SUMMER 2011

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

April 29th: I arrived in Prince George for another season of planting. These diaries aren't a full synopsis of what happened in my camp every day, by any stretch of the imagination. I have to keep a full set of notes from every single day of the season in a "liability log," to document pretty much everything that happened in the camp. That takes up quite a bit of my time, because it usually amounts to between ten and twenty handwritten pages of notes for every day of the summer. It has been very useful on a number of occasions, when referring back to issues with safety or legal implications. It will also come in handy in the next few years, as I write a book about tree planting. Anyway, the stuff that you'll read here is just the sort of stuff that tends to be a bit out of the ordinary for a planter. For some reason, it seems to fascinate most people who read these diaries. I probably go into too much detail for some people (seasoned planters), and not enough detail for other people. For instance, I might not bother writing that a bear walked through our mess tent and ate the peanut butter, because I don't find that it's very interesting or unusual. But other people might disagree. Anyway, let's see what happens this season. The first week or so is usually pretty mundane, but after that, planting life occasionally has its moments ...

May 3rd: Myself and all of my foremen and key staff have been doing training and recertification courses for the past few days, in first aid and a dozen other areas. Tonight we held our first meeting with our full camp, to welcome the new planters, sign all of our employment contracts, and go over a few hours of notes and orientation. Our camp this year is starting out with about 56 people - 45 planters, 5 foremen, 2 cooks, 3 quality checkers, and 1 Scooter. I expect that within a couple weeks, three or four of the first-year planters will have quit. Maybe more. This is going to be a very unusual year for me. I rarely have more than half a dozen first-year planters, but my senior foreman (Greg Mancuso) took over another one of Folklore's camps, so the camp split has left me with a bit of a challenge: I have twenty-one inexperienced planters this year. I can see myself and the foremen going through a lot of Tylenol this year.

May 4th: It was mass chaos today, as we got everyone checked out of hotels and shuttled to the office for 8am, then we finished loading up camp and driving to Vanderhoof. We set up camp in the afternoon, and had some more orientation meetings in the evening. The first week or so, it always seems like we're having meetings every single day, trying to get the whole camp oriented properly and all working on the same page.

May 5th: We had another safety meeting in the morning, then a pre-work conference with our forester, then went out to the blocks and finally put in a half-day of planting.

May 6th: Today was another part-day (on purpose) to let all the vets slowly ramp up to faster speeds. We did a full safety simulation in the morning to test out all of our equipment and first-aiders, before we went planting. Even though we only planted for about six hours, everyone was pretty sore, and wishing that they were in the same condition that they were in at the end of last summer. We always take it pretty easy for the first shift, to try to minimize injuries such as tendonitis. This year, our blocks are still covered with a lot of snow, so we're definitely not in a rush. In fact, there was so much snow on our block (we were starting the whole camp on a single block of over a quarter million trees) that we are going to be forced to take tomorrow and the next day off, and hope that a lot of snow melts. We've been hearing rumours of snow on blocks and delayed startups (of up to two weeks), all over western Canada.

May 8th: Our two "snow days" have been back-to-back warm and sunny, with people starting to get tans (and burns). The warm weather has made a huge difference on our block, although to be honest, a good warm rain clears the snow even faster than hot & sunny days. But these two days appear to have given us the cushion that we needed so we shouldn't have to have any more downtime due to snow on the ground.

May 11th: This was the first day that I didn't spend on the blocks. Instead, I took turns running our few rental trucks to town to get good mud tires put on them, before we move to Alberta. Our own trucks already had the mud tires installed during the pre-season, but the rentals showed up at the last minute, and the foremen didn't have time to put good tires on them before we started working in Vanderhoof. We do a bit of customizing to each truck, to prep it for the planting season: really good mud tires, steel bumpers, VHF radios, special tow hooks, etc. The amount of money that each planting company spends on vehicles in a summer is just unbelievable.

May 12th: Today was census day. Well, actually, the census was a few days ago, but we just got the forms last night. The government actually counts people who are living in temporary accommodations such as bush camps. Some of my vagrant planters with "no fixed address" were somewhat suspicious of the forms. After that, I had a brief meeting to outline plans for finishing our big block today, and for moving to Alberta over the next few days. This first "contract" was actually only a single large block on Greg's contract, to give us a week or so to get warmed up and start training the rookies, before our serious work begins in Alberta.

Click HERE to see pictures from the first camp of the season. This was for our short warmup contract, of only a quarter million trees.

