December 8

3C Overcast
I got home about 2 pm yesterday. It turned out to be a sunny day and the drive down the island was quite pleasant.
I'll start posting the Fort Nelson story again this morning, I did incorporate the section about Sterling as chapters 1 and 2 so skipping that part we'll start again at chapter 3. Actually I will re- ad the introduction along with the beginning of Chapter 3. Any new visitors will have to go back to earlier entries to get caught right up.

         I recently wrote a vignette of one of the Forest Rangers I served under and as I wrote I realized that the year and a half that I spent as his Assistant in Fort Nelson was a bit of an adventure and that I  should include that vignette with an expanded story of the months that I spent headquartered at mile 300 on the Alaska highway.

            The year was 1962, I was at that time an Assistant Forest Ranger stationed in Vanderhoof

            which is the geographical center of British Columbia. I had just passed the entrance exam to

            attend the Forest Service Training School and knew that I would soon be transferred to another

            district. The word came in March that I would be going to Fort St. James so I started moving

            some of our belongings to the residence we would occupy and then took a week off to take an

            Easter time holiday. When I got back ten days later there was a letter on my desk saying that

            instead of Fort St. James I would be going to Fort Nelson.

            I was actually quite pleased with the change as to that point in time I hadn’t spent any time in

            the far north.

            Since our furniture and other belongings were now divided between two houses about fifty

            miles apart, I prevailed on the headquarters warehouse in Prince George to store everything

            while I regrouped. In those days a canvas covered gravel truck was made available for moving.

            Once everything was packed and gathered together I left with my family from Vanderhoof and  

            headed to Fort St. John which was where the Ranger District headquarters was. In those days it

            was almost an eleven hour drive and we finally checked into a motel about ten that night.

           To appreciate the Fort St. John Ranger District, I will attempt to create a picture of the

           geography of the district which should put into some perspective the magnitude of managing

           and supervising the area.

           The headquarters as the name indicates was at Fort St. John, mile 47 on the Alaska Highway.

           The District was a large wedge shape that started at the Alberta border east of Taylor, ran north

           for two hundred and forty miles to the North West Territories boundary then west along that

           boundary and the Yukon boundary for about two hundred and fifty miles then south east along

           the Kechika and Finlay rivers and then Easterly back to Taylor. The westerly edge(one third) of

           the district was the northern extension of the Rocky Mountains and the eastern two thirds was

           muskeg in the north and rolling grasslands in the south.

           The district was dissected by the Alaska highway and included outposts at Wonowon (year

            round), Fort Nelson (mile 300)(six months per year), Muncho Lake(Mile 452)(five months per

            year) and Lower Post (Mile  620)(six months per year). There was one Assistant appointed to

           each of the out posts prior to 1963. There were also Fire Lookout towers at Pink Mountain,

           Prophet River and Fort Nelson.

            In 1963 Lower Post was split off and put under the jurisdiction of the Prince Rupert Forest

            Region.

            The highway itself was paved as far as the town of Wonowon and the remaining Canadian

            portion was gravel.

            To help manage this vast area, the Ranger had a Deputy Ranger, two Assistant Rangers and a

            dispatcher in Fort St. John. Strangely enough although the six month appointments to Fort

            Nelson and Lower Post were always experienced, the five month appointment to Muncho Lake

            was always a new hiree.

Chapter 3

I had been informed before I left Vanderhoof that a new residence had been built in Fort Nelson the year before and we would be the first to move in. Up till that time the summer assistant had occupied a two room attachment to the one room office.

When Our furniture arrived I helped unload and unpack. Surprisingly inspite  of the gravel truck transport there was no damage. Unfortunately because of break-up the truck could only get part way into the driveway but fortunately (?) we didn’t own much and the moving in didn’t take long.

During one of Sterling’s early visits I got the okay to purchase lumber to construct a fence around the property and that became a project as soon as the frost was out of the ground.

In researching the bare bones files in the office I discovered that in addition to the timber sales close to Fort Nelson there was also a free use area for fire wood and a cash sale area for firewood that was to be sold. Both of these were at Muncho Lake a hundred and fifty two miles up the highway.  Early on I inspected both and found that they had been overcut and established new ones a few miles away. This was probably the first time inspections had ever been carried out on such minor timber harvesting.

When break-up had progressed enough I finally made my way into the sawmill that was situated on the Fort Nelson River few miles from town. To my surprise I found it to be a fairly large modern mill,  it was still closed for break-up but when it was operating it employed about twenty men in the mill and had a sizeable logging operation that employed another dozen. The day I got there the only people on site was the watchman, his wife and their young daughter. By coincidence his wife had her baby at the same time in the same hospital in the small town of McBride five years earlier. ( McBride is in central BC east of Prince George some six hundred miles from Fort Nelson).

That day I carried out a logging inspection on the logged area that had been logged the previous winter, It was about a two mile hike along the river in still muddy conditions, when I retraced my steps after conducting the inspection, I found that a single wolf had followed me almost every inch of those two miles, to this day I am sure if I had gone back again I would have found that it had followed both ways. I measured one of his clearly defined tracks – it was five inches across!