Uninvited Guests

The week started tragically, for the town of Cranbrook.  At about 2 o'clock on Tuesday morning, the last remaining wooden buildings on Baker Street (the old city's Main/High Street) burnt to the ground. There were three or four of them together at the western end of the street and they were over a hundred years old. That's old for this part of Canada and they were the last original buildings, built in the old wild west style with high flat board frontages. One was a second hand shop that was an absolute gold mine of memorabilia and junk. I had spent several hours strolling around its many nooks and crannies eyeing up things for my cabin once it is finished. You know the sort of thing; animal skins for the cabin floor; stuffed elk and moose heads for the mantel shelf; old black powder musket for the rifle rack etc.

Fortunately, no-one was either killed or injured although, there were several people asleep upstairs above the shops when the fire started. At least one was trapped by the fire and had to be rescued by the fire service when it arrived. The cause of the fire is unknown but most bets are on either an electrical fault or lightening, there was a tremendous thunderstorm over the city on Monday night. It is a great loss for the city of Cranbrook and for the individuals directly concerned. I understand that the owner of the second hand shop had no insurance and therefore, not only has he lost irreplaceable items but, he will receive no compensation.

Two days after the blaze - not much left to salvage.

The one remaining wooden building, that looks like it is still intact, is so badly damaged it will have to be pulled down. I wait with interest to see what will now go up in the place of these splendid old buildings. I have a sneaking suspicion that they will not be rebuilt but, some horrible concrete monster will rise from the ashes, as it has done everywhere else in the town. Actually, there is no real reason why they could not be replaced with similar buildings. There are plenty of examples where old town centres have been preserved and still have their old wild west appearance. Whitefish, across the border, in Montana is a good example where this has happened.

As I have started on the G1/4 stuff I might as well continue and leave the G3 stuff to the end this week. John Shepard, the homeless man, was moved from his camp site beside Highway 3 to his new home on the Haha Creek Road on Tuesday. In the event, there were more than enough people to move him and neither Ron nor I were needed. As it transpired however, I wish I had been there.


John was moved by the man that owns the camper and a few other local people who make up John's support group. As far as I was aware all went smoothly but, late that evening I received a call from Ron who told me that he had John with him at his home and needed my advice.  Apparently, while they were setting John and the camper up in the new location, a local man appeared and hurled unrepeatable abuse at them and at John in particular, accusing John of being a worthless vagrant and threatening to shoot him. Real or not, this was understandably intimidating to John, who is neither mentally nor physically robust. To make matters worse, the man returned later when most people had left and repeated the threats. When Ron visited later, John was in such a state of fear that Ron did not hesitate to take him away. To me the correct action was very simple, it was time for the Mounties to get their man and so I told Ron to report the incidents to the RCMP immediately, which they did. It is still not clear to me why someone had not done this earlier.


The Mounties went to visit the abusive man the following day and so far this has been enough to deter any further incidents. However, it is still a concern and I suspect we have now discovered who it was that made the complaints about John camping near the highway. I have dropped in to check on John a couple of times but he was not in on each occasion and so I left some groceries in the camper. I did, however, manage to speak to him on the phone and was very pleased to hear that he had landed a few days work in Cranbrook doing some yard work for someone, who put him up while the work lasted.

John's new home, much nicer than the camp site by Highway 3.

His view looking west over the Haha Lake.

In other respects, it has been a good week. I have been fortunate enough to discover four eagles' nests with sitting birds and I shall watch them all with interest as they incubate their eggs and bring up their young. I have also been lucky to receive several trout from Tex and Kevin who have been fishing in the evenings. One was a rainbow trout, which was delicious and was still wriggling when I received it from Tex. It was nothing, however, in comparison to the three Steelhead (I think) trout they gave me on Thursday, whose flesh was an orangey pink and tasted more like salmon than trout. They had to wait until Friday to be eaten because on Thursday it was Ron's birthday and I joined him and his family and a few friends from Wardner for celebrations in the evening. It was heart warming to see Ron's friends and family around him.