May 14th: I arrived in Whitecourt (Alberta) and caught up with the rest of the crew, and caught up on all the gossip. They had all stayed at the Timberland in Hinton on the way to Whitecourt, and there were some pretty funny stories. Apparently, the RCMP were involved in some of the stories, but surprisingly, nobody got locked up for the night while they were out partying. No problems with the hotels either - I encourage my planters NOT to do anything stupid that would get us banned from any of the hotels. Tree planters have a bad enough reputation as it is. I did have at least one planter though, who sustained some drinking injuries that would prevent him from planting for several days. Sometimes, I think the days off are harder on planters than the work days.

May 15th: We had our pre-work conference in Whitecourt to start our contract working with Millar Western, one of our regular clients. We tried to set up camp in the afternoon, but ran into some problems. It was hot and sunny, but the winds were about 80 km/hr. One person sustained some serious bruising when a table flipped up and hit her, and I eventually stopped the setup until the winds calmed down in the evening, simply because we couldn't put any of the tents up. Later, we found out that a major fire had unfortunately just burned down half of the entire town of Slave Lake. Click here to download a PowerPoint presentation that shows some photos from that fire.

May 16th: Today was our first day of planting at Millar. The blocks were a lot greener than we had expected, and the prices weren't great, so people were a bit discouraged. We lost our first planter today - a rookie who was in great physical shape, but who just couldn't handle the job. Too bad, since he was a good guy, and one of the rookies that I hoped would make it. If the contract continues like this, I feel that we'll lose a few more planters before long. But then again, it's good to weed out the weak.

May 17th: Frozen trees! A significant chunk of our first reefer load of trees appears to be frozen solid. It's almost impossible to plant frozen trees, because they come in bundles of fifteen or twenty seedlings at a time, and they all stick together when they're frozen. We have two types of trees, "spring" trees and "summer" trees. Spring trees are actually grown from August to November, then the nursery "lifts" them and packages them into boxes, and then they are frozen in refrigeration facilities. In the spring, the trees are pulled out to thaw, then planted. A second set of trees is sown in March, and grows until mid-June. These are lifted just before the start of the "summer" portion of our planting season, and don't get frozen. So the spring trees arrive on site already dormant from being frozen for the winter, and when we handle them, we try to keep them cool, with the boxes closed. They are stored in a reefer truck, refrigerated at just a couple degrees above freezing. In theory, they should have been just recently thawed when they arrive on our site. The summer trees also arrive in a refrigerated truck, but since these ones are very alive and awake and growing (remember, they've never been frozen), once we get them on site, we immediately unload the boxes onto the ground and open the tops up. This lets the trees get some sunlight, to allows heat in the boxes to dissipate. They still get a tarp or a shade cloth draped over top, to avoid direct sunlight, but air flow is important because plants generate heat as they are growing, and a box of summer trees will actually get pretty warm if it remains closed. That's not great for the trees, because when they're warm, the roots tend to dry out, and we want them to remain moist until they are planted. So anyway, there's your tree physiology lesson of the day. Back to the point: we discovered that half of our load of trees was frozen, which sucks. We turned off the reefer for the day, hoping that they would gradually thaw by tomorrow. On a side note, I find it really ironic (and moronic) that planters get in trouble if they don't properly tarp boxes of trees, yet if you go to the nursery or cold storage facility, their "quick thaw" process is usually to use a forklift to move all the pallets of trees out into the sun, and let them sit there to thaw for five or six days. This is one of the many things about this industry that really pisses me off.

May 18th: I had to give a lecture to the camp this morning about the need to throw plots on themselves, to ensure their density improves. Depending on the contract, the specs for each block can vary considerably. For instance, on this contract, planters are required to plant as few as 800 seedlings per hectare on some blocks, and as many as 1800 stems/Ha on other blocks, depending the forester's assessment of each block. We look at the target density, and use a bit of math to figure out the required average spacing between trees. The planters have a tolerance too, before they get assessed penalties for poor spacing. As an example, a block might have specs of something like "2.4 meter target spacing, with 1.5 meter minimum distance between trees, and any area 4.8 meters in diameter with no tree results in having a 'missed spot' marked on the quality card." Once the planters know their spacing requirements, they judge everything by eye, but they should throw sample plots on themselves regularly, to make sure that they're doing it properly. A lot of planters don't like throwing plots, because they say that it wastes time. But I think of it as insurance - it only takes about sixty seconds to throw a quick plot on yourself. Do that a few times a day, and yes, you're probably losing three or four minutes of time that you could have been planting and making money. But planters who throw plots on themselves tend to have to replant FAR less frequently than other planters. And you don't make any money when you're replanting, or fixing trees that you planted poorly the first time. At mid-day, Wilson's crew got chased off their block by a grizzly bear, so things were a bit chaotic for a few hours, as we moved everyone to a new block. The old days of solving the problem with a .308 are long gone (thankfully).

