Catch of the day
June 22, 2015 12:00 pm Leave your thoughts
This past week has been quite interesting. As most of you may already know Slave Lake has been very dry this year, and the wildfire hazard has reached extreme status for most of May and June. The Tolko Athabasca division was on high alert due to the Old Smith Highway fire only 10km away from the mill. As a result, the Athabasca division reacted quickly to ensure that all wildfire fighting equipment was accessible and ready to rock if the Athabasca Division needed to action the wildfire.
Most of my colleagues were occupied in First Aid training so in the meantime I helped out in the log yard removing any woodlands equipment from our shed to free up some space for more wildfire fighting equipment. Fortunately ESRD had the Wabasca and Old Smith highway fires under control before the wildfire posed any real threat to Tolko’s Athabasca Division or surrounding mills. Anyways, I got to see a lot of air traffic from the local tanker base and appreciate the hard work that went into a good Fire Control Plan.
On June 4, the woodlands summer students attended the 2015 Northern Alberta cooperative weed management workshop, which was a neat opportunity to see the collaboration of different organizations in preventing another threat to our landscape… prohibited noxious weed
s.
The most interesting section I took away from the workshop was the “Alberta Weed Spotter App” for the iPhone, developed by the City of Edmonton. The app helps Albertans identify different species of invasive weeds and educates them on the province’s weed management strategies. If you haven’t done so already, get it from the App Store!
I finished off the week with a big day checking quality on our layout contractors, and no concerns but a good 10.5km of hiking through the bush.
On a lighter note, I caught my first walleye of the year this week! Look forward to catching many more.