A group of planters waiting for the chopper.
Scooter's truck, backed into the ditch on purpose to give it more leverage for winching another truck out of the mud.
Bruce Hawkenson, demonstrating the Hawk Power Screefer, which is basically a chain saw with a bunch of metal tines on the end. It chews up the grass sod really well, and leaves a nice patch of bare dirt to plant the tree in.
Scooter, waiting for the chopper to come pick up a sling of trees.
Adam Visitew.
Cory Adrian.
Nic Grenier, laughing while he waits for Mike Allison to finish bagging up.
Lynnette Van Damme.
Travis Visitew.
Richard Sawchuk, smiling after a hard day at work.
Wendy Goertzen and Candace Reimersma, looking concerned about the bare-roots.
Paul Stapleton.
Planting in the heavy brush.
Jeremy Campbell, Ministry of Forests representative.
Donny Jackow.
Ryan Reiss.
Jonathan Epp.
Kelly Hiebert.
Ryan Huizing.
Random block scenery.
Caption.
Marc Dubord.
Kia, Regan's dog, hanging out under the garbage in the back of the truck.
A black bear.
Jeff Johnson, about to lay down a brush mat.
This map illustrates how lack of planning can lead to poor results. The foreman of this block knew that about 1,000 trees would be planted per hectare (a fill block) and that he had 20,000 trees in total, thus he should have figured out that he could cover about 20 hectares with the trees available. However, the block was 41 hectares in size, so he should have also realized that he could only cover half the block (especially since this was also pointed out to him as he set up the block). When we cannot finish a block, we like to start at the back and plant all the trees together in one contiguous area (to make things easier for the next crew to come in and finish the block the following year). However, this time, the foreman spread his crew out a bit too thin, and when he had finished the trees that were available, only the shaded areas were covered properly. Luckily, about a week later, we managed to get a few more of the proper kind of trees to square up some areas, and he was able to tidy up the block.
The front wheels of an ETV, sunk into a landing (ironically, on the same block shown on the map in the previous photo).
Jonas Soehl, displaying a tree that has just had a brush mat laid over it. The mats prevent competing grass and vegetation from overwhelming the seedling. This was the first brush mat block we've ever worked on.
Breakfast outside the mess tent.
Dan Fekkaldy, planting on a pretty green block.
Jenny, showing off some of the banana cream pie that she cooked at the end of the contract.
Curtis Parker, after eating some of Jenny's pie. It looks like Curtis is a very messy eater.
Tucker Innes, Vanessa Joosten, and Jonas Soehl.
The "donut" block. This one was fairly steep, but not the steepest that we worked on this month.
Doug, fueling up the chopper.