May 19th: We have some sort of sickness (cold, sinus infection, sore throat) going through camp, so I had a meeting to suggest that for the next week or so, everyone should really try to refrain from sharing water bottles, cups, and so on. And also to be especially diligent with hand-washing after using the washroom, and before meals. Quite a few people in camp have gotten prescriptions for anti-biotics - I think we were overwhelming Whitecourt's walk-in clinic.

May 21st: We're starting several days of helicopter work. Commuting to work in a helicopter sounds glamorous, and it's pretty fun for the first three or four flights, but eventually the planters realize how much down-time there is on helicopter work, and they start to hate when they have to fly. On many occasions, our blocks are just two or three kilometers from the roads, and the only reason we have to fly is because the trucks and quads can't get to the blocks (maybe because of a river without a bridge, etc.). Sometimes, it is faster for the planters to walk into their blocks than it is for everyone to fly in, so in those cases, we get people to walk and we just use the helicopter to move the trees in. Anyway, the helicopters are slightly fun but really detrimental to production, and more to the point, extremely stressful for the foremen and myself. A normal decent helicopter (say a machine like an A-Star, that can carry five people or 30-40 boxes of trees per trip) costs around two thousand dollars per hour. That's over thirty dollars per MINUTE. Imagine being responsible for a contract where you have two helicopters flying for six to eight hours per day apiece, for a couple weeks, at more than thirty dollars each per minute. And add the significant safety risks into the equation. Someone, please send me another case of Tylenol.

May 22nd: We had a wolf at our helicopter staging area today. We also had freezing rain for most of the day, making conditions just miserable for the planters. Some of them had a great day in terms of earnings though. On cold & wet days, the best advice is to keep planting as hard as possible, no matter how miserable you are (it's the only way to keep warm). Stop moving, and you die. We also had a bolt of lightning make a tree explode about fifty feet away from two of our rookies. That gave them a minor heart attack.

May 23rd: I found out that some friends of mine (planters, but not in my camp) were just in yet another accident where a truck flipped into a ditch. Luckily, they were all wearing seatbelts, and nobody was injured. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is to wear seatbelts. The number of planting accidents where trucks go into ditches is just astounding. And when planters wear seatbelts, they survive. I can list a dozen planting deaths over the years that I know of, and they all relate to people who weren't wearing seatbelts during a vehicle crash. I don't know of any planter, ever, who has been killed by a bear, or killed when they were hit by lightning. Every major planting company has a couple trucks that get into accidents every single summer. Buckle up.

May 24th: Something went wrong with the electric fuel pump on our tidy tank truck. When we tried to fuel up a vehicle before breakfast, a short circuit caused a ton of sparks to fly out of the end of the nozzle. Thank goodness it was a tank of diesel instead of gas, and it was cool and very wet at the time. If it had been a gasoline tidy tank on a hot day, it unquestionably would have exploded. We sent the equipment in for repairs immediately.

May 25th: Six of the twenty-one first-year planters have now quit. Some of them probably made the right decision, but there were also a few that I didn't want to see go. This was a bit more attrition than I was hoping for. Our production for the camp is still decent, but I'm starting to wonder if I should hire a couple extra planters for July, to fill a few of the empty seats.

May 26th: Sean's truck got stuck, and after we pulled it out, we realized that there was a bigger problem, which he said had developed over the last 48 hours. The truck wouldn't keep running. I looked under the hood and played with it for a bit, and decided that the alternator wasn't charging the batteries (which later turned out to be the correct diagnosis). I ended up towing the truck into Whitecourt for repairs. When the tow truck driver showed up, he looked at me and laughed, and said, "I've been expecting to see you any day now."

