Apex - 1
Artisan - 1
Blue Collar - 4
Brinkman - 9
Celtic - 3
Coast Range - 2
Corsair - 1
Dynamic - 6
Fieldstone - 1
Folklore - 6
Greenpeaks Forest Management - 1
Greenpeaks Holdings - 1
Hybrid 17 - 1
Legacy - 1
Little Smokey - 2
NATA - 1
Nature's Treasures - 1
NGR - 4
Northern - 1
Outland - 6
Rhino - 2
Seneca - 3
Shakti - 1
Spectrum - 3
Summit - 5
Torrent - 1
Wildwoods - 1
Windfirm - 2
Zanzibar - 1
Total = 72 ??
In this list, I'm talking about the maximum number of camps that a company will have in a season, based mostly on starting numbers. So if two camps combine half-way through the season, let's call them two camps, because that's what they started out as. If a single camp fragments temporarily and a crew or couple crews go off to do a smaller job, I'm still counting them as a single camp. But I guess if a big camp does a job for the first three weeks and then splits into two distinct camps for the rest of the season, that could be counted as a pair.
I'm not counting camps or crews that work purely out of motels. This is restricted to bush camps. Let's not restrict it only to tent camps. If there's a bush camp set up by a planting contractor in a semi-permanent location/facility, and the planting contractor has ATCO trailers or something similar for the planters, I'll count it. But if it's a stand-alone permanent logging camp operated by a third party, then I wouldn't count it, because that's more similar to working in motels other than having your meals prepared for you.
There are a couple of Alberta companies on the list. I'm lumping them in with BC, since they sometimes work in BC, and since some of the BC companies work in Alberta. So this is a two-province list. However, for each company, I'm only counting the camps that are active in either BC or Alberta. So for example, with companies like Brinkman or Outland, I'm not counting any of their camps in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, or the Maritimes.
If I get better guesses or corrections from other planters, I'll try to keep updating this post (at the top of the thread) to reflect revised estimates. We'll assume that this is a snapshot of the 2015 year, ie. I'm not going to go chasing corrections to the list for future years. It's mostly just wondering about the rough number for curiosity. I know that the WSCA tried to do a study and estimated that there are about 6600 planters in BC each year, and there have been studies of the number of companies that plant trees, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone ever trying to consider the number of bush camps.
Obviously, the number of planters will vary significantly. My own camp usually has about 48 planters, but some of the other standalone camps I'm familiar with have small sizes of as few as 18-24 planters. And I've heard rumors of big camps with as many as as 70-100 planters in them at other companies. So a company with three large camps might have more planters than another company with six smaller camps. It would be really hard to study the sizes, so I'm not even going to try to understand that measurement.
