The First Weeks Alone

June 22, 2015 12:00 pm Published by Greg Spence 1 Comment

Well, the two and a half weeks of training are over and my partner Jonathan and I were issued our West Fraser company truck a few weeks ago. It feels really good to finally be able to go out into the Cariboo/Chilcotin wilderness and get to work. One of the most fascinating things has been the drives to our daily work locations, it is not uncommon for us to drive over an hour into the bush down some resource road to get to our work site. Here in the Cariboo/Chilcotin the landscape can vary incredibly depending which area you are working in. If a work site is located out West on Highway 20 the landscape turns into a giant plateau with dense pine, fir and hybrid spruce stands, in contrast if you head out East into Likely the landscape resembles somewhat of what you might see on the coast with steeper terrain that is populated with cedars, firs and spruce. I love the variability, and the ever changing landscapes make the work even more interesting.

In the past weeks since Jonathan and I have received our truck I have really began to get a feel for what working in the operations side of the industry is like, I must say I am really enjoying it. The typical day for me starts at 7:30 in the office, there I meet with Sean the engineer, Sean has created a list of jobs he wants the summer student to complete and every morning he will give us one of the jobs on his list. After we receive our daily task the next step is to print off maps and digitally upload map files on our tablets, as a Geography major and a tech student I have developed a partiality for paper based maps and I really appreciate being able to use them in my daily work. In my opinion being able to interpret and use paper maps is an incredible skill that I hope is not lost in the future to technology based alternatives. After figuring out just where it is we have to go, we usually have to stop by the forestry shed and get all the appropriate gear we need, on really good days this involves loading up the quad trailer. After stopping at the forestry shed we gas up the truck and head to the job site.

One of the best days Jonathan and I have had in the bush so far, without a doubt, has to be our first day on the quads. On this particular day our task was to head down a deactivated road and take final inspection pictures of a recently installed bridge that gives access to several West Fraser cut blocks. The site was located 80km West of town off Highway 20 and another 100 km down a resource road 20 of which, due to seasonal deactivation were only accessible by quads. It took us just over 2 hours to get to site where we had to unload the quads and another 35 minutes to get to the actual bridge site. During our quad commute it began to rain quite heavily on us so we had to slow our speed down, however, Jonathan and I could have cared less about the weather as we were having too much fun taking in the scenery from the seat of our quads.

The past couple weeks in the woods have been very memorable, and hands down one of the best summer student experiences I have had, I love waking up for work in the morning excited about work and wondering where I will be traveling to that day, I’m looking forward to the weeks to come.