My summer in High Prairie is ending and I will be heading back for the third year of my Forestry degree. I could not have asked for a better summer than this one. Doing layout was the best job I have ever had, and outside of work I was never bored. There were so many good times over the last four months it’s hard to keep track of them all, but for my last blog post I will tell you about my four favourite parts of the summer.
Right off the hop fishing was a big highlight of the summer. There is no lack of fishing opportunity around High Prairie and I didn’t even go to a fraction of the lakes and rivers I wanted to. In May and June Taya, Logan, Nick and I spent most of our evenings fishing for pike and walleye. We would take our boats on the water or simply cast from shore. There were days we caught modest numbers of small fish, but plenty of days we caught so many fish we stopped counting. In one evening, I was casting a line and reeling in mindlessly because no matter where I threw the lure, I caught a fish on practically every cast. Another time our supervisor Dylan showed us what is now one of my favourite lakes. As we fished from shore there were so many fish jumping you’d swear we were at a rainbow trout pond, but it was just a little bay jam packed with hungry pike. I threw each cast just past where a fish had jumped and had good luck doing so. Eventually something big swallowed my lure and started fighting me. When I brought the fish on shore in was my personal best. I admired it for a few seconds then released it. A couple weeks later Nick and I went out on an evening where I happened to beat my last pike with an even bigger one. In the same evening I also caught my biggest walleye at 68”, then with the next cast toped that with a 71” beauty. I caught record numbers of fish, and some absolute lunkers, making this summer my best fishing season yet.
In the spring months when I wasn’t fishing, I would go bear hunting. I glassed some cut blocks and walked cutlines in a few different areas but couldn’t even find sign. Since I wasn’t finding anything where I was, I decided to head in the opposite direction to scout a new area. While Taya, Logan and Nick were fishing I drove some oil roads in hopes that I would find some sign. As I drove something small and furry darted across the road and hunkered down in the ditch. To my surprise it was a little kitten. I was 12 km’s as the crow flies from the nearest farmland, so I knew it wasn’t someone’s farm cat. I pulled the truck over, walked towards the ditch and started talking to it. In half a second the little kitten meowed and ran over to me. After I checked the bush for its mom or other kittens, I concluded someone must have abandoned it there, so I took it home. The poor thing was skin and bones, but friendly as could be. I wanted to give it a forestry name and Dylan suggested we call her Flagging Tape, but that was a mouth full, so we settled on Ribbon instead. I did not need myself a cat, so Logan helped me find Ribbon a good home. That was one of my best bush finds and I’m glad I found her before she became a coyote snack.
There were a lot of new things I experienced this summer but the most interesting one was touring the Slave Lake air tanker base. We got the opportunity to tour the base after finishing our bear safety training the one day. Everything at the base was foreign to me. I had seen the air tankers flying before but had never seen them up close in person. We learned about retardant, what it’s made of, how its mixed, how it’s loaded into the planes and how it’s used to supress wildfires. There were multiple types of planes at the base including a Lockheed L-188 Electra, a 690 Turbo Commander, and all four of Alberta’s CL-215’s. Fortunately one of the pilots was kind enough to let us on one of the planes. He told us some stories and what it’s like to be a pilot. That air base was one of the coolest places I’ve been to, and I greatly appreciated seeing this operation that not a lot of people get an opportunity to see.
My final and most memorable part of the summer was my two best days of layout. The block we had to layout was a big one, at 398 ha in size. The first few days we went to the block were unproductive. Between bad access because of rain, strong winds and poor GPS accuracy it was slow going. Finally, the weather let up and the road dried enough that we could drive right up to the block. On the first two productive days we got, everything went right. The air was perfect temperature, the GPS had 30cm accuracy and never skipped a beat and my feet didn’t stop moving. I don’t know what was in by breakfast those two days, but I was faster than ever. I covered 47 ha the first day and 49 the next, with a total of 4 km of wetlands streamed. Aside from the production numbers, I found a shed, plenty of deer sign and copious amounts of blueberries that made those days even better. The forestry gods gave me the perfect layout conditions to make for the most satisfying workdays of the entire summer.
I had high hopes coming into the summer, and my job at Tolko superseded everything I expected. Taya, Logan and Nick were the best friends and coworkers I could ask for and they made every day a good one. I couldn’t be more thankful to my supervisors and everyone else in the woodlands division for providing me the opportunity to gain such valuable industry experience. I’m going to miss driving forestry roads, walking through the bush during the day, going fishing in the evening and sitting by the fire at night, but that’s what next summer is for.
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