On the Road, and in the Air

There have certainly been challenges the last while with trying to keep a blog anywhere near up to date.  As well as going through two new laptops, and re-installing all my programs and files three times, there were also some serious connectivity issues.

Our internet in the fire base camp is beamed from the source in town to a mountaintop fire lookout about 70km out, then another 15km or so down into the camp.  Although well grounded, a lightning strike managed to fry a few components of the system.  Repairs take time and require multiple helicopter flights to first assess the damage, then return with new replacement parts.  We do have a satellite based back-up system which has not been used for a while, and it turns out it now requires a change to a new satellite.  I was getting by, using a blackberry as a hotspot, by parking in a strategic spot along the road where there was some cell coverage, but that only worked well for quick e-mails and the like.  And to make matters worse, our communications guy got sent up north to help with the fire situation up there.

It has turned into a busy fire season in much of Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, but not much has been happening in our area, so most of the crews have been shipped out to areas where there are fires.  That makes things pretty quiet in camp.

I think they even closed it for a while?  But I wouldn’t know, since Hailey and I were off on another working road and flying trip to the north country.  Like last fall, there was a need for a short term tower person to fill in for a while, and I guess we were on top of the short list!

Our ride for the first part of the journey was a brand new 2015 GMC Sierra 2500 4X4, with leather seats, back-up camera, and a touch screen entertainment centre.  Nice!  I hope I don’t get too spoiled by it.

Hailey settled in for the long drive north to Peace River.  I told her she was going on her 5th helicopter trip, so she decided to practice a bit with her flying box.

The next day we were off early for the 45 minute flight in to the tower.

Our temporary home came complete with a screened in porch full of plants and the yard had squirrels and groundhogs to provide some entertainment for Hailey.  I wouldn’t let her climb the tower with me, so she decided to get up on the roof for a look around herself.

Lots of groundhogs here, and at first I thought I might have to use stealth to get a decent photo.  I started from up in the tower.

 

Soon, I realized that they were not that afraid and I had to back off in order to get the telephoto to focus.

Hailey spotted one a bit too far from it’s escape hole – and took after it.  But I noticed that she was careful to run slowly and not actually catch up to it, since they were about her size!

Most towers I have been to have had ‘safety’ rings around the ladder.  Like this one I was at last year.

But this brand new tower is wide open, with nothing to block the view.  Must be a govt austerity program!  I wasn’t sure I would like it, but now I prefer that there is nothing to get snagged, and like the extra elbow room.  And, it’s only 100’ down.

I know some tower folks who have not spotted a real fire in a long time, but as luck would have it, I was only up in the tower a couple hours when the ambient smoke cleared enough for me to spot a large column of smoke to the north!  I called it in, and soon the area was the centre of attention.  Two bomber groups were dispatched and did a good job of surrounding the blaze, but crews worked on it for the next week, keeping it to around 5 hectares or 13 acres in size.  On another rare clear day, I could see huge smokes to the north and east of the tower.

Other fires in the area necessitated the evacuation of the tower that Hailey and I spent time in last fall.

That’s all for now …….!

Back on the Road. Briefly.

Summer has finally arrived, and it is going fast.  Crazy to think that the days are getting shorter again already!  But the sooner fall arrives, the sooner we can get back on the road again.

In the meantime, there were some days off to be enjoyed and so we left the fifth wheel in camp, loaded up the truck camper and off we went.  BC always has some good places to go in the summer so we retraced our path to some of the same places as last summer.

South of Revelstoke, we caught the ferry across the lake.

And found our ‘usual’ secluded spot along the lakeshore.  The water was high, so the normal spit of land and beach was totally submerged.

At the end of the lake there is a spawning area with a viewing platform.

Essentially a logging road, this is actually a numbered BC highway!

Remote hot springs were also on the agenda.

We stopped in at home long enough for some short flights, mow the grass, and drop the camper off before heading back to work.

Ran into this little guy and his mom in the bush near camp.  There have been lots of wolf sightings in the area, but at last report he’s still OK.

That’s gotta be a record!

Well, well, well!  It seems that I have almost run out of excuses for not (finally) updating the blog.

After a record of more than two months, I guess it is time to get this thing updated again!

When I last posted, Hailey and I were hanging out at a fire lookout at the start of the 2015 fire season, prior to the arrival of regular lookout staff.  We got out of there at the end of April, and resumed the rather humdrum life in the fire camp.

For quite a while, there was not much to blog about, and few photos that I thought worthwhile to post.  Then, there were some technological issues.  My older HP laptop had developed a habit of crashing regularly with the ‘blue screen of death’.

Eventually, with a fresh pay-cheque in hand, I decided on a brand new laptop before the old one died completely, or before I dared to re-install windows on it for a fresh start.  I hung back a bit as well, hoping that Windows 10 would be released soon, and solve the problems.

I picked up a high end Dell laptop with Windows 8 and a very nice touch screen and even facial recognition – or so I thought.  Well, that laptop turned out to be a real dud.  It was very sporadic when trying to connect with wi-fi, often saying that the connection was limited when it was clearly not.  It would refuse to connect, even when the old laptop sitting beside it that it was supposed to replace was connecting and working just fine.  It had many tricks!  Turns out the facial recognition wanted cash to continue past a week or two!  Re-booting or restarting the machine would often fail or take forever.  One of it’s best tricks however was when trying to log on to the machine with a password.  It would continuously refuse to acknowledge that the correct password had been entered.  Of course, it did not display the password as it was being typed, but I was 100% sure that there were no errors.  Turns out, it would randomly change the keyboard layout without saying anything.  I only discovered this by bringing up the onscreen keyboard, and using hunt and peck to find the correct letters for the password!  After spending countless hours installing all my favourite software and programs, I took the piece of junk back to the store.  Kudos to BestBuy for taking it back no questions asked.

So then, I ended up with a brand new Asus laptop without the touch screen, but with a back-lit keyboard and facial recognition that does not seem to expire!  So again, I spent hours and hours transferring files and installing software, trying to make it useful.  This was about the time that it was discovered that Windows Live Writer could no longer be used to edit blog posts.  Since I had absolutely no desire to use Blogger editor – which by the way still has error messages that have been ongoing for over a year now with no help from Google.  Fortunately, it is now reported that Live Writer is once again operating correctly.  After getting much of the software installed and files transferred, it became obvious that this computer had it’s own problems hooking on to wi-fi!  After some long chat sessions with the Asus people, they had me ‘refresh’ the laptop, promising that none of my files would be lost.

WRONG!  So – I’ve now been spending hours and hours re-loading all my files for the third time!  Conveniently, internet went down in camp at this exact time, after our link got nuked by lightning.  And it is hard to install programs these days without good internet.  Even a brand new computer apparently needs about 160 windows updates.  And again, after you ‘refresh’!  At least I am becoming an ‘expert’ at re-installing programs, locating all my random cd’s, and doing windows updates.

Fortunately, during all this time, there were at least a few things going on worth photos and blogging!  Lookouts needed to be serviced.  A rather long video shows one of these flights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhTGUirExtM

Other lookouts are road accessible and can be serviced by truck.  I visited a couple here on foggy days when there were certainly no fires spotted

You can’t see it, but this lookout is 100ft through that gate!

Here’s a GoPro video of an American Goldfinch at my home feeder.

American Goldfinch

Here’s my little camp on the side of the airstrip where I’m spending the summer.

In May, there was a ‘drummer’ in my neighbourhood.  I got thousands of photos of him, but was not able to get any video ;-(

 

As it turns out, I now have a good supply of blog photos and material, so it should not be as long before the next update.  I also have lots of new video, but it takes a lot of time even for simple editing, and a long time to get them online.