Alberta and BC Wildfires

After a few days in Rocky Mountain House we headed to Springbank Airport which is close to Calgary and stayed for only 1 day to be relocated about 2.5 hours south to Pincher Creek, Alberta where we stayed for about a week.  Pincher Creek has one annual event that the town lives for….The Pincher Creek Pro Rodeo and we hit it just in time.  Unfortunately hotel rooms were a bit of a nightmare trying to find rooms for all the crew….but I was able to catch a few hours of the local festivity as well as an afternoon trip to Waterton Lakes National Park which was absolutely stunning even with the smoked in mountains from the fire.  

Once we got released from Pincher Creek we got picked up in BC on all the fires there.   Logistics can get somewhat complicated as we are using a Uhual for our Service Van….the joke is a Service Van in every town as typically there are Uhual rentals everywhere and with this amount of moving from the East Coast of Canada to the West Coast of Canada…it only makes sense to use this service and it works out great storing everything that is inside the helicopter and setting up a makeshift office.  Sometimes the other helicopter companies are driving 30+ hours in their service vans to get to the next location…so this works out well for us at this point in time. But what I have found in Canada with the Uhual companies is not all of them allow you to pay the drop-off fee to dump them in another city.  When that’s the case, then logistics become a nightmare as sometimes we have to backtrack and drop off the Uhual where we picked it up and usually we are nowhere NEAR where we picked it up. This is where I become useful…as the engineer can go with the chopper and I become the drop off driver and meet up with the crew later.  This was the case when we left Pincher Creek.  We had a rental car that needed to go back to Calgary….as Budget was not willing to let us pay a service charge to drop it off somewhere else close to our location and the Uhual had to go about an hour and some change east to Lethbridge.  So I followed the engineer in the Uhual to Lethbridge, we dropped off the Uhual, and then I drove him back to Pincher Creek, they blasted off to go to Hope, BC and then I drove the 3 hours North to Calgary to drop off the rental car and catch a flight to Vancouver to pick up another Uhual that was only available the next morning and meet them in Hope. So I had a quick night all to myself in Vancouver and then an early morning pickup at the Uhaul place and then a few hours drive to Hope, BC.  

In all of my own personal days of fighting fire before I met Aaron working on the ground in the States and of all of the times I have tagged along with Aaron all over Canada and in Australia…this is the worst air quality I have ever encountered here in BC.  The articles in the news coming out daily is that BC is currently the worst in the world for smoke inhalation….it’s like smoking 7 cigarettes a day right now….and I have to admit….it feels like it.  When I landed in Vancouver you could barley see a half mile.  It was unreal.  The only thing that is going to put out these fires is old man winter I’m afraid…but we will continue to do our part and fight the good fight!  We stayed in Hope for a week or so and then got released to go home to Quebec.  We all know how this works so we decided to wait for a 24 hour period to see if things changed…as they always do. The next morning we woke up to “no new news” so around noon we all made plans to head home for about 5 days as we had a Whistler job that we needed to come back to at a later time.  So we got the helicopter all situated at another local helicopter company to keep an eye on, bought airline tickets, took the Uhual back, rented 2 cars as 3 of us had to catch flights in Vancouver and the other crew member was driving back home….gave the hugs and said our goodbyes for now…..and that’s when the phone rang…..we got picked back up on fires….destination Fraser Lake, BC….OMG!  So, all 4 iPhones were going, cancelling all the plans, making new reservations….and 20 minutes later…we were off to Fraser Lake!  I was able to travel along via the big chopper on this relo and see the stunning scenery below…and sometimes not too far below as the mountains are HIGH!  These are the moments that make it all worth it…to be able to tag along and see these sites is surreal.  I was able to spot a few black bears and lots of geese and other birds.  Doesn’t get any better than that.  

Once in Fraser Lake, we got the last 3 remaining rooms at the Fraser Inn….none of us are high maintenance, but boy oh boy…that hotel was something else.  I think after 10 days all of us were ready for clean bedsheets, a real working shower with hot water, and just anything better than what we just encountered.  When we arrived at the airport, there were about 18 choppers on the scene.  WOW!  They had the crane, 4 Kamovs, 214ST, 214B, 3 S61’s, a few 212’s, a handful of Astars, a couple of Jet Rangers/LongRangers, and probably some other one off’s I can’t remember.  It was a regular Air Show everyday!  We flew quite a few 8 hour days at the beginning, but once a lot of the the heavy iron was released the days became super long as they weren’t launching us until after 4 PM or later at night….so you sit there all day….just waiting! It was a loooonnnngggg 10 days! Nonetheless, we got an extra 10 days of firefighting and shut the season down on September 7th!  It was an EPIC summer of fighting fire all across Canada.  Next stop….QUEBEC!