twelve inches of fresh logging chaff, with a 12-inch screef required, is a bit of challenge. At the end of the day, the planters were not exactly looking forward to another day on the same block.

Click HERE to see pictures from May of 2008.

May 31st: Moving day. Time to drive to Vanderhoof for our next contract. Unfortunately, we're really tight on time because of all the snow days that we lost. We have to finish tidying up a whole lot of loose ends in Kamloops, finish packing, then drive from Kamloops to Prince George to pick up a bunch of extra equipment and supplies (a six-hour drive). After that, we have to drive from PG to our camp site in Vanderhoof, which is another couple hours of driving, and set up camp so we can plant tomorrow morning. Oh yes, throw in a few pit stops on the drives so everyone can pee. Well, nobody ever said that the job was easy. We arrived in camp to start setting up at about 10pm.

June 1st: A surprising amount got done last night. I told the planters to set up their tents and go to bed at 11pm, but a couple of people stayed up for another hour or so to help Dan and Shelley and I finish up some of the key things like plumbing and electrical systems. Anyway, we got up early this morning and everybody did another hour or so of work to finish setting things up, then we all drove off to attend the prework and spend the day planting.

June 2nd: James was quite excited this afternoon. He found three dead coyotes and a dead wolverine on his block. It must have been an epic battle.

June 3rd: We're planting a block right now that is supposed to take 270,000 trees, but it's covered with slash piles, and we're supposed to stay TEN meters away from the edges of the slash piles. It looks like that's going to cut fifty thousand trees off our initial projected allocation for the block.

June 4th: Today was a day off, so last night, most of the camp went into Prince George and hit the bars. One of the girls was so hungover today that as she was lying on the ground, curled up in a ball in front of the laundromat, someone walked by and mistook her for a homeless person and gave her $1.75 to buy some food.

June 5th: British Columbia's six billionth tree was planted today. That's a lot of trees.

June 10th: The bed of my truck came off the frame today. It didn't come right off the truck, but I was driving up the Kluskus and it just sounded funny. I looked in the rear-view mirror and it was pretty obvious that it was no longer centered on the frame. I had to limp it back to camp slowly where I could use a pair of jack-alls to set it back into place.

June 11th: One of my drivers slid off the road beside the block, while driving the suburban, and the drive shaft was snapped off by a large rock. The vehicle will have to be towed into town.

June 12th: We planted a really confusing block today. There was supposed to be a section of the block which had not been planted yet. I walked it a couple of times to make absolutely sure that I was in the right place, but part of the section that "needed to be planted" hadn't actually been logged, and the part that was logged was definitely planted already. That was quite a waste of time, especially since the foreman had already quadded the trees in while I was walking around the block. However, there was a nice bald eagle nest in a tree on the block, so I got to see both eagles from about thirty feet away. I wish that I had brought my video camera today.

June 13th: Today was a Friday the 13th, on a contract wrap-up day. We had to plant a LOT of trees to finish today, and we unfortunately had some block-jumping before we could move to an overflow block. What could possibly go wrong? Well, surprisingly, very little went wrong, except for not finishing the trees until 7pm. Oh, and a major snowstorm during the day. But hey, it's the middle of June. Why should we be surprised by a snow-storm?

Click HERE to see pictures from early June of 2008.

June 14th: Moving day. Our Vanderhoof contracts are done, and it's time to move to Alberta. We got the camp packed up in the morning and everyone hit the road. Before I pulled out, I had to do one last "garbage sweep" to try to make sure that absolutely nothing got left behind. We do this at every campsite, and usually find a bit of stuff that should have been picked up. It was a good thing I did the garbage sweep here – I found garbage, jackets, tools, planting bags, a tarp, and the bottom half of one of our outhouses. But then, as we were just about to leave, I discovered the most stunning thing that almost got left behind – the spare truck. I had to call one of our other drivers back to make sure that it came with us to Alberta.

June 15th: We had our prework with West Fraser Hinton this morning. I learned something interesting. For years, the trend from the nurseries used to be to put fewer and fewer trees into the boxes, to avoid crushing them together. However, with recent pressure mounting for companies to reduce their carbon footprint, the nurseries have been purposely using shorter "stubby" boxes, and packing more trees into each box, to minimize cardboard use and wastage. That's great, in an environmental sense, but it's also good for planters to have more trees in each box.

