A Life in the Woods: Alan Ramsden

The summer of '44 was sort of an interesting time. I was turning 18 in April, and the Forest Service was looking; around for candidates to replace the previously available manpower [because of the War]. And so they began recruiting young people at University, and particularly high school students. And I think because I was very active in Boy Scouts, and because I had a couple of friends whose fathers were in the Forest Service, I sort of got the word that they were going to accept some applications. So we -went downto the Forest Service office (at that time in the Courthouse and had a large warehouse about where the present forestry building is). But the Nelson Ranger office was upstairs in the building on the corner of Ward and Baker.

Okay, so in those days, I think, we were all aware of Forest Rangers, but not much else, you know, because firefighting was really the activity that the public was aware of. I think unless they were in the actual logging business or the lumber business, people didn't see the Forest Service. But, as young people, we also were aware of an activity under the Canadian Forestry Association. I remember going to see films, mostly aimed at firefighting - protection. You know, 'don't leave fires burning', all that sort of thing. And they were recruiting young people in the '30s, particularly, to join the Canadian Forestry Association. And originally they gave a little copper-coloured badge you could wear, and then they decided to go further and issued red shirts and green ties. And I think for those of us that were active in Boys Scouts, we saw the Junior Forest Wardens, as they were called, as almost against the Boy Scouts - not that they were against the Boy Scouts, in that sense, but they occupied the amount of time that you had available for Boy Scout activities. They were doing Junior Forest Warden stuff. A lot of us sort of belonged to both! [laughter] We managed to fit it in. So that, I think, also probably contributed [to our awareness]. So anyway, we went down to the courthouse and found the Forest Service office, and filled out the application forms. And then I understood later that they checked back at school to see what kind of people we were as school students. One of the interesting things was that when I was filling out the form, it asked: "can you drive?" Well, I was 18 and we didn't have a car at home and had no opportunity, to learn how to drive. I was pretty confident I could probably do that, you know. But anyway,-1 said, "No, can't." I didn't have a license. And I think only two people that ended up on the crew we were on actually had driver's licenses. So they said, ''Well, put it on there anyway, because this is one of things they check down when they're making the assessment. You know, you aren't going to be on the highway anyway." So anyway we filled those forms out and then went back to school and wrote the school exams and so on, and almost forgot about it.

Anyway the day when I got home [from a sailing adventure on the West Arm], there was a note telling me to show up the next day at the Forest Service, complete with all these items; you know, a pair of substantial boots and a couple a pair of trousers and so on.

Dale Anderson: And this was for a fire crew?

Alan Ramsden: Yeah, and to report at the warehouse office- And so at 10:00 in the morning, we assembled there - me and the other guys that were from Nelson that were going to join the crew. They boarded us on the back of a two-ton Maple Leaf Steak truck with a steel deck and wooden slat sides, and said that we were going down to Relly Creek and we'd be looking after the trail up to the Beaver Lookout. Until there was fire season on, apparently they didn't put a lot of lookout men in place.

So off we went and set up a camp on Kelly Creek. It was a logging road originally, and it came past the sawmill which was abandoned at that time and which had been water-powered with a waterwheel. And about, oh, a quarter of a mile past that I guess, the road crossed from the right-hand side of the creek to the left-hand side. And that location had a bit of a flat, and so that's where we established our camp. Put up two sleeping tents and a cookhouse tent and a stove tent. And then in the next couple of days we found a nice lookout spot on the sunny side of the hill. A local school teacher that taught us in junior high school, and his wife and their daughter, were our camp supervisors. And we were joined by a couple of fellows, a fellow from Creston and a guy from Grand Forks. They left shortly with about six of us on that crew.

I had always had an interest in radio, and I had taken signalman's course and got my signalman's badge in Scouts, so I was handed the responsibilities of the portable radio, which was a backpack unit which we hung on a 2x4 in the cook tent.

Dale Anderson: Do you have any fires that were especially memorable?

Alan Ramsden: Yeah, well, I guess the first one's always memorable, you know. We were in camp I guess three days when there was a brief overnight rain storm. And lightning came. And we had a land-line telephone up to the lookout. And Harry Mitchell, who was the chap at Beaver Lookout, called down and said that he could see the smoke right above the town of Fruitvale. Well, about two-thirds the way up on those almost perpendicular hillsides, it had been logged off years ago and had second- growth growing up there. But [also] a lot of standing snags, and one of them was on fire. ' We could see this thing. So this was our first fire and we were not, you know, conditioned y this time by exercise and camp work or anything. So off we went. We had to pack a lunch, a can of tomatoes and a loaf of bread! [laughs]

Our gear? I had the radio on my back, the Pulaski, and a shovel. And, you know, everybody was loaded as if we were just walking down to load the truck or something. Anyway, I guess about two-and-a-half hours later, we managed to get up to this fire. Three or four weeks later, we'd have each taken the appropriate tools and whatever was needed - not everybody with a lot of extra gear - and we'd have been up, probably on the run, to that fire. And not pooped out! [laughs]

Anyway, we did get up to that snag, and it was really steep on the side of the hill where the snag was. So we were trying to figure out whether we should drop the snag, take a chance that it would fall up the hill. We tried peeing on it with the backpack pumps and everything else we could think of. [laughs] But it was just an old tamarack [larch] snag, and when the lightning hit, it was burned and charred down in the crack. We dropped the snag uphill, and then we just went down and sprayed it and packed the crack [in it] with dirt. And so we ended the fire.

So that was our first forest fire. And we had a number of terrible expeditions. One of them was up above Erie Creek up Champion Lake way. And the first place we tried to get off the road ... we certainly didn't realize that whole hillside had been burned off, at one point, and it had re-grown with hemlock. Well, the hemlock was so dense you couldn't push a foot through the stuff, and so we had to drive all the way down to Champion Lake and go up an old logging road there and then hike over the hill into the top end of Erie Creek. And then when we got there, there was no smoke, [laughs]

So I had to keep stringing this fish line and form a wire antenna over a snag, and try and get ahold of Harry on the radio up at the lookout and see if he could tell us where the fire was. And the maps' scales were not too large in those days.

Later on we photographed some of our area where we noticed the fires were burning quite regularly, and we had small carry able prints with us, so that if we were on the ground at least we could say, 'well, this is where we are', and we could see where we were going. As it was, we spent a lot of time thinking we were going to the right place and climbing over a hill and 'we had better go around down there'...

But when we did get to that fire, we had to leave two guys there, because it wasn't much of a fire but it was in a lot of duff. Gave them each a backpack and everybody chipped in all their lunch and groceries and we left them there for the night. So they just dug around that small fire, and eventually they were able to pull out in about two days. So that was the first fire fighting camp-out. I wasn't on that crew. I was stuck with the radio and had to go back.

The following year I was in senior matriculation in school. And by the time I was graduated in June, the War in Europe was over and they weren't calling to train anybody. Anybody that was going to the Japanese theatre, they were already in the Army or the Air Force or the Navy. So I went to work for the local radio station in that year. And about, I think, the fifth or sixth of August - we had an extremely hot summer in '45 - we had a huge fire start up Sheep Creek. And I was walking uptown from the radio station, walking along Front Street. A familiar voice, George Schupe, who was a district forester, gave a beller out at me, "Hey, Alan, got a minute?"

So innocently I said, "Sure, George." Walked over thinking he wanted to shoot the breeze about the old days and so on, and all he wanted to do was get me close enough to tell me to go home and get my boots and gear and [laughs] 'be back here in a few minutes'!. I was dragooned into the Forest Service again.

And so I said to him "Gee, I'm supposed to be at work tomorrow morning at 6:30."

"Don't worry about it. I'll phone them up and tell them. Be back here, I'm going to Salmo at 5:00." So I bustled up the hill and left a note for my mother, and grabbed my boots and pack and blankets and some underwear and socks, and headed down. And we went out to Salmo, and I got put in the Ranger Office there. And the fire had just really got going, and they had maybe ten or 15 men on it at that point. So I got the job of being quartermaster and radio man and whatever, in that office. Within about two weeks, 350 men on that fire. We had truckloads of food coming in and out, an d I was busier 'n a one-armed paper hanger! [laughs] I had to make three or four trips a day up to where the fire crews were. A lot of the fire was up Wolf Creek. Went up and towards the main lake. And we had a lot of Russian [Doukhobor] fellows working there and they unanimously decided they wouldn't fight fire if they had to eat any kind of meat - and that was an incredible challenge, because the only supply place was Trail. So I used to drive a three-ton truck into Trail every day and scrounge up canned tomatoes and all that kind of stuff to take out, eggs ... and filled the little Ranger Station up and its little garage - that became a storage warehouse. And the guys on the fire kept ordering stuff, you know - it was endless. We had packers going in with horses.

