A Rapid Change In The Weather

 

    There are highway signs in the mountains that warn drivers that the weather conditions in the mountains can change rapidly.  I thought about those signs yesterday evening.

    I was sitting in the living room and happened to look out of the window.  I noticed some dark clouds building over the Cariboo Mountains which I thought looked interesting with the very green trees, accented by the purplish-pink flowers of the lilac tree in the foreground, so I shot the photo at the top.

    It was only seven minutes later when a sudden rain storm hit, ushered in by furious gusts of wind.  That storm must have come from the opposite side of the Valley.  

    Everything out the window had changed.  It was darker, all of the colors in the scene became muted, and the Cariboo Mountains disappeared.

    There is an old saying that I have often heard:   “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.”

    That certainly was the case last evening.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Relocating A Martin

 This is a repeat of yet another blog I posted in 2013 concerning my encounters with Martins:

       Anyone who has been following this blog will know that I have had several encounters with martens.  Most famously, the one where a marten came into my bedroom. 

        For a couple of weeks now,  we have been noticing that we haven’t been getting any eggs from our free ranging chickens.  There for a while they were laying their eggs in the dog house, but then the eggs started disappearing.

        I thought the thief might be the marten, which suddenly started hanging around our house.  I had a live trap that I borrowed from a friend, and so two weeks ago, I put it into the dog house with an egg in it for bait.  The next morning the egg was gone, the trap was open, and overturned.  I had caught something over night, but because the door mechanism was a bit wonky, the animal had struggled and managed to escape.

        I worked on the trap making it more secure, re-baited, and reset it.  A week and a half passed with no results, then yesterday, my wife noticed that the trap’s door had been sprung, and when I investigated I found a not too happy marten inside the trap.  It snarled and hissed at me.

        We drove it out to a nicely forested area down the road, and the marten didn’t even wait for me to fully open the trap’s door before it rocketed out, escaping into the bush.  Hopefully, that will be the end of our marten problem, but I am not so sure.

        I was immediately struck at the trapped marten’s appearance when I first discovered it in the trap.  It seemed like an adolescent.  It was thin and long legged.  The other marten I had seen appeared more bulky.  Maybe the fact that it was running around in my bedroom made it appear larger.  I do have a suspicion that this might be a young one recently kicked out of a family, and the other was the mother.  I will just have to wait and see.

        I guess I will reset the trap with another egg and see if any more of these critters come in for a meal.

My paintings can be seen at:  davidmarchant2.ca

BC Forest Service: Driving Around In Trucks

 Above is a painting I did of an old Forestry truck that I owned after it was sold.

       I sometimes question my masculinity.  I am not what is often thought of as a typical male.  I have absolutely no interest in sports, and I am not a motor-head.  I am not interested in loud powerful engines or going fast in vehicles.  All that being said, I must say that one of the things I really enjoyed during my 23 years of working at the BC Forest Service (or the Ministry of Forests, as it was later rebranded) was being able to explore the Robson Valley by driving around in trucks.

        Our district was huge, as big as the country of Belize.  It was made up of mountains and valleys.  Highway 16 went through one valley east and west, and Highway 5 went through another valley north and south.  The rest of the area could only be accessed through a few secondary roads, some well maintained “Forest Service Roads” and a lot of very poor logging roads.

        The jobs I often had to do were varied.  I had to sometimes go out to pristine areas that were slated for logging to do timber cruises.  I had to get fire fighting equipment to fires, ferry barrels of jet fuel for helicopters, take boxes of baby trees to tree planters, and to visit isolated side valleys to determine what kind timber types were growing there.

        Sometimes the remoteness of the places I had to go to meant that a helicopter, ATV, or snowmobile had to be used, but most often it meant driving a big 4 wheel drive forestry truck.  I really enjoyed slowly bouncing along unexplored roads, not knowing what lay behind the next bend.  

        Of course, driving in the trucks was just a means of getting where we had to go.  Once there, things often became much more physical.  Tromping up mountains, and spending the day, fighting our way through the Devils Club (a nasty spiky plant), fighting mosquitoes, or snowshoeing through heavy snow.

        What a glorious thing it was to finally return back to the truck after a hard day in the bush, and to be able to finally sit down again.  It was always a welcome reward at the end of an exhausting day, even if it still meant  a half an hour of bouncing along a logging road, then another hour’s worth of driving on a highway before I finally got back to the office.

        Because the Forest Service used to hire on a lot of extra people over the summer, it meant that we needed extra trucks for them to use.  One of the things I always looked forward in the spring, was being part of the crew that was driven up to Prince George, to pick up the brand new rental trucks, and driving them back to McBride.

        Not only was it enjoyable to drive a brand spanking-new truck, the trip always gave us some “city” time, and since we had a truck, we often took advantage of the situation by purchasing items that we couldn’t carry in our own personal vehicles.  I bought a rototiller once and hauled it home, and another time bought a fruit tree that wouldn’t have fit in my car.

        I will always have fond memories of those forestry trucks.  They were not only a means of exploration and adventure, but also a sign that a hard exhausting day was finally over.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Seeing Green

     The winter after our first summer living in the Robson Valley, I got out some of the slides I had taken over the summer.  I was surprised when I started looking at them:  Everything was so lush and green.  It looked like something you would see in the jungle.  I later learned that our area is classified as an  Interior Temperate Rain Forest.

