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.