June 17th: Today was a disastrous day. I started out the day with a camp-wide safety meeting, to talk about an upcoming safety audit, quality issues, bear safety, and driving safety. Half an hour after the meeting, one of my foremen flipped his truck while driving out to the block, on pretty much the flattest road I've ever seen. It was pretty amazing that he could even flip it, but the truck slid sideways a bit in the mud, and the leading rear wheel dug into the "ditch" and acted as an anchor point, so the truck started rolling. Thankfully, everyone in the truck was wearing their seatbelts, so nobody was hurt. The truck was quite a mess though.

June 18th: Today my camp had one of their better production days ever, planting about 172,000 trees. Mind you, I did have a big crew (Jesse) from Peter Schmidt's camp helping us out today, since they are on their mid-season break but wanted some extra work. Even so, that's a lot of trees for one day.

June 19th: Today was the last day of the "spring" planting season. I was amazed – even with the loss of eight planting days at the start due to snow and frozen ground, we still managed to complete our spring season a full day ahead of schedule. Of course, it helps that the main camp has sixty people and only six of them are first-year planters.

June 23rd: We were supposed to start our "summer" planting season today, still at West Fraser Hinton, but that didn't pan out too well. Our trees were coming from one of the PRT nurseries, and they were supposed to be loaded and delivered yesterday, but that was a Sunday. The powers-that-be finally called to say that they would be arriving a day late, because they couldn't get loaded yesterday. That was pretty frustrating, since all of the planters had already come back from their break, in order to start work again. On a positive note, it was only part of the camp (about 20 people) since it was four days of "optional" work. However, most of them had been in Jasper, so they were quite annoyed to have come back from Jasper to end up spending a day sitting in camp with nothing to do. I made a few phone calls to tell people how mad I was that we weren't warned about this before the weekend.

June 24th: Our trees arrived today, but we had to pick them up in the WalMart parking lot at 7:30am. By the time we unloaded the reefer and got out to the blocks, it was almost lunch, so we essentially had another wasted half-day because of the late tree shipment.

June 25th: Once again, today I was reminded of how much more I enjoy being a foreman rather than being a camp supervisor. Since only a third of the camp is working for the optional plant, I get to be a foreman for three days. Much more fun than supervising.

June 26th: We decided to try to do one of the "helicopter" blocks today without a helicopter, to save some money. The planters only had to walk in 1.2 km, so it wasn't too bad. However, their walk-in was through a very swampy seismic line, which was almost impassible for the quad. I ended up finding a better access route, down a snowmobile trail that cut through the block, but the drawback that it was a 6 km round trip from the truck to the block when I used the snowmobile trail. And it was pouring, freezing rain. Still, aside from being frozen to the bone, it was a pretty enjoyable day.

June 27th: Today was a bit of a stressful day, because we had to use a helicopter all day long. When the helicopter costs about $1100 per hour to keep running, everyone has to do things efficiently and correctly the first time, so the stress of trying to keep the work flow running smoothly is rather annoying.

June 28th: I've never smelled anything in my life that smells quite as bad as a dead bear. Live bears are no treat either, but a dead bear takes it to a whole new level. I've only been close enough to live bears to smell them about three times in my planting career. It's an unforgettable smell. Now, when I smell it, I stop dead in my tracks because I assume that there must be a bear within twenty feet of me, hiding in the bushes. This time around, however, it was a dead bear, rotting in the sun and being eaten by flies. Not a pretty scene for people with weak stomachs.

June 29th: Today was a day off for the camp. I got up and started the generators. About twenty minutes later, Jackie stopped by to tell me that the kitchen had just flooded. Apparently, somebody had turned on one of the taps during the night, when the power was off, and since nothing came out, they walked away without turning the tap back off. The sink was plugged at the time, so when the power came on in the morning, it quickly overflowed. I'm glad that Jackie noticed it and cleaned everything up right now.

July 6th: We had another massive windstorm today that picked up the dry tent and moved it about 300 metres across the landing and up on top of a stand of almost fully mature pine trees. It's funny – this seems to happen every year. And every year, I tell people to put about a hundred large rocks on the base of the tent so it can't blow away, and every year, the wind picks it up anyway.

