What better place to start the year's photos than a shot of IRL in Prince George, where we all get our planting gear.
Meghan, sitting on a trash container.
Taking the track unit out for a test spin in the yard.
Here is a photo of everybody trying to envision how camp will be set up, and where everything will be located.
Foreman Ben Harper, looking confused, and wondering where to begin.
In this photo, some of the camp structures are starting to come together.
Planters who are wondering what happens next.
Picking up our first shipment of trees at High Country Cold Storage in Kamloops. Rocky says that their facility has about 70,000 boxes of tree seedlings at the start of the planting season.
Terri Gillespie, learning to plant.
Scooter, taking the 5-ton truck out for a tree delivery.
The camp bulletin board.
Meghan, looking apprehensive in the rain.
A first-aid simulation, at the start of the season, to make sure that everybody understands what would happen during an emergency.
All of our first aiders, and several of the rookies, get involved in the action.
Some flowers. The weather in Kamloops is so warm that the grass is green everywhere, and all the plants are in bloom, even though it is still April.
We drove past this girl, and thought she was selling lemonade, so we didn't bother to stop. However, we heard shortly afterward that she was selling fossils, not lemonade, so we came back to pay her a visit.
I managed to buy this nice fossil for only $1.00, marked down from $1.10. The girl said that she found them in the rock quarry near her house.
An oil tanker in Kamloops, with a big dent in the top. At first glance, I looked at it and thought that a plane must have flown into it. Then I thought, "No, that's not likely." Then I looked on the other side of the road, close to the tank, and saw the end of one of the runways at the airport. Ooops.
The Bell baby blimp, at the airport.
Lowell Geddert, foreman.
Planting up the hillside.
Another view from the top of our first block. You can see the trucks parked on a landing, looking pretty small in the center of the photo. You might also be able to barely make out the transmission towers and lines in the background down behind the trucks, about a kilometer lower than the landing that the trucks are on.
A photo of a large ginseng farm, taken from the side of the mountain.
A close-up of the ginseng growing under the suspended tarps. These are the same type of tarps that we use in our shade tents.
A cow. There are cows on the logging roads all the time here, which is a bit of a problem.
A photo of Tim's dinner one night. Stephane made us all tacos, baked potatos, and soup for dinner.
Stephane heard that plants grow better when you talk to him, so he is serenading some boxes of seedlings in the walk-in cooler. We are not permitted to keep boxes of trees in the canopy trucks overnight, as they need to stay in a cool location. These boxes accidentally ended up in camp when the 5-ton was left on a block an hour and a half away, so we stored them in the cooler overnight rather than make somebody drive them out to the 5-ton.
I think this is a yellow-bellied marmot, although I'm not positive. There are a lot of them around here.
Boxes of trees in the reefer.
More boxes in the reefer - it holds about 800-900 boxes when it is almost full, depending on the size of the boxes and the length of the reefer.
A group of wild bighorn sheep.
The fire hazard level sign.
Ben, on his first day wearing a high-visibility vest.
A group of bees that were massed on a sign at the Esso card-lock.
Ben's truck, the first time that he got it stuck.
A view of Kamloops, early one morning.
This is one of the industrial plants in Kamloops. I'm not sure what it does, but you can see the smoke or steam coming out of the stack from dozens of miles in every direction, so it is a bit of a landmark.
Ribbons on a young pine tree on a cutblock, indicating where a future road is going to go.
Chris and Shawn, a couple of guys doing timber cruising in the Red Plateau area, who helped me out one day.
A morel mushroom, highly sought after by mushroom pickers.
Fertilizer tea-bags. These tea-bags get planted in a slit in the ground, a couple inches away from the seedling, and release fertilizer for the next 12 months to help the seedling grow.
A mix of the four types of trees that we were planting on the MacGillivary contract. From left to right, these are pine, spruce, larch, and fir.
Sumaya, planting a tree.
A small rabbit that I saw on the block.