April 4

Another Birthday today, my oldest son, Happy Bd. And will phone later.
Raining at 5C. Guess we'll see lots of flowers in May!
I was happy to finally find the picture,yesterday, of Alec Johnny (Fire in The Euchinko) and amend the story by placing the picture at the end.
I don't know yet what I'll put on here today, if I get stuck it may have to be a poem I wrote last week but I'll have a look see through the files again. I do have another one story along the lines of a legend that I wrote some time ago. A pause at my end while I go look.

Well here's one  - it is about fires and will be in two parts - here's todays part:

IN THE FIRST DAYS

  The year was 1970; the winter and spring were normal, no unusual weather, perhaps a bit colder through the winter than usual but not much.  The clearing of the Canoe Valley to make way for the eventual flooding that would result from a new dam on the Columbia was well underway.

  In retrospect, perhaps the forty miles of valley that had been turned from a beautiful river bottom to a forty mile scar of partly cleared, partly logged, partly burned debris field, did in fact impact on the micro climate of the weather.

  Before the valley supported a river that both meandered and boiled in tumbling rapids; had small game filled meadows in the curves where it wandered and stands of spruce, cedar, birch and poplar along the steeper banks and here and there scattered ridges of lodgepole pine.

  But now the forty miles, running like an arrow between and beneath the towering peaks on both sides and connecting the Columbia valley to the upper Fraser valley was a wind corridor and the normal breezes that had once played in the branches and tops of the living forest found no impediment and swept the valley from one end to the other, sucking out the moisture and drying the upper slopes where normally snow would last well into late spring or early summer.

  Obvious now, but back then not so.  We who were creating the mess couldn’t see what the devastation was doing or had done; we were too busy getting the job done.

  So, to move on to that 1970 summer, it was warm and dry for all of July, more wind than normal was felt in Valemount.  I remember starting to get antsy as the days of clear hot weather piled up one after the other.

  Oh, I forgot, who am (was) I and why should the nice weather bother me?  I was the Forest Ranger for the Valemount Ranger District.  My office and headquarters was just on the edge of the small village of Valemount.  I had a staff of two Assistant Rangers, a Dispatcher, a Lookout Man, a two-man Initial Attack crew and two weigh scalers.  We were responsible for all the forest and rangeland in an area that ran from the confluence of the Canoe and Columbia rivers thence north westerly to where Horsey Creek ran into the Fraser and from the edge of Mt. Robson Park to the height of land south of the Thompson River, an area of approximately 1400 square miles.

  Of course this is in the middle of the ‘Rocky Mountain Trench’ so high mountains, narrow valleys and the fertile upper Fraser valley river bottom were all included in our terrain.  Electrical storms were a common occurrence and a normal summer usually recorded an average of thirty forest fires from May to September.

  From May to early July that year our “man caused” fires were up a bit but nothing really out of the ordinary.  From the last week of June through the month of July the weather was warm and dry with zero precipitation. August arrived with no change except in the afternoons; cumulus clouds would build up to towering heights over the peaks that surrounded us.  Occasionally there would be the odd rumble of thunder, but it seemed that the lightning that birthed the rumbles was heat lightning and no strikes were recorded. 

  The morning of August the fifth was much like all the mornings of the past few weeks, a little cooler perhaps, but it warmed rapidly and by noon it was well into the eighty’s (Fahrenheit back then).  The clouds started building over the mountains earlier than they had been.  I told all the staff to stay by their telephones when they went home that evening, and made sure they had fresh batteries in their “lunch box” FM radios.

  The day moved on, the clouds stayed high but there were more and were piling up over all of the peaks; the air was muggy.  I decided to go to bed early as I had this feeling that the next day might be different than all the preceding days and was asleep by just after ten.

  I no longer remember if I slept soundly, but I remember being woken by a blast of thunder that rattled the windows!  It was three am.  I got out of bed and went into the living room, to the south and southwest the sky was being lit by one flash of lightning after another.  As I watched a jagged bolt flashed down to a valley wall just a few miles away. I went to the kitchen window at the back of the house, it was all trees at the back but the night sky was flashing above and beyond the trees back there as well.

  At that time of the morning and with no way to confirm how many strikes were creating fires or even where, the best thing was to try and get more rest.  I went back to bed and lay there for about an hour and a half.  Did I sleep?  I don’t really know, perhaps I dozed for a few minutes.  Finally just before five I got up, dressed and walked the hundred yards to the office.

  I started laying out timekeepers' kits, first aid kits and other assorted small items.  Tools, pumps etcetera would wait until we knew what the day would bring, besides I was just putting in time waiting for daylight and what was to come with it.

  I telephoned to Prince George about five thirty to the regional Duty Officer and told him I would need an air patrol to be on its way as soon as it was light enough to fly.  I remember that didn’t sit too well with him as historically the patrols were done closer to noon and in midday.  “I don’t care what we usually do.” I argued. “I know we have fires and I need to find them sooner than later.”  The patrol left Prince George just before seven.

  By seven the staff was all at work, Jack, the Lookout Man had radioed down at six thirty to let me know he was up in the tower, five minutes later he called back with a smoke in sight just across the highway from town.  The Initial Attack crew was dispatched and had it located and almost extinguished in the next half hour.

  The patrol plane entered our district at eight am and in the next two hours, between the lookout, the patrol and ground reports we had eighteen more fires.  The strange thing that developed over the next two weeks was that no matter how many fires we attacked, controlled and extinguished every day our ‘fires burning’ report was eighteen!

THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED

  So many fires, so much action, but what I want to relate isn’t so much the blow by blow, day by day things but some of  --- well just a little bit of everything.

  We got pretty well organized in a hurry; within a couple days almost every able-bodied man from the area that could be spared was on a fire.  We shut all the mills but two down, they were the two biggest ones, and we left them with one shift each.  It looked like we had a handle on everything and then two days later a second storm rumbled through in the late afternoon, we had whittled our fires burning down to twelve and that storm brought us six more in one hour.  The biggest of that bunch and what proved to be the largest one we had was spotted by a helicopter pilot.  He saw the strike hit high up in a side valley to the Canoe and before he had flown out of sight the fire that had started as a single strike, blew up as though fueled by an accelerant and in the several minutes before he was by, it was close to fifteen acres!

This was an interesting fire; it started after almost all of our resources were committed to other fires and as indicated turned into a conflagration immediately.  The side valley in which it started rose from the floor of the Canoe valley at an elevation of 2400 feet and ran back and up to above timberline, a distance of about four miles and topping off at 7800 feet.  The lower portion was in heavy timber gradually giving way to pine then mountain balsam and finally balsam thickets and alpine meadows.

 I flew it the next day; it was already well over five hundred acres and starting an uphill run.  It was across the Canoe River on the opposite side to any road.  The river was in full flood.  With seventeen other fires on the go, no manpower and no way to cross the river with machinery I decided to let it run and we would attack it on our terms.  With this in mind and with some knowledge of fire behavior in the mountains, I decided that we would ready ourselves and stop it when it reached the main valley.

  That was the plan. But!

  I had a Ranger Supervisor who had a reputation for ‘getting things done’. Not a hell of a lot of fire experience but had progressed rapidly through the ranks by knowing when and who to --- well you know the type.

  He arrived a day later and together we looked at all the fires, “What are you going to do about this one?” Was his question.

  I told him and the reasons why.  His response? “No, you are going to put a crew on it now.”  I argued the point, tried to show him the rationale – his reply – “Either you put a crew on it or I take over!”

 I couldn’t believe it.  But I knew him well enough, that he would have loved to do it; it would ‘looked good on the old record’ – his that is.

  So we went back to town, not much was said.  He had nothing to offer in the way of support, just the threat.

  He headed back to Prince George his half hour of “supervision” behind him. 

  I racked my brains for a little while then phoned the Ranger at Vanderhoof (I had been his Assistant a few years earlier) and asked him to round me up forty natives from the local reserve and send them out by bus.  Then I had the dispatcher put together a tent and fly camp for forty men and a grocery order for the next day.

  The crew left Vanderhoof at ten o’clock that night and arrived in Valemount at six the next morning.  Back then we only had a few of the old jet ranger helicopters that could pack three passengers and G3B’s, Hillers that could pack two; we had one of each servicing all our fires. 

  So we had to pull two machines away to get the forty guys to this fire.  The only place we had to land them was in the alpine above the fire; normally not done because of safety but because of no tree cover was an acceptable risk.  By late that afternoon they were on site and had their camp set up.  But now had to face the prospect of fighting the fire from above instead of working up from the bottom.

  I had known all these fellows from my years in Vanderhoof and we had a great rapport and I trusted them implicitly once out on the fireline.

  I contacted a fellow who knew the Canoe pretty well and he thought there might be a place we could ford the river, not so.  My nemesis paid another flying visit and his solution was to build a raft and ferry cats across the river.  So I thought ‘Okay, Jack you need something to do.’

  I suggested that since my hands were full with everything else (we had five hundred men on eighteen fires) that perhaps he could supervise the construction of the raft and get cats across for me.  He was at first quite happy about the idea. At first!

  Three days later a raft had been created from green trees cabled together, the first of three D6’s arrived and was loaded, a cable had been stretched across the river, put through a block and returned across and hooked to an HD15.  The idea was that the HD15 would serve as the anchor while the raft would be dragged by current and cable to the opposite side.  The river was only two hundred feet wide; it would be a ‘piece of cake’.  Twenty feet out the current caught a corner of the raft and promptly dumped cat and driver in the river, luckily the operator was wearing a life jacket and he managed to get to shore a couple hundred yards downstream.  It took two days to get the ‘6’ out of the river.  Jack remembered that he had an important meeting back in Prince George and left the morning after the ‘dumping’.

  As he left he said, “Build a bigger raft.”  I never saw him on the ground again the rest of the summer although I heard he flew out a couple of times.

  In the end we found a spot about fifteen miles upstream where we were able to walk the cats across and walked them down along the river.

  It was almost three weeks later when we stopped the fire at almost the identical spot I had originally selected to meet the fire, it was at the point where the side valley met the main valley and we could use the wind and big timber to work on our behalf.

  Actually I started this fire story to tell about two things that happened that were kind of humorous.

  Now as I mentioned I knew my crew of guys fairly well, as an Assistant Ranger I had been right out on the fireline with them, so I told the dispatcher that when their grocery orders came in I wanted to see them.  The look on his face told me that he thought I might be losing it! The first order was okay but the second one that came in included fifty pounds of raisins and fifty pounds of granular sugar.  “Here Alec.” I said. “Take these items off and on any other orders take off anything that has dried fruit or sugar. With this stuff they would have a brew in less than five days.”

  They tried it a couple more times then gave up.

  The other thing that was quite funny, at least I thought so was this single instance.  We had set up an administration base camp in the main valley as we were servicing four other large fires in a radius of ten miles.  This camp served as a helicopter base, fuel dump, tool distribution, radio relay base and many more things. It was headed up by my most capable assistant.

  I was at the base one day and the radio reception for some reason was very poor.  My native crew was virtually right above the camp at just under 8000 feet and across the valley.  The timekeeper for this crew was a fellow I had used many times, he was in his thirty’s, smart but only had one arm. He was knick-named ‘Smokey’. 

  This day Smokey was calling down with an order for supplies and he kept breaking up, fading in and out.  The fellow who was communicating with him kept telling him to repeat and saying that the transmission wasn’t coming through.

  Finally Smokey came through, this time loud and clear, “Can’t figger it oudt, we’re up here, your down dere, it’s downhill all de way!’

  We all just bust out laughing.