We had been on the fire I guess a good three weeks. There was no rain. With hand tools and that, what are you gonna do? You head it off in one place, and it would just blow off up to some other area. And so the crew got bigger and bigger.

One of the ways they enlarged the crew was we'd take a truck and go over to the main gate of Cominco [laughs], and as the guys came off of their 3:00 shift, with the tailgate down they could climb in the back of the truck! [laughs] And we weren't too popular with either the CM and S or the guys.

Dale Anderson: Firefighting has always been an exciting type of thing.

Alan Ramsden: Oh yeah, and you know, when you're on the job and you know what's going on and you're part of the team, it's amazing what's accomplished and the kind of crew spirit that quickly develops. It was amazing, because these people hadn't been working together. Most of the guys at Cominco might have been working in the same plant but were dispersed about the plant, they weren't buddies or anything like that, most of them. And then we had all these Russian fellows and we had some old retired miners from around Salmo. And all these guys pitching in and going on out there. In those days, I would think that guys that worked for government didn't get terribly well paid. And what we learned was that, as the fire grew into the end of August and into the early part of September, all the big wheels in the District suddenly booked on to that fire. We had the District Forester. We had the Assistant. We had the Nelson Ranger, [laughs]

Dale Anderson: Getting overtime or ...?

Alan Ramsden: Well, I guess so. I know that I was getting paid 50 cents an hour, and I was putting in 16-h our days - which was more than I was told I'd be making at the radio station. But guys on the fire were working as many hours as they could stand. you know. If a guy felt he could work two shifts, he worked two shifts. If he worked 12 hours, he worked 12 hours - not every day, 'cause it was ruddy hard work. I was up on the fire line quite a few times distributing stuff, or making sure what was going on and trying to solve some radio problems.

But we had a huge rainstorm and like overnight we went from 300 men to 100 to 25, you know. And we had 25,1 guess, for quite a few days on the fire. We just patrolled it, mostly, and watched to see if it was going out. And it kept raining.

Travelling in the bush in the Salmo area was really interesting, because we saw the remnants of the turn-of-the-century logging which went on there and down the big river bottoms, and the huge cedar stumps that had existed originally when the first people were underwear and socks, and headed down. And we went out to Salmo, and I got put in the Ranger Office there. And the fire had just really got going, and they had maybe ten or 15 men on it at that point. So I got the job of being quartermaster and radio man and whatever, in that office. Within about two weeks, 350 men on that fire. We had truckloads of food coming in and out, and I was busier 'n a one-armed paper hanger! [laughs] I had to make three or four trips a day up to where the fire crews were. A lot of the fire was up Wolf Creek. Went up and towards the main lake. And we had a lot of Russian [Doukhobor] fellows working there and they unanimously decided they wouldn't fight fire if they had to eat any kind of meat - and that was an incredible challenge, because the only supply place was Trail. So I used to drive a three-ton truck into Trail every day and scrounge up canned tomatoes and all that kind of stuff to take out, eggs ... and filled the little Ranger Station up and its little garage - that became a storage warehouse. And the guys on the fire kept ordering stuff, you know - it was endless. We had packers going in with horses.

We had been on the fire I guess a good three weeks. There was no rain. With hand tools and that, what are you gonna do? You head it off in one place, and it would just blow off up to some other area. And so the crew got bigger and bigger.

One of the ways they enlarged the crew was we'd take a truck and go over to the main gate of Cominco [laughs], and as the guys came off of their 3:00 shift, with the tailgate down they could climb in the back of the truck! [laughs] And we weren't too popular with either the CM and S or the guys.

Dale Anderson: Firefighting has always been an exciting type of thing.

Alan Ramsden: Oh yeah, and you know, when you're on the job and you know what's going on and you're part of the team, it's amazing what's accomplished and the kind of crew spirit that quickly develops. It was amazing, because these people hadn't been working together. Most of the guys at Cominco might have been working in the same plant but were dispersed about the plant, they weren't buddies or anything like that, most of them. And then we had all these Russian fellows and we had some old retired miners from around Salmo. And all these guys pitching in and going on out there. In those days, I would think that guys that worked for government didn't get terribly well paid. And what we learned was that, as the fire grew into the end of August and into the early part of September, all the big wheels in the District suddenly booked on to that fire. We had the District Forester. We had the Assistant. We had the Nelson Ranger, [laughs]

Dale Anderson: Getting overtime or ...?

Alan Ramsden: Well, I guess so. I know that I was getting paid 50 cents an hour, and I was putting in 16-h our days - which was more than I was told I'd be making at the radio station. But guys on the fire were working as many hours as they could stand, you know. If a guy felt he could work two shifts, he worked two shifts. If he worked 12 hours, he worked 12 hours - not every day, 'cause it was ruddy hard work. I was up on the fire line quite a few times distributing stuff, or making sure what was going on and trying to solve some radio problems.

But we had a huge rainstorm and like overnight we went from 300 men to 100 to 25, you know. And we had 25,1 guess, for quite a few days on the fire. We just patrolled it, mostly, and watched to see if it was going out. And it kept raining.

Travelling in the bush in the Salmo area was really interesting, because we saw the remnants of the turn-of-the-century logging which went on there and down the big river bottoms, and the huge cedar stumps that had existed originally when the first people were in the area. Or some mining, I guess ... but buildings that - my god, they must have had an incredible supply of cedar shakes and stuff in that Salmo area.

Dale Anderson: Were a lot of the hillsides burned off?

Alan Ramsden: Oh, sure. One of the most memorable fires, I guess, was more towards the border. We were sent down there, and a local guy was sent with us because they said, 'I don't think you guys will be able to find it because it doesn't seem to be smoking much, but we know it's there because every now and then a puff of smoke comes up out of it, and it's in second-growth stuff and really potentially a tremendous fire, could sweep for miles'.

So we were sent off on this thing and we finally got up onto a ridge, and on the way up we came across lots of old logging flumes which, you know, had been used to take logs down. And then we saw some dry flumes [chutes] which were just jack pine, small jack pines, 20 feet 30 feet [long], that had been nailed to whatever available tree. And anyway, 'cause of the steep angles, they'd just shoot the stuff [sawlogs] down the thing! No water, just slide down the chute. That's old technology, I guess.

Dale Anderson: Yeah.

Alan Ramsden: Anyway, talking about this fire that I remembered so clearly. After we got up on the ridge and we were hiking along and we had no sign of this fire. We could sort of smell occasionally a burnt smell but not like the burning of green needles and turpentine and oils and all that sort of thing, but just sort of a burning smell. But we couldn't see it anywhere and certainly there was no sign of smoke. And we'd been searching from about 4:30 in the morning, and this was getting close to noon and we were beginning to grumble a bit about, you know, maybe we should find a place where there was some water we could hunker down and have a sandwich. And, ah, we were up on one of those ridges down towards the Pend Oreille, fairly open and the young growth was still coming up yellow pine and that, because it had been burned off quite heavily prior to this, maybe 25 years before. Anyway, there were a few large old trees, that had survived the fire, that had fallen down. And finally we got into sort of a bit of a rocky outcrops here and there other than duff and not too much undergrowth at all, and we were standing around in the middle of this saying, 'well, maybe we should just go back home, wait till the darn thing starts up again or something'. And there was a tree I would guess as maybe 60, 70 feet long, laying down, and which had lost its bark, you know, sort of stuck out into the rocks and duff. And so I'd gladly taken this darn radio off my back, and a couple of the guys that smoked were sitting around having a cigarette and shootin' the breeze for a minute. And I got on top of this tree and thought, 'Oh, I'll just walk down to the end and see what's there'. So once I got most of the way along, I thought, 'Gee it's pretty warm up here today'. You know, I felt like I was getting a lot more sunshine than I expected. And I thought, 'Gee, there's a nice rock outcrop looking down over the hill there. I'll hop off and walk over and take a look'. So I hopped off on to the duff. Well! It was just like hopping into a barbecue! The surface was about half an inch of moss and needles and stuff that wasn't smoking, but right underneath it was totally glowing! It was just incredible! So I looked - what on earth was this? - and then, of course, a puff of smoke came up from my feet disturbing it. And I suddenly realized that my feet were hot, so I scrambled up on the rock and climbed up and yelled at the guys, "Well, at least there's some fire over here!" Well, you know, "Ha, ha, ha- what do you mean?" So I roared back and got one of the guys, persuaded him to come take a look. Well, there it was, and we figured it was about 200 or 300 hundred feet in diameter.

Dale Anderson: What was burning?

Alan Ramsden: It was just underneath everything. I guess we spent the best part of three days trying to get a ditch in the ground around that thing, you know, and it was too far to bring water. And there was no approach, no pumps or hose lines. We were just too far away in the hills for anything. And so what we did was dug a ditch around it all, posted two guys on it, and we hiked back out, which was two days later. Went down to the Ranger Station in Salmo, and they hired a couple of local guys and they took a horse and supplies and stuff in there and they just sat on that thing and controlled it. They were on that fire, I guess, for about a week, ten days. It never rained. There wasn't anything they could do except control it and make sure that it wasn't finding some little underground way of getting out of that area. So that really was an experience unlike the crown fires that we occasionally ran into, they were scary I must admit.

The first time we had a wind change, when we were on a fire that kept going up in the upper part of the trees, it went right over our heads just like, whew, just like a drift of wind and you know it was all flame! I wouldn't have believed before, but I could see how people could be dropped unconscious by lack of oxygen. And the other thing is that the air is so hot that after one intake of air, you don't want it! Your nose closes down, your throat closes up, and then the only thing to do is get out. I could see an area that might be level or flatter, you'd have a heck of a time knowing which way to go because fire-generated winds tend to swirl and cruise around. I could see how people lose their lives. Crown fires tend to burn all needles and stuff, and you get huge billows of smoke and the damn stuff rains down on you. I remember your shirt gets totally useless because it's full of holes, you know. Guys that take turns with the backpack do a quick shower and soak down. And your hair would be all full of burned spots, and in those days, you know, nobody wore hard hats. Lots of burnt hair.

Dale Anderson: What about your use of radios?

Alan Ramsden: Yeah, well, some of the things that I recall about the suppression-crew summer are some interesting little bits about radio. We were operating on what was called marine band frequencies at that time, which was just around the same frequencies that some of the amateur radio bands were on. And in order to make it mobile we had to have batteries and the kinds of batteries that they supplied for were a dry cell. And they produced a nominal one-and-a-half volts, and so we had four of those to operate this radio as a portable. And so, the radio unit had fairly small tubes in it, and the loudspeaker, about three inches in diameter, was also the microphone for the radio. And it was all mounted in a little plywood box painted green-grey, marine grey, and provided by an outfit in Vancouver. There were several names for the same company. At one time it was Spilsbury Hepburn, another time it was Spilsbury Tindle, sometimes it was just Spilsbury. One of Spilsbury's associates built these radios, originally for the fishermen, and then the Forest Service picked them up as a source of useful communication equipment.

The problem in this area of course is that these small sets, which probably churned out a whole five or six watts at those frequencies, required a substantial antenna in order to get the signal in the air. So, for non-station purposes we had an antenna which was I think about 40 feet of antenna wire, which was a braided copper wire with a porcelain insulator and about three or four feet of parachute cord (this was tied to the end of the wire). And the technique was that you'd find an open branch that you could get the thing over, and you would swing this insulator with the wire around, around, around like a bolo -heave it up over a branch, it would drop down the other side then you would pull the antenna up until the insulator at the end of the antenna was close to the branch. And then you would walk away from that tree until you had sort of a slope from the tree to your transmitter. And then they would endeavour to make contact.

But because of the nature of the terrain there, you couldn't usually talk directly to Nelson. In fact, from Kelly Creek you would never talk to Nelson directly. So we used to talk to Hooknose, which was the forest lookout who could pick us up on the American side, and they would relay the message for us. Or we talked to the guys that were up on the Western Canada air station and weather station, which was up above Rossland, on top of Old Glory and they would relay the message back into Nelson for us.

So that was sort of the technique. The theory originally was, of course, that there was a radio in the Ranger station in Salmo and Rossland ... Castlegar had one, Grand Forks had one ... very often we were able to talk to the guy in Grand Forks, who talked to Nelson. So the Nelson broadcasting facility for the Forest Service was down on the CPR flats and they had a large transmitter, about 500 watt power, and they could talk to Vancouver and more or less around the District.

Anyway, in the morning we used to have a sort of round-up call, starting about 6:30 and running till after 7:00. And the Nelson station would call the various Ranger stations and that, and sometimes lookouts, if they were available to the Nelson station, and get the fire report of the previous day and pass the weather information. We had these little wooden rods in which we told the amount of moisture, and you got a moisture reading which was relayed on. And, ah, anyway, the other thing was in order to get somebody's attention on a fire call, you always had a piece of old crowbar that had been bent around in the forge and turned into a gong, much like the picture you see of somebody at the cookhouse calling time to eat. Somebody had a little small crowbar and hung that up on a piece of rope, hung it down in front of the loudspeaker - and another hunk of iron. And just turn on the transmitter and bang! Bang bang! bang! bang!, and everybody would know it was a fire call. [laughs] Then whoever's attention you got, they would announce what station they were, and you would then come on and tell them where you were and what information you were trying to relay.

Well, in the morning we could hear a lot of calls. We could hear Nelson calling these people, but we couldn't be received by Nelson. He [Nelson radio operator] would do the morning round up and there was an old Swede over in Grand Forks who was out on the lookout there and he would call in. And we had call letters, which were much like ham-radio call letters or broadcast station call letters. And at that time the call letters for the Forest Service sequence of various stations all began with CQ. Well, they had CQAL, CQB4 and so on and all this kind of stuff. And the one up at Grand Forks was CQ4Q.And [laughs] this old Swede ... you'd hear his call, and the guy would say, "Hello, Grand Forks, this is Nelson BNSO," or whatever it was, and "what's the situation?" And the guy would say, "Good morning. Fork U back!" [laughter] - you know in this great Swedish accent, so that was a bit of hilarity that we all enjoyed. Every morning! [laughter]

Dale Anderson: Were the radios a fairly new arrival in the woods at that time?

Alan Ramsden: Well, no, they must have had them for quite a while. I think as many portables as we had at that time was quite unusual. Well, it was during the War, and they [the Forest Service] weren't adding them in the War, so these were some of the things they had before the War began. I would think that most of the equipment would have been late '30s [vintage].

Dale Anderson: How much would those radio units have weighed?

Alan Ramsden: I think about 35 pounds, with the batteries.

Dale Anderson: The batteries would last you for...?

Alan Ramsden: Oh well, in the field you were really only on the air for a matter of 30 seconds or a minute at a time, and so I think I replaced those batteries about four times during that summer. We always had a pair you were working with and a pair you had on hand. And then we had regulars - a storage battery that we used in camp. But there was the land-line telephone, which was a single wire thing with little pony insulators hung on trees, and for stand-up lines all the way up to the lookout. From our camp into town we had a two-wire phone. This was the old style of doing it, and it was reasonably good, you know.

Dale Anderson: The radio antenna was used for both receiving and transmitting.

Alan Ramsden: Right. In camp we had a T-shape one, you know, where you strung between two high trees and then a drop wire down the centre. So that was a much more efficient antenna in the camp, but only efficient in the direction it was pointing, perfectly aligned for any one place. And we could never talk to Salmo, for instance, yet they were only around the corner from us.

Dale Anderson: The radio must have been, then, as now, a pretty difficult piece of equipment.

Alan Ramsden: Even as difficult as it was, it was still really important. It really gave the opportunity to be away from a fixed location and be able to do something. Out in the bush, if we could take our crew and work up the road a couple of miles, we'd be doing something useful. So yes, it was really essential, really useful. On fires several times we had people burnt, not badly, but we could see that certainly if the injury had been worse it would have really been useful to have alerted somebody, so that an ambulance or a vehicle of some sort could have got to us and we could have got that person to help. So, from that point of view, it was a crew thing.

The other thing was the people who might want to tell us something, there was at least a chance they could get to us. In the past, if the crew went off to do something, they were gone till they showed up again somewhere, and you didn't know if they were alive, dead, doing their job or just sitting under a tree having a good time.

But very often we went for days without, other than the morning report, ever using the radio. Because a lot of the times it was more convenient to just pick up the phone than to go through a relay of messages.

Dale Anderson: It would have still been hand tools you used for fire fighting, for the most part?

Alan Ramsden: Everybody was issued a Pulaski, which everybody cursed, but used. A good utility tool but not entirely designed for the terrain that we were in. Then we had half a dozen six-foot crosscut saws and an assembly of shovels, and I think some of the dullest mattocks [laughs] that were ever issued to mankind! I think by the time they equipped our crew, all the Forest Service personnel and the Rangers and that all had whatever was the best of stuff. But the War was on and tools weren't easy to get. That's what we had. And Indian packs.

Dale Anderson: Indian packs?

Alan Ramsden: Yeah. These were a about a eight- or twelve-gallon container with a brass pump that's mounted on the top at the back with a short piece of hose. Fill with water and when you get to the fire you pumped 'em, trombone-style. What we learned about them was not only were they damn heavy - I forget what 12 or 14 gallons of water weighs - but it's a fair amount. So, you know, it was all you could do to stand up with one of those things on your back. If you were climbing hills, you know, you had to go with it probably half-empty.

We were sort of like on stand-by all the time. The suppression crew were on stand-by, and it didn't matter whether it was raining or sun or what it was. So we were working on the road. The previous year or two, some people had been in doing some work and they had widened the thing out so that it was what now would be called a jeep road, I guess - you know, about six feet wide, eight feet wide, most of the shrubs, trees, and stuff knocked out of it and an effort made to fill between the large rocks that you couldn't crowbar out. It went up above our camp, oh, about a mile and a half, and where it left off was a large chunk of rock. So we couldn't really do much when we first got there.

But they brought in two fellas from Erie; one was a big old Finn. I thought he was an old Italian, but it turned out he was a Finn. He looked sort of like one of those pictures of the sumo wrestlers, that sort of a build. This guy was maybe 70 years old at this time, but he had a young fellow working for him from the mines who held the drill while he cut. He could swing that 12-pound hammer all day long. You could hear this hhhuhhh sound and wham! Anyway they came and blasted and worked on this chunk of rock.

We had the flat-bed truck which was available. We had another gift given to our camp. Nobody wanted it. This was a thing that looked like a caterpillar tractor that somebody had made a mistake on. It was very narrow and very long. It was about 14 or 15 feet long, and it was maybe a little better than three feet wide. It had apparently a marine engine and old Cat tracks that I think came off a Fordson tractor. It had been originally built in Oregon, and they had a blade, in the front, and a winch. The blade was designed so they could make a fire guard under the redwood trees and stuff like that. Well, it had enough power for the kind of rock pushing and stuff we needed it for, but after one day of us using it in the bush we decided 'no way'! Because if you went over anything even smaller than the size of a grapefruit, you rolled that thing over, it was totally unsafe. It was too narrow.

But it had one good feature. That was big winch cable on the front. So, after we got through that rock pile, we were able to take it up and then ran into, oh, about 60 or 70 ft long strip of muck, just totally black muck on the hill.

I remember the first day we were there and we got to this stuff and it had been dry for a few days, by the time we got to work on this. And so we took this little cat and we pushed a nice chunk out of this stuff, and went in there with hand tools and cleaned it up thoroughly. Boy, did we have an easy piece here. We got ourselves a nice chunk of road. So it rained that night, we got up in the morning and you couldn't even see that we'd been there! [laughs] All that black muck had just filled the whole face in. And we'd go in and try to take a shovelful of stuff out, and then you couldn't see where you were shoveling! [laughs] So we decided that what we would have to do is we'd slog our way through that and work on the other side, which was mostly dirt. And so we built quite another half-mile of road, leaving this thing in place. But in one point in August, it had dried out quite well. And so what we did was we went in and cut the sod out, and then we went into the bush and found a couple of big dead cedar, felled them, split the wood, and made them into two nice huge timbers, and then we were able to pull them [the burned cedars] out of the bush with the cable. But when we unwound the cable we found we couldn't handle it. It was just full of slivers [jaggers];we needed gloves.