Marvelous Meziadin

My wit and wits are eluding and deluding me at this point of the season. Working out here is all-consuming sometimes, which has its pros and cons, I suppose. It's especially interesting when I juxtapose this lifestyle to the one that I'm going to lead in a few weeks, let alone in about a month or so down the road. Astonishing really, things can change so absolutely rapidly with even the slightest of nuances, like a geographic alteration...which almost results in a mental altercation, but that's why I started this blog, in part, afterall...

One thing that I have relished doing this summer is getting completely absorbed and washed away in TV shows; escaping reality on a laptop is a fine way to while away the time, knowing that there are bigger and better things beyond your own little reality. That, and it's just a darn good way to re-LAX: being brainwashed does great things for stamina while simultaneously reinforcing a crazy and melodramatic imagination. It feels good.

At least there's always my dog. Trusty little guy.

This week we were staying at Meziadin Lake Provincial Park--we even got up the courage to finally go swimming on the second to last day of our seven day shift. (Good thing, too, since I hadn't showered for over a week, I just won't write how much over...) Fall is in the air so the days have cooled down significantly, and the nights are cozier with a hot water bottle and dog in your tent (and I won't finish that sentence). My favourite smell right now is when, in the morning when the air is still cool, there's a lingering drifting scent of sun-warmed, spicy raspberries--mmm.

Sweet Summer

Spring and fall have always been my favourite seasons; I love the crisp mornings and warm days and scents of things growing and dying. But now. Well, now I have had my first taste of summer in at least six years and it was awesome thanks mostly to Des, but also to all of my friends in Montreal. My sorry-looking, bruised, white legs, saw the sun for the first time in awhile, lounging by the (free) poolside; we went for a long bikeride(.pdf) (and even got a flat, make that two!, to make the experience a complete package); shopped at the market and then cooked and ate everything we bought (mmm!) and washed it all down with applejack(s!); discovered a new favourite cheese (L'Édel de Cléron...as delicious as eating butter); learned to surf (in Montréal!!!); made some new friends; and, had a really fun potluck with friends, old and new. I think that's it. I feel as though I'm missing something...oh well, in the spirit of summer, I won't dig too hard in my brain to try and remember because I wouldn't want to break out in a sweat or anything on my holiday, eh?

After 13 hours of travel, I have now returned to Smithers although one could easily imagine that I am half way around the world by now, or at least have done a return trip to Paris, or someplace extravagant like that. I missed the heatwave here, but I didn't miss the beautiful sunrise over the glacier and mountains this morning which I'm glad about because now it's overcast, chilly, and looking drab, but at least there's a nice memory to recall during the day.

I've four more shifts of work to do which, I might add, seems nuts. Time flies. Then, it's wedding and holiday time for a few weeks (with a few more days of surfing, I hope!), and then, I return to Montréal almost mid-September for my (hopefully) last semester of school. Until then, I will try my damnedest to keep this puppy updated and interesting (emphasis on the latter).

Flowers and Bears - Oh my

Big ol' Grizzly Paw. Grr. This block scares the shit out of me; I once saw a Grizzly (perhaps this very one...) eating a young black bear here. Quite the experience. Apparently, male black bears will kill the young of females to make them go into estrous again so that they can breed with the female: the definition of spreading your seed, I suppose. Anyway, and the Grizzly we saw was highly likely eating the remains of this charming ritual.

Lupinus spp.

Apparently several lupines are known to have caused fatal poisoning in animals, so all species should be considered poisonous; apparently the moose (?) like to graze the tender tips of these lupins in the Nass Valley (Nisga'a Core Lands). In this picture there is also some fireweed (Epilobium anustifolium) and bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum).

It's always a real treat when my plot includes a bird's nest, especially when it contains eggs. The two structures amaze me: Can you imagine how long it must take for the little bird to gather up snippets of twigs and grass to form a bed for its progeny? And, how does mother nature make sure a perfectly thin and beautifully rounded shell to protect the growing embryo? So cool.

Catch Up

Well, I'm a little bit behind the times and need to recap the past two weeks of my life for you, now, don't I? Well, here goes something...

The week before last was spent lounging in a motel, watching crappy TV...naw, we worked hard, promise! We were in a motel though. Terrace was the place to be. It was actually alright. The first two days were in the helicopter, flying with two of the best pilots in the world: Mike and Ian at Quantum, in Terrace. The first day we went down to the Falls River area. I saw a porcupine (aka Mr. Porky), which made me laugh, and it was a beautifully misty day with smatterings of sunshine and rain and clouds that drifted in and out of the valley, hiding and revealing the lovely waterfalls that decorate the steep hillsides. The second day we went over to the Big Wedeene River, near Terrace as well but had to abort our mission within about an hour because the block that we were going to work on wasn't quite ready for us!

After another day's work around Terrace, we hussled out to Prince Rupert for a day's flying into Silver Creek (just next door to PR), traipsing around in the multi-layer cutblocks (see the photos on my Flickr page). In one of the blocks there was a huge section of "culturally modidfied trees". These CMTs were cedars that had had their barked stripped in one section over the years. The bark would be used to make baskets, etc. Anyway, check it out...!

Working in Silver Creek is a bit amusing because it's within cell range of PR. That always throws me for a loop: you think you're in the middle of nowhere, but in all reality...!!! That evening we went and had sushi at the BEST sushi joint I've EVER been to. It's called Opa's Sushi. It's in Cow Bay, in Prince Rupert...if you're ever there, don't miss it. That and their rolls are SO cheap and SO good. Mmm! It's also super cool because it's housed in an old fish net loft so the building's all wooden, and not painted on the inside or finished in any fancy way at all really; the beams are all exposed and it smells like the ocean and wood and sushi all rolled up into one.

After sushi dinner we sauntered across the street to Cowpuccino's! One of the three-way tie winners for the best cafe in Canada, in my humble opinion. It's so funky. And, they make the best baked goods in this eentsy-weensy kitchen. So, if you're a sweetie-o-holic, you'd feel right at home here. Hannah grabbed three treats for the road; I succombed only to a measly chocolate oat bar and could hardly finish it (I'm not very hardcore in the world of sweeties)...but, it was so good.

The next shift of work took place in the buggy Meziadin. This is the campground we stayed at: Meziadin Lake Provincial Park. We even went for a dip, two times! (It was COLD!). The work this past week was good, albeit somewhat buggy. Behind my left ear looks like a chicken-pocked warzone...not very pleasant. And, I suffered a lopsided black-fly collagen injection, a la Goldie Hawn in some movie way-back-when. That was interesting!!! And, I'll include a picture for a little self-mortification effect:

The bug net was my best friend this shift. Hannah's being laying on the deet...I wonder how long that'll last for! That stuff melts plastic...I'm not so sure that it's fit for human use!

Anyway, time to go roll some sushi for myself and the hungry pregnant lady. Mangoes, smoked salmon, short grain brown rice, accompanied by some delicious tofu and eggplant a la ReBar...very high culture, let me tell you!

Hopefully the crew out at the Oilers game tonight comes home satisfied!!! Drop me a line...anytime! -L.

Geranium erianthum

"Northern Geranium"

'The name "geranium" when translated means crane's-bill or stork's-bill and refers to the fruit with its central pointed column of fused styles that resemble the long bills of cranes or storks.' -Plants of Northern British Columbia (p. 210)

This Is What Rain Looks Like...

Pretty cool, eh? Thought so.

We went to the Nass Valley (North/Northwest of New Aiyansh; North of Terrace & the Nisga'a Lava Beds Provincial Park) for most of the shift and went to the Meziadin for the last day (just north of the Nass). It was pretty all over the place, weatherwise. But, overall, it was quite wet!!! ..which is good for the flowers?!!! (or something like that.)

There was a Grizzly Bear on one of the blocks we worked on, but I missed it :( I suppose that's a good thing, but it would have been a nice 'National Geographic Moment'! Instead, I indulged in taking some flower photos in my, ahem, spare time, which you can peruse on Flickr at your leisure because I'm feeling too lazy to upload them onto Blogger...Flickr's faster!!!

Anyway, it was nice to be back in the nasty Nass: it's where we seem to do the majority of our work so it felt like home sweet home, especially after having to try and navigate a few different road systems over the past few weeks that I was unfamiliar with. (Always mildly unnerving...the thought of beginning work on the wrong block!!! Thank goodness I live with a map fiend, and I'm a bit of one, too...otherwise, lord only knows what could have happened out there!)

Highlight of the shift, or more likely the most unsuitable thing for me to be writing about (but, in hindsight, I thought it was pretty funny so I'll share it with you, but mind my crude sense of humour, puh-lease). So. It finally happened. 'It' being one of those bush nightmares (except it didn't turn out all that bad...I'm here typing, anyway)...the world as your toilet: the world as animals habitat: the world as a bear's habitat, or moose, for that matter. When we were working in the Mez (bug capital), I'd finally hiked my tired butt up a nice hill and there was a breeze on this little ridge. Breezes keep the bugs at bay (but only sort of, in the Mez) so it was as good a time as any to finally take my morning crap that I'd been delaying because I didn't have the energy to fight off the bloodthirsty black flies. Ah. Relief. Woof. Shit, I say (pardon the pun, if it is one). Jasper starts barking his snout off...and my pants are around my ankles. Oops. Bear or moose, I do not know, but it did go crash-bang, that's for sure. Scramble scramble scramble. I safely make it out of there. Walk 100 metres down on my line, and then continue :) Thankfully that area doesn't need to be planted so no one should find my hurredly buried #2. So, I've always wondered when that was going to happen: my privacy being 'invaded' by another creature. Don't they know how to knock? Maybe that's why Jasper was barking so much!

