A Life in the Woods: Les Stilwell

I was born in Nelson, raised here, went to Creston in 1941, finished school there and started with the Forest Service in Creston in a summertime position called "Dispatcher" for three summers. Then wrote and passed the Assistant Ranger examination and became an Assistant Ranger in 1946,1 guess it was, and I worked out of Boswell. That was my headquarters for that summer. In the fall I went back to Creston and in January '47 went to the second class of the Forest Ranger school at Green Timbers. Then in January of '48,1 was back in Creston. George Palethorpe, who was Ranger in Nelson had his leg broken, so for three months or so I looked after the Nelson Forest District. Summer of '48 I spent working at the Nelson Ranger District headquarters here, in charge of the fire-suppression crews that they had, one at Lumberton, one at Erie or Salmo, I think. Then I went over to Kettle Valley for three months, too, to help out there. And then back to Lardeau in April '49, and that's the first year it was opened as a Ranger District of its own.

Peter Chapman: Were most of the loggers working for the sawmills?

Les Stilwell: Well, in the early days, the sawmills had their own logging crews. Now, they happen primarily to be logging contractors. The fallers work for the contractor, the contractor works for the company.

Peter Chapman: Did that change make a difference?

Les Stilwell: I don't think it made that much difference. There may have been a little less supervision in the bush than there had been before, but I guess the thing that made most of the difference again was the way the logging machinery developed: things like shears that came along instead of power saws. I'd never been around very much where those were working, but I guess there are a lot of them on the go, nowadays, especially as the size of the timber that they're taking gets smaller.

Peter Chapman: Were there some things that were particularly difficult to administer with the cutting?

Les Stilwell: No. Not really. We had some sales where they - again, I doubt that any of it is being done now - but where there were trees marked to leave or trees marked to cut, and they could only cut the trees that were identified in the contract. Then there were other things where they tried other management techniques like "leave blocks" and that sort of thing. And, of course, forms of selection logging have been on the go forever, but how successful a lot of these things were, I don't know. I've never really been back to those sorts of areas. A lot happens in ten or twelve years in the bush, you know.

Interesting, though, to see all the changes. I often wonder, when I see some of these big power poles going up, where they managed to get them now, but I guess there are still a few left somewhere.

Peter Chapman: Why are the trees getting smaller?

Les Stilwell: Well, in this country, a lot of them are coming from higher elevations. Kootenay Lake, what are we? - basically 1700 feet above sea level, to start with, and down at the Coast you're logging literally from sea level up. So the climate is not quite as conducive to growing big trees, when you're starting at these sorts of elevations.

Peter Chapman: But there were large trees here.

Les Stilwell: Oh, sure there were. There were large trees because there was nobody cutting them and they were old.

Peter Chapman: Where were the largest, densest stands in the West Kootenay, the heaviest timbered stands?

Les Stilwell: I guess in some of the river bottoms, some of the cedar-hemlock stands in the river bottoms were probably as heavy and dense as any. You know, there were some big cedar in a lot of those areas.

Peter Chapman: They weren't always sound, is that right?

Les Stilwell: Well, no, but there was a lot of real good stuff left in those big cedar shells. They would be all clear [knot-free] from the first log or two - and even, in the '40s, that was, clear cedar boards would get you $100 per thousand [board feet]. I don't know what they would bring now.

Peter Chapman: They had been logging white pine along Kootenay Lake for a long time, hadn't they?

Les Stilwell: Yes. A lot of the white pine, of course, went to match blocks. W.W. Powell had a match-block factory here in the early days. They were still in business in the late '40s. But a lot of the little mills would have piles of white pine there, all laid out so it would air dry, with spacers in-between. And they would just leave it there for a period of months to air dry, and W.W. Powell would have paid a pretty good price to the people for that lumber. They'd come along and gather it up and take it to the mill. Now match blocks weren't the only things that they produced. I'm pretty sure they produced a lot of select white pine too, although I think I was only ever in that mill once while it was working. But they shipped white-pine match blocks to the east and they were made into matches there. I think Eddy bought the most of them.

Even Duncan Lake Lumber Company had several piles of white pine dry-piled there for W.W. Powell, years ago. And there were lots of small mills through the Kootenays that Powell bought their white pine. They had a buyer who went around and tallied the piles and paid for them. But the white-pine blister rust hadn't really quite caught on, in those days, as much as it has today.

Peter Chapman: Do you remember when companies started applying for clearcuts?

Les Stilwell: I can't really specifically remember, no. Probably in the '60s. I wasn't really involved in that sort of thing in those days. I guess, even though there were things like the mountain pine beetle infestations in various parts of the country, it took a little while to convince people that there was harvestable wood there. And that's when a lot of the clearcuts started to happen, in the lodgepole-pine stands, particularly in the East Kootenay. And if you left the trees sitting there, the mountain pine beetle was going to get it anyhow. And so they pretty well clearcut all that stuff. There might be a few little whippy ones left around.

Peter Chapman: When you supervised or checked the logging, what were you checking for when you made a visit to the site?

Les Stilwell: Well, primarily to make sure that they hadn't gone outside their boundaries and trespassed as far as cutting was concerned. And otherwise it was primarily to see if they complied with the conditions of the contract. The contract was a six- , seven- , or eight-page document which covered all sorts of things. In the summer you were concerned whether they had the fire-prevention equipment and fire-suppression equipment that they were required to have by regulation at the sawmill site or on the skidding machines or whatever. Fallers had to carry a shovel and so on with them in case their power saws set a fire.

