Shaun Newman Podcast - #684 - Jasper Wildfire

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Liam is the co-owner of Freya Logging Inc. in Prince George BC. Their group did fire prevention logging around Jasper and he discusses using thinning techniques to reduce fire hazard along with the promotion of Aspen trees over Pines & Spruce. Marty a.k.a. Marty Up North spent 30+ years as a petroleum engineer and made a name for himself with his YouTube videos that documented his excursions into the Canadian outback. We discuss what happened during the Jasper Wildfire and things that need to be changed moving into the future. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener.

This is Ken Drysdale. This is Dr. Mark Trozy. Hey, this is Gordon McGill. This is Drew Weatherhead, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. How's everybody doing today? Happy Tuesday. All right, before we get into Sean's walkabout, his world travels,

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take care of that for you and you won't find many like Mr. Shane Stafford. 780842-3433. Caleb Taves, Renegade Acres, yeah, they do the community spotlight. This month in July, we've been talking a lot about you, the listener, the SMP community. That's taken on the form of Substack for the month of July. And I don't know, my theory on Substack has been to never overdo it. I'm not one to have 7,000 emails in my inbox from the podcast. or from anyone for that matter.

So it's been pretty sparse, pretty sparing. You know, we've been doing some trip updates. I got a new one coming here. And then, of course, some of the live updates with us doing, you know, the attempt on Trump and stuff like that. Today's show was alive. We did Sunday night that featured some guys on the Forest Fire in Jaspper, the wildfire in Jaspers.

So if you're wanting to pay attention to what the podcast has been doing for the month of July, we've been paying it well we've been hanging out mostly on substack it's free to subscribe to down in the show notes if you want to become a paid subscriber throughout the year we do uh substack exclusives with some of the guests some of the shows and that's where you can find that content as well i've been now on the road for um well pretty much a month it's been 32 days on the road we started in lloyd and then we've done over 6,000 k in driving We are now an upstate Minnesota at Mel's family cabin enjoying some time there. Things get back to normal, August 1st. So Thursday things are going to start to click. Mash up, you're going to see me back there. I know everybody's a little bit sad. We've had a fun month.

I think Tuesday's had a fun month. You know, it's starting out with Truck Prodnick, then Vance Crow, Drew Weatherhead. And then last week, the Mash up north with Marty up north. And it's back to just regular old me. this Friday and for the third straight year I was thinking about that today I'm going to be at the lake for a mashup and we try and have a little bit of fun I think I've done it on the pontoon boat one year and I don't know maybe I'll be in a broom closet this year I've done the mashup from several different spots it seems like there's never going to be a dull mashup ever again with the state of the world

and what's going on I'm looking forward to being back there so 10 a.m. Mountain standard time this guy and, well, everybody's favorite or maybe you're not a big fan of Tuesday. It doesn't matter either way. Tews is going to be there, and I'm sure he'll be fired up. I'm going to be fired up. I'm excited to be back. We've got some information regarding clothing, some memorabilia. If you're interested in that sort of thing,

make sure to tune in to the mashup Friday 10am. That's going live. What else can I tell you? Other than 25 days in the car on the road before we got to Mel's parents was interesting to all the parents out there that have ever tried anything like that? You probably understand what I mean. And if you've never tried it and you're a little nervous to, I suggest you try it. Like, I mean, yeah, of course there's a few times where you're ready to kill each other,

and they're probably ready to kill me. Other than that, it's a ton of fun and I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. The only thing that I struggled with was, you know, I'd flick on Twitter, you know, once a day probably and see some of the things going on. I'd be like, you should be talking about this. But a break for everyone, including this guy, as I say that, there were still four shows a week coming out on the podcast. So, you know, my term of a break, I guess, is a little different than some others.

Either way, I'm excited to get back to Monday through Friday. I'm going to be coming live from Minnesota here for a week or two before we get back on the road back home. And look forward to some guests coming up. Thursday, we're going to have Tom and Alex. That's going to be the first, you know, like I'm back rolling Tom and Alex coming back on. I believe it's a 14th time. And after that, we're just going to put the pedal down and away we go.

So if you've been enjoying your July, July is almost over, folks. Isn't that crazy to say? And August 1st right around the corner means this show is going back to five days a week. And we will see you here. Now, shall we get on to that tale of the tape? The first is co-owner of Freya Loggins. the second 30 plus years as a patrolling engineer who goes by his YouTube handle, Marty Up North, where he documented his adventures in the Canadian Outback.

I'm talking about Liam Parfid and Marty Blanche. So buckle up, here we go. All right, welcome to the Shaw Numa podcast. We are live here tonight. We're going to talk a little... We're going to start... I'm laughing because we're starting a few minutes late, trying to get James on, but we're having some issues with technology.

and him running an old school phone. So one of the difficulties of stream here it, I guess, as we find out more. That's all right. We got a few guests. They're going to hop on. We're going to talk about Jasper, the Wildfire.

And, you know, obviously the topic and what has gone on in Jasper is not fun. But certainly having some people with some background to talk about it should be interesting nonetheless. And I think that part of it is always interesting. so I don't think watchers of the podcast, listening to the podcast,

got Marty up north and then a new guest to the show, Liam Parfit. So I'm going to bring them in and boys, thanks for hopping on tonight. Hey, Sean, thanks for having us. Now, to James,

if you're tuning in and watching this on Twitter, I apologize, that really sucks because I was hoping to have you in here and have the four of us, regardless the three of us, will labor on.

Jens, Marty, you can, I'll start with you and then, and then Liam, you can hop on in. I just want to get, Marty doesn't really need much of an introduction on here, but if you want to just give your background and you're opening, you know, not thoughts or arguments, just your thoughts around Jasper, the fire, and then we'll switch over to Liam. And then from there, boys, honestly, it's a round table, feel free to jump in whenever. Sure. Yeah, for those who don't know me, I'm a retired engineer, spent 20, 25 years. of my oil and gas career living up north in Alberta. That's how I got the moniker Marty up north,

living in towns just on the outskirt of Jasper. So we lived in Edson, Alberta, Fox Creek, Alberta, a little bit further north, you know, Grand Prix, places like that. And basically semi-retired these days, spending a lot of time on social media. But, you know, my take on Jasper, I had a tweet that, you know, for all intense purposes, went pretty viral the other day.

And I basically, actually, before I get to that tweet, so Jasper is my playground. Like for those 25 years living up north, you know, when you live in the north, we don't live up north. It's a choice we make, right? We want to be in the forest. And we're typically like, I hike, I hunt, I fish, I snowmobile. Like we, you know, you don't live in the north without enjoying the north. And for me, Jasper was my background because I love motorized forest, but I also love hiking.

And I've been hiking in Jasper for about, I don't know, 25 years. And I have probably hundreds of videos on my YouTube channel that are focused specifically on hikes in Jasper. And in almost every hike I've ever done in Jasper, at some point, I put the camera on myself and I turn and I say, you know, look at this crap. And I'll highlight something that frustrates me in Jasper or other national parks, whether it be trees that are old and dead and haven't been harvested, or the fact that, there's no more animals anywhere or, you know, Parks Canada's putting a, letting a fire access road get decommissioned and overgrown and stuff like that. So in a nutshell, you know, last week I was very critical. I think the events of Jasper are absolutely,

were absolutely predictable, preventable, and it's a travesty. It's a travesty that it had to get this far and that people had to lose their homes. Liam, you're new to the show, by all means, take as much time as you like. Just filling the audience in on who you are and what you do. My name is Liam Farford. I'm part of owner of Freya Logging, one of the original founders of Freya Logging. I'm a forester, a forestry degree, and I kind of spend my time these days raising awareness around some of the values of having forest that's less dense and I've sort of been splitting my time between about as far north into

the Yukon as you can get to about my southern boundaries about McBride, British Columbia, which is just an hour and a half from Jasper and sort of looking at the benefits of semi-open forest and how that reflects on fire hazard and biodiversity and our lack of semi-open forest through across that range sort of from from all of Western Canada. We're looking at all these very tight coniferous forests, not a lot of aspen in them, particularly like in the Prince George region, we have this sort of legacy of forestry activities that has fostered pine and spruce and this dense coniferous forest. It's natural as well. It was natural in Jasper, but when we can sort of look at this forest as a little less natural than what we would actually think it has,

I've been looking at some paleontological studies. I don't know if you know what a benthic layer is, but when there's a pollen event in the summertime or in the springtime, that pollen sits on top of the lake. It sinks to the bottom of the lake. You can read the bottom of the lake. The benthic layers, the pollen stays in there for not for a long time. We can go back and we can kind of recreate what forests look like.