May 28th: These helicopter days are taking a toll on the camp. We're leaving for work at 6:45am, and although some trucks are getting back in time for supper, the last trucks (ie. mine) are often out until almost 8pm. By the time we get back and eat, there is very little time to do anything else before people collapse into sleep. The foremen in particular are getting pretty wiped out. Also, our garbage is really starting to pile up. I can't ever leave staging while we're doing helicopter work, for safety & first-aid reasons. If there is ever an emergency on a block, the only person that they can contact on the radio is me sitting at staging, to tell the pilot to start up the helicopter and go to the rescue (the helicopter's radio doesn't work when the engine isn't running). So because I'm stuck at staging all the time right now, I'm not keeping ahead on dump runs and other errands.

May 31st: Spruceland Ford in Whitecourt still hasn't even looked at Sean's truck, let alone started to fix it. That's pretty annoying, since it was towed in to the dealership five days ago, and it even had a prior service appointment for yesterday that they ignored. We are having a really hard time working with those six seats not available, especially since it is also a "Big Box" truck that carries 120 boxes of trees at a time.

June 2nd: Another problem with helicopters is that they can't fly through fog or clouds (we use VFR choppers). So today, the crews arrived at staging on a nice sunny morning, and we got a call from the pilot who said that the airport was fogged in, and he couldn't see to lift off. I told the crews to start walking to their blocks if they wanted to make any money, and hopefully the helicopter would be able to fly more trees in to them within a few hours if the fog lifted. They had enough trees on their block for about an hour and a half of work, to get them started. Luckily, the chopper was able to fly by about 10am, so the only real downside was that some people had to walk for an hour to get to their blocks. Mind you, it sometimes takes longer than that to fly everyone into their blocks.

June 3rd: We had our first experienced planter quit today, because of shitty land and shitty prices. It's not unusual to lose a bunch of rookies, but it's quite unusual for me to lose vets. Prices have been decreasing for the last several years, and right now, the industry is faced with a combination of prices that haven't rebounded since the recession a few years ago. There is also a labour shortage because minimum wage is rising and people are finding that planting is less lucrative than some jobs in the city. Combine this labour shortage and pricing pressure with the fact that a lot of companies are still a few weeks behind because of the snow problems in May, and it is one of those "perfect storm" years. Foresters are going to be scrambling to get all of their work done, and planters just won't care because they can go find other jobs if conditions get bad. And conditions WERE bad today - rain all morning, then snow for a few hours in the afternoon.

June 4th: We had a bit of a surprise when we got up this morning: nearly an inch of snow in camp. But we got a bigger surprise when we got to the blocks: a foot of snow. So much for doing any planting today.

June 5th: Not a good day. It was our last day of helicopter work, which was nice, but we had yet another batch of frozen trees in the reefer, and one of the foremen was trying to thaw them out by leaving the closed boxes on the block in a pile without a tarp. However, when the forester saw this, he checked the temperature of all of the boxes, and six of the twenty-three were already thawed, so the foreman got us a $450 fine for those six boxes. We were a bit frustrated by this, since we were trying to deal with frozen trees, but the foreman admittedly should have had a tarp over the trees. To make matters worse, he also got us a $500 fine for another problem at the same time. I also saw a wolverine though, which was pretty cool.

June 7th: Today was supposed to be our last day of planting on the Millar Western spring contract. Based on the number of trees left, we should have been able to finish by mid-afternoon, get camp packed up afterward, and have people on the road by evening. However, a ton of things went wrong on the blocks (including some quality fixing), so we didn't get camp loaded and all of the planting done until about 8pm. Annoying. Also, something interesting happened to me on the way to the dump on one of my many trips today: I got pulled over by a Commercial Vehicle Enforcement officer, who tested the fuel in my pickup to make sure I wasn't using "marked" fuel (which is only legal for heavy equipment).

June 8th: We spent the morning finishing our garbage cleanup, and then left our camp site for the drive to our next contract. Unfortunately, there is a scale and inspection station between Whitecourt and where we were camped. Our first three trucks got pulled over with a fistful of warnings, even though we try incredibly hard to make sure that we meet all provincial and federal regulations. However, our next truck got impounded for a "soft emergency brake," and the shower trailer that it was towing got impounded separately because there was a crack in the roof. The driver got a 72-hour suspension, and to top it off, he also got a $575 fine for not having his quad strapped down INSIDE his canopy truck. We had to get the truck towed into town and repaired, and I had to buy a bunch of stuff at Home Hardware to fix the shower trailer so we could tow it away, and we had to bring a second driver after the truck got fixed. We still had several more trucks and trailers to get past the scales, but rather than risk any more problems, we took a detour route through a bunch of logging roads that bypassed the scale, but that added another hour and a half to our camp move. We had hoped to get out of Whitecourt by 9am this morning, but it was after 4pm by the time the convoy finally left town. On the drive, Mike almost ran over a deer. Someone was passing him at the time, and a deer ran out in front of Mike's truck, hit the car that was passing him, destroyed the car, and the deer richocheted back off to the right side of the road UNDER Mike's truck, but somehow missed the wheels while it was going under the truck. Lucky.