Peter Chapman: I can't imagine fallers toting a shovel around. Did they tend to stash them somewhere?

Les Stilwell: Well, they primarily kept that sort of stuff handy to where they fuelled their saw. They did it, you know, just in case something happened, they could kick some dirt or throw some dirt around. And then other than that, we were looking at waste, whether they were wasting things, looking at the road construction, whether they had the culverts and drainage and so on where they should have. And slash disposal, whatever that would entail. In the early days some of it was lopping and scattering [of leftover parts of the trees] and some of it was bunching and burning. A number of schemes, depending on where you were, were in vogue.

Again - going back a little earlier - in the selection cuts, tops all had to be lopped and the limbs scattered, so they came in contact with the ground. They rotted much more quickly than with the tops sitting up in the air. Later on you didn't have to worry too much about that because they got more or less smashed down anyhow with the skidding techniques that had been developed over the years, and rubber-tired machines that seemed to be able to cover all sorts of ground. So it was just basically looking at compliance with contract conditions.

Other things that were looked at - in the early days, before the weigh scales came a long - was check scaling, the marking of the timber. I see now they are concerned about marks, timber marks, again. That identified the area that it came from and the stumpage rates that would have to be paid.

Peter Chapman: What would happen in the case of a licensee's harvest contractors trespassing on an adjacent license?

Les Stilwell: Well, we'd stump cruise the site. In other words, we would measure the stumps and, from that measurement and some indication of the height of the trees, we would then arrive at a volume that was taken in trespass. And, depending on the trespass - whether it was a deliberate thing or accidental or whatever - that would be billed to them at penalty rates, maybe one-and-a-half times the stumpage they'd normally pay, or maybe two or three.

Peter Chapman: How could you tell if it was accidental or not?

Les Stilwell: Well, again, some of it may have depended on how well defined the boundary line was on the ground. Sometimes, you know, it was pretty tempting to grab a couple of more white pine trees that are just outside the boundary and white pine being a high-stumpage wood, but also very desirable species in the early days.

Peter Chapman: Would they attempt to steer you away from the trespassed area?

Les Stilwell: No, they didn't know when we were coming around, particularly. No, they wouldn't try and steer us away. The odd time you'd get a little discussion over trespass, but most of the time there was not much hassle.

Peter Chapman: What would happen if there was a fire?

Les Stilwell: We recruited manpower, too. But their basic job, as I say, was a patrol job. But if there were fires, they were involved in those, in a supervisory role as much as anything, if the fire required outside help. It was a relatively wet year, '49, so they didn't require much, outside of for that one fire in the west fork of the Duncan. They backpacked the initial stuff in, and then extra supplies were air-dropped in from the old Junkers aircraft that was stationed at the Regional headquarters here in Nelson. That was the aircraft that did the patrols after lightning storms and the air drops of supplies to remote fires. They got to be pretty good at that, packing parachutes and so on. It took a long time to learn how to really properly package stuff for air drops. But up till that time, with some of the early aircraft we had, there was no way you could air drop anything from them. The Junkers was the first of the aircraft we had in the region that was a good aircraft for that sort of thing.

Peter Chapman: I wanted to ask you a few questions about fire fighting, and particularly about the early use of aircraft. The early planes were on floats?

Les Stilwell: On floats, yeah. All of our aircraft were on floats, well into the '60s. In the mid '60s, maybe late '60s, we went from the Junkers to a series of Beaver aircraft after that. They were all float equipped.

And then, of course, there were more and more airstrips developed in places like Revelstoke and Kaslo, Creston, Grand Forks, and eventually an airport was developed at Beaverdell. And along the Arrow Lakes there was Nakusp and so on. Of course, then they switched to a small twin-engine aircraft with wheels, and by then the helicopter had become a pretty available tool, so you did away with the air-dropping of supplies, because the helicopter could sling stuff in on a long rope if he had to, and put it right where it was needed.

Some of the first helicopter use on fires was in the '60s or probably late '50s - '57, '58 - G-ls and G-2s and the Hiller 12-E. They were the basic machines of the day, limited to loads they could carry, elevations they could work, and so on. It was quite a few years before the light turbine-powered helicopters came on.

Peter Chapman: With regard to aircraft, you must have had to develop your procedures as you went along, because the planes were new, and find new ways to use them.

Les Stilwell: Yeah. I can remember when I was a kid seeing the old Moth here in Nelson. It was a float plane that did patrol work and so on and there was no radio communication in those days, so I don't know how they got messages around. Anyhow, after the war the first aircraft we had that was sort of a contract aircraft was a Cessna Crane. It was a twin-engine training plane, I guess, that they used with the Empire air training scheme or whatever it was. Anyhow, I said, "Well, twin-engine aircraft, that's pretty nice. Well, it was a safety factor, it could fly on one engine. So we're up flying around one day and I was sitting in the co-pilot's seat, the seat beside the pilot, and here is a little brass tag right on the instrument panel of the aircraft. It says maximum elevation that this aircraft could maintain was something like 865 feet. So there we are with this great safety factor of a twin- engine aircraft flying at 1700 feet, basic, above sea level - so it wasn't going to make it anyhow!