And the forest that we had around Jasper was, we think it's natural, but it probably isn't, right? It was grown in from it was probably a grassland prior to the establishment of the park because the grass fires used to come in from the sort of like Alberta Plains and burn the forest off. So we've had a lot of forest encroachment in Western Canada and the world probably in the last couple hundred years. We've eliminated First Nations cultural fire burning practices.

And we actually logged Jasper in 2018 and 2019 with Canfor. It was fire hazard prevention logging just to the sort of west and a little bit north of town. So I was kind of interested to see where the fire stopped. And in this case, the fire happened to have stopped right before our fire line there. So I'm not sure if I'm as I would like to use this. Like it's really, really sad for everybody's lost their homes. It's even sad for me. I mean, Jasper is a beautiful place that I used to go to fairly frequently.

there's a lot of memories tied up there. People got married at birthday parties. There's just a lot of personal meaning to that place. And I think we shouldn't jump on it as a tragedy and start pointing fingers at everybody as much as we should say, hey, you know, we tried some fire prevention activities ahead of time and they work, but we just didn't do enough.

Why didn't we do enough? And how do we stop this from happening again? Because we lost Linton. Fort McMurray had a disaster. what's next, right? So Jasper is an opportunity to, you know, to learn from the mistakes. But there's a lot of people that want to do the best thing. I think we need to step back from the sort of like that there's this narrative about climate change and forest management.

And there's not a lot of room between the two people that are using it. And I think that's a big mistake because we are seeing warmer summers than we used to. and we're seeing a lot more Hector is getting burned than we used to. Part of that is fire suppression, but part of that is climate change. Both of those things are driving this, and we're probably going to see a slightly warmer world than we were 100 years ago based on a lot of the data that's coming out of there. But you can't just say climate change, we're done.

We don't have to do anything else. And I think that would be the goal of any sort of like conversation we have today is to look for solutions here. This doesn't happen again. and to look at what works and what doesn't work. And I think what doesn't work is saying forest management, climate change. It's one or the other. No, it's both.

If climate change is here to stay like the climate change, people say it is, we have to do better forest management. And that's the only real thing we can change here is forest management because you can't really stop China from using coal to turn in the light so they can teach your kids to read, right? Yeah, I definitely tend to agree. with everything you said, Liam. I mean, you know, climate change is real.

I showcase that all the time. Same thing in my hikes. I mean, I just come back from a hike the other day, and I brought back these coral, these horn corals. And I love to explain to people that these horn corals used to be on an ocean bottom, and now I found them at 1,800 meters above sea level. But so I like what you said, that it's not one or the other, right?

Just climate change or just mismanagement. But I'll ask, you a question. Do you kind of share my observation? I mean, my observation of going through Jasper is that we kind of had the management side pretty good up until a point, like, I don't know, I'm going to say 2010, maybe a little bit later or a little bit earlier, but do you feel like something changed along the way in terms of the management approach? Well, I can only speak to personal experience. So in 2018, we went there with Canfor and we removed over a thousand truckloads of wood to the west and the north.

That's a pretty big deal for a national park. So I was impressed. Park staff that we worked with were awesome. There was a couple first nation, one first nations lady. I can remember her name, but like she was really big about getting back to grassland. Like elk don't eat pine trees. They eat grass. When there's less pine trees, there's more grass.

Their prescription was great. It was anything but for naspin to remove. So we removed the pine and the spruce and left all the deciduous. And the Douglas fir is a little more fire. adapted. Then we went back again. I think it was 2022 and we logged a campground just south of town there. And now when we actually did like they we were getting the contract and like, what do you mean? You don't want to charge us any money. I says, well, I'm going to keep the woods. So we're not going to charge you any money. And well, we can't. You can't do it. I says, yes, we can.

Woods worth lots of money. It was peak of the lumber market. So we went in, did it for free. And then we went back in and we went to there's a caribou, uh, a material. internal pen they're building just south there on towards the park on the parkway and we we log that one as well with we're subcontracting to the to the company that had we're building all the maternal pens and the fencing and everything but we bet I think we've been there four times maybe five times because we have to go back a couple of times for the caribou pen I'm not sure if went back two or three times but like they were trying but when you looked at they carved out some of it but that dead pine is is persistent it doesn't disappear It's we're still harvesting dead pine in British Columbia that blew over in in in in 2017. It died in 05. It blew over in 2017.

And we're still harvesting. It's still good for pulp. And so that one doesn't go anywhere. But I think I think what needs to happen now is everybody involved needs to sit down and say, okay, these are these are things that work. These are things that didn't work. Obviously leaving a whole bunch of dead pine around Jasper that was dense enough for easy crown fires was a mistake.

I think we need to look at the sort of crown fire, ground fire thing, and it doesn't have to be all or nothing, right? Like you could actually just remove the dead wood and leave the greenwood and have a forest type that would support a ground fire, but not a crown fire. And if you think about it, if you have a campfire, it'll escape on you, right? But it'll escape 10 feet, five meters from the fire. It won't escape 200 feet from the fire, right? When you get a campground campfire escaping.

But when you have a crown fire, it's escaping. It can easily push dinner size burning embers, you know, 10, 15 kilometers ahead of the front of the fire. But not all the time, but definitely the 5 kilometer mark is quite common. I've watched fires jump rivers. I've watched fires jump lakes, big lakes, the Natchako Reservoir. I watched a fire jump about two and a half kilometers in 2011. And that's that crown fire. So if we can make the forest within range of towns where it's very difficult to have a crownfire,

it's not impossible. The way you actually measure crown fire risk is what's called crown bulk density. It's a fancy way to measure how much fuel you have in each hectare of the forest. And the way they measure it is how much wind speed do you need to have a crown fire? So if you have a forest that needs 10 kilometers an hour to sustain a crownfire versus 60 kilometers an hour, you're not going to have as much of a risk because, yeah, sure, you're going to get gust to 60 kilometers an hour, but you very rarely get sustained winds about 20, 30 kilometers an hour. And even if you think about the Black Cross, which for firefighters, that's 30% humidity,

lower than 30% humidity, higher than 30 degrees and faster than 30 kilometer hour wind speeds, you're still not going to get a sustained crown fire if you can get that crown bulk density down. And I think we can do that and solve forest. Inside of that forest, we'll have more animals, more berries, more values for people, right? Like people really don't care about pine needles. Well, and actually while you were talking, I just want to throw something out there.

You know, we talk about Jasper, in one term, but there's the forest of Jasper, right? I mean, Jasper's a national park. Don't quote me on this, but I think it's about 1,600 square miles. Like, it's big. And then there's Jasper Townsite. And when you're talking, I'm thinking, you know, perhaps the whole point,

part doesn't need to be managed exactly the same way, right? I mean, there's one thing to managing the back country, but the area immediately, like, if you wanted to protect, say, Jasper proper, what kind of an area around the town of Jasper would need a different management to protect that town? Well, I think, I think like if you use like five kilometers as a minimum, perhaps seven or eight kilometers as a circle, and you can identify those forest types that are more dangerous than others. And we're not talking like I fully believe that we need to have some natural areas to watch what is current forestry. I'm not going to say natural because I don't think that

anything we see is natural. I think First Nations have been managing the landscape for so long that it's impossible to to, it's very difficult to determine what is exactly natural. But sort of like without current management practices changing things, it's nice to have some areas that show that. But It doesn't mean the whole town. It just means we need, and this goes for, this goes for everywhere else, too. We need to have more intensive management areas within about five to seven kilometer radius of town. And you can't pick, because they did those fire breaks to the west, and that worked beautifully. The fire stopped there.

And I'm sure if we wouldn't have done those, the fire would have jumped and continued on its way because those, they would have landed. There wasn't anything for the embers to catch as those things. But you can't predict where the wind's going to come in from. And the wind comes in from the south, not imprequently. I'm sure, Marty, you could talk about it. that better than we spent more time, Jasper than I have. But the wind can come in from the south. Sometimes the wind can come in from the east.

The wind's coming from the west all the time, and it can come in from the north, right? So it's not productive to try to have a whole bunch of experts get together and say, okay, we're going to treat 1% of the area that's a bad area because that's the most dangerous area. It's more productive. You know what? We're going to take five to seven kilometers and we're going to have some areas that are very well cleaned up.

And other areas, we're just going to reduce the odds of a crown fire because the crown fire is what you can't fight. You can't, you can't fault anybody for not putting enough firefighters in front of that fire because you cannot action a crown fire. You can't even put heavy equipment in front of it because it can move it faster than a like, like a D6 will move at five, five kilometers an hour, seven kilometers an hour. Sometimes those fires move at 10 kilometers an hour, 15 kilometers. You cannot put people in front of those fires when they're crowning. All you can do is make the fire less likely to crown in that forest so it just crowns intermittently or. I just want to hop in real quick, Marty.

I apologize. I'm the layman here, and I just want to make sure that I understand everything. When you're talking crown fire versus what other type of fire, and if you just wouldn't mind breaking it down for the moron on this side, I would appreciate that. I'm sure it's real simple. I'm sure I'm understanding clearly, but I want to make sure I'm not jumping over anything. Picture your forest, right?

Your Jasper forest before it burned. And I will say this, too. It's going to look great in two years. It's going to be green. It'll be beautiful. It'll be fireweed. There'll be different things in there. But a crown fire is when the fire is burning in the canopy of the forest. So in the branches. So if you think your average tree in Jasper was probably between 50 and 80 feet tall, that fire is sustained in the top part of the trees. A ground fire is crawling along the ground. So it's not in the canopy. So you're looking at flames of maybe, you know, knee height, maybe chest height, maybe as tall as you occasionally when it hits, like a blow down tree, it would burn a branch on the ground, but it's not getting up into the crown.

And so when you have a dense forest, it's easy because there's trees, touching trees, touching trees, touching trees. So you remove a few of the trees and then it can't jump to the next canopy, the next top of the tree. So a ground fire will spread five meters in front of it. A crown fire will easily spread 5,000 meters in front of it. So it's a thousand times worse. And have a crown fire than a ground fire. And firefighters, when you see the shows where the firefighters are throwing water on the ground, they're throwing water out of ground fire.

There's nothing you can do on a crown fire. And am I correct, too? Like if we go walk in some of these areas now and you look up, the trees are all dead, but the trunks at the base and the grass underneath is almost intact. Like it's very eerie, right? The fire just moves so fast and just burns the tops of the trees. I have some great pictures of forest fires from last year in the Fort Nelson region. and the moss is green. So the moss was dry, but it didn't, it must have been a bit moist.

But the trees, the trees burned and they're black, but the moss is green. So when you get a crown fire going, it moves so fast and so explosively because our crown bulk densities, which is, it's technically a meter of kilograms of fuel per cubic meter of canopy. So if you think a hectare's 10,000 square meters, if you have 10 meter tall trees, you have 100,000 cubic meters of space in your Hector. So when you get above a certain amount of fuel, it's just like if you have a campfire, it's eight pieces of wood in it and you take out four or the five of the pieces of wood, but the remaining pieces don't touch very well, fire almost goes out, right?

Or it will go out. So you can manage the fire using the geometry of the stand, which is making instead of trees this close together, making trees that close, and then the fire can't jump across. And that's what most of Canada looks like fire. You know, I'll just throw this out there. A lot of people think we have this very wonderfully, you know, the Jasper forests are part of the boreal forest systems. So there's sub-boreal and there's boreal white and black spruce,

but a lot of pine and jasper, so obviously fire-dominated ecosystems. But if you look at Canada, if you take jack pine and lodgeful pine, some people call the pine that grew in Jasper jack-fine, but it's technically log-full pine, but they do hybridize, so it's very similar pine. black spruce white spruce balsam those four species make up i think 75 percent of canada and aspens another 10 percent so almost 90 percent of canada is just a handful of species i can't

them on one hand yeah if somebody wants to see a really different kind of forest still in the mountains it's canaanascus you know you come south of canaanascus and you go in peter lawheed national park and places like that where or provincial park where there's been constant ongoing active logging for the last 60 years, those forests look different. They look completely different than, especially than, I find the forest around Jasper to have been one of the most homogeneous, like, I don't know how I got that way. I really don't. So that forest, the forest in Jasper, if you get in your car and you head north, it looks

the same for a long ways. Like if you were to drive from Jasper to Prince George to Burns Lake to, to, you It would change a little bit past Smithers. It'd be a little bit more coastal. If you headed north on 37, which is the Kitwanga Cassiore Highway, you pick that same forest type up after about 300, 350 kilometers. And then it's the same for another 1,200 kilometers. So nature's creating these very homogenous stands with forest fires.

They're typically hard to pine and kind of all the same age. Well, they're all the same age within a few years. They're generally all the same height. There's not a lot of different. You don't have big trees and small trees in a lot of cases. they're kind of all the same size. There's some big ones and small ones, but there's not four foot trees and small trees.

They're all between six inches and 12 inches, generally speaking. So these are stands that are fire generated, and pine loves fire. It absolutely loves fire. If you see pine, like pine will outgrow anything on that freshly disturbed, burned all the carbon off like a gravel pit, basically after some of these fires go through. So pine out competes other species on there.

What we really need to see, and I'll say this for James because he didn't make it to the show, but we need more aspen. Like, it doesn't burn very easily, right? Once it hits leaf out, it'll burn in the spring when there's grass and leaves on the ground.

But by the time we get to sort of like June, July, August, when its leaves are green, you can't burn an aspen tree to save your life. If you break off some aspen leaves and hold a lighter up to them, they're not going to burn. You burn your hand a lot quicker.

Even when it's dead. I mean, when I go hunting, that's the last thing we burn. Even a dead aspen just smokes. Like it doesn't, can you, can you for the viewer, oh, it looks like James. Look at this. Hey, we got James, James in.

Let's get James to join in. But before James join in, can I just ask one quick question to Liam? Sure, sure. Yeah. Hey, Liam, just for the viewers, describe, describe what an old tree is in Alberta versus an old tree, let's say, on the coast of, you know, of the coast of BC. I mean, probably there's a few three, four hundred year old trees in Alberta up high and some tucked away corner for, perhaps like above, like close to timber line. But generally speaking, I think a lot of the pine and spruce stands in Alberta would be old at 120 or 140 years old.

They'd be really old actually. So a lot of them would be when you drive between Calgary and Golden, sort of that, I can't remember the number of that or sort of come out back into the trench there, between Cranbrook and Golden. Like some of those, there was a, I remember when I was a kid, there was a fire, then there was another burn 20 years later. It burnt through the, through the regenerating pine. So like some of these stands, like they're unusual. to get to 30, 40 years old before they're burning again. And that's sort of the pattern that we've seen through those stands. So there's not a lot of this big stuff.

Whereas on the coast or even actually, you know, in McBride, like not very far from Jasper. If you come into British Columbia and head north to Prince George, there's some thousand-year-old trees. They don't know how old there because they're so rotten. But, you know, they're 14, 15 feet in diameter. Very, very old ancient forests. A lot of rain, a lot of moisture coming down there.

But, you know, Alberta is a pretty dry place, right? you guys we steal all your rain with the with the rocky mountains and the caribou mountains and the various ones right so you guys are in a dry area we're in a wet area wet areas yeah you can get amazing trees very old very large diameter very great variety those trees are kind of we shouldn't be logging those in my opinion like those trees should stay there they've been there for three times longer than than than canada's been established or 10 times longer in can't have established in some places but on the on the contrast allows boreal for us and we

British Columbia has lots of burial forests as well. They only get 100 years, 120 years old. It's, you know, they burn and then you get an even age stand coming up very, very homogenous. It's not a wonderfully diverse stand like people tend to imagine in their minds. So you're absolutely right, Marty, like those those pine stands and in Jasper, they're not, they're not some magical stand that was absolutely beautiful. There's many, many, many, many, many, probably about 10% of Canada looks somewhat similar to that. Before we carry on, James, I really apologize because normally I would have pronounced your name about 17 times before we started, but I'm on the fly here. Steadel.

Am I close? I'll let you get away with this one, Sean. It's Stytle. Stytle. Well, Steadle or Stytle, you know? I think one of the two. James, thanks for hopping on. What we've done with Liam and Marty is at the start, we always give, you know, a lot of, you know,

a couple minutes just for you to tell a little bit of your background. And, you know, if you want to, a few comments on Jasper, and then you can just hop right into this roundtable. I mean, I'm sitting back and enjoying myself. Marty and Liam have pretty much taken over the show. I'm sure they'll add you right into it. But if you want to just give a bit of your background so people can get a feel for who you are. Sure.