On that note... -L.

It's Alllllright...!

This is the view from block BK4B, just past the head of Baker Inlet. The water on the right is Alvin Lake...it was so beautiful!

The shift was a lot longer than expected so I was a very dirty girl with only a t-shirt, two pairs of underwear, and a pair of pants. Gross. Five days of wearing the same clothes and not showering won me the stinky girl contest and earned me a lot of comments on my hair.

First, I want to try and explain what my job is before I go any further, so here's what I wrote to Aisha, and hopefully it expliques things a little bit more!:

"so, in bc, there's a pretty comprehensive system of checks and balances between the government and logging companies/private contractors. a lot of the land in the province is diviied up into forest licenses, which many of the big name logging companies own (or lease may be a better word)...i.e. west fraser mills, weyerhaeuser, etc. each time that a company logs the land on their license they make a contract with the government to reforest the area to specific standards. it's my job to go in there and collect data to see if they're meeting and/or beating these standards. so, i go in and walk the land in a grid-style (to cover it equally and randomly) and take sample plots, usually every 100 metres or so. these plots are 50 metre squared circles and i tally up how many trees there are in them, what kinds, what the plants are like in and around this circle, forest health/pest issues, etc. and from there, we compile all of the plots on the land and do a few statistics on them to see if they meet the standards layed out in the logging company's contract with the government. and, if they don't meet the standards, then we 'prescribe' treatments for the land (i.e. you need to plant more trees, you need to clear away brush from the trees, etc.) trying to make them meet these standards. these standards also have timelines attached to them, so one of the big surveys that we do is called a free-growing survey. this is when we survey the land, throwing plots, when the area is a certain age post-logging. if the area meets the standards for 'free-growing' set out in the contract, then the company that logged the land is no longer financially responsible for it, and it reverts back to the crown for management. another aspect of my job, usually only in the springtime, is to do quality checks ("pay plots") on any tree-planting happening on ground for the companies that my company works for. that is what have been doing for the past week :)"

So, what was I doing in Baker Inlet? -you may ask, well, I was doing pay plots which are plots that I throw to collect information on the planting quality to determine the rate of pay for the planting contractor (i.e. if they're good then they get 100% pay; or, their suckiness correlates to a reduction in pay or a need for re-work of the areas planted). There's a bit of a supervisory role, too, in that I'm the representative of the company that logged the area, but most of that role was fulfilled by the guy who started this planting contract and I was just there to throw plots and clean things up, so-to-speak. Hope that makes sense.

I flew into Baker from Prince Rupert on Monday afternoon and had a great flight in. It was just me and the pilot in the Beaver, so that was fun. Just outside of Prince Rupert, near the mouth of the Skeena River, there's a big sand bar and when we flew over it the sand was exposed and a '?' of seals (what do you call a group of seals?! a flock? a pod?!) were sunning themselves--so, we buzzed the seals and they hi-tailed it for the water, it was pretty cool! Those little guys can move really quickly. There were even fuzzy baby white seals there as well.

Once I arrived at the floating barge camp (see photo at right) I got to hang out there for a few hours before every one returned back from work. I got to listen in on some crude conversations and get used to the fact that Maxim magazine is a staple in the bathroom... and yeah. Welcome to the faller's camp. Looks pretty nice eh? The little aluminium skiff in the foreground is what we used to get back and forth from the barge to shore (we were tenting on the shore but eating in the camp). Personally, I preferred hanging out with the planters in our camp rather than cramping their style on the barge. In the world of forestry there seems to be a very distinct hierarchy in place and treeplanters are at the very bottom of it all. And, because I was hanging out with them, I got lumped into that category. The guys that were staying in this camp were fallers: there job is to cut down the trees. Since this is a heli-logging 'show', the next guys to come in, once the fallers are done, are the riggers. Those are the guys that hook up the logs with choker cables which then get hooked up to the ginormous helicopter that is used to remove the logs from the block that was harvested, to put the logs of the barge. Once the barge is full, it starts its journey to a mill of some sorts (in Canada or the States). If you ever get a chance to see the heli-logging in action, take a moment to oggle at the skill required to get the logs off the block on to the barge: the pilots use the principal of a pendulum to land these brutally massive hunks of wood perfectly on the barge. There's also a person or two on the barge, moving logs around...I would not want that job...can you imagine if anything went wrong?!!! Yikes.

The planters that I was working with were great. If anyone's ever looking for a job with a pretty solid company, call Justin (below) at Little Trees (in Terrace, BC). They're all good-natured and alcoholic, as well as loads of fun and hard-workers! I was laughing pretty much non-stop after the first day of new-person awkwardness. The tree prices were good, too: $0.32/tree.

There was a bit of down-time for me, as the 'checker', so I put on the planting bags at one point and planted some trees. Lo-and-behold, it's a lot like riding a bicycle, as one of the planters pointed out: you never forget how. In fact, I found it easier than before. Go figure. That's my hand after putting 1,000 trees in the ground. I didn't have any gloves...! The only bummer is that I can't get paid for any of the work because that would be a slight conflict of interest!!!

I love helicopters. I didn't get to fly in one this shift, but I did get to sling some trees! Oh boy. To the right are four slings full of boxes of trees at the head of Baker Inlet. The helicopter comes in with its long line hanging a ways below the body of the chopper. At the end of the long line there's a thing called a carousel: the carousel has little slots where you can attach the sling. The helicopter then gains elevation and pulls the sling into the air and flies it to the block where the trees are to be planted, at which point the sling gets dropped in a particular spot. This is all done for heli-access blocks where there is no road available to truck in trees.

As a side note, our helicopter pilot was an ex-army pilot who has undergone a sex change. You can only imagine how this gets played with in a camp full of loggers. "S'him". "2-0-switch pilot" (the helicopter is a Bell-206...and 'switch' and 'six' sound interchangeable on the radio). "It". So not cool. She's got guts, man, working in this environment. Maybe it's better than the army...yeesh.

Other fun stories from the shift...well, I was supposed to leave at lots of different times so that became a bit of a running joke! First, I was scheduled to fly out on Wednesday afternoon, then my boss realised that the flight should have been for Thursday (because I had a first aid course to recert on Friday and Sunday). But then my plane didn't show up. Hmph. So, I got to put my sopping wet tent back up and stay until the end of the contract. We finished on Saturday and boated out in the sun, wind, and pea-soup fog. Almost ran into an island at one point but thankfully our trusty driver saved the day! It was kind of creepy being in a boat in fog where you couldn't see anything. Occasionally islands would mist in and out of view, looking more like paintings than real islands with real trees.

Well, I think that's all for my adventures right now. Perhaps I'll tackle the weeks jokes and folks in another post! -L.

Jelly Legs and Bruises

The first shift of work has flown by and, all-in-all, twas a success.

My new co-worker, Hannah, and I were working close to Kitimat, BC in pretty coastal terrain and it was beautiful. The weather was amazingly hot and sunny for the first two days and then we were blessed with some manic weather systems that never got too extreme for comfort: just the right amount of sun, wind, clouds, and sprinkles of rain.

The last block we worked on yesterday was so close to the ocean that we could smell it. Mmm. I miss that smell and always associate it with walking off the plane in Vancouver now.

I think that my body has survived the shift in part due to the fact that I got to sleep at a motel and watch satellite TV every night. Plus the dinner from Haryana's (the best Indian restaurant in Canada, in Terrace, BC) on the first night of the shift energised me for the next few days (but I don't recommend leftovers for lunch because they make for some hefty burps whilst climbing up hills...!).

Jasper is getting in shape (as am I). He had a great day yesterday and is doing fine today (that's the real test, to see if he makes it stiff-free the next day!). Anyway, I'm happy that he's getting back into the swing of things because I was feeling guilty having brought him out here and leaving Des dogless... :(

This is where I'm going this week: Baker Inlet, it's located on the mainland, south of Prince Rupert across from Pitt Island and the Grenville Channel (have fun on googlemaps!). Hopefully there won't be snow! I'm going to be doing pay plots on the planting that's been happening there for the past little while--just finishing up the contract that someone else started. I fly in on Monday afternoon and come out Wednesday. This means that I get to go to Prince Rupert which means that I get to go to Cowpuccino's, the best cafe in the west! The coffee's not A+, but it's good and fancy, it's their baked goodies that are to die for. And the atmosphere. I really like the atmosphere. If I have time on the way back I'm going to get some sushi for the drive home, too, from the best sushi place that I've ever been to. Food for thoughts during the week!

Have a beer for me at Copa and cheer for Oil.