The one where I explain what exactly I've been doing for the last 3 months...

After a brief mountain-y hiatus, it is time for this blog to return to the very nearly contemporary.

Tree planting!

I'm not sure how best to summarise my time planting trees, since, some of it was, inevitably, rather samey. I guess, that's what over a thousand trees a day for 3 months will do to your daily activity rota. I figure i'll give you a brief description of my average day for the last little while, since I get the impression that some of you find it hard to imagine what i've actually been doing on a daily basis. Subsequently, I will seek to demonstrate how there is no average day planting, however much it might sound like it, and give you a run down of some of the sights and happenings of the last few months, as well as telling you all about some of the places that i've been hanging out.

Going through the motions:

Tree planting is essentially quite simple, but I guess it is a little hard to imagine if you know nothing about it.

This is a planted tree:

They vary in size and species. Usually they're about 6 to 12 inches long, plus their plugs, though, of course there has to be an exception. This year that was the larch trees we planted, some of which were at least 2 foot long and looked like long whippy twigs. In fact, they looked so like twigs that occasionally you would find yourself planting one right next to at least two others, where the other planters hadn't 'twigged' (hah) that they were so close either. But I digress. Mainly we plant pine and spruce in varying proportions.

You bag up approximately 300 trees; more or less depending on how big the trees are and how fast the land is (and by 'the land', I really mean, 'the planter', but it's kinder the other way around).

However, in order to be planting ready, you don't just need trees in your bags.

Most people have several morning rituals to follow before they are ready to go. For example, many people tape up all of the fingers of their planting hand (and other bits of them besides) in duct tape, as an alternative to wearing gloves or bare-handing it (not to be recommended). For most of the season I wore gloves, but by the end they were all so thread bare that I took to taping my fingers as well. It's a good look, especially the pasty, untanned hand you get from it by the end of the season - that's a particularly good look.

For me the most important thing was tying my hair up and then wrapping a scarf as tightly as I could around my head. At first this was to keep my hair out my eyes, but quickly became far more essential as a measure to save my sanity when pitted against the bugs. There are few things in life more distracting than having bugs flying into your ears over and over again for 8 hours a day. The scarf keeps them out, stops them biting to a certain extent and cuts out some of the irritating buzzing noise. I can only say that it is a shame that you can't realistically put the scarf over your mouth, nose and eyes as well.

Early in the season, the black flies came out first and took great delight in spending all day just bumping into you. They didn't even bite very much, they just flew into your eyes, or close enough that you breathe them in up you nose or your mouth. There is no sound quite so distinct out on the block than the sound of a planter breathing in a fly unexpectedly and choking. Mmm. Bugilicious.

More on bugs later.

So, you're taped, gloved and scarfed up, gaiters in place and bug spray on, and when you're ready to plant you look something like this:

(That's a lie, this was actually the end of the day and we're pretending, and Cam isn't ready to plant at all, but we all look very happy, so why not)

So, that's you, the planter, and also the plants covered. Where do we plant them?

Trees get planted on blocks of land that at some point in their existence, have been logged. This could be last year, or could be several years ago and it's already been planted to some extent. It's hard to describe an average block, though, generally speaking you get an idea of what it might be like from the price you get, per tree, to plant on it

Unfortunately for me, all of the photos I can find of blocks all look really nice. There's something about photographing them that makes them look flat, friendly, rockless and not at all slashy, and this is sooooo no true. The conditions you encounter tree-planting are sometimes more than a little ridiculous.

Most blocks have some combination of swamp, rocks, slash (:anything planty/tree-y that was left when they logged it from twigs to piles of whole logs), jungle, steep hills, lakes/ponds. Occasionally the entire block is nothing but lake and you just had to plant on any dry spot you could find. The back of the block in the picture was like that. It looks nice, but it wasn't exactly fun to plant. On the other hand, we came across one block that looked like a mossy pebble beach and basically involved stuffing a tree anywhere you could wedge your shovel/dibble into the ground. Sometimes replanting is not well thought out by the companies involved...

Um... I think you get the picture. Enough about the knuts and bolts for now. Next post, where i've been and the non-average days :D

I leave you with our whole motely crew on a pile of boxes of boxes (box boxes)...

(the long lost) Road Trip # 2b - Banff - Japser - Schuswap Lake (a.k.a train!) (ad finem ultimum )

Soooo, the final installment in my much belated road trip specials.

Basically all the was left to do now was to find our way back down to Vancouver - a trip that could plausibly be completed in one day, but more sensibly required two. In an effort to cover ground, we had decided to go back down in a circle. See some different hills and lakes and mountains than first time round - yay?.