    After our long winters and things warm up, the plants know their growing season is rather short, so they get down to rapidly growing, and explode into foliage.

    I took the photo above looking down from the balcony to the small pool I have beside our “shade” deck.   The plants have been busy elbowing each other out of the way, trying to get as much sun as they can, for themselves.

    Below you can see the view looking out from the balcony.  You can see that there are areas where I have forced my will onto the landscape, in a desire to have some “jungle-free” space that can be used for other things.   Even though those areas have been cleared, I think you would agree that there is still a predominance of green.  Can you spot the pool featured in the top photo, in the lower left corner of the photo below.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Pine Martin In My Bedroom

     I have been blogging about my first experiences seeing a Pine Martin in 2013.  Today’s blog is the exciting finale to the story:

        As you can no doubt tell, the photo above is fake.  It is a poor composite I constructed in Photoshop, but it does pretty much show what I saw this morning at 4:45, when I raised my head off of my pillow to see what all the commotion was.

        I was asleep and I heard some scratching noises.  I assumed it was the baby squirrels (I had discovered they had a nest up under the eaves of our house.  I figured they were venturing around up in the ceiling.  

        Since there was nothing I could do about it, I tried to go back to sleep.  Then I was roused by our cat, who was jumping around by the window, and knocking off papers and books that were sitting on the short filing cabinet below the window.  

        I raised my head off of the pillow once again to yell at the cat, who seemed mighty interested in the curtain, or what was behind it.  Surely, I thought, those baby squirrels hadn’t gotten in through the window.  At that point, a head peaked out from behind the curtain--it was the marten we had been seeing around the house.

        I usually have the window shut overnight, because when it is open, the train whistle that originates across the river and valley, over a mile away, sounds like it is coming from just outside our house.  Over the last few nights, despite the train whistle, I left the window open, because it has been so warm.

        We do have a screen on the window, but it is held by some slots, and the marten managed to slide it out of the slot and squeeze through the crack on the loose side.  Now, it was hiding behind the curtain, and Lucifer, our cat was stalking it, even thought it was a lot bigger than she was.

        I jumped out of bed, my mind racing through all the possible solutions of how to get the marten out of the house.  The marten, who by this time was feeling outnumbered, to his credit was trying to get back outside, but couldn’t get the window screen open.

       The cat jumped, and the marten responded by leaping down to my guitar case, then the floor and finally behind a dresser.  Lucifer followed, and as the marten vocalized various hissing and growling moans at the cat, I tried disparately to get the screen out of the window, so that if the marten got back on the windowsill, it could escape back outside.

        I yelled at the cat to get away from the marten, and finally got her out of the bedroom, at the same time I opened the door to our balcony, thinking maybe I could get the marten to go out that way.

        In the end that’s what happened.  Once the cat was gone, the marten came out from behind the dresser, and I herded it out into my office, and seeing the open door, it scampered out to the balcony, and I closed the door behind it.

        Needless to say, it was a while before, I calmed down enough to go back to sleep.  Life in the frontier is not always as relaxing and stress-free as urban dwellers often think.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Pine Martin Gets Closer

     A couple of days ago I blogged about seeing my first Pine Martin in 2013.  Well, that wasn’t really the end of my martin story.   A couple of weeks later, I had another blog about the martin:

          Some of the critters we have around here are sure publicity hungry.  On May 23, I wrote about spotting my first marten along our trail.  I took its photo and posted it on on my blog.  They are rather secretive creatures that you don’t normally see.  It wasn’t even in the type of forest where they usually live.  

            I suspect this one got hooked on the international publicity, because the other day, it had scampered  out of the woods, and was running around on the branches of the birch tree that sits 10 feet (3 m.) from our house.  I assumed it was interested in getting its picture taken again, so I obliged it.

Take look at my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

At The Whistlestop Gallery

     McBride is known as sort of an “Artist Town” because of the many talented artists that live in the area.  The McBride Train Station features The Whistlestop Gallery, where many of the paintings and other works of the local artisans are on sale.

    On Wednesday, a film crew from a Prince George television station traveled to McBride to film a piece about McBride and the Whistlestop Gallery.  I was asked to show up as one of the contributing artists to be interviewed.

    While one of the Whistlestop officials was being interviewed, I was standing out in the lobby awaiting my turn.  As I stood there, a tourist couple came in and were looking at some of the brochures on display.  Being a friendly local resident, I asked the lady tourist where they had come from.

    She replied that they lived on Vancouver Island.  She then told me that they had driven up to the university in Prince George to visit their daughter.  She added that now they were on their way to Clearwater, to see a friend who lived there.

    Then she said that long ago she had a high school teacher in Victoria who had inspired her to pursue an education in biology, who she thought had later moved to McBride.  

    I asked her what was his name, thinking I might know him.

    “Mr. Foster” was her reply.

    “Mr. Foster?” I surprisingly remarked,  “He was my next door neighbor for 35 years.”

    Then it was her time to be surprised, and we talked about the Fosters, who had just recently moved down to Victoria on Vancouver Island.

    The incident shows what a small world it is, especially for people who live in a very small community.

    My interview with the TV presenter, must have went okay, because I later learned that after I had left, he bought the print of my painting of Mt. Robson, I was holding up, as I explained my painting technique of painting just one two inch square every day.

    I also learned that the woman tourist who I was talking to, bought one of my art cards.

You can see my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca