December 14

1.5 C Overcast.Supposed to get some precip this morning.
Short mat bowling yesterday, and today a work party to get clubhouse ready for painting.
Two weeks into December now which means two weeks closer till spring!
Here's a picture of one of our picnics along the Alaska Highway. The vehicle is the station wagon from the story.

Lucky for our dog, Skookum, we had arranged for our friends to feed him while we were away.

As freeze-up came on I started ranging further out with the muskeg tractor. It was a tracked vehicle on a one ton chassis. It had an all steel body and was steered by levers. The engine was I believe about a 490 cubic inch Chevrolet or perhaps a Dodge motor. On good surfaces it could get up to about forty miles per hour and was quite capable of smashing through brushy areas.

Before the first snow came I had carried out about a dozen well site inspections and submitted reports. In the report I included a letter of instruction for the disposal of the slash which would be signed and mailed by Sterling.

I finally got the word my pick-up was ready for me and early one morning I drove to Fort St. John and traded

vehicles and returned home the same day.

I now could travel on bush and seismic roads and based on any information I could glean I was able to start visiting active sites and seismic roads under construction. This lead to more of an education program with the exploration companies and the necessary clean-up started to be concurrent with their drilling programs.

That fall turned out to be quite beautiful with temperatures from mid September hovering around ten to twelve below. Then one night about the end of September the mercury dipped to twenty-eight below (F) and never got above that until the following spring. The cold weather came on so quickly the thousands and thousands of acres of birch, poplar and cottonwood were caught with the leaves still in place but in the bright yellows of fall. They stayed that way until winds and snow finally plucked them away.