Then, of course, we got the Junkers, which was a great plane. Its wings, they really flapped. And I can remember the pilot we had was a fairly young fellow and he was concerned about all this movement in the wings on the aircraft when we were flying. And he got in touch with his boss, the chief pilot of the company, and he was told, 'Well, don't worry about that. The time to start worrying is when t\\ey don't flap', [laughs] So that's the sort of thing. And then we thought we were well off when the Beaver came alone, and we were compared to the types of aircraft that we had had previously. So it was with the Junkers that we started some of the air-drop stuff, and it was continued with the Beaver over the years and then, of course, helicopters came along.

Peter Chapman: What were you air- dropping, primarily?

Les Stilwell: Grub to fires. Or if we had ... occasionally, we had cruising crews way out in the boondocks that were going to be there for ten days, well, you'd drop some of their grub to them. They'd just pack some of their essential gear and then air drop their grub.

Peter Chapman: Did they always get their grub?

Les Stilwell: Mostly. We had the odd time when the chutes didn't open. In later years, it seldom if ever happened, and some of the places we dropped to fires the stuff got hung up in tall trees. Now if you ended up with a cruising crew, they would probably pick a camp site where they could drop the stuff and they wouldn't have any problem retrieving it. Those guys got pretty accurate with what they were doing. Then, like you say, the helicopters came along and there was lots of limitations with those early ones. With a lot of the early ones, it wasn't sling stuff, it was loads of things so they had to have a place they could more or less set down. Later on, when they had the hooks on them and they could use a long line, it made a lot of difference. And, of course, even later than that, some of the long lines ... they took their lines back with them because they had a hook that was controlled electrically from in there. It went down the line and the hook opened at the bottom, whereas before they sort of dropped right from the aircraft. It was line and hook and the whole works went. But really been quite helpful [in firefighting]. That along with the ability to get initial attack crews there by helicopter, either using the rappel system or just able to put initial attack crews down somewhere and let them walk for ten, fifteen minutes to the fire. And if they can use the air tankers just to buy you that much time, it's pretty good. It's expensive, but who's to say?

But, no, I think if you can get the fire detection, [you're at an advantage]. The worst part now, I guess, is still the man-caused fires. The lightning location system should give people - if they look at the information that's available and comes out of it, get some air patrols out - it should give them a good idea of where their problem spots are, because you know where the lightning has been, where years ago you didn't. All you knew is there was a flash in the sky, and you're not quite sure how many ridges over it was. Now it's well plotted. Amazing accuracy in that system. It's available in every District now, whereas previously it used to be available only in the Region. The Region had to try and get the information out to the district. Now every District can access it. And if you use the information there, and if you use the weather forecast and the indices, you should have some idea of what you should do. But it's come a long way in ten years, believe me. It's communication, all the things that electronics can do for people.

And of course the weather system which we just barely got started on when I was there is now "interrogated" automatically at specific times and goes into the fire-weather indices and so on.

Peter Chapman: To change the subject, what was involved in timber cruising?

Les Stilwell: Well, it was basically sampling the timber stand. And in the early days it was all strip cruising, where you took a strip, used a compass and ran a direction and you cruised a half a chain or something on each side of your tape, and tallied the trees and mapped the timber types as you went along. That gave you sort of a sample for which you could then work out the volumes. When you did your mapping, of course, you were mapping out the areas that were not satisfactorily stocked, or where there was a change in timber types and that sort of thing. You arrived at values and you did an appraisal on it in which you theoretically log the stuff, and moved it to a mill, and sawed it into lumber, and sold the lumber. And on the basis of that, you arrived at a price that was going to be charged for the stumpage.

Peter Chapman: How large were these sales [areas]?

Les Stilwell: Well, some small sales might be only 20 acres, but in other places you could have had timber sales that went up to sixteen- seventeen-hundred acres, maybe even larger than that. A lot depended on the topography.

Peter Chapman: Who decided where the timber sales would be?

Les Stilwell: Well, the individual companies applied for a timber sale. The first step was to take an application and then it was submitted and we got a clearance on it, and the clearance was nothing more than to say that it was Crown Land and there was no encroachment of mineral claims. And then you had an idea then where you were going to cruise. Sometimes you would end up cruising an area bigger than the cleared area, primarily because it was the logical thing to do. And then, of course, before you proceeded to do all your paperwork, you had to get an amended clearance to cover the extra area. In places like the Kettle, where there were so many mineral claims - around Greenwood and other parts - a lot of these mineral claims had surface rights attached to them, they were surveyed long enough ago. So quite frequently, timber sales and that particular thing had more funny little jogs, because you ended up going around mineral claims where the holder of that mineral claim actually had the timber rights on that claim too.

Peter Chapman: In a case like that, you must have had to be fairly exact.

Les Stilwell: Oh, yes. You spent a lot of time looking for old survey monuments. Mostly always, where we were involved with mineral claims, we could get copies of the surveyor's original field notes. So, though you might not be able to find an old wooden corner post, occasionally you could find the surveyor's "bearing tree," even though the post had rotted out many years ago. It was all very time-consuming, occasionally.

Peter Chapman: Who laid out the roads?

Les Stilwell: In the early days, the licensee of the sale did their own road layout. Occasionally, our maps would indicate a possible location for an access road. But basically the licensee was responsible for roads.

Peter Chapman: How did you ensure that the timber sales were appropriate in term* of overall management of the Ranger District, the amount of timber, the age class?

Les Stilwell: In the Interior, for one thing, the clearcut didn't exist. Slash burning didn't exist. The machines were all much smaller than they are today. The standard method of disposing of slash was lopping and scattering. The logging was all selective cutting. A thirty-two-foot log was probably the longest log that was skidded out of the bush. A lot of smaller Cats were used for skidding and contract conditions required thai the blade be taken off the Cat when they were skidding. The trees were felled in herringbone fashion to the skid trails and were taken out that way, so you didn't have the compaction that you get with the rubber-tired machines and didn't get the amount of small stuff being knocked down, because you weren't skidding tree-length stuff, you were skidding already- manufactured logs.

In other parts of the country, they used jammer skidding, which was nothing more than an old truck chassis that had a couple of poles on it in the form of an A-frame and a winch, and some guy with lots of muscle carried a set of tongs on a 5/8- or 1/2-inch cable out into the bush and hooked them on to the log that the taller had left there, and [the logs] were dragged in, a log at a time. They also used those same machines for loading the trucks. There was still a lot of horse logging going on in the early days. In the late '40s, over in the St. Mary's, George Mclnnes had one Cat and fourteen teams of horses sort of thing. Logging was pretty man- power-intensive in the early days.

So, in a lot of those stands, because they were selectively cut and logs were manufactured in the bush, you didn't get a lot of other stuff knocked over. They left an area that had a reasonable amount of scarification with the small machines and a pretty good seed source. I know a lot of those areas had second timber sale over them probably 15 years later.

Peter Chapman: Was this, in a sense, high-grading the site and leaving poorer trees that took up the growing room?

Les Stilwell: No. There was nothing wrong with a lot of those smaller trees except they were younger, and the standard in those days was fourteen-inches-diameter stump - "breast height," as we used to say, which meant that it had even a little bit bigger stump that. That was the size of tree that was classed as merchantable in the early days. The type of sawmills there were around, you couldn't really handle a lot of eight-inch stuff like a lot of the pine that's being taken out now. Of course, some of it's really small. No, the old mills all had circular saws and the kerf on them was [laughs] about 3/8 of an inch wide, you know. So they wouldn't be able to handle a lot of the small stuff. Now, with chip'n'saws, and gang saws, and the band saws that they are using in the mills, they can handle that smaller stuff without losing much in sawdust. And of course they have the capability in that size stuff of tree-length logging. I'm sure you've seen load after load of jack pine on the highway that are all tree length and tops down to three and four inches. The standard top size in the early days, of course, was eight inches. We didn't start charging them for waste unless the tops were over eight inches in diameter.

Peter Chapman: So, you would do the cruising and make all your calculations. And then would that be put up for bid, or ...?

Les Stilwell: No, it was all put up for bid. Some of it went to auction. For some of it, sealed tenders were sent to what we called the District Forester in those days, now would be called the Regional Manager, and of course the highest bidder got it. There was a lot of competition. I can remember having auction sales, timber sales, where we had fifty and sixty bids, maybe four or five sawmills bidding on the stuff. And our auctions were always held on Saturday mornings.

Peter Chapman: What was the auction like? Was it an auction where you were standing in front and people would bid out loud?

Les Stilwell: No, I sat at a desk and with each bid we had to record who it was by. And some of them would say, "Ten cents across the board." In other words, he was raising the upset price by ten cents a thousand board feet for everything. Or somebody might say twenty-five cents on the fir or five cents on the pine. He always had to raise the price that was bid previously, if it was one of these across the board things.

After the auction was over, the successful party then, of course, had to produce cash or cheque or something for the additional amount of money for the 10% deposit, because he had a basic deposit there to start the bidding, but he also had to produce the extra money, the ten-percent of the extra value, at the time of the auction. So that was a security deposit. Then, of course, as they harvested the stuff, they paid for it as it was harvested. And eventually later, if everything was okay, then they would get their security deposit back.

There were a few changes made later on, too. They could deposit bonds in a bank and the bank would give us an understanding that these bonds were there and were being held so that they could get interest on their money that was tied up as a security deposit. Whereas I don't think we paid any interest on the money that was held as security deposits on these things, at all. Those were the sorts of things in the '40s and '50s nobody seemed to worry much about. Not at our level, anyhow. We didn't have any more money than it took to live.

Peter Chapman: Who would bid, other than sawmills?

Les Stilwell: Most of the bidders were sawmills. We had other things, not so much in the Kettle, but for instance in Kootenay Lake where you might have had sales where the major product was probably cedar poles and there might be a residual volume of saw logs of one sort or another. Then, of course, you'd probably get a totally different group of people involved, because in the early days you were either in the pole business or you were in the saw-log business. And then in other parts of the country, where there was a lot of old cedar, dead cedar, there was a big market for cedar fence posts. This could have been some of the areas that had been burned and some of the big old cedar were killed and they stood there, and so then you had sales for cedar fence posts and that sort of thing.

The railroad used to buy literally hundreds of thousands of fence posts in the early and middle '40s when their rights-of-way were all fenced. Most of them went to the prairies, and of course the railroad also bought a different class of pole for their telegraph poles along the rail line than the power companies or B.C. Tel used.

Then there were all sorts of other minor products. Cordwood was classed as a minor product. In the Kettle Country we had things called orchard props that went to the Okanagan. Some of these Jack Pine stands were thicker than hair on a dogs back. You go in and thin those things out and you get poles ten, twelve-feet long, yea-big around [indicates with hands] that they used to prop up the limbs on the fruit trees when they were heavy with fruit. Oh, there were parts of the country where there were still old tie hacks who were making hewn ties. Well, they were ties hacked out in the bush with a broad axe. Railroad ties. So they had a price too. Then later on you got into shake blocks and that sort of thing. That was quite a few years later. But again, it was using downed cedar, primarily big old stuff that had toppled and they split shakes out of them. That was about the extent of the minor products at most places. But in later years, of course, all that changed with the types of tenure that were issued.

Peter Chapman: Did you worry about "sustained yield" in the early days? Did you attempt to control the cutting in that way?

Les Stilwell: No, because, like I say, all through this part of the country clearcut logging was not a problem. In the early days, of course, they didn't have the ability to get high up on the hills like they are getting now. The capability in road building and so on has changed much. The capability of logging trucks, too, to even get around is much changed. The rubber-tired skidder came along later, and loading and skidding machines [whereby] you ended up with fewer men in the bush and a lot more volume being moved. So in the early days, we didn't really worry about selective logging. In fact, outside of the Coast in the early days there was little if any reforestation, "artificial regeneration," done.

Peter Chapman: You remember the mill at Duncan Lake that opened up after World War II?

Les Stilwell: Yeah. It burned while I was there, on a Saturday night. The Duncan Lake Lumber Company, they called it.

Peter Chapman: Was it a typical-size mill?

Les Stilwell: Yeah. It was a steam mill. They were logging on the Howser Creek, at the flats there on Howser Creek and floating it down the river to the head of the Lake, and George Sawczuk was doing the logging for them and they had a little Cat up in there. And I can't remember whether there was much trucked from other places, but I know that they had to blast some of the logs in two because they were just too big for the head saw.

Peter Chapman: Blast them?

Les Stilwell: Yeah, they used a little bit of powder to split them in two. And, of course, that would be the cedar butts. They were probably hollow anyhow, but a lot of good clear cedar came out of that. And they trucked their lumber to Lardeau and loaded it in boxcars there. There was another mill I think at that particular time up on Howser Ridge too. Bedwell, I think, ran a little mill up there.

There was very little, actually, the summer I was there. There was some pole cutting going on, and other than that there was not much in the way of timber work. Glacier Lumber Company [later called Kootenay Forest Products] weren't up there in the early days. It was a few years later that they went up.

Peter Chapman: They were logging on Kootenay Lake first, were they?

Les Stilwell: Yeah, they were. They were some of the earlier places that they logged. Crawford Creek, Goat Creek, these are all sort of south of Crawford Bay. And at that time they had their tug boats. I think a few years later they started up in the Duncan. I can't remember whether they had a camp and so on. Maybe they did. I didn't go up to the Lardeau much, because I had enough with Crawford Bay and so on as part of the Kaslo District when I was there. But maybe they were set up at Marblehead in the mid '50s.

Peter Chapman: George Mclnnes logged in the Duncan didn't he?

Les Stilwell: Yep. I think he had a mill up there, probably at Howser at the bottom of Duncan Lake. He probably had a mill in there at some time. That was long before my time. I think there were a couple of mills burned in there over the years.

Peter Chapman: As Forest Rangers, were you conscious of the changing forest, of the changing kinds of species - for example, that as white pine was logged out, the forest coming after was different?

Les Stilwell: Well, like I said, everything was selectively cut [in the earlier years]. And, white pine, as an example, perhaps the cutting diameter would be a little bit higher than it would be on the fir and so on. I don't think it really presented much of a problem to us in those days. To start with, the areas that were being logged were nothing like the size of those that are being logged today.

Peter Chapman: What was it like to go to Green Timbers?

Les Stilwell: It was a change. You met people from all over the province there. The time I went, of course, the classes were half Rangers and half Assistant Rangers, so you had the benefit of some real old-timers along with a bunch of new young fellows too. First session we were there, the five-man bunk houses, there was no lining in them, they were just a cabin with some electric lights in them. You went to a washroom where they had the washbasins and showers and the toilets. That building was set in between, right in the middle of the four bunkhouses, so it wasn't very far for anybody to travel. And of course you didn't have any snow in winter so that was a little different for some of us - a winter with no snow.

Peter Chapman: Was that the first time you'd been out of the area?

Les Stilwell: Yeah. It was the first time I'd been to the Coast. In the early days travelling here, the highways weren't much good. Bus service was kind of erratic. It was a good 24 hours or more by train. And a lot of people just didn't do that much travelling in those days. That was the first time I was down to the Coast in my life.

Peter Chapman: When did Ranger School start?

Les Stilwell: Forty six. I was in the second class, in '47. It was one of these things where you didn't know what the [entrance] examination was going to be about, and I guess some of us who were a little bit younger and were not too long out of high school didn't have much problem, because it turned out to be primarily a mathematics examination.

Peter Chapman: Did you go down after Labour Day, in September?

Les Stilwell: Yeah, it was. It was closer to the end of September.

Peter Chapman: And did you finish in one season, or did you have to go back a second time?

Les Stilwell: No. In those days there were two terms. From January until the end of March and from sometime in September until just before Christmas. And you had to write examinations, of course, all the way through this thing. So you had to pass those examinations before you got put on any sort of a list for promotion. The early days, you know, they didn't advertise positions. People were just sort of appointed to them. As time went on, of course - as the organization grew, as communication got better, that is not only from the point of view of electronics, but highways and airlines and so on - you could probably draw from a larger pool of people. So that's when they started advertising. And people weren't afraid to move around a little bit in those days. And then, of course, once they went to advertising, there was a lot of changing around, of people going from Region to Region. They were called "Districts" in the early days, now they are called "Regions."

Peter Chapman: You started your career just about the time the Sloan Commission Report came out. That made some real changes in the Forest Service.

Les Stilwell: I can remember the first Sloan Commission Report hearings being on [1943-45]. I don't think it brought that many changes to the structure of the Forest Service. Probably in time it brought a lot of changes in tenure and licensing to harvest timber. I think the Tree Farm License came out of that first Sloan Report [of 1946]. And I think that made a lot of difference. Not so much in the Interior, but certainly on the Coast. I don't think at that particular time there was more than one TFL in the East Kootenay; there may have been one. But I do remember in my own Ranger District there were two Tree Farm Licenses issued, one to what was then Boundary Sawmills and the other to Ollinger Lumber Co., I guess or Don MacLean Lumber Company I guess it was called in those days, in Beaverdell. That seemed to be the major change in the type of tenure. And by being issued a Tree Farm License, of course, the industry accepted a fair number of responsibilities relative to forest protection, regeneration of the logged sites and whatever.

Peter Chapman: Was there a season or seasons to the Ranger's work, certain things that you did at some times of year?

Les Stilwell: Yeah. Summer was pretty much the season for protection sorts of things. We used trail crews to cut the brush off of trails, and that sort of thing, during the summer. That's when we had our fires, that's when we had our suppression crews, and this is when we did a lot of our improvement work, even a lot of the range improvements like drift fencing and so on. We did a lot of that sort of building on the Crown ranges. Winter was primarily involved with timber work. We did a lot of our cruising in the early winter.

Peter Chapman: What was your job after you became a Ranger? Were you in Protection?

Les Stilwell: Well, protection was part of the thing. It depends on what district you were in. There were three basic things that were involved for the Forest Ranger. That was: forest protection, forest management, and range management. So if you happened to be in a district where there was a fairly decent- sized cattle industry and so on, you spend a lot of time in range management - allocation of Crown range for summer grazing for cattle and so on. It was probably one of your bigger headaches in the job. And other than that there were the usual forest-protection things: the fire-prevention part of it and detection. And then timber management, of course, was timber cruising, timber sales, inspections of cutting and that sort of thing. Trespasses, seizures, whatever. You know, when fires were going, all the staff were involved in them. We didn't have people who were specifically there for fires except those who were hired as fire-suppression crews, and they were usually high-school students set in a camp - and probably July and August was the term that they were available. They were primarily an initial-attack fire crew, so they would get out and get the fire tied up. And if it was going to be a week or two, ten days or whatever after that - where people were going to have to baby-sit it - you would hire people to look after it and get the initial attack crew, the fire-suppression crew, back to camp and cleaned up and organized, and tools conditioned for the next go.

Peter Chapman: So you were working at the District Office after Kaslo?

Les Stilwell: After Kaslo I transferred into the Regional Office as a Supervisor of Rangers. There were three in the Nelson Region at that time. We had 22 Rangers, and there were three Ranger Supervisors. Over a period of years until the re-organization of the Forest Service occurred in '79-'80,1 think all the supervisors covered the whole of the twenty-two districts in the Region. Every two or three years we used to change the districts we supervised.

Peter Chapman: And did you do that until you retired?

Les Stilwell: No. When the Forest Service organization [of '79-80] took place, the Ranger Supervisor's job became one of the redundant positions in the reorganizations, so I took over a Regional Protection job in Nelson until I retired in '84.

Peter Chapman: Had you wanted to be a Forest Ranger? Is that something you thought about deliberately?

Les Stilwell: Well, I guess I became Dispatcher when I was still in high school. It was one of these things where the Ranger came around to the schools and was looking for people who wanted a summer job, and there were a number of us. He interviewed us and I was chosen. So after three summers as a Dispatcher, I wrote the Assistant Ranger examination when I had the chance to, and passed that exam and went on from there. And this is basically, in those days, how a lot of people got started in the Forest Service. They either were a Patrolman or a Dispatcher, working seasonally, and took the opportunity to write the Assistant Ranger's examinations when they came around in the winter and managed to snag a vacant position somewhere.

A fair number of the Assistant Rangers in the early days, of course, were laid off at the end of September. They weren't put on until the middle of April or the first of May the following year. That was in the years immediately after the end of the Second War. By 1950,1 think that most Assistant Rangers were employed year-round. They may have got shuffled around from one district to the other. They may have been in one district during the summer and then shoved off to some other district for the winter, just based on the sorts of work loads as they occurred. So, well, it was good experience. Other districts for instance, the districts on the Columbia River - primarily, say. Golden and Revelstoke - they had a fair number of Patrolmen and river boats, because the Columbia River really wasn't navigable around the whole length of the Big Bend. Of course, they had several boathouses along the river where they kept the boats, and the old Big Bend Highway was quite a travel. It used to take all day long to drive from Golden to Revelstoke or visa versa. So on the Golden side, there was an Assistant Ranger Station or Patrol Station at Bush River and then at 100 mile on the Big Bend. There was another fairly good-sized station operated out of Revelstoke and then along the river in various places they had single boats, basically 34-foot river-boat style. Boats and boat houses. Nobody ever bothered them in those days. You knew if you always went to the boat house you were going to find your gasoline and your boat and motor still intact. It wasn't going to have disappeared on you while you were away.

Peter Chapman: Were you the first Ranger in the Lardeau?

Les Stilwell: First Ranger stationed in the Lardeau, as near as I know. The CPR boats ran twice a week. Occasionally the Amabilis or the landing craft came up. They were stationed at Kaslo, brought a vehicle up and a few other things like that. Other than that, our transportation on Kootenay Lake was an 18-foot Peterborough canoe with a five-horsepower motor. And we had two Assistant Rangers that year m Lardeau, two Patrolmen in the Duncan. We called them the Upper Duncan and the Lower Duncan Patrolmen, but they worked together. Spent a lot of time at the old Healy's Landing cabin. And there were two lookout men, one on what we called Duncan Lookout on Bear Mountain and the other was Lavina Lookout. And there was a Dispatcher. That was the size of the staff. So we had only the one fire of any consequence that year, and that was the one I mentioned before at the west fork of the Duncan.

We had radio on the lookouts in those days. I think they probably put radios in in about 1938, on Lavina anyhow. Prior to that, it was all telephone lines. There was no telephone line to Duncan Lookout, because it was established a few years later, after radios came into effect. There were three telephone lines we looked after for quite a few years up in the Lardeau. I think the telephone line from Lardeau to Gerrard must have been taken over from the railroad, after the railroad was pulled out and they used the railroad grade as a road. We had another line that went from Lardeau around to Johnson's Landing, and another line - that was pretty well shot by the time I got there - went up the Duncan River, and we could still see traces of it along by Howser Creek. But the radio-communication equipment we had was big and heavy and awkward. And it was all basically AM, so it tended to be pretty noisy at times, and especially the [shortwave, marine band] frequency we were using in those days in the Nelson Region.

Peter Chapman: Did you have to maintain the phone line that you mentioned?

Les Stilwell: Oh, yes. We maintained the phone line right through to Gerrard. I don't think we kept it up to Johnson's Landing. But we did keep the other line open to Argenta anyhow, so we had some communication there. I think it was in '49 that we managed to get a telephone hooked onto the old CPR telephone line between Kaslo and Lardeau, which used to run along the lakeshore. And it hooked into the BC Telephone exchange in Kaslo; so, for the last two or three months I was there, anyhow, we had telephone communication through BC Tel. They're all magneto phones, so, of course, you wound them up [by hand to generate a bell-signal current]. It was a party line. [laughs]

So other than that, you know, we were pretty much on our own. We had three river boats that were 34-foot boats that were based in Howser and had big old Johnson outboard motors on them, which were two-cylinder opposed, with 22 horsepower. You couldn't make it from Howser to Healey's Landing without stopping and filling the fuel tank once or twice. It would depend on the going on the way up, which meant that you found a place to tie the boat up while you filled up, and then you sort of pushed the boat out into the river and hoped the motor would start with a few pulls of the starter cord. There were no rewind starters on those, either. You wrapped the cord around the flywheel and pulled, and hoped it would go. I can only remember once when one of those motors started after the first pull, but they usually started after three or four pulls. They were a great boat. They were certainly well built and worked well in the rivers.

Peter Chapman: Who actually ran the boat on the river?

Les Stilwell: The Patrolman or the Assistant Ranger, whoever was going up at the time. See, the Lower Duncan Patrol, supposedly it was one-man-one-boat. And like I said, the two Patrolmen worked together. And they either would stay at Howser or at Healy's Landing, depending on what work they were doing or what the hazard might have been at the time.

Peter Chapman: What was their job?

Les Stilwell: Well, they were primarily looking after the river. It needed a lot of work done on it. Snags, deadheads, and that sort of thing had to be cleaned out, and they did a little bit of trail work. They had to keep the trail open to the Bear Lookout, and they were the people who used to pack groceries up to the Lookout man, or at least they'd pack them part-way up and the Lookout man would meet them and take them up the rest of the way. Other than that, their main job would be fire fighting.

Peter Chapman: Was there a lot of resistance among Rangers to the reorganization of the Forest Service in 1978? The elimination of Rangers?

Les Stilwell: There may have been. I can't really remember that there were too many who talked very much about it. There were a number who retired early. I don't remember, because it didn't affect me. They probably had some sort of a buy-out package where people were declared redundant. Some of them left with a pretty fair package, but for those Rangers who didn't become District Managers, there were the two Op Sup [operations supervisory] positions in each District which probably gave them a chance to stay right where they were and fill those in. I think there was a fair amount of opposition from various places to it, but...

Peter Chapman: There seems to be quite a difference between someone who had years of experience working for the Forest Service and went to Ranger School and worked into the system that way as opposed to someone who went to forestry school and became an RPF and came into the Forest Service the other way.

Les Stilwell: A lot of the earlier people in the Forest Service had had some basic experience in logging. A lot of the people who have gone to university, and come out with RPF [certification] and so on, haven't really had the opportunity to be exposed to a lot of those things. Now a lot [but not all] of them went with industry. I think there is quite a difference in the philosophy of those who went with industry and those who came to government.

Peter Chapman: In what way?

Les Stilwell: Well, I think perhaps some of the people who are with industry are probably a little bit more in touch with some of the facts of life. I think you have to get your hands dirty once in a while before you find out how long the mud stays on them.

Peter Chapman: Was there a special duty to being a Forest Ranger? That gave you concern for the forest in a different way than industry would have?

Les Stilwell: Well, I guess [there might have been], because we were looking at it as a 'people's heritage' sort of thing. You accept that when the crop is ripe it has to be harvested, but it has to be harvested in a careful, thoughtful manner. My days as a Ranger all date back to when things were considerably more simple. The big machines that they are using now hadn't been developed at that time, so there were limitations on what you could harvest primarily because of the machinery that was available. You know, the roads that are being built now are monstrous compared to the roads that were built in my day, because they've got machines that can build 'em.

In the early days, you know, if you saw a D-7 Cat belonging to a logging company in the bush, that was a big machine. Things like D-8s were saved for highway construction. A lot of roads were built with D-6s. Now you see some monstrous machines in the bush building road. And people drilling rock and blasting to get a road through. That didn't happen in the early days. These were all things that stopped the operation cold. So being a Ranger in that particular time, you probably have a little bit different outlook than some of the people would have had who were in Ranger's positions at the time of the Forest Service re-organization [late '70s].

But you know, you just didn't spend a lot of money on roads because you didn't have it. Now, some of the road building, I still have a feeling in some instances, the industry is over-building a lot of roads. I don't know if it is or not, but that's just the kind of gut feeling that I have. But maybe the kind of weights they are hauling with the types of vehicles that they have now, maybe they have to do them that way.

But, of course, I don't really believe in the universal prescription of clearcut. My own feeling is that I just can't buy that as a universal prescription. I'm not going to say that there aren't some places where clearcutting is probably an essential. But to say that clearcutting and burning is the only route to go, I just don't believe it. It makes it easy. But there are other alternatives that worked very well in years gone by, and might work well again if we sat back and looked at them, but they are going to cost them a dollar more, and right now it appears that everything is based on how fat you can make the wallet. That's my opinion. I think that twenty years down the road we are going to suffer for it.

I have another theory, too. Somewhere along the line, to satisfy political needs, or whatever you want to call them, they have probably developed an over-capacity in their forest nursery, so they've got to find a place to put all this stuff. The best place to put it is in the clearcut. But I've seen an awful lot of plantations that have been total and absolute failures too. I think it's kind of nuts. Hard for me to believe that somebody can say that you can clearcut and burn, and then when you're ready to plant, you got to come along with some herbicides and kill all the brush and weeds and stuff that have grown up on it.

On some [non-clearcut, non-burned] sites, I'm not going to say you won't get brush, but you're probably not going to get it to the same extent. You see on non-clearcut areas you don't get that sort of situation, with this fast weed growth primarily because of the fast return of nutrients after the burn has happened. And then, again, my feeling is that after the clearcut and burn, you've got a fair amount of very soluble nutrients which are gone very rapidly, whereas if you did some scarification or just bashed some of that stuff down into little chips and so on, it is still going to return nutrients to the soil, going to return them over a longer period of time. And ten chances to one, even if you did go into areas like that and do some fill-in planting or whatever, you might get a better forest. I don't know. Of course there are those who would say that I wouldn't be qualified to pass that sort of judgment, but I'm still entitled to an opinion, [laughter]

Peter Chapman: If operations were so limited in logging in the '40s, yet you were responsible for putting out forest fires in fairly remote spots, did you ever wonder about the value of putting fires out in areas where logging seemed quite remote?

Les Stilwell: There were places where, of course, the decision was made to let the fire go. Even as late as 1970s, I guess, we let fires go up the Duncan, because if all you had was manpower - and these people were trying to build fire line by hand - and you had helicopters hauling stuff in there at a great old rate ...

In fact, it used to keep one helicopter totally busy from the end of the Duncan River Forest Road. I think this fire was up around Hume Creek or something, years ago. And they just were not making any headway, the ground was tough, somebody was going to get hurt seriously in there. And besides that, we had a helicopter in there that could probably be put to better use somewhere else. You know, this was a decadent cedar stand that had been hit by a fire before. So the decision was made to leave it. Rains came four or five days later. I don't think that we would have done much more except spend a lot more money on it.

But I think in those situations, somebody had to make some decisions, some priorities. The only way now you can really handle some of these big fires is you've got to have some road access. You've got to be able to get some machines in. You can't do it with manpower alone anymore. So over the years there have been places when you're just endangering life and limb, and you're spending a lot of money and you're not going to gain an inch. So that has to be faced as a fact of life, occasionally. Now there's a lot more country been opened up in the last ten years than there was in the twenty-five years previously, primarily again because of the types of machines that have been developed to do this.

But again, you know, a great lot of the problems that occur are the overbuilding of roads.