The first day was fairly leisurely, spent coming across various places that resembled, unnervingly, the village of Royston Vaisey, and the people who populated them even moreso. One guy running gas station had a fixation on beef jerky that was deeply creepy; we removed ouselves from there pretty sharpish. The village near our 'hostel' (more on that in a moment) looked normal enough from the outside - charming even, but the more people we met, the more convinced we were that we would head back to the hostel and improvise our own dinner. We'd actually meant to go to the local pub to watch the Canucks (Vancouver's Hockey team) win one of their quarter final series games, but when greeted with a few very drunk, very scary looking locals (at 5pm) and a 14 year old (so it seemed), we scidaddled. So much for sociability.

That said, our hostel wasn't exactly what you would describe as 'normal' either. The entrance to the hostel was simutaneously the woman who ran the hostel's house, the local grocery store, the greyhound station, the courier base and the living room and kitchen for the hostel. The sleeping accomodation was in old Canadian Cabooses - trains to the rest of us.



Aside from the trains, there was also a magical door:


...in to a seriously freaky garden walk thing with Barbies hung up as fairies and random Furbies and things hanging out in trees:




... a beaver dam thing (complete with beautiful lake):



...and llamas. (You'll have to take my word for that, the pics aren't uploaded).

All was not truely weird though, we found some tree planters to chill out with in the lounge and watched the Canucks roll on to an extremely close victory over their quarter final partners and chilled out with a bottle of wine safe in the knowledge that tomorrow we would roll on to Vancouver where sensibility mostly prevails and there aren't freaky fairies in the trees (mostly).


For Hannah and Tabitha, just a brief stop in Vancouver before heading on to the island for a month to chill out before summer jobs. For me a week of chilling in cafe's attempting and failing to write this blog pre-tree planting.

Next time:

Exciting arboreal adventures oop north, featuring Banksy

cum plantatur arbor mediocritas

(the long lost) Road Trip # 2b - Banff - Japser - Schuswap Lake (a.k.a train!) (Part 3)

Japser.

Some people love Jasper. I was a little indifferent to it (though the National Park in general was sooooo awesome).

Since hiking is what you do in Jasper, we decided to go on a hike. I mean, it turned out to be more of an amble, but the sentiment was there. Actually the whole thing turned into one big anti-bear hunt. The tourist info lady, when suggesting routes, had mentioned that the bears were now out (we'd been mooting this point for sometime, unsure as to when bears get up after the winter), and we surmised that they might be rather hungry.

Already a little cautious, the bear prints we found on the beach of the lake we were going around did nothing to alay our unease.


In fact, we had actually intended to walk through the woods by this lake, but collectively (though mainly Tabitha) we had freaked ourselves out a little too much and someway into the woods the imaginary bears got the better of us and we all scooted rather hastily in the other direction.

Safely out of the woods we spent some time playing with the cracks in the ice before deciding to give the whole hiking thing another go....


However, instead of calming down, we found dangerous quick sand, and empty (possibly haunted, i mean, one never can be too careful...) cabins round the edge of the other lake that was there.




We gently nursed Tabitha around the rest of the lake back to the car, having tacitly agreed that if either of us did see a bear, we certainly wouldn't tell Tabitha. And thus ended probably the most stressful gentle stroll of my entire life. Safely back in town, we went for a bit more of a drive and then sat down with a bottle of wine and a couple of movies, Tabitha quietly thankful we were moving on the next day away from the phantom bears of Jasper-land.

So much for Jasper.

(the long lost) Road Trip # 2b - Banff - Japser - Schuswap Lake (a.k.a train!) (Part 2)

Sooo, that was Banff. Done. Well, no, not done at all. It would be awesome to come back sometime and do lots of mountain hikes and see more of the wilder (and perhaps more skiable!) bit's of Banff, but it was time for us to move on.

The next day was probably the highlight of my Rockies trip, which is amazing, because all we really did was go for a drive, but it was probably the most stunning drive i have ever taken. In fact, I enjoyed the drive up to Jasper rather more than i was taken in by the town itself.


First stop, Lake Louise.



Again, somewhat not nearly as melted as we had originally hoped (well, with a few exceptions (see above!)), but still very pretty and very cool, and you get a better sense in these pics as to how big the lakes are from the tiny weenie people towards the back of them.


Next stop, the Crow's Foot Glacier (looks like a crow's foot, except that one of the toes fell off/melted and now it's a crippled crow of some sort. That's global warming for you.


There was also a really crow (or maybe a raven, who cares) at the glacier who stalked us the whole time we were there, so i had a photo shoot with him...


Back on the road, and no longer stalked by our feathery friend, i took loads and load of photos of mountains and snow in various combinations. I shaln't bore you with the whole sequence, but here's a few...


Somewhat closer to Jasper by this time we all knew we wanted to stop at the Columbia Icefields - aka the Athabasca glacier. It's pretty cool. It would have been even cooler to walk on it, but the price tag associated with doing that is a little too steep for our liking, and we figure we've just spent all winter walking on snow and ice anywayz (admittedly not ice that's been there for ancient amounts of years, but still, it's all frozen water in the end...)


