my parents and sister were ultra-kind enough to u-haul a trailer-load of books and dishes and furniture all the way from edson this weekend. they headed back west (where it's apparently snowed half of a foot since last night) about twenty minutes ago. consider me happy to have the following ( Read more... )

here's a bunch of photos from fire, er, i think it was 106. when the province is on high hazard and your fire is the only active fire, province-wide, they tend to throw a lot of resources at you. fires like these are about as fun as they get: small, active, lots of tanker drops, and i wasn't the fire boss. generally, the leader of the first crew ( Read more... )

i often wonder how many well-site leases are in alberta. thousands and thousands, i'm sure. they dot the landscape. a typical lease site is 100 metres by 100 metres (one hectare, eh?). oilfield construction companies plow roads into the proposed site, plow the ground to clay and pile a bunch of sand/gravel/fill to prepare the area for a ( Read more... )

thanks to cam for this video from 2005:

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v451/boreal_circle_a/summer%202005/?action=view¤t=Camspictures363.flv

it was, in fact, my doing.

this summer, after a week and one half spent north of revelstoke, b.c., in areas visited only by loggers and wealthy heli-skiiers, we made our way south to creston. tha hazard was bordering on extreme in the southeast corner of the province, and a few bands of dry lightning were predicted to move through. i was pretty excited at the prospect of ( Read more... )

boy, was i surprised to get two cds full of two seasons worth of fire photos from cam this morning. i'll probably be subjecting y'all to a few posts featuring some of these photos, which hi-lite a number of silly things we do in the course of a summer.

i'll start with getting smoked by a CL-215 drop.

( Read more... )

part, um, 4, is it? i had an anthro exam this morning, which required an especially early trip to school for last minute studying from the text i refused to buy, but convinced the prof to put on reserve. hooray for saving 100+ dollars! hooray for reserve textbooks. at the u of a it was mandatory for profs to put all required texts/readings on ( Read more... )

http://www.platial.com/anarchobotanist/map/10311#Fires_2002

as promised, and with the suggestion from 5_miles, here are my 2001 fires:

edit: that didn't seem to work. try this: http://www.platial.com/anarchobotanist/map/10309

because i'm an enormous geek, i've decided to map all 120-or-so fires i've been credited with on google earth to, you know, look for patterns, trends, etc. this is what you do with an ecology degree. money and time well spent.