This happened in 1981:
This happened in 1981:
When my wife and I got back home there was a thunder storm forming over the Cariboo Mountains. We could watch from our front window as lightening struck Belle Mountain. At 11:30 PM, we could see four different spot fires on the slopes. I knew I had better get to bed because I knew the next day would be a busy one for me at Forestry.
I had just fallen asleep when my wife woke me to tell me to wake up and look at Bell Mountain. By this time, a couple of the spot burns had grown and were quite visible in the darkness of night.
I again went back to bed, but our phone rang at 1:00 AM. It was Ned, one of my co-workers at Forestry, who was the active “Fire Duty Officer”. He told me to find two guys, have them meet me at the office, and then go out to fight a fire beside the highway, close to LeGrand. First I called Trevor, but he was already out fighting a fire near his home on Hinkelman Road. I then thought of Kim and his friend Mike, who were renting Kjell’s house next door over the summer, while Kjell and Celine were vacationing in China.
I had Kim and Mike meet me at the Forestry office, I attached a utility trailer with a pump to one of the Forestry pickups, and we headed out into the night, toward LeGrande. We did find the fire, and luckily it was just one tree, a big hollow cedar that was burning in the center. We had to work with headlamps to see what we were doing.
We tried spraying water through a crack in the trunk to put out the fire burning inside the tree, but it became clear that we would have to fall the tree to put the fire out. Big hollow cedars are dangerous to fall, because they could unexpectedly collapse, and it didn’t help that we were working in the dark with just some light from our head lamps.
I sawed through the tree, but when it began to fall a bit, it hung up and leaned against another tree. I then had to carefully saw that supporting tree down, again something very dangerous, but fortunately, they both came down without killing me and we were then able to get to the fire burning inside the cedar’s trunk and extinguish it.
It was still dark as we headed back to the office. As we approached McBride, we could see the orange glow of a fire burning on Bell Mountain, so we drove up the bumpy mountain trail to try to find the fire and to check what the situation was. We did find it and discovered that it was burning in slash (an area left after logging, full of discarded limbs, and unwanted tree trunks). The fire was too big for the three of us to fight, so at 5:00 AM, I radioed in to the office and told Ned they needed to get a caterpillar tractor up there to fight the fire in the slash, then we slowly made our way down Belle Mountain and back to the office.
Kim and Mike went home, but I stayed in the office for the rest of the day, doing fire-related work. I took several fire fighting crews to their fires, hauled pick-up truck loads of Turbo-B jet fuel (for the helicopters) barrels to the airfield, before finally being able to drag myself back home at 6:00 PM. after putting in a long 18 hour day.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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