Probably the best part of this mini excursion, though, was seeing the glacier buses they use to drive people up the glacier (if you're prepared to pay for the pleasure...)

They're awesomely ginourmous. That would have been fun; maybe another time...

Down the road we went for a wander around the Athabasca (ice) Waterfalls. They were very pretty, and i dare say would be rather spectacular during the summer. The pics will be up on picasa, but i'll try not to put tooo many more up here for now.

Somewhat later, having passed even more waterfalls and mountains and snow and fun crap like that, we arrived in Jasper, which is to say that we drove down the approximately 1 street of shops that constitutes the whole town. (Maybe that's unfair, maybe there are two...).

As it happened, today was Easter Day. Arriving at our hostel we were immediately invited to join in with an Easter potluck they were having with everyone in the hostel. Never having had a roast dinner on easter in my entire life (i don't think...) i was rather keen, and in my world a raost dinner can't exist without yorkshire puddings, so we all went shopping to get some ingredients. The dinner was awesome. The guys working at the hostel got the ham and then everyone else had done veggies and salads and pasta and all sorts of things. My yorkshire puddings were hilarious. They worked really well and everything, and those of us familar with them really enjoyed them. However, what i enjoyed the most was the look of utter bewilderment as to what these strange things were and what on earth you were supposed to do with them from everyone else in the room. Apparently yorkshire puds are difficult to decifer...

(the long lost) Road Trip # 2b - Banff - Japser - Schuswap Lake (a.k.a train!) (Part 1)

If i don't get around to posting this now, i never will, so without much ado, i present, The Continued Roadtrip Adventures (from May) of Rachael and her housemates: Banff, Jasper and other places what we went.




Once safely arrived in Banff we had to decide how we should spent our just over a day there to make the most of it. We all agreed we had to go up either the Banff or the Jasper gondola, and since we had been blessed with just the most stunning weather from arrival, we thought we'd not tempt fate and would go up the Banff gondola first thing that morning. Banff gondola is separate from the ski hills and exists purely to give you a good view, which, i think you'll agree, it more or less manages:





The Rockies are simply stunning the whole way around, and while i wasn't sure at the time, i'm really glad we went when we did with all the extra snow that you get from heading out there in the spring. It was just breath taking. The down side of all the snow, of course, was that there was still a lot of snow... Getting up the walk way at the top of the gondola was something of an intrepid adventure. Packed snow filled some of the stairways right up to the top of the fence, and with all the footfall it was basically just one icey slide...


We proceeded with caution...


At the top, aside from an awesome vista, we found a "Cosmic Ray Station", whatever one of those things is. It sounds coool. I imagine it's owned by an evil genius with plans to take over the world, but what do i know?


Gondola ticked off our list, we set out to explore some of the other sights Banff had to offer. Just heading down to the end of the road, past the Fairmont (which looks like an enormous Bavarian castle, but alas, i don't have a picture to hand), we went to see the waterfalls. Some how it hadn't occurred to any of us until we got there that perhaps they might be frozen (they were definitely frozen...) , but we got to stand on a giant ice sheet, which was pretty cool.

And the view of the river was beautiful. (I'm goint to start sounding like a stuck record soon - *everything* was beautiful, you can just take that as read from now on... but i fear when I get to the drive up to Jasper, i might have to start telling you that again, repeatedly...)


While we all knew we wanted to go to the hot srpings in the afternoon, we figured we ought to do some sort of work or excercise first in order to fully appreciate it. With that in mind we set out to go on a hike to some other, less frozen, waterfalls, however, through complete ineptitude, and lacking a map, we found a lake instead. I'm not gonna lie, mainly we went there because we thought it had a funny name.


Perhaps we were just pronouncing it wrong, but um, i like to think not.

Our accidental excursion was awwwwweesome. The entire, very large lake was frozen, sufficient that you could walk the whole way across it without trouble. So, this is me stood *on* the middle of a lake. Coooool.


It's a little hard to get a good perspective on how big this like is, but it's pretty damned huge. And those mountains, even huuuuuger. Trust me.

I think there are some tiny people in the back of this picture if you look closely, it might give you an idea...

Anywayz, after a while the novelty wore off and we decided that we would go to the hotsprings whether we deserved it or not. The springs were sort of nice, but not really what i expected. It's a really small pool and humongously crowded. I can't even imagine what the queues must be like in the Summer, if that's what they're like in the Spring (infact that goes for all of the Rockies - must be a bit nuts!). That said, there's very little wrong with relexing in a hot outdoor pool with only mountains and blue skies to fill your view. Mmmm.

Since we were feeling all classy by this point we headed back to the (very very nice) hostel common room and shared the champagne that we picked up in the Okanagan winery. This is the life. What more can I say?!


A few inlets had melted here and there, revealing that gorgeous blue that Canada's lakes are well known for.

The lake all the way around with Hannah at both ends: