Welcome to Hell!Welcome to Hell!
| Greetings. This is a semi-guided tour through hell.
For those of you unfamiliar with Hell's geographical location, it is located about 100
airmiles north-west of Fort Nelson, BC. Where is that, you say?? Find a map of BC that
includes the bottom half of the Yukon. Find the centre of BC (somewhere near Prince
George). Go straight north until you hit the border of BC and the Yukon. There should be a
small dot called Fort Nelson. If you can't find it, don't be
alarmed; you're not missing a whole lot. During the summers, in order to finance my way through my never ending university degree, I have been working in tree planting camps. For those of you not familiar with tree planting, there are a number of lovely websites out there. Suffice to say, you live in the woods and either plant trees or work in the kitchen. I did the latter... For the most part, this job is pretty good. You get up early (breakfast was usually 5am, you do the math) and got to bed around 9pm (hopefully with a nap sometime in between). Most of the camps are quite picturesque and you get to commune with trees and fuzzy things (all sorts of fuzzy things, from bears to mice..). This camp was the exception. This was a fly-in camp. The only way in or out is by helicoptor. This means the whole contract (in this case, 3 weeks) is spent in camp, days off included. This alone is enough to give a person a twitch. Our particular experience was enhanced by the fact that it a) rained all but 3 days; b) the camp was situated so it caught all the run-off from the block; and c) the soil in and around Fort Nelson has a nice "gumbo" like consistency when it gets wet. Most people are sceptical when I describe the trials I endured in Hell. Trust me, they're real. Constant rain, no time off away from camp and every thing you own being damp and/or muddy is not something that you quickly forget. But far be it from me to try to convince you. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves... Back into HellWell, apparently the "S" for "sucker" is glowing loudly and proudly on my forehead because I managed, once again, to find my self back in the Hell that is Ft Nelson. This time the voyage into hell was a little more grueling; a 45 minute drive, 3 hour boat ride and 10 minute chopper ride had me feeling like John Candy in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." When we finally ended up in camp, we found ourselves about 10 km from the point where the BC, Yukon and NWT borders meet and just below the Artic Circle. Being just below the Arctic Circle in June means that summer solstice is almost upon us. With summer solstice comes the longest day of the year; that's right, it never got dark. It didn't really even get dusky. This made it rather hard to sleep for the first few days, but made getting up at 4:30am a less painful experience. Again, I have decided to let my pictures of hell speak for me, so here we go, descending into another circle.
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