SUMMER 2009



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



May 3rd: I've been in Prince George for several days now, taking safety, liability, and first aid courses. We finally left PG at lunch, heading for our first contract in Kamloops. If today was any indication of how things will go for the rest of the season, these planting diaries should be pretty interesting. We had rain, then sunburn weather, then a snowstorm on the drive down. We saw lots of wildlife, including a couple dozen deer, a bear, and some beavers. We saw a "badger crossing" sign, but unfortunately no badgers. We drove through a forest fire that had the highway closed for a while, and unfortunately saw houses burning on the side of the road. And the top half of my camper trailer separated from the bottom half, although I believe that it is eminently fixable. So basically, it was a typical day of adventures. We'll be having our pre-work conferences tomorrow, and setting up camp, then we should have full days of planting starting early Tuesday morning.

May 4th: I made a new friend today while I was filling the propane tanks. We use "hundred pounders" to supply propane to our showers and water heaters and stoves. These are five-foot-high steel propane tanks which are close to 175 pounds each when they're full. They're a bit awkward to move around by yourself when they're full, especially when you're lifting a bunch of them into and out of pickup trucks. Anyway, while I was getting them filled, the girl at the station was extremely negative, complaining constantly about pretty much everything around her and in her life. I kept quiet while I was fighting with the tanks, trying to ignore her and deal with the job at hand. Anyway, when I was done lifting the final tank into place, she put her hand on it lightly, then pulled it back quickly and said, "Oh, I hate getting dirty." I looked her in the eye and said, "I hate people who whine about their jobs." So when I said a few moments ago that I made a new friend, I was kidding. I was actually being sarcastic.

May 6th: I was going through the scales today with the 5-ton and got pulled in and written up for a burned out headlight. Luckily, everything else on the truck was fine, and my driver logs were filled out properly. At least my purple truck and another one of our pickups passed with no problems.

May 7th: We had a few inches of snow on the block this morning, so we had to wait until lunch for it to melt before we could go to work. Then, when I was going out to the blocks, I pulled into the scale to show them that the headlight on the 5-ton was fixed. However, we got written up at the same time on my purple supervisor's truck (which Jackie was driving) because it didn't have the company name written on the side. I wonder what tomorrow's scale problem will be. After that, the afternoon went fairly well, except for the blizzard that started at 4pm.

May 11th: Nothing beats the smell of a chain saw in the morning.

May 12th: Today we planted the "tick blocks." These were a pair of fill plant blocks in Greenstone, which were part of the Barriere forest fires of 1998. The problem was that the foresters warned us in advance that there were a lot of ticks on the block. Seeing ticks is an extremely rare event for us, but I did have a safety meeting about how to deal with them before we started planting. At the end of the day, the crews were absolutely covered in ticks. Everyone had to strip and try to shake out their clothes, and most of the girls had at least a dozen in their hair. At least Lyme Disease is an east-coast problem, and not prevalent in BC.

May 14th: More snow. Everyone sat in the trucks until noon again, before the weather cleared up enough to plant.

May 17th: Near the end of the day today, I was out on the blocks and heard a whole lot of rifle shots. I went to investigate, since they sounded pretty close. I found three guys doing some practice shooting. I told them that unfortunately, there were about fifty planters in the immediate area, and a whole bunch of people were planting on the block that was hidden behind the woods in the direction that the guys were shooting. Idiots.

May 19th: Our five-ton refrigerated truck that I use for picking up trees in town lost its hydraulic brakes, so I had to limp it down the mountain in low gear while using the manual brakes (which took most of the morning). The brakes couldn't be fixed today, so I started to panic because I thought we'd run out of trees tomorrow, and I finally ended up renting a three-ton truck from Budget to prevent a lost day of production. I picked up the trees that we needed, and finally rolled into camp at supper, thinking that I had salvaged the day. However, I found that almost everybody was drunk and dancing around camp, which was pretty puzzling. It had allegedly been snowing heavily on the blocks from 10am to about 3pm, so they were forced to shut down (although when I arrived there was not a bit of snow anywhere, so I didn't know whether or not to believe them).

May 26th: On the way out of our Bonaparte camp, one of our suburbans broke down. It will have to stay there for a few days until we have time to come back to get it.

