January 9

8C Cloudy
We are having a warm spell!
Bowls yesterday. I'm thinking if it stays dry for the next couple of days I may take the cover off the motorhome. I don't want to store it wet!
Had a phone call from a high school friend the other day, his sister had just died and he found me through a donation I had made. I'm told we were on the phone for 3/4 of an hour. I turned off the gas to the living room fireplace this morning. No point burning gas with these temperatures.

have an immediate impact on how much work was done each day.

We established a “point of commencement” by arbitrarily choosing a point that was easily identified on the aerial photos we carried then commenced the routine of back and forth strip cruising.

When we got back to the cabin that evening Scotty had a warm cabin and supper waiting for us. He had found a small patch of bulldozed trees and managed to saw up some of the wood; he figured he could cut as much each day as we burned.

The next day all three of us headed out to work but by noon Scotty was slowing us down. He had  to stay with us for the day but that evening I told him he would stay at the cabin, cook the meals and cut wood.

So that was my introduction to the valley, the cruise lasted twelve days rather than ten and we only managed that by reducing the number of plots which would impact on the information required for calculating total volume.

My second foray into the valley was about a month later when we cruised a second timber sale just two miles up from the mill. I was destined to visit both of those two areas in the ensuing years.

Two years later in the fall of 1957 I was transferred to McBride as Assistant Ranger. Cy was still the Ranger. By this time the first of the two sales had been accessed although not by the existing road but by another route from the valley of the Raush which crossed the Kiwa at right angles on the opposite end from where we made our trek two years earlier.

The sale was now under my jurisdiction as a contract administrator as was the second.

The Kiwa valley is quite narrow where it approaches the Fraser River but from where the old cabin still was, it broadened somewhat. Seeing it in all sorts of weather and the different seasons, I started to appreciate what a very pretty area it was and still is. Ironically most of the timber on the first sale was quite inundated with several types of rot. This in turn resulted in a large percentage of the trees to be left untouched and a very selective cut was the result.