April 5th

Sunny and some cloud, temp is 5C. I was just noticing how many people have had birthdays in the last week, I wonder why the end of March, beginning of April is so popular.
I guess we'll do short matt bowls this afternoon, a few more week and we'll be back to lawn bowls.
My two nesting sparrows seem to have disappeared, I hope it is only because the weather turned cool  again. Time will tell.
Here is the rest of the story of the 1971 fire season.

Oh yeah, one last thing.

  When the fire was winding down, I told the Assistant running the base camp that when my Vanderhoof bunch were finished I wanted the payroll records in my office long before they got there.

  Of course the records wouldn’t be ready until they were finished so we had to do a bit of juggling.  When the crew were ready to be pulled off the fire we ordered another forty-passenger school bus, (room to spare as two of them had been hurt and shipped out earlier).  We got them down off the mountain by one pm that last day, added two hours to the payroll for the trip to Valemount and another nine hours for traveling up to midnight.  The payroll was sent up by helicopter and when the bus arrived I was just finishing the last check.  We didn’t want any of them getting off with a six week paycheck so I got on the bus, told them what a great job they had done and passed out their checks and told the driver to get going.

  I heard later that one of them got off in McBride, forty –five minutes away and stayed there for the next week until his money was gone!

  Not far from the base camp we had another fire up a side valley, it was one of those that was locked in by canyon walls, the only timber was where the fire was.  In total I would estimate the timber covered an area of about 8000 acres and was split down the middle by another river.  When we found the fire the day after the original storm it already covered about fifty acres and was mainly burning on the upper slopes.  We flew in a crew of twenty-five locals and brought in an Assistant Ranger from another district to run the show.  The first two days they kept it up high then one night it ran down hill and got into the river bottom.  It shouldn’t have been a big deal as it would run back up hill during the day and could be re-contained.  However for some reason the Assistant Ranger took all his resources and built a fireguard a hundred feet away and parallel to the river.  The fire left to its own will then proceeded to burn everything between his guard and the rocks above.  When I was able to get there a couple days later the fire was about a thousand acres, the fellow had no rational reason for his action.  I appointed one of his crew to be in charge and brought him back out with me and sent him back to his own district.  We scrounged up another Assistant and were successful in stopping the spread.

Another of our large fires was in the headwaters of the Canoe River, far beyond the clearing for the dam and about fifteen miles from the town.  It got hit by severe winds and scattered fire all over then all these separate blazes worked very hard at becoming one fire.  We were able to hold it to one side of the valley but it did wipe out about 5000 acres.

  The one funny incident about this fire was when the Vancouver Sun newspaper phoned me, they had heard (from a local?) that the fire was threatening the town and wanted to know when we were evacuating.  They really didn’t want to hear that I didn’t believe there was a threat and through out the conversation tried to get me to say something, anything that would make things really dramatic.  At one point they asked me to comment on how successful we were with dropping ‘cats’ from the air!

  Perhaps the most frustrating thing I had to deal with through the whole six week episode was when the District Forester for the region came out and said and I quote, “This fire is a real hot potato, especially from a political standpoint, all the focus is on this district, we don’t want any mistakes.” Political!!! What bullshit! The people of my town were going flat out, my staff was more than flat out, staff from other districts were doing everything they could and he wants me to be concerned with politics and politicians because a newspaper was trying to sell newspapers!  I could have been almost fired or at least relieved that day.  I walked away and poured a cup a coffee for both of us then asked him if he would like to take a walk.  We walked down to the Post Office and back, everyone – mostly women (their men were fighting fire) had something to say.  I told him as we walked that this small town was like a family and was more so because of what we were going through.  I told him politely that I sincerely hoped he could handle the politics at his end as I didn’t have the time and we were just doing what we were paid for.

  He went back an hour later and that was the end of that.