Making Friends

August 19, 2015 12:00 pm Published by Ryan Wilkie 1 Comment

Well my friends, summer is starting to wind down for me here at Slave Lake Plywood. I have one week of work left and then it’s back to Thunder Bay for school (actually for the first two weeks of September I’ll be in South Africa for school) but after that it’s TBay all the way. Needless to say, I am excited to get back home and see everyone again, but I will definitely miss this place. The big sky, the hillscapes and the adventures, but most of all I will miss the friends I have made here. To the other summer students, Taylor, Adam and Logan, it’s been a slice! And everyone at the mill, I have had a blast and thank you, everyone, for making our time there fun, exciting and worthwhile. From the first day, we were welcomed with open arms and smile, and for that alone, it made this job a great experience.

So, with time running out, I’ve been really trying to experience all that Slave Lake has to offer. From the restaurants to the scenic views and great fishing spots. Adam and I also made a trip into Edmonton to hit up the mall the other weekend.

One of the best parts of the summer job was the views. It’s no BC mind you, but it has a different kind of beauty. When you get up onto a big hill (which they name mountain here, shhh) you can see the undulating landscape for miles. In the afternoons, you can see rain clouds and thunderheads all around you, sometimes right on top of you, but when the sun hits them just right, they glow in a golden flare of colour that is inspiring to see.

This past week, we had been assigned to do stocking surveys in blocks that were aerially seeded with lodgepole pine back in 2010. So it was our job to walk these blocks and do small plots in a grid pattern and determine if there were trees in those plots, which species, how many and how tall. Once the plots are tallied the silviculturalists can determine if there has to be any controls applied to the block to help the trees grow back in the proportions that were there before, or if they can leave it as a free to grow area. The work was quite easy, so no complaints there, the views were enjoyable and the blocks were filled with raspberries and blueberries. We all ate our fill of fresh fruit, it was crazy! We didn’t even need to bring a lunch, so bountiful were the berries.

Along the theme of making friends, below is a photo of a female cross orbweaver spider. I came across here on the stalk of grass you see, just chilling on her web as I went to have my lunch. While I sat there, I noticed that there were no insects in the web, and that there were tons of flies all around me. So when landed on me, I caught it and stuck it onto the web to see if she would eat it. Within a minute of me sticking the twitching fly to the strands, the spider came whipping down, grabbed the fly and was back up on her perch sucking on her lunch like a cool-aide jammer! So we chilled in the sunlight and enjoyed the respective company.

As my summer comes to a close, I feel that I have made some new close friends that will hopefully stick around for a while. I want to say thank you to everyone who helped us along through the summer to make this an experience to remember. I have one week left after this and so the next and final installment will be written from home, after all of the excitement coming up over the next week and a half.

Talk to you all very soon 😉