National Bring Your Grade Nine to Work Day.

Last week it was National bring your Grade Nine to Work Day. So Randal took Courtenay with him out in the bush. She got to have a look and experience a day in the life of "Dad at work". She's decided it isn't something that she'd want to have as a career, although she does enjoy going out in the bush with Dad. Here's the report she wrote to send to Daddy's boss. She also took a copy to school and is using it for credits for school. Kinda nice to spend the day out driving in the bush and have it count towards school!!! Well I'll leave you with it then...Enjoy!

Bring Your Grade 9 To Work Day

November 7^th 2007

Ministry of Forest and Range

Compliance and Enforcement

The three sites that I went to today with my Dad were:

******** Bros. Mill

Logging sites

Several range pastures.

At ***** mill we visited the scale site. I learned that the logging trucks park their full load on the scale, go and unload it, and then come back and weigh it again to find the difference.

They categorize the different kinds of wood to find out how much they should be paid according to the weight of the logs. A cubic metre of logs is worth from $50-$200 depending on the type of wood. They put all the information into their computers and send it down to Victoria. The mills that don’t have access to computers store their information in booklets

The logs are unloaded either few by few by a front end loader or by a big electric machine called Letourneau that picks up the whole load at once. It is electric because it is more efficient than diesel powered Wagners because it can go uphill with a load and it has the ability to brake coming back downhill. After the logs are unloaded they are either taken to log decks or directly to the mill. Before they take it to the mill they mark and chop the logs every five meters to make sure it isn’t rotten on the inside.

After we left the mill we drove up to Jack Creek area and drove around looking at piles of logs and logged areas. Here I learned that loggers cut down the trees by hand with chainsaws. I also learned that if you want to log an area you must have a license to cut, unless it is your own private property.

We stopped in a few clearings and I was taught about the mountain pine beetle and how to identify a “MPB” attacked tree. The bark has squiggly indents in it from the beetles burrowing around and laying eggs, there is usually spots of pitch on the bark from trying to push the bug out, and there is a blue ring of fungus on the butt of the tree. Here I also learned a little about how GPS works and that if a moose were to ever charge you to climb a tree and call for help.

The third thing we did was go to Brownie Pasture area and looked for cows that were or weren’t supposed to be on certain property.

You can tell who the owner of the cow is by the brand on the cow. The brandings are either right or left, hip, rib, or shoulder. The ones we were looking at were RRC, right rib cow. We weren’t able to make out any markings on any of the cows though because they were all either too wet or too old and faded. The cows eat basically the same thing as deer or moose: grass or small green plants, though sometimes when they are desperately hungry they will eat twigs. Ranchers place salt blocks in the grazing area for the cows to lick. Putting the salt block somewhere ungrazed will help move the cows into a new area. You can tell that an area has been grazed by the height of the grass and whether it’s been trampled down. In the whole day we saw approximately thirty-two cows.

In conclusion, I had a good day today. I enjoy trekking through the bush and looking at stuff. The positives were just the whole day in general. The only negatives I can think of were getting up, the cold weather in the morning, and trying to write notes on the bumpy bush roads.

thanks for reading. Have an awesome night/day.