Click HERE to see pictures from the second camp of the season. This photo album has a bit more emphasis on some of the planters that work in our camp than most albums.

June 9th: This was our first day on our third contract. The Millar Western contract has decimated our camp - we've now lost a total of eleven planters out of the original fifty-five. I've hired one replacement, and I'm looking for three or four more, to keep our production on track for the rest of the summer. We had a long day today. We met for camp setup at 8am, had our tree delivery at 11am, had our pre-work at 2pm, and set up our blocks and got everyone to plant a box so we'd know where our pieces were, and be organized for morning. Everything seemed very good up to this point. But then, as we were about to go to town for supper, one of the trucks broke through the surface of what looked like a perfect dry and flat logging road, and dropped down into an area where there were underground springs in the road. We have several trucks with tow ropes and winches in our camp, but they were already gone ahead for supper, so I was stuck with four trucks that didn't have a tow rope, and we were in an area with no cell service. It took a bit of effort to solve that problem. We dug out the truck, put logs ramped up in front of the tires, hooked on to it with another truck using a quad chain, and had a dozen people pushing the stuck truck for extra horsepower, and just barely managed to get it out at 7:30pm. But it could have been worse - we could have been stuck there for the night.

June 10th: A couple of our blocks got buzzed by a jet this afternoon, which was pretty cool. It just appeared out of nowhere, and blasted past our block about a hundred feet above the planters' heads (about twenty feet above the tree-tops). That definitely startled some people.

June 11th: Today was a particularly miserable day. First, we are starting in a small area that is really far from our camp, so for a few days, we're going to have drives that are over an hour and a half long just to get to work in the morning. Then, because of the sinkhole in the bad road, we can't get the trucks in, so we have to walk 3-4km to get into our blocks. In another rutted section of our roads, two of our trucks got major dents in the doors today (including my own). We had pouring rain. Another vet said that he was leaving, because of his academic studies in Asia. We broke a quad, because the lug nuts on the wheels weren't tightened enough after a tire change and the lug posts got stripped. And finally, we had two people who were injured today, and one who slept in, so our production was even worse than it should have been. But on a positive note, dinner was amazing, as always. We had a couple different types of pasta, shephard's pie, salmon steaks, sauteed asparagus, and fresh baked homemade bread. At the end of the day, we can always count on our cooks (Stephane and Jessica) to make everything seem great.

June 12th: We resolved to finish planting the area that is really far from our camp today. There were constant challenges through the day, due to rain and the fact that I spent most of the day towing trucks out of the mud, and I had to winch my own truck out of the mud about a dozen times. In fact, there were two times that I honestly thought I'd have to abandon the truck permanently, because the mud was over the top of the wheels at one point (and I have large wheels). Anyway, we got through the day, and finished pretty late, but we got it all done. Then, as we started for home, we got a bunch of our trucks stuck as we were leaving the blocks. At one point, we ended up with four of our five trucks either stuck, or blocked in behind stuck trucks, and it was already 7:30pm (an hour past dinner, and remember that we had a ninety minute drive to get back to camp). I had to use a bit of ingenuity with our last truck to get everyone extricated. In the end, we got four of the trucks rolling again, but we had to abandon one truck. I used up a lot of my good luck today.

June 13th: Finally, we're back to short drives from camp again. Everyone is in a good mood, and I expect the camp to plant close to a hundred thousand trees today. Now I just need 48 hours to catch up on paperwork from the past two weeks. Total exhaustion has set in though, so a good night of sleep would be a nice change.

June 14th: Today is a day off for the planters, so all of the canopy trucks are doing runs to the dump in Calgary so we can finally get caught up on our enormous pile of garbage. I fell asleep at 8pm last night, so I feel slightly awake for the first time in a week or more. I feel like today is going to be a good day, and I'll almost feel caught up by the end of the night. It's hot and sunny, and everyone is in a great mood. The only problem so far is that I had to break into yet another truck (fourth time this year) that the planters locked the keys in. I can break into most of the trucks in about three to four minutes, but this one was the suburban which is a bit tricky, and it took me more than half an hour.

June 17th: We've had several days of rain in a row (and a small amount of snow) which has been kind of challenging to work with. I haven't had a day yet on this contract where we haven't gotten at least one truck stuck. Sometimes, trucks are getting stuck half a dozen times a day. We've broken a few tow ropes this week, and several of the foremen are going to be buying more tow ropes on the next day off. Today was also our head cook Stephane's last day of work. He's heading off to run the food services for the Edmonton Folk Festival, and our assistant cook (Jessica) is taking over as head cook. She's been a head cook for several years too - I've been really lucky with my cooking staff this year.

June 18th: The Boy Scout and Wolf Cubs were planting some trees today (sponsored by Spray Lakes) on a block close to several of our blocks. I stopped in for a while to talk to some of these potential future employees. Some of them had planted almost a hundred trees each. I don't think they believed me when I said that we'd plant over a million in three weeks.

June 19th: Today was a fairly non-descript day, other than pouring rain, and one of our trucks hitting a deer. Both parties suffered damages; the deer's injuries were terminal. Thankfully it wasn't a moose.

June 28th: I took my truck to a truck wash in Sundre to spray off the windshields, mirrors, headlights, and brake lights. The owner came up to me and kicked me out. He told me my truck was too dirty and he wasn't going to let me wash it there.

Click HERE to see pictures from the third camp of the season.

June 30th: I almost caught a rabbit today, on foot. By "almost," I mean that he stopped underneath a small bush. I guess he figured that if he couldn't see me, I couldn't see him. I poked his back, probably scared him senseless.

July 2nd: I could see my breath again this morning. I was a little worried that it was going to snow, but by mid-morning it had warmed up and we were getting a light rain. Mike and Andrew called me to say that they had a small pack of wolves watching their planters. I asked if they were positive that the animals were wolves. Mike replied, "I'm no zoologist, but these are considerably bigger than the biggest dogs I've ever seen." Definitely not coyotes. The foremen weren't too worried though - the planters were working in groups, and the wolves seemed more curious than predatory.

July 5th: I had to take one of the planters in to the hospital today for what he thought was a cracked rib, after he slipped and fell on a log. While I was in town, I was surprised to run into Luke Patterson, a friend of mine who I bartend with back in New Brunswick, who just got moved from Ontario to Alberta by Brinkman. In the afternoon, I almost had a misadventure when I was coming around a narrow, sharp corner on a one-lane road, and almost got destroyed by a large oil tanker which left me about 18 inches to spare on the road. I decided that hitting the ditch seemed safer than a head-on collision, and he missed me by about five feet. Luckily, I wasn't going too fast at the time, and I was expecting the worst on the corners even though there wasn't supposed to be any traffic on the road. And thankfully, he pulled me out of the ditch afterward.

July 7th: The weather for one of our other camps yesterday was so bad that planters were bleeding from golf-ball sized hail, windshields were broken, and there was a foot of hail on the blocks afterward. We just had wind and lightning where I was working. I was trying to use a chopper at the time, and the wind was tossing it around like a toy. The foremen were watching, and drawing straws on who would have to take my place after the chopper crashed.

July 8th: As Bob Dylan put it, "A hard rain's gonna fall." And it did today, as fierce as I've seen in years. By the end of the day, some parts of the road were at risk of washing out entirely . For part of the afternoon, I was monitoring one section of road and trying to decide if I should just evacuate my entire camp. It looked like it was going to hold since it was stagnant water instead of flowing water, but I was worried that it would get up over top of the engines and air intakes.

July 9th: A good way to put the flooding on our blocks into context would be simply to say that we had ducks swimming across our main access road today. I also heard that beavers were swimming around some of the cars in town.

July 10th: More rain. I took on a dozen planters from Rich's camp today who had no work. The main bridge on the ANC haul road is shut down now because of washouts. Rich's camp were on a day off yesterday, and tried to go to town, but the road systems were washed out in so many places that it took them seven and a half hours to find a route to escape from camp. They're all stuck in either Whitecourt or Edson now, but unfortunately their planting gear and all of their other belongings are back in their camp, which they can't get back to. I was only able to round up twelve extra sets of planting gear to allow a small group of them to work with us for the day.

