22C Sun.
 Got home about 11:30 after picking up our uniforms for the senior games.
Puttered about at home yesterday, then some practise bowling with our partners for the  games. They stayed for dinner and a visit.

IT WASN’T A BIG ONE

BUT—

  I’m pretty sure it was in the summer of 1961. There were forest fires all over the central interior. At the time we only had one of any consequence going, it was down in the Tatuk Lake are and my fellow Assistant Ranger, Ron, was looking after it.

  Our biggest problem was that the Danger rating was extreme and at least all of the western part of the region was under a thick blanket of smoke. Visibility at ground level was about a half mile and thickened skyward for fifteen hundred to two thousand feet. Lookouts were completely hampered from seeing any new fires and air patrols were basically useless over much of region.

  However Fort St. James our neighboring district to the north was a bit better off and were still able to call for limited patrols.  One Saturday morning they had called for one of these patrols but were unable to get it until the afternoon , as luck would have it, their patrol was assigned to an aircraft that was checking out a smoke report in the Quesnel area to our south. When the plane diverted for Fort St. James it flew at an elevation of six thousand feet directly over our town of Vanderhoof on a heading to “The Fort”.

  We received a call from the pilot about four pm, his call went something like this: “XLT28 Vanderhoof, XLT28 Vanderhoof, this is charlie hotel romeo. You Copy?”

  George, our Ranger was on standby for the weekend and because we had an active fire, he was in the office. He replied, “C H R, this is Vanderhoof go ahead.”

  “Roger, Vanderhoof, I’m an estimated twelve or fifteen miles north west of you, I can’t see the ground because of the smoke, but I have a bubble in the smoke layer that may indicate there is a fire down there.”

  “Roger that C H R , can you give us an approximate grid?”

  “Standby one Vanderhoof.”

  “Vanderhoof ‘by.”

  A moment later the pilot came back with the map number for the area and a grid reference  that put the location somewhere in a ten mile square area north west of town. “Sorry I can’t get it any better than that Vanderhoof, I’m guessing as it is”

  “Roger C H R, we’ll work with that, thanks much, Vanderhoof out.”

  George plotted out the information then phoned me at home. “Hey John can you come in? Just got a report of one somewhere off the road to ‘The Fort’.”

  Ten minutes later I pulled into our compound, hurried into the office and with George examined the given location and our District wall map.

  There were several logging roads that ran from the Fort St. James road east towards the Stuart River, The pilot’s report put the location on the east side of the road, but which road or was it on any road?