A Life in the Woods: Frank Hill

I started [with the Forest Service] in '35 in Slocan. I was firefighting when I was sixteen and every year after that until I went to work for $45 a month under a federal government program for three years, from about when school let out until September. I got to be Ranger Assistant, they called it. You were under his supervision. We got $45 a month and board if we went fire fighting or if we worked out of town, we'd get paid for our lunch and so forth.

Then I applied for a job in Kaslo, so they put me up the Duncan. I came back here and stayed in Kaslo until I quit the Forest Service in '46 and went in the transfer business. Anyway, then that didn't work out in the winter and so I went into Nelson one day in March and of course I knew the guys all pretty well, and I went to the Assistant District Forester lan Cameron, and I said, "Have you got any jobs?"

When I quit in August the previous summer, they had said, "What happens if we have a fire in Kaslo?" And I said, "If you have a fire I'll be there and I'll do everything you want me to do," because I wanted to go in this transfer business.

So when I got in there he said, "Well you quit last year, didn't you?" And I said "Yep." I said, "That was a mistake." He said, "We're starting a new Ranger District in Elko. How would you like to take charge of that?" I said, "I'm your man. Just put my name down."

So the first of April I went to Elko and there was nothing there. We'd rented an old store. Elko had been a logging and mining town and there was a power dam there and that's the only living that anybody made at that time and they logged over across the valley about ten miles away and there was a little sawmill not far.

It was a bad fire area, a big flat valley fourteen, fifteen miles wide and high incidence of lightning and roads everywhere, old railroad grade where they logged, and logging roads -horse logging roads and so on. So that's why they started it up again. And we had an old store as an office. Just nothing.

Well, I went to Ranger School first of January in '48 and when I came back, they said, "How would you like to go to Kaslo?" Well, I knew the boats and so forth and that was important, you know. So I went to Ranger School again that fall for six months and then in '49 I was full time in Kaslo, got married, had this youngster, and then in 1950 Cranbrook showed up.

I always believed that you go to a new place and you learn something new. You never learn anything by staying stagnant in one place, so we moved into the old courthouse there. They built a new station in 1950. I moved into that and then two years later they split it into two, Cranbrook East and Cranbrook West, because it was just too big. So I took Cranbrook West, which was Fort Steele and the River and that's how I got farming.

Finally in '63,1 quit again. I was a bit unhappy with the way things were going, that we were losing control. I was in the cattle business anyway, so it wasn't much effort for me to quit. I gave them three months notice, which is unusual, and Ralph Johnson at the time said, "I hope you change your mind. I hope you change your mind." And I said, "Well, I've given it a lot of thought."

I went completely farming then, but that didn't turn out too well. Too much risk in it. So I sold out there, came back to Slocan, fiddle-diddled around there for a couple of years, drove school bus, and then I went to the Ranger who I knew quite well by the name of Jupp, who had been at Elko after I had been there and I said, "Have you got any jobs?" He said, "Yeah, I've got a job in the lookout. How would you like to take that on?" I had serviced lookouts, every year but I'd never been on a lookout as a Lookout man. So I said, "Yeah." So he put me on Idaho. I was there for two summers. Most enjoyable summers I ever had, except too many people, but it was interesting.

Of course the Ranger downtown knew that he didn't have to keep bugging me to see that I was there. He would know that I would be there when necessary. If I wanted something, they hauled it up, no question. But I did a lot of wandering around there, you know and I saw a lot of things in nature that I normally wouldn't have.

I remember once the fellow that was lookout man up here and Jimmy Robinson wanted to do some cruising up at Schroeder Creek and I was to take them up there [on the Amabilis] and of course, you couldn't get within six or eight feet of the shore because it drew about three feet of water. Robinson had a pair of high boots on, but the other fellow wasn't too sure what to do. He wasn't too used to our boat, although he'd been around a couple of years. And he said, "How am I going to get ashore without getting wet?" They were going to cruise all day and he wouldn't want his boots wet. So I said, "Well, there's a pike pole here." I'd ordered these pike poles specially. They were about 20 feet long. If you have a boat that big you have to be able to reach the bottom, to ward off rocks and logs.

