New Work Partners and a Taste of Forestry Planning

June 30, 2015 10:17 am Published by Greg Spence 1 Comment

I am now approaching two months of employment at West Fraser and the time is flying by. In the weeks since I have last written I have engaged in a few new job activities and done some that I am very used to.

I am really getting a feel for the scope of work in the operations side of forestry deals with, some days are hard, such as marking culverts by pounding stakes into the ground with a 40lb post pounder, and some are easy, for instance ground truthing deactivation sites on quads.

One of the newest and more enjoyable tasks my work partner and I have carried out was searching for decked wood that needs to be hauled out of a non-operational block. Decked wood is timber that has been harvested, cut to length and left in a landing of a resource road for hauling. Jonathan and I had the privilege of locating decked wood in the beautiful countryside of Likely, British Columbia. During this two day operation Jonathan and I had to locate the decked wood and  large wind thrown trees that made accessing the wood impossible without clearing it via the help of a contracted logger. In order to give our supervisor the most accurate location of where the decked wood and blowdown were located we were given a tablet with a georeferenced pdf map to make points on as well as a paper map to manually draw the locations. To complete this task most effectively we had to carry it out on quads which made it even more enjoyable, however, some of the blowdown was too big for our quads to handle and we had to survey some areas on foot, the large blowdown can be observed in the image on the left.

About a week ago I got a taste of some of the duties that members of the planning side of the industry partake in, I quickly realized you must be in good shape for planning work. One of the newest planning members offered to take us out to do some check cruising in some blocks located in the Horsefly. In order to get to the plots we had to drive 1.5 hours, park the trucks and hike in about 3km on some pretty unforgiving terrain, finding the plots wasn’t too hard thanks to our GPS enabled tablets. Once we found the plots we were shown how to effectively check cruise, check cruising is essentially auditing the timber cruisers work to ensure that they are doing a thorough job of evaluating timber supply in a block. I enjoyed check cruising quite a bit as it gave me time to use a lot of the skills I learned in school (tree heights, BAF prisms, check calling), some of these planning skills it felt like I hadn’t used in ages so it was an enjoyable refresher.

This week upper management at the Wuilliams Lake office decided that it would be good practice to change the work partners as the pairs of summer students have been working together for almost half of our summer contract. I didn’t mind the idea as it will allow us to get to know everyone a little better. I was assigned to work with Hannah one of the planning students, we will now be splitting our time between operations tasks and planning tasks, I am excited to learn a new area of the industry. Our first day together, we were assigned an operations task, myself being the operations student in the pair took the reigns on the assignment. The job for the day required that we take quads to inspect culvert conditions on brushed in roads, I could tell Hannah was excited as she had yet to take the quads this summer. All in all it was a very successful day, and Hannah said it was one of the more fun days she’s had in awhile, I was glad she enjoyed herself. Tomorrow we are doing some more check cruising with the planning department, with that said I had better sign off and get some rest ad I am sure tomorrow will present itself with a lengthy hike into the bush