This was a very bad sight. We went out to check our blocks, after a snow delay, and this was a block that we were scheduled to plant only a week later. That's a lot of snow.
But down in the city, where our camp was staying at the Knutsford campground, the days were warm and sunny. I didn't think the planters believed me about the snow on the blocks until I showed them photos and videos.
Joanne, our assistant cook this year, chopping up food for a salad.
Shelley, stirring up a big pot of stew.
The lineup for supper.
A seatbelt on a set of planting bags. Our planters often try to buy seatbelts from auto-wreckers, because the plastic clip buckles that BushPro and WorkWizer put on their planting bags are garbage. You'd think that these companies would learn to just start making bags with seatbelt buckles.
A big fat toad.
John Hopper, our forester, measuring the distance between two trees to make sure they weren't planted too close.
Walking through a block. The trees that were cut off at about ten feet tall were left on the block as wildlife habitat for woodpeckers and other animals.
Bagging up in snowy weather.
Scooter, wishing that it was sunnier.
The road to one of our blocks. BCTS had to bring in snow plows so we could get to the blocks.
A view of some of the scenery surrounding Kamloops, photographed from the Red Plateau forest service road.
It is an optical illusion? Or was I just trying to practice my leaning?
Here we see the forester and the foreman, sympathic for the planters who had to fill plant this piece of the block.
Warning: cowboys ahead.
The cowboys must be chasing the Bighorn Sheep.
Kent, giving a pre-work discussion about the specific requirements for the fill plants.
As Corb Lund said, "the truck got stuck."
However, this was not any ordinary stuck truck. We had three trucks stuck. And after I realized that I couldn't pull them out, and winched myself for almost half a kilometer to get my own truck out to clear roads, I decided to do something that I had never done before: call in a bulldozer to pull them out.
Sharon, putting chains onto the five-ton.
We take our recycling very seriously in our camps these days. Not only do we take back the refundable bottles and cans, but we also take back the recyclable cardboard, tin cans, and plastics. The only trick is to be careful to take these items back to town on a trip when other things are going anyway. It would be senseless to make a trip to town just to turn in these items, because of the fuel consumed on the trip to town.
The dashboard of Nate's truck. Everytime someone on the crew does something good, "above and beyond the call of duty," Nate gives them a sticker. Once they accumulate seven stickers, he plants a free box of trees for them.
A wasp, trying to warm up on Scooter's finger.
Idle hands are the devil's work. We lost seven days in May due to snow on the blocks. For one day off, some of the planters decided to build a catapault, so they could try to catapault empty beer cans and roadkill into the other planting camp that was sharing the campground with us.
Here is one of the "good" roads on the blocks, that a truck can actually use. Well, sometimes. No wonder we get so many trucks stuck.
Loading up the trucks in the morning, after breakfast. It can't be done at night, because the foremen aren't allowed to load trees into the trucks until 6am.
A grass snake that I picked up. Kamloops has rattlesnakes, but we haven't seen any yet.
It looks like these are cobwebs on the block. Actually, they are spider webs. There are spiders that live underneath the snow all winter long, in that tiny space between the ground and the bottom of the snow, and they spin webs all across the surface of the block. When the snow melts, the webs are revealed. After the sunlight hits them, they only last for about a day before they disintegrate, so people rarely see the webs. However, it was so hot out in Kamloops on some afternoons that large patches of ground were finally exposed, and in some areas we could see acres of spider webs across the block. It's amazing to think, when you see a snowy block in the winter, that the ground is completely covered with spider webs under the snow.
Another one of our blocks, covered with snow patches.
This particular block was a story of economic hardship. The logger cut all of the wood on the block, but then the price of fuel rose so high, and the selling price of lumber dropped so quickly (due partly to the low American dollar and the fall-out from the sub-prime crisis), that the cost of removing the logs from the block was higher than the sale value of the wood. So all the logs got abandoned on the block. Obviously, this kind of waste is disappointing, but there isn't much that can be done. The logger will probably get a large fine from BCTS for wasting the wood. There were about 200 of these large log decks scattered across the block, which also made it hard for us to replant, because the planters had to climb over log decks all day long.
Another photo, showing more of the log decks on the same block.
Henri Lali, Folklore's certified snag faller.
Kelley, bagging up with some pine trees.
These soft roads are not great for the weight of the five-ton.
Three of the girls, bagging up with more trees.
Andrew, at the cache.
Water, water, everywhere.
The mountain pine beetle continues to kill almost all of the mature pine trees in BC. You can see all the dead red trees towering over some younger green pines, which luckily, are young enough not to have been affected.
Snow beside one of our blocks. This photo was taken on May 22nd.
And once again, a truck got stuck. This time, it was in the middle of the road.
A duct tape design on the side of Nate's truck.
Up at 4:30am, checking out what the cooks had just laid out for breakfast, before the planters all got to it.
Another one of our blocks. This was a nice overflow, overlooking a large lake. Well, the bottom of the block that you can see was very nice. The top half of the block, behind me, was very rocky.
Aidan, fixing the horns on James' truck.
A photo from the top of one block, showing several of the other blocks in the area.
A grouse. This bird relies on its camoflage to protect it from predators. He thought that I couldn't see him, so I walked right up to him on the road and sat down beside him. This photo was taken with the camera about twelve inches away from the bird, on wide-angle. I actually had to pull the camera back a bit to fit it all into the frame.
Derek Egan, planting his very first tree. We hardly have any rookies in our camp this year (54 people in the camp are veterans), so I thought the occasion was worth a photo.
Joanne, breathing in the fresh air at the Kamloops Regional Sanitary Landfill.
Dylan, getting ready to ride his motorbike to Alberta.
Oh, you wouldn't believe it. Another truck, stuck in the middle of the main road.
This is what a stump looks like after it has been run over many times by a skidder.
Some interesting looking rocks on the side of the road. I'm sure that my father, being a geologist, will email me to tell me what they are, so this page will probably be updated shortly. They have a bit of a golden glow to them. Maybe they are a form of iron pyrite, but I thought that rock usually had more silver to it.
Jon-Eric and Ben, trying to figure out what kind of pizza to have for dinner.
And once again, trucks don't get stuck as often if you don't park them right on the edge of the ditch.
Standing on top of "Block D," about an hour before sunset.
This is what happens when a truck driver drops off a reefer unit in your camp and fails to put support beams under the front legs. The camp gets loaded into the reefer, then the reefer sinks two feet into the ground. Then, when the next truck comes to pick up the reefer, it can't get in underneath it, and you have to call in an expensive (and very large) tow truck to lift the reefer straight up in the air, out of the hole.
One of our nicer blocks in Kamloops.
Another section of the same block. Don't be fooled by the wood and the rocks that you see on the hill. With a full screef down to pure mineral soil required, this one is still a winner for the motivated planters.
If you work hard, you might get a box planted in only three or four hours. You don't want to go any faster than that, or your quality won't pass/
Camp had already been taken away by the last day, so we had to have dinner at East Side Marios.
The waitresses were pretty good about things, despite a large group of extremely hungry planters descending on them unexpectedly. I thought everyone was eating at different spots, but we all showed up (separately) at the same restaurant, unexpectedly.
One of the last parts of the contract - burning all the box-ends after the tallies are balanced for the payroll system.