I have been promising to tell you about wood licensing in BC and now is the time. One can download from the internet, at no cost, a fire wood licence. It permits you to collect dead wood on Crown land, of which (as you are now aware) there is no shortage here. The only restriction is that you can only transport lengths up to 4 ft long. This is no real inconvenience other than the requirement to cut it on site if needs be. This restriction is to prevent the commercial exploitation of resources for purposes other than for fire wood. The great benefit of course is that there is an endless supply of winter fuel, all you need to do is to go and collect it. The benefit to the forest is that it helps clear the forest floor of dry dead wood that, if it is not removed, presents a serious fire hazard.

There is also another type of licence available to the general public that permits the collection of dead wood, standing or on the ground, up to 12 ft (3.60m) in length. For this license you have to pay a small license fee of about $12. There are restrictions about where, what and how the wood can be collected but these are easily accommodated. This license is very useful for people, like myself, who want or need wood for projects such as mine, furniture making, wood hobbies etc. On Thursday I had a fascinating, educational day with Kevin, who took me out into the forest to look at and for wood with a view to me applying for one of these 'wood salvage' licences, which I did on Friday, requesting up to 50 cubic metres of Lodge Pole pine. Kevin showed me how to identify the different types of wood and what to look for in order to get suitable wood for spindles, railings, furniture etc.  I can now identify fir, from pine, from larch etc and know what diameters I need for the various things I want to make. We also identified several areas where there is, frankly, so much wood that I could harvest it for my requirements for years without making much of an impression on it. Apparently, you can have several of these licences, covering different areas, running concurrently.

On the current ops front it has been a slow week. We had to wait all week for the replacement rafters from the Indian Reservation Mill but they were available on Friday and we went down to collect them and took them up to the site ready for putting them in place next week. Most of the week therefore was spent on less glamorous work, such as trimming the final gable ends to match the 12:12 pitch of the rafters and putting in place fir blocks under the sub-flooring.

This is one of the valley rafters that was rotten. Looking at it now it is easy to spot but, when it was wet, covered in snow and under all the other timber, it was less easy to see. Anyway the mill manager, Raymond, came out to the site on Monday, inspected the rotten timber and agreed to replace it, free of charge.

The four replacement timbers on site. Now we can finish the roof framing and make a start on some of the other, remaining tasks.

Cutting the gable ends was not easy. I had been waiting for the rafters closest to the gable to be removed before attempting this with the chainsaw. In the event my own chainsaw proved too light weight to handle the task. I think the motor is now well and truly knackered and the chain needs replacing. I just hope that there is enough strength left in the motor for fire wood cutting and collecting the 'salvage wood'. I had to use Owen's, larger, saw and by the end of the job his chain was also U/S and will need shortening or replacing.

But, the job is now done and as you can see here the gable end now conforms to the line of the rafters and the SIPs will sit comfortably on both. The SIP panels have been ordered and all that remains for us to do now is pass the final measurements to the supplier who will cut them, so they can be lifted into place without further cutting on site. They should be with the supplier in 3 - 4 weeks and then a couple of days to cut them and they should be ready for collection/delivery. I am impatient for that to happen, in order to get some protection over the structure.

Beneath the sub-flooring I have been busy cutting, rubbing down and fitting blocks of fir to fill the gaps between the beams and sub-flooring. I will need to do this in several places and have been using left-overs from the rafters. I estimate I will just have enough wood to complete the job without having to buy any more wood.

I have also had a few uninvited guests. On Thursday evening on my way to Ron's I was showing the house off (I am sure she didn't mind) to Susan, a friend of Ron's parents, when I noticed a bird's nest on the beams under the sub-flooring. As I removed it, we noticed a North American Robin coming in with some more nesting material. She waited patiently on the gable of my bedroom dormer, mouth full of more grass, for me to leave and watched as I destroyed her day's work. When I returned on Friday she had replaced the nest and there was the beginnings of a second beside it. I removed them as well but on Saturday I found another, in another corner which, I also removed. I guess they will eventually get the hint. At least they are not woodpeckers.

I may be a little late publishing my blog next weekend because I have agreed to attend a trade show in Cranbrook in support of my contractors, which runs from Friday through to Sunday. So I am planning on publishing late on Sunday evening.