So I said, "When you get to the bow, you take this pike pole and stick it down in the bottom and then jump ashore." So, he got the pike pole and he fidgeted around. He'd already thrown his pack sack and his lunch ashore and he got hold of this thing and let go and slid straight down into the water. So I didn't say anything. I took the pike pole back and put it on board and headed home.

I was with Harry Tomlinson one day and we were tied up at Argenta. We'd come down from Howser and when we hit the lake, I said, "Look at that lake. We're not going out on that." It was absolutely white. Just white. "We can afford to wait a while."

"Yeah," he said. He was an old seafaring man, you know. Sailed around Cape Horn when he was sixteen. We got down to the wharf and were getting ready to unload our truck and we could see the CPR Moyie and barge over at Lardeau. They were unloading or loading cars, getting ready to leave.

Some people on the wharf came running over and said, "Could you take us over to the CPR barge, so we can go down to town?"

And I said, "We've already sorted that out and we're not going out on the water. It's too rough."

"Well, we know it's rough, but this woman has a two week old baby, and she has to catch that boat.

I said, "I sorry. It's just too rough." So Tomlinson went down to pacify them, down the wharf, and he came back and he said, "You know, they're desperate."

And I said, "You know as well as I do that it's not safe to take that boat out on that water." And he said, "Well, I'll go back and tell 'em." Geez, he wasn't gone five minutes and he's back again.

"Well," I said, "Okay, okay. But I'm not responsible for this deal." So I said, "What we'll do" - we were in behind the wharf you see - I said, "We'll get the woman and her baby on with all her luggage and we'll tie a line on so we can let the boat loose and go around and head into the storm." The water was breaking over the wharf. So he was out in the bow and these people eased us back and I had the motor warmed up and running, and headed out.

With every wave, stuff was rattling around in the back and I sent Tomlinson back to have her sit in the middle so when the boat rocked the baby wouldn't get too upset.

We headed across the lake, quartering into the waves at about two miles an hour, just as slow as it would go, and every wave it would dip under about two feet of water.

When we got to the other side, the Moyie was out in the bay with the barge waiting for us. They knew we were coming because the phone was busy back and forth. So we went in behind her and unloaded. We got over to the wharf and tied up and Levesque, who was the station agent there at that time, came down and he said, "You know, every once in a while that ruddy boat disappeared and there'd be a big red flash (which was our red lead paint on the bottom). It would come up and disappear." And he said, "We were sure concerned." And I said, "Don't think for a minute I wasn't."

It turned out alright, but if we had tipped over or anything had happened to the motor, quit or anything, we could have got out because there was only a mile to shore and we could have washed up on the sand, but the baby would not have.

In those days, you didn't quibble about it. You did what had to be done, because people expected it. It was the Forest Service at that time, so you gave service. If the boat had turned over and we'd lost that youngster, I'd have gotten blamed for it. But you don't think about things like that. I didn't think it was reasonable. But old retiree Tomlinson said, "Oh well, yeah..." He'd been in much worse storms, but not on this lake. He said that was the worst storm he'd ever seen on Kootenay Lake and I believe that. It was just pure white.

Another thing the Forestry got involved with was the Fisheries. Up until 1942, when they tore the railway tracks out and put the highway in, the Forestry had a speeder and a flat car for use on the railway tracks between Lardeau and Gerrard. We had to get permission from the road foreman to get on the track, otherwise he might run into you.

So we used to haul the Rainbow trout eggs from the hatchery at Gerrard, and then we hauled them on the Amabilis down to Kaslo and they picked them up there themselves. That was how we became involved with the Fisheries. We hauled their supplies up and if they needed somebody to move out, we did. We loaned them radios. They didn't have any radios of their own. We were quite involved with the whole welfare of the Lardeau Valley.

At East River [we were repairing a cable crossing and] I had to devise a way to drop this new cable out of the aircraft. As you realize, that whole country was timber and swamp and there was no wide places in the river where we could drop it and find it. The trap door in the aircraft was about eighteen inches square and you couldn't dangle the cable down. You had to compact it. So I built a wooden box around this cable.

It had to be less than the hole but not very much and the object was, as you were flying over, you couldn't let it down easily because the air stream would jam it so you had to get ready and give it a push.

We were up in the plane and we flew back and forth, and the pilot says, "Now, where do you want it dropped?" and I'm trying to look out the side and find out where the cable crossing was and not drop it in the swamp or in the river or in a tree. So I said, "Okay, we'll go back down again a couple of times." And we went down there and I said to the young guy helping me, "Okay, we'll get ready now." And I'm looking over the edge and I said "Now!" and we both pushed it straight down so that it fell free of the plane.

The following week I went back and looked for it. I had hung two or three rolls of toilet paper on so that when it let go they would string out in the air, so we might find it. No way, we never did find it.

We used to drop groceries and all that sort of thing by airplane. That's what that eighteen-inch hole was for. But then a camp would be out in the open and they could find it. Of course the stuff was smashed all to hell when it got down there.

There was absolutely no access to the east side of the river from the East River crossing right up to where it got small enough to where you could fall a tree across it. You couldn't fall a tree anywhere across the Duncan. The water was just too fast.

We had a cabin at Duck Lake. It was a pretty good cabin, built during the Depression when there were lots of people living at Hall Creek panning gold. 'Thirty-five, -six, -seven. A few of them made a few dollars.

Earl Stevens had a trap line that went all the way up past Hall Creek and went right to the head. He had a cable crossing of his own: one pulley on a telephone wire. You can believe that I looked at that very very carefully. It wasn't much of a creek, but it was quite a drop. If you dropped, you'd break a leg, you know and that was no place to break a leg when you're twenty miles by yourself. I went back and forth over it several times.

You sat on a plank and roped across to the other side and of course there was a lot of slack in the cable, so it went down and up the other side. When you got to the other side there was quite a steep grade to pull yourself up. There was no hand line on it so you had to hold on to the top cable and a good chance of losing your fingers, you know, in the pulley. When you got over to the other side there was a fastener there and you had to try and get there and give a pull and get there quick enough to get a hold of the fastener and hook onto the chair.

A Forest Service type [from Victoria] was looking for lookouts and I climbed several mountains with him. He went up and took pictures. He and I went up several of them. One was at the head of Duncan Lake, but it didn't turn out. If there are too many mountains around and you couldn't see, it's no use. Bear Creek Lookout was across from Healey's, and the fellow that was the lookout there still lives in town. Bob Wallace. He got chewed up by a grizzly bear on that same lookout.

We had a telephone coming down the hill [from the Lavina Lookout]. It was World War One insulated line, telephone cable, which had been used in the war and brought back. It was only one wire, a grounded circuit, but it was cloth covered and this particular spring, we couldn't get the phone to work. It had been hung in trees and left over the winter in the snow. So I'd helped pack the Lookout man up. Earl Stevens had about eight pack horses at Argenta and it took two days to go to the top of the mountain with these horses. They were soft having lived on the marsh and not done anything all winter. They'd stand and just drip sweat. We could see the marks in the dirt around them.

So we'd go halfway up and stay over night and rest them, feed them a bit and then the next morning go on up. I'd been up there two or three times and helped them. Leonard Bradshaw was the Lookout's name. The trail went around the south side of Lavina Mountain. It was an old mine trail. But we had a short cut that went down a slide on the west side and that's where the phone line went, because it was much shorter. We used to run down this slide and get off to the side and let the boulders go by and then get on again.

On the way down we checked the line, ran it through our hands and I did that about three times, [but still the] phone wouldn't work. "This time," I said, "I'll do something different." So the whole way from the top I ran it through my hands but I stretched it. And finally about half way down, here: broken in the middle. The cloth held it together you see. So I cut the cloth and taped it up and put it together. I had a portable phone with me and checked it out and sure enough it worked.

PETER CHAPMAN: How long would the lookout man stay in up there? When would the season start?

FRANK HILL: [He went up in] about the middle of June and stayed there until rain came, which could be anywhere in September. He had to be off there by the end of September because the pay ran out then. They had brought horses up to take us out.

Lavina was one of the first lookouts. They had one on Old Glory, out of Rossland, but that turned into a federal government weather station. They had people up there all year round eventually, but I first went there when I was sixteen with the Assistant Ranger, who I started with in Slocan. So I went over to visit him got a chance to go climb up this lookout. Old Glory. But that was the first one and I think they had a phone up there.

[The early lookouts were often] just tents to start with and there was a great danger of them getting blown off. Now Buchanan is made out of cement blocks, two stories. The bottom was for storage and the top was for the lookout. Windows all around. So when they first started out they were pretty primitive, pretty primitive.