Here are some of the first pictures of the season! Hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea of what we do out here, though I have yet to take my camera onto the block with me to take pictures of the actual planting.
That said, here are a few treeplanting terms that might come up over the next few months:
Block: any area of clear-cut land that we are planting.
Crew: A crew typically consists of five planters and a crew boss (who also plants unless it is a double crew in which case the crew boss will spend the day checking trees, etc).
Planting bags: Two bags that sit on either hip and are filled with a few hundred seedlings.
Cluster fugde: When all the planters in a crew are squeezed into a tight space of land to fill it in and spend more time crossing each others lines and such than planting. CFs are frustrating.
Fist: Fiberglass Insulated Seedling Transport. They fit onto the back of a pick up like a huge cooler and can hold between 20-30 boxes each of which have between 300-400 trees.
Cream: Really nice land without grass , slash, rocks, and other obstacles.
Slash: the logs and branches left over from clear cutting....somewhat like the excess in a meat packing factory. Slash can be spread out over the block or can be in large piles: it's nice when it's all neatly piled up...and even nicer when it's not there at all.
Burn piles: Large slash piles that have been burned down in a controlled manner. They, too, are cream.
Shnarb: General bad terrain including slash, fallen trees, poplars, grass etc. We don't like shnarb.
Duct tape: used for taping up fingers (to replace gloves), cuts, as tensor bandages, to seal boots, cover blisters, as protection from sunburn, keeping headphones in, etc.
More will likely crop up over the next couple weeks so I will add to it as they come. Here are some pictures of how we spend our days.
Me, Kate, and Tammy.
We leave very odd looking yellow grass spots when we move camps.
We get daily shows of interesting cloud patterns.
We get to drive into storms...and out of them.
We rely on trucks to bring us to work everyday and though they start out new at the beginning of the season, they are put through hell on the dirt roads. The drives to and from the blocks are quite possibly the most dangerous part of our day.
The trees we plant will go towards things such as pulp, particle board, pressure board, and other paper products roughly 70 years down the road when they're fully grown.
Birthdays are celebrated with a bang.
And finally, we save puppies. This is Jasper after his first bath. He is 6 weeks old now, we got him on our last day off and he's now trying to blend in with the four other camp dogs. (Don't worry mum and dad, he's not mine, I just got to pick him out).
So far Alpine (Tim and Mary's dog) is the only one who will give Jasper the time of day.