May 27th: I saw my first loaded logging truck of the season today. I've been working for almost a month. That alone is a pretty sure sign that the economy is in the toilet.

May 28th: Today was a day off, before we start working on one of the "Forests For Tomorrow" jobs (still in Kamloops). The Ministry of Forests has a number of FFT jobs throughout the province. They award the work to forestry consulting companies, who then award the planting portion to companies based on tendered bids. ForSite is the company which is administering the contract that we'll be working. I've heard numerous horror stories about the FFT work so far this year, from other companies and from one of the other Folklore camps that is working on a separate contract. However, I don't know yet if it is the FFT job that is causing the headaches, or the consulting companies. I guess we'll find out tomorrow, although on a positive note, our pre-work meeting went smoothly this morning, and Chris, the guy that we're working with, seems quite organized.

May 29th: My crews reached a significant milestone today - they just planted their fifty millionth tree. Most of these trees were planted with Folklore Contracting since 1995, although a few million were with Tawa/PRT in the early 1990's, and a few thousand were with another company more recently.

May 30th: The FFT job seems to be going well so far. We've had good feedback, and our quality on the first two days of planting was definitely good enough to ensure full payment. We've been working on uncut blocks of mature pine trees that have been attacked and killed by mountain pine beetles. The work is pretty confusing, because we don't normally plant in full-grown forests, so it's hard to fully understand the block boundaries. Also, the spacing requirements and assessment of naturals is proving to be very tricky for the planters, so they're planting a lot more slowly than usual. But on a positive note, there's a lot of shade on the blocks, so the high temperatures aren't really bothering people.

June 2nd: We just finished our FFT job, so tonight we're getting ready to move our camp to Swan Hills, Alberta.


Click HERE to see pictures from May of 2009.


June 5th: Today was a rather annoying day. We started planting for Millar Western in Swan Hills, on a contract that requires a lot of helicopter use. However, inclement weather (a snowstorm in June?) shut down the heli in the afternoon, so the crews had to walk out of their blocks. The helicopter company that is flying us needed to send a pickup out to bring winter covers to protect the machine where it sat grounded, and on the way to our site, the driver rolled his truck, so we had to go rescue him. And to top it off, I got a phone calling saying that one of our blocks on the FFT job came in at 69% quality, so I might have to send a crew back to BC to do some replanting. The quality issue was the strangest thing. Over the years, I've been in charge of about four or five thousand blocks. In all that time, I've only ever had one block that I planted come in at less than 87% quality, and I considered that one to be a disaster. But how does a crew go from 96% quality to 69% quality in one day? Well, there are only two possibilities: "politics" or "idiocy." My own checkers and foremen thought the block was fine, and I walked it myself and didn't notice any problems. It boggles the mind.

June 6th: I love working for Millar Western. It's a family-run mill (albeit a large one) and I've worked for them off and on since about 1993. I was in Whitecourt today picking up a tire compressor at Canadian Tire, and someone that I didn't even recognize came up to me and said, "Good day Scooter, I hope things are going well so far." It's great to be working on a contract where you know that the company actually cares about the planters and is interested in the work that we do. Millar Western is having a really tough time right now (like all other Canadian mills), so I really hope that they can survive the economic downturn.

June 7th: Today was day three of our June snowstorm season in Swan Hills. I'm no longer dreaming of a white Christmas.

June 8th: Our other suburban broke down a few days ago, so Jim got it towed into Swan Hills to get fixed. However, he couldn't remember the name of the towing company that he used, and he didn't know where it got towed to. So in other words, we lost the suburban. I spent a while driving around Swan Hills, peering into garages and backyards while looking for it, without any success. Directory Assistance said that there were no towing companies in Swan Hills. So finally, I went into "Nam's Variety" (which doubles as the gas station, and liquor store, and car wash, and half a dozen other things) to see if they could help me figure anything out. I said to the clerk, "This is going to sound a bit retarded, but I'm wondering if you could help me find a truck that I misplaced a few days ago." I started to explain but he interrupted me and said, "Oh, your white suburban. I know where it is. The guy behind you can help you out." I turned around and another guy said, "Yup, I towed it for you." I got his phone number - it was five digits long. God bless the small towns.

