By Adam Sprott
It was the best of weather, it was the worst of weather. That’s basically how Two Lakes felt.
Our first few days went well—we hit the ground and scouted out the Narraway road to find the best landmarks and get the lay of the land and then jumped right in with some of our most difficult access. Marlene, Ashley, Kelsey and her dog Berta tackled the “I” ecosites with 6 kilometre bushwhacks there and back, and Adam and Mackenzie quadded down soaked cut lines and over grizzly prints to reach the furthest fire sites on the map. This was all well and good while the weather stayed on our side—and it did so for the first part of the shift. That changed on day 5 when it rained from sun-up to sun-down.
After 24 hours of rain, some getting stuck, and some truck maintenance issues, we found the road through the 3 km slide zone up the Narraway gorge to have gained nearly 5 metric tons of soil and some very disgruntled mid-sized trees that hadn’t quite uprighted from the night before based on the way they sprawled across the road. Nevertheless, on day 6 we nimbly skirted around the stricken spruces and grabbed a bunch more sites before the rains returned. This second day of rain was too much for the narrow road in Narraway, and we were cut off from our sites in the caribou’s range.
We returned to Narraway for our second shift and full of vim and vigour covered the entire length of our range. With the weather cooperating we reached deep into the old growth black spruce forests and regularly found super-dense stands of thick, scaly, and gnarly trees that could hide a tech doing lateral cover in the first five metres. A few nice pine forests appeared on sandy berms in the wettest of the bogs, and we were never short for wild company seeing both grizzly and black bear sows with cubs, a moose with her new-born calf, and even a black morph fox.
We kept cheery with campfires, dinners in the wall-tent, and terrible jokes at tailgate meetings but as the bugs got worse and the mornings stayed cold we were happy to finish our surveys in Narraway and pack up from Two Lakes. Next shift we moved to Sheep Creek and the Red-Rock Prairie Creek herd.
