My first piece. Unfortunately, when I took this photo it was slightly overcast, so you can't see nearly as far out into the water as you would have if it had been sunny at the time. The view was pretty incredible.
The ground has a lot more rock and slash than blocks in the Interior. Those logs on the ground are about two feet in diameter. You can barely see a small green cedar tree that I've planted in front of the bigger (three foot) rock near the right side of the photo.
Sometimes, the hardest part of your piece is getting onto it. The scale is hard to perceive in this photo without a person in it. But where the cache is, the bank is about eight or ten feet high. Sometimes it's pretty hard to climb up onto the piece if you're carrying thirty or forty pounds of trees in your bags.
Maybe this photo will give you a better perspective on scale. You can see the checker down on the bottom right of the photo. Compare his size with the banks up on the left, near the hoe.
The blocks are a lot rockier than in Alberta, although to be honest, I didn't find it very hard to find soil most of the time.
This is my hand at the end of day two. I think it's because I was wearing a glove, and it was raining constantly. Normally, I don't get blisters when I go bare-handed.
Looking out my motel room window at 7:30am on a rain day. We normally work in the rain (which I actually enjoy, somewhat), but the first day I was there I heard that they had just gotten about 170 mm of rain in the previous 24 hours. That's a little excessive. It makes the ground kind of dangerous, because things get so saturated that there are massive mudslides on the blocks.
Again, there is a lot more slash on the blocks here than in the Interior. Some of these logs that are three feet wide are tricky to climb over at times. And it's interesting that sometimes it is easier to crawl under slash & logs than over top.
Gaultheria shallon, more commonly known as salal.
Another one of the blocks. Always good exercise climbing around this sort of stuff.
To a northern Interior planter, this piece looks like crap. To me, it looks like money.
Another block.
I didn't actually see too many really big stumps. This one was about three feet across. I only saw maybe four or five stumps on the pieces that I worked on that were more than a dozen feet wide at the base.
Another one of my pieces. It looks a bit scary, but it wasn't.
You can probably spot the piece of blue flagging tape where one of my trees is planted. I don't usually flag trees in the interior, but I almost always do on the coast.
Another block.
Matt, our mill checker, throwing a plot in my piece. Matt worked with me at Folklore before - he was a foreman there for quite a few years.
The view from one of my pieces.
Another block.
The view from another one of the pieces that I worked on. I didn't realize that it was slightly out of focus at the time. The auto-focus wasn't working, probably because of the 80 km/hr winds at the time. I had a hard time standing up, and actually got blown down to the ground a few times with my bags on. Thankfully the wind was blowing at the cliff I was working on, rather than across it.
The view near my motel room.