June 10th: I left camp before breakfast, to get to our helicopter and fly some trees into the blocks before the planters arrived, so they could get a reasonably fast start to their day. However, the helicopter broke down, so we had a couple hours scrambling to find enough "roadside" area to keep everyone going. Around lunch, when all we had left was sections that the quads couldn't drive into, we were able to borrow NGR's helicopter for about half an hour to fly eighty boxes of trees into the backs of a couple of blocks. NGR was working just three kilometers down the road from us. Thanks Lawrence!

June 15th: Today was the last planting day of the contract. I gave a big motivational speech at 6:30am, to remind people not to screw up the quality on the very last block, which might prevent us from being able to come back for summer trees. I also said that we had a long day ahead of us, so there was no time to be sitting around. I said that if everyone worked really hard all day, we could probably finish by 5pm, and have a dinner at our "normal" time, rather than the 8pm dinners that we've had the past couple of days (because of a long drive to the block). People did work pretty hard, and I was happy to see the last tree get planted at 4:53pm. Perfect timing!


Click HERE to see pictures from early June of 2009.


June 16th: We packed up the camp from the Millar Western spring contract today, and hit the road for the drive to Cochrane (down towards southern Alberta) where our next contract will start. Jim called to tell me about our upcoming campsite: "I think, in the history of tree planting, this is going to be the worst spot ever to put a planting camp." Coming from a man who can look at a gravel pit on the side of a logging road and say, "this is perfect," I'm a bit apprehensive. Then, to top it off, one of the drivers backed a truck into a gate tonight and probably did about $3000 in damages to his truck. And this was on the open prairie. Unbelievable. I think he was in an area with no trees for probably about a hundred miles, yet he still managed to run into something. But at least it was just some property damage, and nobody was hurt or shaken up.

June 17th: Everyone was supposed to meet at the PetroCan outside of Cochrane at 3:30pm to go set up camp. However, a few minutes before then, I got a call from two of the planters who had one of our suburbans. They were broken down on the side of the road, a couple hundred miles away. Hm. And then another of our canopy trucks also broke down and was getting repairs done. Hm. On a positive note, when we got out to our campsite, it wasn't going to be nearly as bad as we had envisioned from Jim's description. That is, as long as it doesn't rain for the next two weeks.

June 18th: First day of planting at Spray Lakes. We had safety meetings and a pre-work conference with the forester in the morning, then everyone was out planting by lunch-time. The day went relatively smoothly. I was quite amused to take a walk around camp at quarter to eight and there was not a single planter still up and awake. As far as I could tell, the only two people still up, other than myself, were Greg and Nate (the foremen of my two big crews). They were out prepping their blocks for morning, as usual.

June 19th: We had a visit today from Stephane Levesque, my old cook from several years ago!

June 20th: Nate told me that he had "a little bit of blowdown" on his block, and that it would be helpful if I could swing by with the chain saw for about an hour or so. I was a little puzzled why he thought it would take me a full hour to cut out a few trees that had fallen across the road. However, by the time I was done cutting, I used seven full tanks of gas! I've never seen so many trees across the roads on a block - there were hundreds to cut out.

June 21st: Today we planted on the block with the best view that I've ever seen in my career. Even better than blocks in Alaska & along the northern coast of BC.

June 22nd: I was supposed to pick up a food order today. Sysco will sometimes deliver right into our camps, but the road into our camp is not pretty, so I called the rep and said that I'd meet the delivery truck at the Casino out on the Trans-Canada, and just pick up the food there. The rep said that the driver would be there around noon, and would call an hour beforehand, to make sure things went smoothly in case he was running late. At 9:30am, I got a message on my voicemail from the driver, saying that he'd be at the Casino in half an hour, and I was 45 minutes away. Even more frustrating, he didn't leave a phone number so I could call him. I hustled out to the casino, but by the time I got there at 10:20am, I couldn't find the driver. I spent twenty minutes trying to get the driver's phone number from the reps in Calgary, and when I finally got it and called, he said that he was off in Canmore and wouldn't be back until about 4pm. I was furious. I ended up chasing him down in Canmore and getting the order there, but even so, I still didn't get back to camp with the food until almost 3pm, which was a huge waste of time and fuel. I called several people back at Sysco and told them how much I hated their customer service. It was especially frustrating because I've dealt with Sysco for eight years at my restaurant back in New Brunswick, and I've generally had very good experiences with them. However, their customer service in Alberta is the shits.

June 23rd: Today was a day off, and I made service appointments for seven of our trucks in Carstairs. Or so I thought. However, I got a call from Shelley at 8:30am, who was the first to make it there, and she said that the Ford dealerships there had never heard of us. I did some checking, and eventually realized that our appointments were in Cochrane. Luckily, almost everyone carries cell phones these days, so I managed to get in touch with all but one of the drivers to let them know about their new destination. There are too many places that start with C in southern Alberta ... Cochrane, Carstairs, Canmore, Calgary, and Cremona, for starters. C is for Confusing.

June 27th: We had to do a major dump run today. After a lot of phone calls, we learned that it is almost impossible to dump empty trees boxes in southern Alberta, so we finally ended up driving to Calgary to dump boxes one into of the city dumps up in the northwest.

June 29th: Moving day. Somehow, despite the massive hangovers (and some people who appeared to be still intoxicated), we managed to get the reefer loaded and I locked the doors by 9am. We aren't actually done the Spray Lakes contract yet, but the contract is so spread out that it makes sense for us to spend the last couple of days in a hotel in Sundre, and attack the rest of the northern portion of the blocks from that central base area.

July 2nd: Sean, one of my first year foremen, lost his quad virginity today. He's used his quad quite a bit in the past, but this was the first time that he's had a block which I considered to be fairly tough access. I dropped his crew off and was going to let him deal with things, but then I got a bad feeling and figured that I should go back and check on things before I left the area. It was a good thing that I did - his crew was still trying to find the block. Once we got them planting, I spent a bit of time with Sean and tried to show him a few tips on dealing with tough quad access, such as using a hair elastic (or grass) to tie the throttle down when the quad is stuck, rolling the quad if you can't push it out forwards or backwards, using slash to help rather than hinder the quad, using corderoy to get over mud-pits, avoiding high-centering, etc. He looked a bit concerned at first about getting trees into the block quickly enough, but once we had reviewed some of those tricks, he had a really positive attitude and seemed very confident that he could make it work. I put some extra corderoy down in a few tough spots on the walk out, just to be safe. Sometimes, the extra ten minutes that you spend putting corderoy down in a soft spot is well worth the investment, if it prevents you from getting stuck for half an hour and speeds up the rest of your quad runs throughout the day.

July 3rd: Today was going to be my first official day off in four summers of planting! For 24 hours, from noon today until noon tomorrow, I was actually planning to "leave" planting and go on a short "vacation." I dropped my truck off in Cochrane, rented a car, and drove into Calgary with Shelley. We ended up walking around the Stampede for a couple hours, then had a good dinner at a Pub in downtown Calgary. In the evening, we went to a club called The Warehouse where a couple well-known DJ's that I know were playing, and I spent some time getting photos and video footage of them for a couple of media projects that I'm working on. The photo galleries are available on my facebook fan page, if anyone is curious.

Click HERE to see pictures from the Spray Lakes contract.


July 6th: Today was the start of our final contract of the season. We are going to be working for Millar Western for the next couple weeks, based in a camp outside of Whitecourt.

July 7th: We've been pretty lucky with the weather until today. Yes, we've had several days with snow, which has cost us about six half-days of planting so far. But snow is not a bad thing. Snow brushes off your clothing when you're planting, so it doesn't soak you and chill you to the bone. As much as snow can frustrating because of the downtime once it starts to accumulate, planters tend to still want to plant when it is snowing moderately and the ground is still visible. The same does not hold true of rain. People can still plant when it is raining out, but the difference is that they generally do not WANT to plant. And today was miserable.

July 8th: Still raining. Another ugly day. The only consolation was the fact that every other camp in every single company planting in central Alberta right now was going through the same misery as us, and would be slowed down as much as we have been.

July 9th: Greg's crew had a goat following them around all day. The goat's owner was there (they were planting a woodlot), and offered to sell them the goat for $20. Thankfully, everyone remembered the "no pets" rule in camp (after one of our rookies brought a pet bunny to camp a few years ago), so the goat did not end up coming back to camp.