Yeah, I was listening to the show on the way up here. Sorry, I was just at a barbecue and I went to my girlfriend's house to use my phone. That didn't work. So I made the run back home here. to get on the laptop and seems to be working. I hate technology. I hate all these changes they make to the operating systems. They always got to buy a new phone.

But my phone still works. Why don't I got to buy a new phone, you know? I'm here in Prince George here. I'm a woodworker. I got a wood shop. I'll just point out the ceiling behind me. That's made out of Aspen. So I try to put my refloaf at two.

So that's kind of my one of my sticks in life. I grew up on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere, south of Prince George, a place called Punchaw. I never had power, no TV, no phone or anything like that. And, you know, just grew up in the woods. Like, you know, most people grow up in a suburbs. They look at a lot of houses, a lot of human activity. I grew up just looking at trees and birds and wildlife and learning about the forest from a young age. I don't have the experience with fire like you guys did.

I was listening to the show up here, and you guys covered a lot of amazing ground. Honestly, I don't know if I needed to come on a show. It's so it sounds like you guys have all this stuff covered. But, you know, I kind of come at it. I look at the world through the lenses of aspen goggles, I call them. James' topic is rather specific, and he's out there promoting the Aspen. And maybe Liam can talk about why the Aspen, and I think some people call the Aspen the Poplar more generally,

but why is the Aspen demonized in this province, in Alberta in particular, and what we're doing to prevent the Aspen growth and flip that into why Aspen from an ecological point of view should be promoted. Wait a second. Before we go any further, is Aspen a popular? Yes. Is that what you're saying?

A poplar is an Aspen. Or Popple, if you're from back east. Poplar. It's all similar. populous, there's some slight distinctions. There's cottonwoods. There's, there's, there's trembling aspen. There's some other black poplar.

The trembling aspen, which are those big sort of dry upland. Some people mistake them for a birch. They got a very white bark, but the bark doesn't peel. You can't peel off the bark and light a fire with it. And there's kind of a, there's a very negative idea about Aspen in most of Canadian forest culture, which is a big problem because, like aspen feeds things spruce and pine doesn't so like moose elk deer brous robins you name it like like like i've actually got a bunch of aspirin around my house i walked out in yesterday and i there's

sounds like somebody's upset a hornet's nest and i looked up and there's there's aphids on my i think their aphids are on my aspen and there's just a swarm of insects around this aspen if you walk into a pine stand you just don't see that if you're hunting elf where you're going to go marty aspen or pine yeah i'm going to go for aspins or i'm going to go for grassy slope somewhere yeah if you had like a grassy pine slope yeah but like the especially where you get a burn get that young aspen is the tree of life essentially um and then there's a bunch of other nice things that it does it's an excellent firebreak uh it it accumulates more carbon dioxide um from from the atmosphere like it grows more cubic meters or tons of wood per year than the coniferous species.

It helps put the water on the ground better. So like in the summertime, the rain actually gets through the canopy of the aspen in the winter, they lose their leaves so that accumulation of snow is two or three or four or five times greater in an aspen stand versus a canifer stand. Like you know, when you want to walk in February, you go into a thick pine or a spruce stand, you can actually walk through it, whereas an aspen stand, you don't want to walk through it because it comes up to your knees. that's water storage for later in the year.

Well, and sorry to interrupt, but if I'm, if I'm hiking and it starts pouring rain, I'll go seek shelter underneath the spruce tree. I would never seek, seek shelter under an Aspen or something like that, right? So that shows how dense. What is it about an Aspen when you talk about it being a good firebreak? I assume there's a reason when it comes to, you know, like everybody knows an old dirty, not an old Christmas tree. Like, I mean, she goes up.

fast, like real fast, like better than gasoline fast. So like I completely get, and you know, and if I talk to different people from around my community that still run wood burning stoves or fireplaces, they'll talk about the different cuts of wood and the ones that burn the best. I assume it's the same theory when it comes to a forest. I guess I've just never, you know, like, unless I'm talking to Marty, I don't really put two and two together. So I look at these fires, you know, and I look at the string.

that Alberta's had now. What has it been over a decade? Maybe longer than that. Maybe there's probably more than that. But certainly over the past, what has it been? Decade, there's been Slave Lake and Fort McMurray, now Jasper.

I'm probably missing a couple in there and I apologize. But you know, you start to see like this isn't something like it's new to Jasper, but like we're having these fires continuously happen. What is it about the Poplar, the Aspen, that makes it so it's a good fire break And then if that's the case, at what point, you know, it's like, well, do we want to stop fires or not? And why aren't we implementing this?

I can take a crack at it. I mean, two things about the Aspen, three things. But one is I think it naturally spreads itself out. So it grows in the lower density than, say, pines because it needs space to push its leaves out. So once they start competing, the little ones die. And so it naturally pushes itself out, which makes what Liam was talking about, that jump. jumping across on the crown almost impossible because they're farther apart. Plus their leaves are wet.

They're nice green, wet leaves. They don't burn. So even if there is a crown fire, as soon as it hits that aspen, it starts to slow down because it's just not going to bounce across. There's nothing to burn. You know, take a go in your backyard and cut an aspen or a poplar. Throw that leaf in your branch in your barbecue or in your fire pit. It just smolders.

Throw any branch, even a green branch from a spruce in your fire pit. and it still burns pretty good. Throw a dead one and it's just like a blow up. So those things. And then of course the bark of the tree of an aspen tree. Like if you if you go and get firewood, you know, sure, for firewood for me, I'll try and find dead standing lodgepole and things like that. But once in a while, just because I'm nice, there's a dead poplar there.

You cut it down. You don't want to let it go to waste. But boy, a dead poplar, you've got to cure that forever. I mean, you know, take a foot in diameter chunk of. hopper and drive your axe in there, man. It just sinks because it's so wet. Like, it's a wet wood. Yeah, it's bang on, Marty.

It's just about the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the tree. It lets more water into the forest and it, and it has more water in it. So it just doesn't burn at all, really. It'll burn. Like, if you have a forest fire and you kill the tree and you cure it, and it's a hot summer day, it'll burn, but, and it's, you know, I'll say, it's not bad firewood. I burn it sometimes just because, just because it's there. It's cutting firewood.

There's a dead. When it's. But beyond that, so why is it demonized? How come, how come there's no sort of market for it? How come the industry doesn't want that, that wood? I mean, like, so like one of the things is it doesn't take a nail very well. So when you put a nail in it, it tends to split. I can hear James, I can hear James disagreeing with me in the background there,

but it doesn't, it twists in cups. It's more tricky to deal with. Having said that, like, I think, I think it's an underappreciation. wood, we could definitely look at doing more with it. We definitely make OSB out of it. Like most of your OSB is coming. They take Aspen, they chip it up. They kind of glue it back together, which helps with the twisting and cupping.

If each strand is pointing a different direction, they all point in different directions. They don't try to move in whatever. I've run a little sawmill before, and if you have a slightly crooked piece of aspen, you'll cut the board off. And as it comes off, it'll, like, pop like that. It'll actually jump right off the sawmill. So it's a bit tricky to work with. But beautiful wood.

But I think the biggest thing is, is we've always been kind of focus on spruce pine is good, right? And it's not even until recently that we say balsam in BC, but it's subalpine fir is the other common name for it. Or A.B.'s Lacey Ocarpa if you're a professional. So like that tree wasn't even valued until 20 years ago, right? So it could be a value in the future. Before we move on from this or have Marty, I know you, I'm looking at them because I'm, oh, I got a tough. No, we're not moving on. I mean, I'm trying to evolve the discussion.

Well, what I'm wondering about, like, if I drove into Jasper, all you guys drove into Jasper, and all you looked around and saw was Aspins, would that not be the opposite feel of what you've come to know Jasper about? So is that part of the pushback on why this doesn't happen? Right. Like, I'm just going to pull it up. I'm going to, I'm going to share my screen here and give me one second, boys. I just want people to see what I'm seeing, right? Like the leave color change when you go to an Aspen forest is unreal through the seasons, right?

But when you pull into Jasper, you don't expect that. You don't expect any of that. You expect to see these, you know, these pines and the different Christmas tree looking type forest, I guess is what I'm trying to spit out. So is the push on this not to do it because, you know, there's a whole bunch of ramifications. or is it like people just don't want that? And then the ramification of that is like, well, then you're causing, you know, all it takes is one match goes off. Natural or unnatural human being setting it up.

And all of a sudden you got a raging forest fire that goes, you know, I forget the number on the ground. Liam, I think he said it was like five feet. And in the crown, it could be 5,000 meters. I don't know if I'm getting my numbers right. Five meters and 5,000 meters, yeah. Five meters and 5,000 meters, right? Like, to me, it just seems like a no-brainer at this point.

especially in Alberta, Marty, where we've had all these giant forest fires, except do people want to look at that? I'll take a crack at it, and then Liam is definitely going to pipe in. But ironically, you know, people do actually like the change of colors. Like here in Calgary, come a larch season, when the larches are losing their leaves, people go out of their minds to go hiking and drive along Canaanaskis because they want to see the changing of the colors. So they could get an example of that with the changing of,

of the aspens. And, you know, in Ontario, everybody goes Gaga over the changing of colors in Gatno Park and things like that. But unfortunately, in a place like Jasper, the, the, what do people want to see more? A tree, an aspen, a spruce, or an elk. And people in Jasper want to see an elk. So one of the things that's become popular in Jasper is the darn elk. So they let the elk come in town and this is where Liam can pipe in.

And what happens when you let the elk come into town in Jasper? They just eat, they just eat all the Aspen, so the Aspen can't get established. The Asper are trying to grow the elk come. Why are the elk in Jasper? Probably the answer is there's less wolves in town. So you have a big wolf back. So like one of the things they're doing to recover Caribou and other populations just to the north of Jasper in the Chetwin areas, the West Moberly Indian Ban and Soto First Nation are doing wolf control.

and lo and behold, the Caribou population is growing 30, 40, 50% a year. Obviously, we're never going to be doing wolf control in a national park, but those wolves are in the national park. They're driving the elk into town, the elk create and the aspen. They're excluding the most fire-prone or fire-resistant forest, and you just tend to get more conniferous. But having said that, it's not just the elk. Like, there isn't a lot of aspen.

from a constantly burned area because it takes well to get the roots established. And it gets out competed by pine and low productivity sites, which tends to be like Jasper is not a high. Can you elaborate just? Yeah. Sorry, can you elaborate just or explain this to the viewers? Like,

let's say you have a nice mixed forest that burns. Can you go through the sequence of how it grows back? Like what comes up first, not just trees, but talk about plants and things. Like, what are we going to see in Jasper in a couple of years? Like the first thing we're going to see is we're going to see the grass, which some of the grass wouldn't have lost its roots.

So we're going to see perennial grass coming up immediately. And we're also going to see Aspen shoots. So any place where it wasn't too far away from an Aspen, Aspen has this wonderful networks. Actually, the thing about Aspen is it like it's, you have one tree and it's a clone. And like you just pulled up the images there, Sean, great images of that's the Pando. It's the largest living being on the planet. It's this clone of Aspen in Colorado. I can't remember if it's 200 acres or 400 acres, but they're all the same tree genetically.

So they sucker. They're like twins. So the big tree puts out its roots. And then it's like, oh, forest fire. And it starts putting up shoots kind of the next day. So you're going to see aspen shoots come up. You're going to see fireweed. You're going to see all these perennials.

You won't see any coniferous this year. But next spring, you might see some of the pine seeds. Pine is a serotonous species, which is a. fancy way to say the cone is covered in a kind of a wax and the heat from the fire will sort of release the seeds. You know, get those pine seeds growing again. There'll be some spruce seeds blow in from a little bit further away. Spruce doesn't survive that real well. But generally you get your deciduous first. So that's everything but pine and spruce. And then the pine and spruce serves as it's kind of like a nurse crop that deciduous burst after the fire. It's very beautiful.

of fire weed. And it's also very protein rich. It's very useful for biodiversity, which is why First Nations have been using fire to manage this landscape for thousands of years. Because after the fire, you get a burst of protein rich foods. Pine and spruce, when you haven't had a fire, when you've excluded fire, it just hasn't happened for 50, 60, 70 years.

You start to get more and more and more coniferous. So coniferous is a sign. As a forester, we call the biogeoclimatic zone. so that is the last thing to grow. If you just let it grow forever, the last plant to dominate typically tends to be spruce, pine in this area, Douglas fir as well, where it's drier. Because they win the race to the light kind of thing,

like they're the ones who can get the tallest? They come up through the bottom, right? This deciduous explosion of biodiversity and color and beauty and everything else, it ends up kind of getting replaced with this coniferous forest, this climax forest, because the coniferous. trees, nothing eats them. That's the biggest problem. And that's a new thing in North America.

It's only been going on for about 10,000 years. There's things eating pine trees and spruce trees for millions of years. But somehow they all died when we showed up. So it's a new thing and it's a problem because if you think about it. Give an example. What's a creature that was roaming in our forest 10,000 years ago eating pine? How big was that stuck? If you're really bored, I have a pathetic YouTube channel with like seven subscribers.

and there's an interview I did with is Dr. Reese Lemoyne at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in April, and he did his PhD on why these big things died. And there's more and more evidence showing humans are quite implicated in the decline of large browsers and grazers. We lost 78% of our mammal species in about 1,000 years in North America between about 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. But the things that were eating these trees, so mastodon is not a politically correct. website for people that didn't like Twitter. It's actually like up to 22,000 pound hairy elephant and its teeth are basically look like buncher teeth. So they were able to eat probably about a two inch branch, put it in their gut and take a lot of energy out of it. So they find their poop

and there's Macedon skeletons from the northern Yukon to California to Florida and all the up to Nova Scotia. The only place you can't find a Macedon skeleton is where the ice sheets sat for most of the time in Canada, everywhere else up to the edges of them. And the reason that you can't find a mastodon skeleton under that ice is because every time that ice melts, it bulldozes everything and there's no records to be found, but anywhere you don't have the ice.

You have these mass on its kelps. And they go back. So the mastodon is an elephant, but its elephant DNA actually branched off from the other elephants that we know today, African elephant, Asian elephant, 25 million years ago. So this species was around for 25, million years and what it ate was pine and spruce that was what it loved it didn't mind douglas fur either

um but and and i talked to this doctor rice le moyne and so they can go back and they can estimate the the weight of these creatures on the landscape so there's he figures there's one per square kilometer which means that canada in the last interglacial which was about 150 000 years ago it would have had 10 million elephants running around mannison mastodonts 10 million elephant today in canada out, we have about 750,000 moose, a couple million deer, not 500,000 elk. Like the total weight of all the ungulates in Canada today is between 1% and 10% of what it was in the last interglacial, mostly because we had these large tree browsers that would take pine needles and spruce needles, turn them into elephant poop, which is very, very good for the soil,

dump them onto the soil and then everything else that everything else. Imagine the size of that done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 500 pounds a day of spruce needles into nitrogen and fertilizing. All right. You know, James is still with us. He's making comments in there.

He's got a great comment that he just made. He said that he says that Jasper could look more like Colorado. Totally. In terms of aspens and, I guess, overall force. Are we doing something other than the elk? Are we doing something? Other than the elk, are we doing something specific to, prevent the the aspen from growing back not not necessarily um we're definitely not in jasper so like

the argument that like there's uh there's a couple experts on twitter um saying well you know jasper forest management is exacerbating forest fires well there is no forest management in jasper except for the little bit that we did and lo and behold it stopped the fire dead in its tracks um so this is a very natural system that we're seeing it's not natural in the last millions of years but if we look at it in the last 10, 12,000 years, that's a very natural thing. Probably we could help establish some Aspen, the best way to establish some Aspen, a little bit of elk exclusion, but the biggest thing we could do is reduce the density of the coniferous.

And maybe that's something we do in that five kilometer radius because we want some pristine, untouched wilderness. But it's tough to get Aspen established. It's a very, very valuable, the deciduous in general is very valuable to biodiversity, but it gets excluded through natural processes, right? Right. Did either of you guys, a tree plant, curious? Ten years. Okay.

When you, okay, and I did as well. I'm just racking my brain. I'm like, did you ever plant aspen? Oh, no. Was it always pine? Like, I'm thinking it was black and white spruce. Was it not? I don't know.

For me, it was black spruce. I had 11 species in my bag once in the cutneys. Okay. We had white pine. We had bull pine or ponderosa pine. like lodgepole pine, spruce, Douglas fir, larch. We had balsam. I can't, I can't, it was, I think we had two kinds of balsam.