July 11th: I tried to go around a truck on one of our sloppy mud roads today. Someone had left a door open while they were loading trees, so I swung wide to make sure I didn't hit the door, and ended up sliding into the opposite ditch. Sean hooked up his tow rope to pull me out. It looked like a pretty easy extraction, since I was barely in the ditch, but when he started to pull me, my entire winch bumper ripped right off the front of my truck. But on a positive note (for a change), one of my planters, Brian Sandiland, planted his one millionth career tree today. That's an amazing achievement. He did most of the trees working with Brinkman. Congratulations, Brian!

July 14th: The Sysco food delivery truck got stuck on the landing in our camp. I tried to pull him out, but no luck. I brought one of my foremen in, and we tried with two trucks, but no luck. I called Jim Logan, and he and Greg Mancuso showed up in two more trucks. We had four pickups all chained in a row, trying to pull out the Sysco truck. After breaking a tow rope, then pulling the hook bracket off the Sysco truck, then completely separating one of our steel trailer hitches in half, we finally managed to get him pulled out. I didn't think it was possible. Luckily, I had the whole thing on video so I'll have to put that on YouTube at some point this winter when I have a bit of time.

July 15th: Due to a logistical issue that was beyond our control, my camp and Greg's camp had to share a helicopter today. We didn't think it would be impossible, because I had already flown trees into my block, so it should be a matter of an hour or so putting my planters in (45 people), then a quick hop down to his staging area, and not much longer getting his smaller group into their blocks (25 people). After a pre-work, since it was a new pilot, the flying went off without too many hitches at my end, and the last load of planters went in at 9:23am. Not great, but I've seen worse. But then things started to go wrong, and Greg's last load of people didn't get into their block until 2pm. Brutal. What's the point of even flying? We are never sharing a helicopter again.

July 16th: I'm not sure what amused me more today: the hitch-hikers that I picked up who started talking about, "... this tree planting legend, Scooter," that they'd heard rumours about, or the fact that one of the checkers got head-butted by a black bear.

July 19th: There's one less deer in Alberta tonight, and one more broken grill on one of our trucks. Anyone who is impressed by the good that we do for the environment should also think about the wildlife that we inadvertently destroy, and the fact that each planting camp burns about thirty to fifty thousand litres of gasoline every summer. We also create about two or three transport truckloads of garbage for the regional landfills. That makes our perception of being "good for the environment" a bit less impressive.

July 21st: A lot of things seem to go wrong when tree planting. if something can go wrong, it will. Earlier today, I found out that one of my foremen seized a quad engine by failing to check the oil. A new quad is over eight thousand dollars. When things were going badly, I was thinking, "It could be worse; I could have been hit by a transport truck this morning." And now that that has happened, I'll have to think of a new phrase for self-consolation. Incredibly, neither my truck nor myself sustained any real damages.

July 23rd: Most of the camp had a pretty brutal walk-in to a block today. The block was nice, and the walk wasn't too far - less than a kilometer. And we looked at a couple routes from the air to find the best, and this one looked grassy but less wet than other options. But it turned out that the planters were wading through water up to their chest in one part of the walk-in. Not a good way to start the day. We would have flown into the block normally, but the helicopter company didn't have enough helicopters available. Millar Western is trying to find a second helicopter company, since this lack of choppers is really turning into a major pain in the ass for us. This is the first day that it has really caused a problem for my camp, but Greg's camp and some of the Brinkman camps have really been scrambling to find machines. And at least a wet walk is better than a day off.

July 30th: One of my foremen was unloading a quad from a truck in camp at breakfast this morning, and the wheels slipped sideways on the wet quad ramps. He lurched sideways, and slammed into the edge of the canopy's back doors. The impact cracked the quad helmet that he was wearing, and he ended up getting a concussion and a cracked vertebrate in his back.

August 2nd: We had our year-end party yesterday, and today we got all the trucks ready for the convoy back to Prince George. Less than twenty minutes into the drive, on a sunny and clear afternoon, one of the drivers caught their wheel on the edge of the highway (where the shoulder was only eight inches wide before dropping off) and the truck ended up rolling. The truck was a complete write-off, but she got out of it with just a scratch on her leg. That was one more blatant example of the fact that seat belts save lives. Years ago, it was a constant fight to get planters to wear seatbelts, but nowadays almost all of them buckle up automatically, without reminders.

That's it for this season. Check back again in the summer of 2012 for more stories.