July 10th: Yesterday was Jim Logan's fiftieth birthday. Haha, old man! No matter what happened today, no matter how miserable it was or what went wrong, I knew that I was going to be in a good mood because he'd be lying in bed in Whitecourt today in some sort of post-alcohol-binge death-coma hangover. That is, of course, if he even survived the night. Happy birthday, Jim!

July 12th: An SRD (Sustainable Resource Development of Alberta) officer showed up in camp today to inspect things. He pointed out a couple of things that we should have been doing better (rightfully so), but he also said that he didn't want to see cases of fruit stored in the mess tent. I thought that was kind of strange. I've always viewed the mess tent as "bait." If a bear actually wanders into camp, I'd rather see it making of mess of things in the mess tent than foraging through planters' tents. But anyway, we moved all of the fruit out of the mess tent and into our walk-in cooler, to be safe. I guess that it did make sense in the end - at least the door is almost always closed on the cooler, so the smell of the fruit won't carry as far into the woods as an attractant. In unrelated news, one of our planters found a dead dog and a dead coyote today in the piece that they were planting. We also seem to be finding a lot of dead cows in the woods.

July 15th: Nate got his quad stuck on the block last night while prepping it for today, and ended up spending the night on the block. On a positive note, he managed to get the quad unstuck by himself after a couple hours of fighting with it. Later in the day, I saw an elk on the block. That's not too common around here.

July 18th: Jackie and I took the 5-Ton to the dump today. It was completely full to the roof since I hadn't had time to empty it in well over a week, so it took the two of us about an hour to empty it out completely. Once we got the floor, things got nasty - the floor was covered with an inch of mud, mice, maggots, and mold. I'm glad I wasn't doing this chore with a full stomach of food, because I definitely would have lost it! In the end, it turned out that we'd had 7,600 pounds of garbage in the truck.

July 19th: We've been getting a lot of SRD (Sustainable Resource Development officer) inspections this summer. In fact, it's hard to believe how many officers are floating around out here this year. I think today was the fourth time that an officer has inspected one of our crews since we started the contract two weeks ago. This time, we were asked to show our registration and insurance (licensing) for the quads. I don't think he believed us when we said that we weren't able to license them. However, BC doesn't have a licensing system for ATV's, and the Alberta government has told us that since we're from BC, unless we're working in Alberta at least thirty days straight, we aren't allowed to register and license the quads in Alberta. That's a bit of a catch-22, since our offices are in BC. In other news, Fraser was charged by a bear today while planting. He and Colin scared it off eventually, with no bites or mauling.

July 20th: We had our most amazing moment of stupidity of the season today. Nate's crew needed three truckloads of trees to keep them planting all day, yet his crew only has two trucks. We anticipated this problem yesterday afternoon, and since they weren't working yesterday, a couple of his planters spent four hours and filled up one of his two trucks with trees and took them out to today's block, and set up a really nice cache, and basically got everything ready so that this morning, both trucks could bring a load each and the crew would have the three truckloads that they'd need for the day. Anyway, we got everyone out to the block and had the morning pep talk and safety meeting, and the planters started to walk into the block. Nate and I then opened the two trucks to unload all the trees, and we discovered that the crew hadn't bothered to load one of them.

July 21st: We had an inadvertant part day today. We ran out of trees, because our next reefer that was supposed to arrive this morning got stuck in the forest fire in Kelowna.

July 27th: Today was the last day of planting. And I got the strangest text from Nate today. He asked me, "What page of the Folklore Safety Manual covers getting charged by a wild boar?"

July 28th: After an extremely problem-free season, with very few moments of blatant stupidity and equipment damage, I was crossing my fingers that the camp could hold things together for just 24 more hours and get all the trucks back to Prince George safety. But it was not to be. Big Pete drove one of the canopy trucks into the Renford Motel. And then, on the drive home, three of the trucks ran out of gas just outside of Prince George and had to be rescued with jerry cans. But that's ok. I won't have to worry about these kind of things again for eight whole months ...

Click HERE to see pictures from the summer contract at Millar Western and from some of the woodlots that we planted in July.





Some notable stats from the 2009 planting season: