Today I went to a pow wow on the Stanjikoming reserve. It was pretty cool... tons of drumming, dancing, singing and cool costumes. Their pow wow specialty is bannock burgers which apparently were amazing (but I obviously didn't have one).
We also entered a canoe race for $10. It was just around a little island and back, Ash and I had one team to compete against. They flipped their canoe about half way through so we pretty much won by default haha. We thought it was all for fun and then we realized that we won $50!!! And the team that came 2nd place (who swam their canoe in) won $30 bucks. Hilarious.
The other day I did some awesome chainsaw training. I cut down 3 trees... they were TALL!! Maybe 60ft? They were all partially dead.. all jack pines. Chainsawing is awesome, I love it. I also did a lot of bucking and delimbing. My crew leader is a chainsaw instructor so we do a lot of chainsawing during training which is great.
Tomorrow we're doing helicopter slinging which is getting a big net and filling it with supplies and the helicopter hovers over top of you while you hook it on. I did it in my SP 100 class- it was pretty cool. We're also doing fire extinguisher training tomorrow.
They train for EVERYTHING here!! You even have to do ladder training (practice walking up and down a ladder). The other day we also trained with bear spray which was neat. We all got fake bear spray cans and pulled the pin and sprayed at a cardboard box bear. It's funny all the training we do here because I carried bear spray all last summer and the only thing they said was stay upwind so you don't mace yourself. Guess it's better safe than sorry for the government.
The weather has been really junky lately- cloudy and rainy. Today the sun shined for an hour or so and it was lovely! I hope it dries out soon. A few crews from Thunder Bay got sent to Quebec today... I hope we're soon behind them!
Miss you guys a lot. Hope everyone at home is awesome!!
<3