Watch That Last Step!

    Yesterday when we went to the McBride Airfield to walk the dog, we noticed that there were several provincial government trucks parked in the usually empty parking lot.  We figured that something was happening and then noticed a small group of fire fighters gathered around a helicopter.  I asked one of the guys that happened to walk by what was up and he told me they were practicing hover exits from a helicopter.

    We proceeded down the tarmac on our walk and when we returned the firefighters were still talking.  We decided to hang around to see if something more exciting was going to happen, and eventually, after practicing stepping out of the door, onto a rail, and finally onto the runner of the helicopter that was sitting static on the ground, the crew got into the helicopter, it started up and hovered 10 feet (3m) in the air and one by one, the fire fighters climbed out and dropped to the ground.

    It was an interesting experience to watch.

    As I watched I was reminded of one of the times I had to get out of a hovering helicopter when I was working for the BC Forest Service.  It was winter, a co-worker and I had to fly up and check on a timber cruise that had been done in a remote slope of Castle Creek.  There were no roads into the proposed cutblock yet and so we had to fly in.  There was no place for the chopper to land amongst the snow covered trees, so it had to fly up to alpine and hovered on the side of the slope and told us we would have to get out there.

    We were going to snowshoe to the block, but of course we couldn’t wear snowshoes in the helicopter.  I stepped out first,  I stood on the helicopter’s runner, then jumped down into the snow, which was about a meter below.  I sank into the powered snow up to my hips.  I didn’t expect that.  

    My co-worker threw down my snowshoes and I struggled to get them on in the deep snow.  Once I had them on, I could stoop-walk away from the chopper and my buddy got out and did the same thing.  The helicopter flew off and we trudged through the snow down to the where the cutblock was.  We spent all day checking the timber cruise, then snowshoed down slope and were picked up in the late after noon down by the river where there was a clearing where the helicopter could land.

    

You can see my paintings at:  www.davidmarchant.ca