But, but I've never planted an aspen tree in my life that wasn't in my front yard as a right. Right. So. So I actually ran into somebody that was doing some aspen planting, um, in the Yukon. They're trying to get Aspen going in these, in these fire breaks. And he, he bid a crazy. price. It was like $2 a tree to plant these trees or something. I don't know. It was a dollar. It was a

ridiculous number. I used to get 15 cents. He was saying that like the survival rate on them was like 10%. Right. So it's not it's it's hard to get Aspen established. It's really expensive. It's really difficult. It's much better to work with the existing clone. Some of those clones. So those are the existing trees and the roots that run between them. They could be there for five, six, seven thousand years. So it's older than like the most gigantic tree on the island. The biggest cedar tree on the island, some of these clonal systems have been there longer than that, right? Same DNA.

It's just, it's fascinating. Like, it's a really fascinating tree. Well, you got five and a half more cents than I got. I got nine and a half cents a tree. Marty, how many cents a tree did you get? I think it was six or seven cents, maybe a little bit less. We're all dating ourselves here. Yeah, I planted trees in university, and I only did it one year in Northern Ontario.

And I remember my motivation was to try and make $200 to buy, like, I don't know, a CD player or something like that. Every day, you know, you reach into the bag and your hands are all cracked. And, yeah. And planting in Northern Ontario was relatively easy. I can't imagine planting here on the slopes. No competition. What part of Northern Ontario, Marty? My family's from Timmins, Capus, Gasing, Hearst, Lollack, that part of the world.

So I, well, I was just curious because I planted north and west, I think, of Dryden. Forgive me, folks who were there. Yeah. But northern, northern Ontario. It sucked. People know on francophone. You know, I see. Yeah.

Yeah, people know I'm francophone. I mean, it even says so on my Twitter bio, but I rarely admit these days. I actually came to Alberta from Ontario in 1990. and I don't like to admit that I was once in Ontario. So if I go back to... So let's get back to... Well, I was just curious, like, to me, like, one of the things that Liam said right off the hop is, you know, like, you know, what can you do with what's been done now in planning for the future? You know, I'm taking your words, Liam, and kind of making my own out of them.

And I go, well, you know, if you're sitting here in Alberta, I come back to Slave Lake, I come back to Fort McMurray. I'm like, these things continue to happen. And one of the things about Jasper, I think from listening to your guys' first talk, is I learned that, well, and I think I knew this, but, you know, it's funny how you know something when you never really think about it. But Jasper's federally, you know, controlled or regulated or whatever the word we're going to attach to it. So one of the hiccups, I assume, with Jasper in particular, is you're dealing with the federal government. And if we all stare at the federal government these days, I can imagine the levels of bureaucracy that are stacked on trying to do even what Liam did. When it comes to something, you know, you get to a smaller area, Alberta, you know, like a lady that I've met and had on the show and Marty knows well.

And you go in Premier Daniel Smith or you go smaller even to cities or towns or whatever and you hear this information. Like what's standing between Jasper, Alberta and smaller, I guess, from implementing some of these strategies so that they just don't get caught with their, you know, flat-footed or sleeping at the wheel if you would i i would say like the first thing that you would do to protect alberta is you would stop spraying stop using chemical treatments to reduce the amount of deciduous after a harvest because you eliminate everything but the coniferous and then you end up with the coniferous at an earlier stage um not everybody in the industry would agree with me and i know they've got some pretty aggressive aspen stands in alberta compared to british columbia but I think it'd be accepting deciduous in a range around the town.

And then the biggest thing is, is like the forest industry is an absolute wonderful gift, if you want more deciduous on the landscape. Like, so my wife is from northern Sweden. She's actually a Sammy person. But like when you go to Sweden, they stopped the spray in 1981 or 1978. So they have an extent.

Go ahead. What is the spray? Can somebody, what are you talking about? glyphosate. It's, it's, it's big. Basically, it's a herbicide that they spray in around August, later August. So the coniferous trees set their buds and they don't absorb the spray. The trees done growing.

Everything else does. So blueberries, willows, aspen, birch, anything that's growing that isn't a coniferous absorbs this glyphosite round up is another way to say it. And then it kills all that deciduous. It gives the next year the coniferous has no competition. and it rapidly goes to crown closure. And then you get a very, very low biodiversity stand. And it's great if you're trying to grow spruce and pine.

But if you think about spruce and pine versus Aspen and Birch, think about like a barrel of racing gas or aviation gas, as high as octane as you can imagine, that's pine and spruce. And then if you think about like birch and Aspen, it's like a barrel of like diesel that got a whole bunch of water in it. like half water and your uncle's like, hey, I'm draining this fuel tank that's been on the farm for 20 years. Do you want to use that to maybe light some slash files on fire? That's the difference between those. It might not even be fair because it's more like just a barrel of water. But

when it comes to fires, coniferous is bad, but dense coniferous is the worst enemy. So what we need to do, I think, is take forest industry, which is very happy to take wood close to town and is often stopped from taking wood close to town because of various nimbism or you shouldn't log that or this idea that cutting down a green tree is murder and thin those forests out. We don't need to cut all trees down. We can still grow or a coniferous trees in those areas, but you can just reduce the density of the stand so that instead of having a crown fire that spreads 5,000 meters, you can have a ground fire spreads 5 meters. That's a plus side. The hunting gets really good. The blueberries come in. I can do a lot of other stuff in that stand. Like a good example.

So Sweden and Alberta, Sweden's like about a third of the size of Alberta, they shoot 100,000 moose in Sweden every year. They did up until very recently. I think it was 80,000 last year. But it's orders of magnitude higher than what we're killing in our different jurisdictions in Western Canada because they have these semi-open forests and willows and other understory brush is what feeds the animals. If it's all crown or if it's all pine all the time, if it's all this crown-clothes pine

and spruce picture that really dark forest that you light a fire under when on a rainy day, there's nothing to eat there. So we can use the forest industry to reduce the density in large diet. Pretty much we should just do it everywhere because that's probably the way the forest looked like prior to the last 10,000 years. But we can create jobs and we don't need subsidies. The worst the worst possible thing the government can do is create these massive subsidies to do small fire hazard reduction jobs. Like we've, we've seen jobs go $12, $15,000 a hectare just to reduce the forest fire hazard. The land underneath it isn't even worth close to that. But we say, oh, we need more government funding to do these things. We need government funding to do the planning. We need to get

the forest industry to pay for it because guess what fire hazard reduction is? It's it's social justice work towards building a house. We have a housing crisis also because of too much bureaucracy in country but basically the solutions are right in front of us we just got to grab them and use them well let me give me a give you a personal experience locally again so um you know one one of the forest management uh companies wants to log in canon ascus and they put in they did all the paperwork and last year because of my poll and specifically on youtube and on some of the uh Facebook sites dedicated to hiking, everybody who's reaching out to me and wanting me to circulate these petitions to stop the logging that was going to happen in Canaanascus.

And I tried to use it as a educational experience. I kept telling people, no, I'm not going to do that. We need to log these forests. They're not healthy anymore. And it cost me in terms of viewers and people and all sorts of things. Like there's the environmental groups in some case are their worst own, their own worst enemies. Well, I think the big problem that I see is you have you have these, I'm going to call them like, I'm going to make a cartoon character. So we have a 32-year-old forester that graduated from University of British Columbia and forestry just a few years ago.

and they're anti-industry they have a decent government job they got a good pension coming they work you know they work so many hours a week and they don't see the benefit of the industry but to some extent the industry's been it's almost enemy because they big clear cuts spring lots of roads those are bad ideas but small clear cuts like marty do you want to hunt a hundred hectare clear cut or do you want a whole bunch of five hectare clear cuts mixed into i want little squares connected by little rivers or trails or cut lines and I want to hide on the edge. And that's the thing. So we're not as an industry.

Like I mean, I'm in the industry, but I, like we're, Freya's biggest selective logger in Western Canada, by, by a good bit. And so what we've done is we've done some studies with,

in particular one with UNBC, where we said, okay, so we're going to cut out 70% of the wood here. And yeah, and I ask people on a satellite image, how much wood did we cut? When we take 70% of the wood,

I show a picture on a satellite image, what percentage of wood? to remove 20%, 30%. I've done it on our Facebook page. You know, you can check out that post. I had loggers, professional loggers. Yeah, you took like 25% of the wood. We can't sustain an industry on 25% of wood.

I'm like, well, actually, we took 75% of the wood. But when you leave just a few trees behind, you leave some shade. Some excellent research imprint storage done recently by this guy named Jeff Werner showed shaded brows. Moose-dony brows during part of the year when it gets full sunshine. So the middle of your big clear cut doesn't feed anything. But if you have little clear cuts, little patches, if you open up the forest, make it less dense, it comes alive. And actually, the UMBC study that we did showed 700% increase in moose activity in a selective block versus an old growth forest.

Or a plantation or a clear cut. So we can create that. We can create a very, very high value environment by changing how we do forestry. But right now, big clear cuts. The reason we do it, oh, it's cheaper. That's the main area. It's an index box. We need big clear cuts.

It's like, so it's not true. Yeah, yeah, no, no, I like everything you're saying. So I'm going to ask you another question then. So you mentioned Sweden. Is Sweden, in your opinion, is Sweden doing something dramatically different and getting great results in terms of forest management? Or are there some examples in the U.S. or places? I mean, I'm sure Alberta is still a model, right?

NBC, we still do good. But who are some of the better ones? So I'm just going to use straight up number. I'm going to compare British Columbia to Sweden because that's one of my favorite songs. So Sweden and British Columbia have the exact same amount of timber harvesting land base. So we have 20 million hectares each. So about 20% of British Columbia is forested, is industry land base. And it looks pretty similar around Jasper.

It's the same, a large portion of British Columbia's working harvest land base is Lodgeful Pine and spruce with some Aspen mixed in and the odd bit of Douglas fir even. So Sweden, right now, BC's. in a we have this big problem we're running out of wood according to all the experts which is complete bunk but we can talk about that a different subject but sweden's cutting 96 million cubic meters so that's the health of the industry bc right now is cutting about 35 million cubic meters now if anybody knows anything about sweden central sweden is about uh somewhat like fort nelson just below the 59 parallel central sweden northern sweden is way north of dawson city and southern in Sweden. I think the far south you could get is like Edmonton. So British Columbia has a

coast. We have these amazing rain, we have a place where we get a meter of rain a year and you can grow trees that are that are 100 feet tall in 45 years. But Sweden doesn't have any of that. So they're cutting three times the volume as of. Last year, we shot 4,000 moose in British Columbia, I think is the number. It used to be about 10,000, but the number's down quite a bit. Sweden shot 80,000. So 20 times the moose, three times the timber harvest. We are burning about 250,000 hectares of land every year in BC and Alberta is not far behind. Sweden's burning around 800. That's it.

So they got no forest fires. They got tons of moose. And another interesting thing, B.C. There's 65 million hectares of forest in BC. 45 million hectares of it is untouched. It's just as good as national park. These are areas where there's just no road access forever. We've got 15,000 caribou.

They've got 300,000 carib. They call them reindeer, but it's the same species. Same species. And then Sweden has the industries around there, other side industries, right? I mean, we all know Huscavarna and companies like that. And I imagine it's a huge market. Are they sort of a producer of lumber and OSB and paper for all of Europe? Or who's their competitors?

Like Sweden has a very, very strong pulp sector, a very, very strong bioenergy sector. A lot of the small communities, they use what's called a combined, heat plant. So they, one of the problems in Canada is when we have a wood waste plant to make electricity, it creates a lot of waste heat. So in Sweden, they harness that waste heat and they have hot water pipes that go around the town. Astrid Lindgren, she wrote Pippi Longstockings. I've visited her hometown this year. We went into her hometown. There's this little teeny three hectare cogen plant. It's making all the electricity and all the heat for that town. They pump hot water through the house. You pay based on the difference. It comes in at 70 degrees Celsius. It goes out at 69 degrees Celsius.

as you pay the difference on the volume coming through. Really, really strong lumber, value-added industries, et cetera, et cetera. It's a very, very robust industry. It's also a very, very robust certification process. I have a friend in Sweden. She's been managing a piece of property. It's been in her family since 1811. It's 120 hectares.

She has 130 some polygons inside that 120%. So she's managing every hectare, Marty. A big clear cut for her. is half a hector. Wow. And she's making a lot of money. Like a quarter section of timberland in Sweden's worth about $900,000. And they get paid the same for their logs as we get paid here.

Their diesel is three bucks a liter or $350 a liter. So let's bring it back a little bit to Jasper then. And I'm going to use the pun. But Jasper, you know, Jasper is not out of the woods, right? I mean, there was a fire, but I don't. Like in the case of, for instance, slave lake in fort mcmurray i made this comment sort of off the cuff but i i think slave lake and fort mcmurray are kind of safe for another 50 years now because does everything burn down and

and and there'll be nothing there it'll take another 50 years but i think in the case of jasper from what i've seen we still need to do something right if they just immediately go and rebuild jasper tomorrow morning i don't think the problem's gone i mean we we burn down the uh call it the southwest side of town and the northeast side of town or or or my are my wrong there liam um like like i think for one thing a lot of that wood was dry so until you until i see pictures of it i can't really have an opinion on this but if i imagine that a lot of that drywood is probably burnt up mostly right so all the pine beetle kill trees are probably gone off that landscape all the green trees when you have a forest fire and a green tree that crown fire it it consumes the branches the the the folier part

but it leaves the rest of the tree, right? And that tree will die and it'll stand there for, what do you think, Marty, five years? Fort blows over. Oh, more than that. I've seen some stand for 10, 15, yeah. Yeah. At some point in the future, all going to blow over, depending on the density of how much is on the ground.

I saw some fires in northern B.C. Last year where there was a fire in 2010. I remember it because I was on a sheep hunt and I couldn't spot for sheep because this fire was destroying my visibility. And so it burned quite a large area. similar to the size of this Jasper fire around 35,000 hectares. And it grew up in young pine through the blown over trees. So you can picture all those blown over trees stacked up on the ground

and young pine coming up between it fairly dense. It burned again and it looks like a nuclear bomb went off. It's just a gravel pit. Like there's nothing left on those stands. So I think depending on what's left, they need to look at doing some in that five to seven. And once again, that'll be a bit more of a ground fire because it's lower on the ground so it won't spread as fast. But they'll need to look at in some areas.

But generally, I say they're probably in pretty good shape because it burned everywhere else off around town except where they'd already done the fireproofing. And the fire, like, let's get the facts. But the first impressions on the fire line is that it stopped right where we did that work with Canfor in 2018, 20 days. A thousand truckloads. It's a big project. It's, you know, 60,000 cubic meters or something. The fire stopped right there, right? So we knew what we needed to do, and it worked.

We just didn't do enough of it. Why didn't we do enough of it? We really need to get the bottom of that. Liam, if you get this crown fire going, okay? And I'm trying to use what you just said, and I just want to make sure, you know, it's going 5,000 meters ahead, and then it hits where you've created the barriers.

I don't know if that's the right terminology, but my mind puts that as what it is. are we saying that 5,000 meters as hard as it's going? It just hits that and it can't jump it? Or there's so many layers to it. It jumps once, it maybe jumps twice. Eventually, it just can't keep jumping. The big thing is so it's not a barrier.

It's a hazard reduction area. There's no way that you can stop a fire from happening unless you get a bulldozer out and you scrape all the organics off, which trust me, it's a bad idea anywhere to do that. We want to grow things on our landscape. We don't want it to be fireproof, like even a parking lot will burn. But if you picture a gravel pit, it's actually fireproof. Or a strip mine. It's pretty fireproof.

But that's not what we're going to landscape. All it does is it reduces the speed, which is spread. So if you picture a big, so the crown fire is pushing sparks five kilometers ahead. And it lands in a fireproofed area. And it becomes a ground fire, which is slow moving. And we can have people action that, right? You can have a guy run over. You can have four people run over there with piss cans and axes.

and they can make a little hand fire control line because it's a ground fire. It's not a crown fire. And so what happens if you didn't do the fire hazard reduction work, remember, it'll still burn. It lands in this dense forest and it becomes a crown fire and it continues to spread five corners. I think, Marty, like this fire grew from like zero acres to about 90,000 acres in three days. Something like that. I think it was even faster than that. I think it caught a lot of people off guard.

Like it grew really, really fast. One thing that I find interesting. They're giving numbers like, yeah, go ahead. If you look at those polygons in like northern B.C. and Alberta where there wasn't any, like that's not a, that's not an abnormal fire, 80,000, 100,000 hectares. That's normal because hot summer day, sick, six, stand, lots of Beatles, poof. But think about it. How do you fight a fire that goes to 90,000 acres in less than three days?

