A Life in the Woods: Bob Robinson

It was probably in the genes. For years my father was a Forest Ranger for the Federal government. And later on one of my older brothers started to work for the Forest Service. He started up working as a summer time Assistant Ranger in about 1935, so it was almost like a family occupation. I think it just sort of rubbed off on us. I think probably above all it is an appreciation for the outdoors, more than anything else. I think perhaps anyone that you ever talk to who has worked for the Forest Service for at least a number of years, you'll find that he has an insatiable appetite for knowledge about trees and tree growth and plant growth and plant life. I sometimes envy people who are, for instance, botanists. I envy people who are wildlife managers. Any one of those occupations I could have gone into if I hadn't gone into the Forest Service, and I think something has to draw you into it. I know in the beginning, certainly, it wasn't wages. I started out at $98 a month, when other people were making a hundred and fifty, and so it wasn't only the monetary returns - although in later years, I have to admit, they finally did become quite adequate.

Peter Chapman: Could you describe a little bit what your father did?

Bob Robinson: Well, yes. He was hired each year by the Federal government. They called him a Forest Ranger, although by today's standards we would probably call him a Patrolman. And they gave him a few fire tools and a canoe and some outdoor equipment that he could put up in the way of a tent for shelter, and they just said 'go'. And he just travelled 'round the country by canoe. This was before the days of the construction of the Big Bend Highway, [which] eliminated the need for such things as a canoe patrolman. But that's what my father did, and his job was: if he saw a fire to try and put the thing out. If he couldn't put it out, well let it go, and then look for another one that he could put out. Well, that's just about the extent of his work.

Peter Chapman: Where was his area, from where to where?

Bob Robinson: Well, anywhere that wasn't accessible by road north of Golden. Anywhere that wasn't accessible by road but was accessible by canoe, which would have been probably from Golden to what they called Surprise Rapids in those days. It's now inundated by the Mica pondage anyway, but that was as far north as you could travel by canoe. See, the Columbia River runs north at that point and nobody ever went through Surprise Rapids in a canoe and lived. A number have tried it. Golden was as far north as the paddlewheelers went on the Columbia. They went from Golden to Windermere. And at one time they built a canal to go through from Columbia Lake into the Kootenay River, and I think one boat went through.

Peter Chapman: Did you go with your dad?

Bob Robinson: No, I didn't. I was too young. But, during the War, my dad was more or less taken out of retirement, and he took on the job as a Lookoutman on Blackwater Lookout. This is one of those lookouts that had been built out of the four props with the platform on top, and he was still occupying that lookout in 1946 when I was working as patrolman at Bush River and during that period. Well here we go again about lightning arresters. There was no such thing as a lightning arrester on that tower, so my dad used to stick around as long as he thought it was safe, and then he would get down off the tower. One day he got halfway down the ladder and lightning hit the tower. When he woke up, he was lying on his back looking up at the sky, and he thought to himself, 'I must have fallen' - and the memory of the lightning actually striking he did not have. But anyway, he decided that what he should do is try and get into the tent in which they had a cot and the Forest Service radio. So his mind sent the message to his muscles to get up, but he couldn't move and he laid there for quite a long time and finally he could feel a little bit of feeling coming back into his feet, so he started to move them and finally he got enough movement back so he could get up to his feet and he staggered into the tent and he laid down on the cot. Well, that turned out to be the wrong thing to do because the lightning storm was still on and the aerial for the radio was - of course, it was always disconnected when it wasn't in use -- it was grounded onto the iron cot that he had laid down on and the lightning hit the aerial and came down and electrified the cot that he was laying on and he became paralyzed a second time in the one day! So anyway, finally he got enough feeling back into his limbs once again, and he hooked up the radio and he called headquarters at Golden and told them what happened. He was about 66 years old at that time. Now the reason that he was more or less taken out of retirement was because there just wasn't anybody available to do the job during the War, anybody suitable.

Peter Chapman: When they replaced the lookouts, or used aircraft more and were manning the lookouts less, were there some things that the lookouts could do better for which you missed them?

Bob Robinson: Well, I was of the old school, and even now I still think that letting those lookouts go might have been a mistake. The reason for it is just simply this, is I know of aircraft that have flown over fires that the Lookoutman has been reporting. The aircraft has flown over them and not been able to see them. And simply because at that particular moment the smoke wasn't coming up. Five minutes later it was, but now the airplane has gone by. So really, rather than to say that the aircraft is no substitute for lookouts, I would say that the combination of the two was really the best. But, for probably all too many reasons, they've closed them down. I really don't know if they have any left in operation or not. But I know I was around when they started to let them go.

Another one of the reasons why [not to close them]: one time we had a series of fires reported by the Lookoutman on Beaver Lookout down at Salmo and the fires were up a place called Hidden Creek. We got the reports from the Lookoutman when I was returning from delivering men and supplies to another fire down near the international boundary, so I happened to be in the helicopter at the time and he reported three fires on Hidden Creek, started up that afternoon. So we flew up Hidden Creek looking for these fires. We never saw a darned one of them. We turned around and came back down and found all three of them. Now the reason for it is that in one instance we were looking into the sun, and the other instance the sun was at our back and strangely enough, the best way to see fires is when you are looking into the sun. You would think it would be the other way around.

Peter Chapman: Does that mean that for a lookout at different times of day they could spot fires in different areas?

Bob Robinson: That's right. Yeah. He would have two quadrants; of course, depending on where the sun was and m the morning one side would be easier to spot fires and visa versa in the afternoon. So actually, high noon was probably was the best time, but you'd still be looking into the sun at some time or other, even at high noon.

Peter Chapman: [Previously] you've mentioned the fellow who had a dog at Bear Lookout, up the Duncan - that you had to deliver dog food.

Bob Robinson: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We were dropping supplies to the Lookoutman by parachute from - I think it was the Beaver [airplane] - and amongst the supplies was a heck of a lot of dog food, because he and his dog were going to be up there all summer. I've forgotten this fellow's name. But anyway, one of the parachutes that didn't open was the one with the dog food on it. And you can well imagine that a parachute will drift after it is released. And once a pilot gets the feel of it, well, he can allow for this drift and dropping would be very, very close 10 the building itself. But with a parachute that doesn't open, there is no drift. It goes straight down, eh, and gosh knows where that dog food disappeared to! It was never recovered. I think there were about three cases of dog food. So, we had to make a special trip back with the dog food to keep the man happy.

Peter Chapman: Was it hard to get fire-fighting crews together sometimes?

Bob Robinson: Well, I suppose you would say 'yes, at times'. One of the easiest places I had to get a firefighting crew was - would you believe, the Lardeau. There were something like between 30 and 40 able-bodied men in the Lardeau that could fight fire who when called upon would have to go, and I established a list of these people, put their names right on the list, and if I needed five men, well, I'd take the first five and when the next fire came up, well I'd take the next five or six. And so on. And everybody got a rotation at it, nobody was hit any harder than the next guy and it worked so well that I used to have fellows coming in to take a look at the list to see when their name was coming up next. But on the other hand, places like Creston, the devils own job trying to get firefighters at times, because they'd be working in the orchards in virtually an essential occupation. If the fruit farmer wasn't harvesting his crop right at that particular moment, he's going to loose it. He couldn't afford to lose the manpower. And surprising how many of the able-bodied people around Creston worked in the fruit growing industry. So there you are. Before the fruit harvesting season, it was no problem getting firefighters - and even after that, if the occasion warranted - but it was harder to get firefighters there than it was in the Lardeau.

Peter Chapman: This is a little off topic, but something I've gotten interested in through conversations recently is flumes - the use of flumes in logging. When you were cruising, or out in the bush, would you often come across old flumes that had been used previously for logging?

Bob Robinson: The only place that I run across a flume was up the Little Moyie River. Do you know where the Little Moyie River?

Peter Chapman: Yes.

Bob Robinson: It took logs to a place called Lumberton. Now on the other hand, they used not flumes but chutes and in the early days of logging in Slocan, the main product was cedar poles - and you could still see some of the constructed chutes where they would use a horse to bring poles out to one central point and then somehow or other they would get the cedar poles on these chutes and they would go right down into the Lake. They had to be quite specifically constructed too, because at the bottom they had to be made like a ski jump, because if they went straight into the lake like that, it would smash the log right up when it hit the water, nothing harder than water you know. [laughter.]

I found several places on Slocan Lake, on the other side of the Lake from where the highway is, where they had used these chutes. And the last one that I know of that they had, they built and used a chute on for logs was done by the logging company at Slocan. And they actually had horse-logged one side hill, and they had built a chute to take the logs down into the Lake, and that's the last one I ever saw. That had to be sometime during the 1950s.

Peter Chapman: One of the things that interested me was how the people who had been Forest Rangers, who maybe didn't have a great deal of formal education but had gotten into the job through field experience, then because of the new training program were faced with the task of taking the training course - of how you worked together perhaps.

Bob Robinson: Well, there was no doubt about it. We helped each other a great deal, even at night. There would be homework sessions, and one or two of the guys would get together and work out these various problems. But I think probably the biggest single item of education was in the field of mathematics. Mathematics, of course, perhaps not so much today as it was then, was a very intricate part of Forest Service administration. You have to go into a stand of timber and then take the information that you have got in the way of measurements and bring it back to the office and come up with a set of figures which represents the total footage - at one time it was board foot, now cubic feet - of timber that there is in that particular stand, and then in turn appraise its value as far as its cost to remove and its residual value in stumpage to the Crown. Incidentally, in connection with mathematics, there is also the art of scaling timber, which of course we all had to be licensed sealers.

All of these items were done at the Forest Ranger level. So as you can see, mathematics was probably the most important thing there as in the course. Not to say that it was the only thing, not by any means because then the next thing we had was the various 'ologies': dendrology, entomology, pathology - and I think there was one or two more which I've conveniently forgotten about - and the art, and I called it an 'art', of fire protection. I think the Forest Service was very fortunate in getting the kind of men that they did get to be the teachers at the Forest Ranger School. They called one Dean and the other one was the Assistant Dean. But the Dean himself was an ex-school teacher, and I think he originally hailed from Crescent Beach or somewhere along there near Vancouver. The other man, his name was Jim Peddly, and he was the one that taught primarily two of the 'oligies' and fire protection, and as a matter of fact, he wrote the manual on fire protection for the Forest Ranger School.

I'd like to talk for weeks on Jim Peddly, because he was an institution. Like I said before, I don't know how the Forest Service could ever possibly be as fortunate as they were to get hold of such a man. But nevertheless, he was there. At one time while my Dad was still working for the Forest Service - the Federal - Jim Peddly was the Forest Ranger at Revelstoke, and strangely enough at that time. Golden came under the administration of the Forest Ranger at Revelstoke. I mean that's history, eh?

Another subject that we were involved with was reforestation, and we had a first-hand view of it, because we were right on the nursery itself.

Peter Chapman: At about the time that you became a Ranger, the Sloan Commission, the first Sloan Commission Report was issued and that set some new directions for the Forest Service.

Bob Robinson: Well, it was supposed to.

Peter Chapman: Tell me from your perspective.

Bob Robinson: I know that when the two volumes that were involved in the Sloan Commission Report came into our office, we all read it and we were all absolutely flabbergasted by the contents of it. Really if it changed our direction as you suggested, I can't really remember it making that much difference. I think it was a waste of paper.

Peter Chapman: What about the question of "sustained-yield management" and your role as a Ranger in managing the timber supply in the forest within your district?

Bob Robinson: Well, that one has kind of got me over a barrel, mainly from memory. I'm trying to think when the concept of sustained yield really started to affect us at the field level. It was such a gradual thing that I can't really put my finger on the beginnings. But most certainly, the first concept of sustained yield was contained in what they called Provincial Forest legislation, and these particular Provincial Forest units were scattered throughout the province, but not necessarily a continuous thing. Why they selected certain areas for this particular concept of forestry and not the next is something I don't really understand, unless it was a case of time and experience and immediate use. But I would like to think that about the time that Tree Farm Licenses first came into vogue was about the time when we started to become seriously involved in it. As far as the involvement is concerned at the Forest Ranger level, we had very little to do with it. Headquarters in Nelson had a staff. They called themselves Public Working Circles and they kept the records. They allotted the allowable cuts. They kept track of how much timber had been removed, how much should have been and wasn't, and why wasn't it, and so on and so forth. That was all done at a District Office level. So the actual sustained-yield problems weren't those of the Forest Ranger. Our function was primarily to see that contract conditions and things of that nature were carried out - including waste and waste measurement. Billing of waste was done at the main office, but we had to calculate it, we had to scale it up.

Peter Chapman: One of the things you did was to inspect the cutting to make sure that they were adhering to the terms of the contract?

Bob Robinson: Yeah.

Peter Chapman: What were the important points there, and how did that work out?

Bob Robinson: Well, the staff of the Forest Ranger who originally made the recommendation for these contract conditions, they were there to see that they were carried out, and primarily it was a case of utilization and, on the other hand, slash disposal. Now during the days when selective logging, selective cutting, was in vogue, well we were quite highly involved, but as that concept of forestry drifted out of the picture and clearcutting became the vogue, well all we were really then concerned with was the condition the ground was left in after logging - and the waste itself, of course. And [waste] had to be accounted for in relation to what had been originally cruised, and if there was any great discrepancies, we had to come up with a reason for it.

Now, those reasons could be multiple. It could be because the original assessment of the timber had been incorrect. Who knows what's inside the bark. I've been fooled so many times it isn't even funny. I've taken a look at a stand of hemlock trees and thought to myself, "That's good, sound timber." There was no indications whatsoever to tell me otherwise. But when it was cut down it was a completely different story. And on the other hand, I recall very, very clearly the cruise we did up Six Mile Creek and, after doing the cruising, I wanted to allow that timber to go at salvage rate because I didn't think that there was a sound tree in the whole stand. Everywhere you look there was mushrooms on the trees, which is always an indication that there is some kind of a rot involved. It was the soundest stand of hemlock that I've ever seen cut. I couldn't believe the hemlock logs, some of them four feet in diameter, which when I went by cruising them I just didn't even bother to mark them down. They weren't even tallied because there was mushrooms growing, and I just figured that any tree that was over two feet in diameter there was nothing to recover in it. I had the biggest shock of my life when, as I say, those trees were cut down. And I wasn't the only one that was fooled. There must have been six or eight of us on that cruise and we all had the same opinion. It did not go for the salvage rate simply because the amount of waste or rot that we had calculated was less than - I think it was less than 33% . I think if it was less than that, then they would let it go at the salvage rate, which I think was 25 cents per hundred cubic feet. But we couldn't bring it down that low, so therefore it had to go at a standard assessed stumpage rate. Fortunately. [laughs.]

Peter Chapman: Who was cutting hemlock then?

Bob Robinson: Everybody.

Peter Chapman: For sawlogs?

Bob Robinson: Yeah. It's a funny thing but when I first started working for the Forest Service, hemlock was considered a weed species, and an outfit down at Vancouver called Alaska Pine was the ones that promoted it as a construction timber. And there's no doubt in my mind it is one of the finest construction timbers that there is. It's not as strong for structural timber as Douglas Fir, but it is sufficient. And for finishing lumber, such as mouldings and doors and things of that nature - plywood - it's beautiful. But for some reason of other, it was just considered a weed species. But when some outfit down at the Coast turned around and started calling it "Alaska Pine" and selling it on the foreign market, it changed the whole idea of hemlock, [laughs]

Peter Chapman: Green Timbers is something I am very interested in.

Bob Robinson: Yes. Well I was there in the fourth class. The first three classes included primarily people who were already Forest Rangers. But then they started to take in a few more potential foresters, so I was in the fourth class. But initially it was I believe the first class that ever started up there was to train a bunch of forest surveyors. But anyway, during the War they had a camp called a Conscientious Objector Camp for people who preferred not to go into uniform for their own personal reasons, and these people were placed in camps and put to some non-military type of occupation during the War, and one of them was of course raising nursery trees. So when that camp was abandoned by that group of people, the Forest Service took it over and started to use it, basically as a school and living quarters for the pupils. At the same time, they started to build a proper school facility and my class, which as I say was the fourth class of '49 and '50, the first three months of our training was spent in the old classroom in the old Conscientious Objector Camp, and the next six months was spent in the brand new facility at Green Timbers.

Did you want to hear about the one that got hit by lightning?

Peter Chapman: Sure, was that common?

Bob Robinson: No, but this is a thing that really got me into trouble. But one of my Assistant Rangers called me up one day and he said, "How about bringing the Lookoutman down for a break?" I said, by all means. The weather had been rainy and wet. He was sitting up there in the clouds, so I said, "Sure, bring him down for a few days." So anyway, when they went back up to, after the rains were over and went back up to the lookout, the thing wasn't there. It had been struck by lightning and burned. So I got onto the telephone and I called the Nelson headquarters, and I told them I was sorry to report that we didn't have a lookout anymore.

So then I asked them, I said, "Did you want a report on it?" And the fellow answered, "No, I don't think so." So anyway, next morning I thought I better sit down and put in a report on it, which I did, and I can still remember the way I started out the letter report. I said, "This report, although not called for, is being written to demonstrate the inadequacy of the lightning-arrester system on our Forest Service lookouts." Well, I opened up a can of corns that you wouldn't believe! There 'was a full investigation that went into the installation and the demonstration of the adequacy or otherwise of the lightning-arrestor system. Now, I never did get my way, but I maintained that what we had was not a lightning arrester, but a lightning attractor. And if you know anything about the early days of Canadian farming, you'll perhaps recall what they used to call "drummers" used to go around selling these things they call lightning arresters that they sell to the farmers to put up on their silos, which is always the highest point on the farm. They were finding that they were burning down more silos with these "lightning arresters" on than they had when they were not on. So then finally somebody smartened up and they put the lightning arrestor over to one side of the silo and not on the silo itself, and let the lightning hit that. And from then on they found they had no more trouble. Well, it was true of the silos in the farmers' fields; why wasn't it true with the Forest Service lookouts? Why shouldn't they put the lightning arrestor off to one side, instead of on the building? But I never did get my way.

But anyway, what I finally did on Lemon Lookout, I concluded that the reason why the lightning-arrestor system had not worked properly was it had difficulty going to ground. So what I did was I took two 45-gallon galvanized oil drums and I dug them into the ground and buried them and ran the lightning-arrestor wire system into ground inside the barrel, which meant then that the soil would always be damp rather than to drain away and dry out. You see, the lack of moisture, in the opinion of a number of people, was the reason why the lightning-arrestor system didn't work properly. It needed that little bit of extra moisture in order [for the electricity] to go to ground. There was never any more problem.

Peter Chapman: You must have been very glad that you decided to give that guy a couple of days off.

Bob Robinson: That was another question I had to answer. Where was the Lookoutman when he got hit? But I don't know even now too much about lightning in respect to why and where it hits where it does. But I've read that, in actual fact, the place where the lightning strikes is predetermined by the bleeding off from the earth itself of what they call ions or something like that, and what happens, this thing starts to build and build - they call it a "corona" - and finally it gets up high enough so that the counter charge from the cloud, which is usually, I think, positive, comes down and hits in the spot where that corona started. Well, the top of a mountain is the perfect place for it to happen, eh? And this lightning-arrestor system that we had on the lookouts was the perfect place for it to start. So why shouldn't it get hit. Now, these are all personal opinions. Nobody could ever prove to me that I was wrong, but on the other hand, there's really no way of proving that I'm right either.

Peter Chapman: Did the fire-finder equipment change over the years?

Bob Robinson: Not a great deal. I'm trying to think of the name of the machine that we used to have. Originally what they did is they set a map up on a flat surface with directional [indication] from the centre, centre being the location were the lookout was on the map. And then they had this little movable machine which they could swing around with a hair on one end and a slot on the other, and they would look though it to line up on a fire, and then they run a parallel out on the map itself and come up with a bearing. Well, someone in the Forest Service - I think his name was Bennett - he designed and built, right in the Forest Service workshop, a machine which was called a "fire finder," which was absolutely superb. It was all made out of cast aluminum. A 360-degree bearing was on it, and it had something like a telescope sight deal, although it did not magnify, but it was very much like what you would see in a telescope sight in a rifle. And it had an 'offset' - you could swing it one way or the other for no other reason than the fact that in front of you, at some time or other, there was a window and its sash on the sides; you just moved it over and then you could see what was behind the window sash. I forget what the name of this machine was originally. But the new one was called "Firefinder Forest Service Bennett," or something to that effect. The big plate was about 20 inches in diameter, and it would have a four-mile-to-the-inch scale map on it, right underneath the whole thing, so all you have to do was look and see where the mark was on it and you could come up with a fair location in nothing flat.

Peter Chapman: What were the facilities like on the lookouts?

Bob Robinson: They were usually a twelve-by-twelve or twelve-by-fourteen building. And the cookstoves were initially coal and wood, and where the odd lookout existed that had a road to it, fuel then was no problem. Then someone designed and built a small oil stove, fuel-oil stove, and then later we ended up with propane stoves and even propane heaters - and on a good many of the lookouts we had propane refrigerators. So much for comforts and cooking. And apart from his bed, that's about all that he needed, eh?

Peter Chapman: Some were actually towers, steel towers, and others were on the ground?

Bob Robinson: I don't know whether the Forest Service in our district ever had steel towers. Some of the first buildings were ... they would pick a couple of 'convenience trees' and then add to them in the way of other trees, and the next thing you knew, they had a tower made out of strictly logs. One of the first lookouts that I ever went up to was called Blackwater Lookout, and that was built exactly like that. But there was no building on the top, it was only a platform. He had radio communication, but he would have to come down off his platform to get to communicate. I believe there was one Forest Service lookout that was put on a prefabricated tower, but it was prefabricated out of wood. That was Sentinel Mountain. In the later years - and probably I don't know whether I should take full credit for it or not, because it might have been a combination of myself and a fellow by the name of Herb Couling - but the two of us designed a lookout-tower base made out of cinder blocks. We had a carpenter crew in those days, and they would build up the tower to the height that they wanted, sometimes as much as twenty-four feet high, and then the prefabricated building was put on top of the cinder-block tower. And of course they had an inside stairway, and another advantage to them was they could lock them up. They had a locking type door. That type of building almost invariably had a catwalk around the outside. The ones that were just sitting right on the rocks - and there were a few of those -- of course they didn't need catwalks. Now I don't know how many of those lookouts were eventually equipped with cement or cinder blocks, but I was involved with at least three. The one on Lemon Lookout was rebuilt after it had been hit by lightning and blown apart, it was rebuilt onto cinder blocks rather than wood. Cooper Lookout, which was one that we had here at Nelson, it was rebuilt onto blocks. And the one at Salmo, Beaver Lookout, it was done the same way.

Peter Chapman: Did you do much flying yourself to see what was going on within your district, or...?

Bob Robinson: Well, every opportunity I had to inspect a fire from the air, I took the opportunity, and I believe it was a very, very timesaving and organization-time-saving device. With a fairly good knowledge of the district in which I was operating, I could go in with a pilot and have a look at the fire and figure out the best way to get into it, which in itself could save hours - which of course means you're saving not only money, but saving the possibility of the fire getting away at the same time. So every opportunity I had to check a fire from the air, I did. Of course, flying was no new experience for me. I had 1400 hours in the war.

Peter Chapman: Would they land floatplanes in New Denver on the Lake and pick you up?

Bob Robinson: Yeah. All they would have to do is come into the wharf at New Denver and I'd be waiting for them, and away we would go. The same would apply here in Nelson. Actually, when I was in Lardeau, yes we were using Beaver, that's right. But we only had twelve small fires the year I was in Lardeau, so I didn't really need the plane that much. I think I was only up in it once, when we had a fire up Poplar Creek. If you ever get an opportunity to fly up towards the head of Poplar Creek, don't turn it down. It's really a fantastic sight. There's three lakes up there and each one is a settling pond for the one in front of it. The first one is kind of a dull blue-grey colour, the next one is kind of a blue colour, and the next one is the most incredible blue-green colour that you could ever think of looking at.

Peter Chapman: Most of the thunderstorms are in the afternoon, aren't they?

Bob Robinson: Not necessarily, not necessarily. But yes, mostly. But certainly you can have them in the middle of the night and when that would occur, there were various ways that the Lookoutman would have of trying to memorize the location of where the strikes were. And one cute little trick that one Lookoutman had is he had a little black marking pencil, and when there was a strike come, well, he'd be standing beside his fire finder ... well he'd go over and he'd put an "x" on the window, and there was the direction of one strike. And then the next would show the direction of another one, and next morning when the light was suitable, well then he'd start to look. Some of them had some pretty good ideas. But that's the one that I remember.

Peter Chapman: So once they started spotting fires, then would they call you?

Bob Robinson: Oh, yes, yeah. They would call the Ranger headquarters which, in fire season always had a man on duty on the radio up until quite late at night if the need existed. The other situation, of course, which could develop is that once we had the AM radios in particular, or the short wave, one Lookout could communicate with another, and if there was no response from the Lookout's headquarters, he could call another Lookoutman who in turn would probably get communication with his, and the next thing you know somebody would be on the deck on the phone. So it all worked out good. It was a very, very seldom occasion when the Lookoutman couldn't get some form of a response.

Peter Chapman: One of the questions I had was about the daily routines of the Post-War Fire Lookouts, and a little bit about what the facilities were like on the lookout sites.

Bob Robinson: Daily routines for the Fire Lookout. There was always a schedule to maintain. First thing in the morning, a radio check-in with the Forest Ranger's office - and that was laid on ahead of time on the basis; of first this man, then the next lookout, the next lookout, you see because they are all on the same [radio] frequency. This is when we were on shortwave radio. Later on, when FM radio came in, it didn't really make very much difference because there wasn't that much interference between one set of radio communications and the next. But the daily routine - apart from those schedules and keeping watch for fires - consisted of nothing much more, I suppose, than maintaining his lookout. If he had a woodstove, then he had wood to cut and carry. Almost invariably, they had to carry water.

From one lookout to the next it would vary somewhat because some lookouts were extremely popular with the public. A typical example of that was the one at New Denver, called "Idaho." Hardly a day would go by, in the summer months, but what someone wouldn't appear on the scene, and of course they would take up the lookout men's time. The Forest Service never did object to it because they [the lookout men] were the best public relations men in the world, some of them.

Peter Chapman: So you would call them up in the morning just to check in?

Bob Robinson: Yep. Every day. If they didn't come on at the time prescribed, we would try to contact them again at some point or the other, during the day. And if there was no contact, then we knew there was a problem, and the problem could be with the man himself, or it could be just simply the radio's gone on the fritz. But, of course, you had to find out.

Well, these men on the mountain were a specific, special type of people, and one of the reasons that they are special is because they have to adapt to living at a high altitude. Now this sounds a little bit strange, when you first hear it, but it's an honest-to-goodness fact that initially, at least, when a person goes to the top of the mountain to live for a while, their brain is actually suffering from a shortage of oxygen, a shortage of oxygen in the blood. Now, I could tell you a much longer story in connection with that because, having been a pilot in World War Two, they gave us this experience and we found out that beyond an elevation of 15,000 feet there was no way in the world could you function normally, and you had to turn your oxygen on to supplement the shortage. Okay. To a lesser degree, perhaps, but on the Forest Service lookouts the same darned thing happened. And I got a brand new man, I put him up on the lookout, I went up there with him, I told him all the things to do, and I said, "Now, beyond anything else, you must communicate with us on schedule the first thing in the morning."

Well, first-thing-in-the-morning rolled around. No communication. So, what's the problem? I went up to the lookout, and the food supplies and the groceries, which we had delivered - by helicopter incidentally - were still sitting outside the lookout building. And I thought, 'my God, what's happened to this fellow?' Anyway, just at that moment, he appeared in the door and he looked at me with the strangest look on his face as if to say, 'what are you guys doing here?' - you know, that kind of an expression. That man was suffering from oxygen shortage. I said, "Why didn't you turn your radio on and call us?" "Oh," he said, "I really didn't have that much to say," he said, "so I thought I wouldn't bother."

So anyway, eventually ... it takes about a week to ten days for a man to adapt to that kind of life, and one of the problems is that oxygen shortage. Another problem associated with altitude is how in the heck do you boil potatoes at 6000 feet? Problems, eh? You can boil them for about three hours. And, finally, the provincial government saw the light and gave each Lookoutman a pressure cooker to cook his potatoes in. But it took a lot of talking to get them to do it. You see, down in Victoria at sea level, they didn't understand the problem. Finally, when I wrote down and showed them how much it was costing them in propane gas, and how much it cost to transport propane gas up for a three-hour session with a potato pot, as compared to what it would do if it were minutes, they saw the light, [laughter]

Peter Chapman: Do you have recollections of some of the first times using aircraft and flying aircraft, having to work out the routines and how to use them?

Bob Robinson: Lets see now. Well, with the aircraft itself, I suppose the biggest use came when they were delivering supplies to firefighters by parachute, and that was pretty highly and well organized. We actually employed people in the main office and the aircraft was based here at Nelson. We actually employed people for the summer as observers in the aircraft when it was patrolling and they were also adept and strong enough to become involved in the process of supply dropping. The parcels were done up in cardboard boxes, strapped with a strapping machine to keep them from bursting open, and at the same time as they were strapped, they were attached to the harness of these war-surplus parachutes. It took quite a lot of jury-rigging of the original parachute to come up with a satisfactory method of using them for our purpose. The original parachute, of course, was packed by experts, and the result was that very few of them ever failed to open. But that was too much of an involved process for us, and we came up with a system whereby we had a bag ... depending on the size of the parachute, there was at least three different sizes of parachute. One was, I believe, twelve feet across and another one about fifteen or eighteen, and then I think there was the personnel chute, which was around about thirty-two, and they made canvas bags out of old tents that were no longer suitable for the tent function. They used the canvas to make bags, and then they would pack the parachute into the bag itself and then, using a piece of grocery string, they would attach the top of the parachute to the inside of the bag, which in turn was attached to a rope so that when the parcel and the bag were dropped through the hatch of the aircraft, the parcel would drop about ten feet. Then it would start to pull out the parachute, and eventually it would all come out and the piece of grocery string would snap, and bing! - away would go the parachute, and then you would retract the strap and the bag and pull it back into the airplane.

Peter Chapman: It went through a hatch in the floor?

Bob Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. So as you can well imagine, the man who was doing the dropping had to be a strong individual, and the pilot would line himself up with the proper place. Yeah, the fellow would have to be strong enough to handle that... oh, they used to weigh them up about 110 pounds a piece, anywhere from 60 to 110 depending on the size of chute, and the pilot would give him the word when to drop and then he would be standing there holding it. And then when the pilot would say 'drop', well, down it would go. He would even give it a good push, because sometimes the slip stream would otherwise jam the parcel into the hole, with it being partly in and partly out, and there's been times when the guy had to give it an extra kick to loosen it up.

I don't think they ever had any serious accidents dropping in that manner, but sometimes I wonder why. I've seen some fantastic things happen. Like one time, I guess one of the cardboard boxes must have gotten a little damp. I think it had been sitting on a damp floor or something overnight and it was loaded up with potatoes and canned food and so on and so forth, and we were dropping that particular load of supplies on a fire way up Wilson Creek, one of the forks of Wilson Creek, and as the parachute opened there was enough of a jar so that everything just spilled right out, and of course they must have been anywhere from 500 to 1000 feet above the ground when they turned this loose, and the crew on the ground didn't realize that the parcel had split open and with it now being nothing more than a light balloon, there was enough updraft running up the mountain so that instead of the parachute going down, the darn thing was going up! [laughter.] Last I saw of it, there was a couple of firefighters running up the mountain trying to catch that parachute! Oh, dear.

Peter Chapman: Meanwhile it was raining potatoes!

Bob Robinson: I think perhaps I was one of the most heavily involved in the initial delivery of supplies by helicopter. As you can well imagine, back in the earlier days of the helicopter, the Forest Service was, I believe, just a little bit reluctant to spend as much money as they were spending on these helicopters. I don't think it's any problem now, but initially it was. And the result was that we very highly organized our helicopter delivery system, and when we rebuilt the lookout tower on Beaver Lookout, we took in all of the cinder blocks. Cinder blocks as opposed to cement blocks, because they are lighter. We took those in to the lookout. We took in gravel to make the cement, sand to mix the mortar to put the cinder blocks together. And we took in lumber and plywood and the prefabricated lookout, and it was all organized from the end of the existing road on the way up to Beaver Lookout, to the lookout itself. Now, it wasn't a heck of a lot of distance as the crow flies, but in elevation it was probably about fifteen-hundred feet. We delivered those supplies in about ten hours of flying time, which I later sat down and calculated how long it would take to have done the same thing with pack horses, and it would have taken a string of four pack horses two months to put the same supplies onto the lookout, so there was really no comparison. But we were very, very highly organized. And as a matter of fact, the pilot, who was a cigarette smoker in those days, says, "Well," he says, "I don't care about you guys, but I'm shutting down for a smoke." Because we weren't giving him a second's rest, you know. But, we even took water in to mix the cement. I think I could talk for days on the subject of helicopters and supply delivery.

Peter Chapman: What was the yearly cycle in the life of a Ranger? You must have done different work at different seasons.

Bob Robinson: Well, yes. Lets begin in the spring, shall we. Preparation for fire season: there was quite a number of things to do. The main thing I suppose was what we call pre-organization. Now pre-organization was a term the Forest Service adopted to cover the concept of knowing where all the manpower is - that is, the potential manpower for fighting fires - where the supplies are going to be purchased at, where your outlying tool caches are and how many tools are going to be there. Who owns what kind of transportation that might be required for fires? And as the fire increases, who has machinery that can be used for bulldozing fire guards and who has the transportation to carry the bulldozers, ad infinitum. Now that was called pre-organization. Now of course when that was all done, you would put in your time on your other duties, which, if you had cruises outstanding waiting to be done, well you went ahead and did them. You had ... part of your crew was involved in supplying and supervising the trail crews. Then of course along come your fire season and everybody is on alert for that purpose. And primarily, and sometimes only, for that purpose. And toward the end of the season you become heavily involved in reports. The office work, as you can well imagine, was something to behold. Every fire, it didn't matter how big it was, had to have its own report. If it was a patch two feet wide and three feet long, along beside the railway track which had been caused by a spark from a railway train, there were two reports to go in on it. One had to go to the Federal government, which was called the Board of Transport Commissioners and another report for the purpose of the Forest Service on our own particular forms. And it didn't matter like I say whether its two feet square or two miles long, it still had to be reported on. In addition to all of the reports involving fires, a full report on all of our activities for the past twelve months had to go in, in the way of what was called an operations annual report which concerned everything which was connected with fires, which included trail maintenance, road maintenance, ad infinitum and another was called a management annual report which concerned all the activities in connection with sawmills, operating, scaling, the cruising, and in addition to all of that we had to submit annually cost factors that could be used in appraisals, such as how much does it cost to run a bulldozer, how much does it cost to buy a bulldozer, same with trucks or any other type of equipment associated with logging. And if we could get full cost figures, such as the cost of how much does it cost to take the tree from the stump to the landing, we would try to get figures such as that. Another was, how much does it cost to haul? Is it becoming overwhelming?

Peter Chapman: What I'm thinking of is how you would arrive at those figures because the companies wouldn't want...

Bob Robinson: It's surprising how cooperative they were. It's very, very surprising, but we did get a lot of cooperation. But anyway, in addition to all of those things if you happened to be in a grazing district which I was at Creston and which I was also at Canal Flats, you had another annual report to compile in connection with grazing on Crown activities. So that takes you in through until about the end of November or almost December and then wherever possible you're going to have start to catch up with your cruising, so on go the snowshoes and I snowshoed hundreds of miles in my lifetime, cruising timber on snow.