July 7th: Tom Mulvahill stopped into camp today for a visit, while I was working on paperwork. Tom works for West Fraser, but I'm not working directly for him this year. However, he knew that we were in the area so he stopped in to say hello. We had a really good conversation for a couple hours about the state of the industry, and how we could improve work processes for the planters in future seasons.

July 11th: Today was the last day of the West Fraser contract. Luckily, this didn't turn out to be a typical painful last day to end a contract - most of the crews were finished their trees by early afternoon.

Click HERE to see pictures from June and July of 2008.

July 14th: We're working for Alberta Newsprint now, with a fairly small contract to finish up the summer. After a summer of extremely long drives to the blocks, we have quite a few blocks within a couple kilometers of camp. What a difference! In Kamloops, we were always ready to leave camp by 6:45am but rarely got planting before 8:30am, because of either the distances involved or because of the ridiculous stock-handling constraints. Here, we actually had planters who started putting trees in the ground BEFORE 7am, on the first day of a contract! Wow.

July 15th: Today was another helicopter day. We were planting a bunch of old herbicided fill plants, which was a bit slow. Unfortunately, they only gave us one chopper for the whole camp, so a few people didn't get out to the blocks and started planting until after 11am. It is really frustrating to have to use helicopters with a large camp, unless they send out two machines.

July 18th: One of my foremen flipped a quad onto himself on the very first day of the season, while trying to load it into a pickup. He's had a pretty sore back all season, and finally decided to go get X-rays yesterday. Well, it turns out that he's been working with a broken back all summer.

July 21st: More helicopter work today. I had hoped that we could get all the heli blocks done today, because tomorrow is supposed to be our last day of work, but it was not to be. The pilot's "duty day" forced him to leave staging at 6pm, so one of the blocks ended up having a small hole of a couple thousand trees at the end of the day. That was very, very frustrating.

July 22nd: Last day of planting! Or so we hoped, since we had our year-end party booked at Boston Pizza for 9pm. We had a lot of trees to put in, on several different blocks, so we decided to get up early and start planting at 5am, just to be safe. After all, things usually go wrong on the last day, so it would be better to have some room for error. It's a good thing that we did, since the challenges throughout the day were actually quite astounding, especially after the rest of this season went so smoothly (despite a few hitches that you've read about here in the diaries). Here's a summary of my day:

- 5am, woke up. After a practically rain-free summer, I was not surprised to wake up to an absolutely raging lightning and thunder storm.
- 6:30am, arrived at Greg's block. Except that the block wasn't there. Spent half an hour driving around, and realized that the road ended a kilometer before the block, and it needed a helicopter. So much for planting this particular overflow block this year (this is why I usually try to check out blocks before I arrive with a crew, although I hadn't had time in this particular case).
- 7am, went with a crew to finish the helicopter block from the previous night. Without a helicopter. The planters had to walk in to plant less than 200 trees each, which was pretty frustrating. Especially since it was raining.
- 10am, got back to camp. I needed to drive the 5-ton, which was fully loaded with flat empty tree boxes, up to the dump in Whitecourt. I called them before I left, just to make sure they were open. They weren't. I called Edson to see if their landfill would take tree boxes. They wouldn't. I called Hinton. Same problem. Finally, after about an hour of phone calls, I found an industrial dump (the Pembina Area Landfill) which was reasonably close, and which would take the boxes.
- 2pm, back to Greg's block. He had two flat quad tires.
- 4pm, ran into the checker. He had just made James' crew replant for leaning trees.
- 5pm, took James to his last block. It was a block that had been selectively logged years ago, and there were five overgrown trails running through the woods. So basically, it was almost like planting in uncut forest.
- 7pm, got a call from Kent. He was stuck.
- 8pm, arrived to pull out Kent. Spent the next two hours, with the help of every foreman, alternatively getting trucks stuck and pulling them out. At one point, four of our five trucks were stuck, and I thought we'd be sleeping on the landing.
- 10pm, arrived back in camp. Already late for dinner. Thankfully, Shelley had supervised the final breakdown and loading of camp, and the reefer was gone. However, as we grabbed all the rest of our gear and trailers, we realized that we didn't have enough hitches to take all of the trailers to town.
- 12:30am, arrived at Boston Pizza. I said a few words to the crew, had my first drink in three months, and promptly went to the hotel and went to sleep.

But I'll be back next year ...

Click HERE to see more pictures from July of 2008.

Check back in the summer of 2009 for more adventures.