Yeah, 90,000's big, but just, yeah, in context, I think for, for viewers, I mean, that if you go on, the typical, um, control burns, that the parks try to accomplish is usually, you know, 3,500 to 10,000. They're not that big. So, hey, question, Liam, so when you guys were in there in 2018 and you do some cleanup slash harvesting, are you using, are you allowed to use very modern techniques? Or do they sort of restrict you and, I don't know, exaggerating here, but are you doing it by hand and by horse?

No, I was super impressed with Jasper. We use, we have, we have, so if you think of logging, you think of bunchers and skitters, especially if you're in Alberta. We have harvesters and for starters. So one machine falls the tree and processes it in the same go. It looks like a processor, except that we've got wheeled ones with longer reach. So you're controlling your trails. So you have a five meter trail, 15 meters between the trail, and then we would just take out.

At the campground, we were leaving a lot of the greener stuff. But basically we're targeting dead wood and trees are going to blow over and trees have high fire hazard. But in 2018, 2019, it was more closer to a clear cut and we use modern techniques. And then when we are done, we burnt off the trails or like they burnt off the trails as we were going. So like all the slash was burned. But it was a dispersed burn, which is better than making it in a big pile to burn it because you get more natural. Well, I mean, some of your harvesters are extremely modern and probably really better practices than some of the old practices. and some of the old practices, right?

I mean, you're basically sneaking through the forest with a machine that leaves a small trail behind it. So, yeah, impressive. Yeah, the thing is, like, I would be super clear and say, I think there's a lot of really well-intentioned people in Jasper that wanted to do a good job. And they did a really good job. They just didn't get to do enough of it. And where they did a good job, it looks like it worked really well. So the opportunity now is to look back to parse that. I hate to say it. I can only imagine the layers of bureaucracy in the National Park.

Like we've dealt with it from the contractor base, but we've always had good people to work with. I've always been impressed how they made it happen. But I think we need to have a conversation that a pine tree is like 100 liters of gasoline sitting on the landscape. And when you have a thousand of them per hectare, you've got a lot of gasoline sitting on the landscape. And instead of looking them as trees, we look at them as fire risks. And then we need to think about how we're going to work with that. We don't need to clear cut it, or maybe small clear cuts and thinning, right? And I think, I think industry is to blame.

I think bureaucracy is to blame. I don't have, like, there's lots of blame to go around. But one of the things I'm, the reason we're doing this show and other shows like this, this week is I don't want them to get away with just blaming it on climate change. Like, and, and a very nebulous climate change. Like for people to say, you know, climate change is responsible for the beetles that have killed the trees and oversimplifying it like that. That's why we're trying to have these conversations to get it out there. And I'm pretty like I'm pretty, I get really frustrated. Oh, it's climate change.

You can't do anything about it through your hands in the air. Like, come on, guys. Like we got us. I think I read there's this. What's the cost of 4,000 homes at half a million dollars? at home plus whatever else. It's probably more than that. Like,

so we have like a quarter billion or a half of a million bucks. It's going to be two billion bucks. The math you just did, it's two billion dollars. I think it's important to bring it home to everybody. Okay, so you're an environmentalist. You have a job with government.

You work in the ministry of whatever. And you're vehemently imposed to cutting down any green trees whatsoever because man is destroyed. Here's, let's bring that insurance charge back to your home insurance now. Now your home insurance is $3,000 more here or $4,000. Where does anybody have $250? a month or $400 a month to add to their home insurance these days.

Where does anybody have any extra money in Canada with the way the GDP per capita is going? But the thing is, is if we bring these things home as a communication tactic, say, listen, your insurance just went up because we're not fireproofing. And fireproof is the wrong word, but we're not actively reducing the fire hazard on the landscape from crown fire to ground fire. That's all we need to do. Get it on the ground. Then we can action.

When you have a less dense forest, the water bomber drops its water and it gets on the ground. We have a thick forest. You water bomb the trees and the trees are like a like a basically a clothing dryer or a drying rack for clothes. You dump that water on those trees. The wind comes up. The moisture is in the branches and the needles. They wave in the wind. They dry off. Get it on the ground. The ground fire just goes out like you can fight a grass fire with a with a garden rake, right? You can't fight a crown fire period. There's nothing you can do without without a 12 inch main line of water and a 10,000 horsepower pump, which is not going to happen. You can't fight a crown fire.

We need to focus on making our landscapes much, much less prone to crownfire. Simple. I was off by a zero just because somebody's going to call in. So 400 homes at $500,000 a piece, let's say, is $200,000 million, not $2 billion. I'm off by zero, but it's still a big number. Yeah. And the thing is, it's not just there. It's everywhere, right?

It was Colonna last year, Littins. And the thing, the thing that I get most worried about is, okay, so there's some fires. But when you, this is an interesting little topic here. Like, people don't talk about this for various reasons because it's heavily politicized. But I just like science. I don't like politics. So we can't say it's climate change. Well, it is climate change.

But, you know, we can't do anything. Carbon levels at 427 parts per million when I was born. It's not going to go down. We're going to be using fossil fuels. were a while into the future. We should try to find better ways to do things, but the facts are the facts. We can't starve people.

Carbon levels are going to go up. Carbon is a very effective fertilizer of trees. And where I'm going with this is that the next stand that comes up is going to grow faster because there's C3 plants, pine spruce. They love a little bit extra carbon dioxide. There's a ton of university level science that shows this. I mean, people have greenhouses pump CO2 and their green house all times. But where I'm going with this is the next stand comes up faster.

It has more foliage. And we have foliage is what really burns, right? It's the Christmas tree when it dries out. So that carbon fertilization is making our forests grow more foliage and faster. So it's going to fire and fire and fire. Hopefully it all turns into Aspen at some point. But personally, I like big trees. I like complex forests.

I like a stand that hasn't burned in a long time because you get big trees, small trees. And you get like Marty, do you garden it? all, Marty, or John, are you a gardener at all? Just started, boys. So when you want to put, when you want to get your soil to hold moisture, you want to put carbon in the soil. So you put peat moss in there, right? And peat moss is much different than the moss grows on the forest floor.

And so carbon holds water. Every time we have a fire, we burn all that off. And that stand doesn't hold any water. I like complex stands. And I think we can have a lot of complex stands. We can have a lot of big trees mixed in with small trees. if we move the forest industry from clear cutting to selective and smaller clear cuts, everybody wins.

Lower fire hazard, higher biodiversity. This is where I wish James was here because one of the things you've said that is going to bother me until I leave. I'm sure there will be other things that I think about tonight. But you mentioned earlier and it was one of the things that caught me when I was listening to you guys talk on Twitter. And it was stopped the spray. It was talking about spraying these forests and you did a very good job of outlining it. I'm just curious, why are we doing that? Like, is that an industry standard?

They only want this type of tree. It's best for foresting or forestry. Like, why are we doing that? Why are we spraying? Like, you're outlining you like complexity and the government is doing simplicity. Industry in this place. Industry? Just wants to simply, we're going to spray the forest.

And they think that's a brilliant idea. It's pure stupidity. There's no good reason to do it. Not even from a forestry perspective in the long run. It's short-term stupidity. It's ridiculous. They don't want Aspins. They don't want poplars.

They want to promote. They want to kill everything that competes with the spruce and the pine and the fur. Coming from a farming background, then, I assume they take a 10,000 view of their, you know, lack of a better term, farm, and they go, what if we just started spraying this like the farmers do? And then we'll wipe out all the biodiversity and we'll have the exact tree we want and all of a sudden we can just go in and log it. Correct?

Yep. Except now the ramifications of that is exactly what we're talking about, where we're like unintended consequences. The biggest issue is if you have everything as a young dent, coniferous den, it's just going to burn crispy all the time. So you can't harvest these trees after they burn. You can do salvage logging on big burnt trees, but not small burnt trees. So it's stupidity.

You get less wood in the long run. And not like that, all that biodiversity feeds the young crop coming up. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you remember in the old days when they used to bail up straw in the prairies? I'm not a big prairie farmer expert, but they used to bail up straw, right? Because you get five bucks a bail for straw. And then I said, oh, I can't get straw anymore. It's like, because it's all getting chaffed out the back of the combine because they're building their carbon levels back up in that soil. when you do that spray on all that deciduous,

you're killing your carbon layers. You're making that a drier stand. It's less productive. If you want to grow wood and you want to make money, you want production, you want fast growth. The way you get fast growth is you layer in deciduous and coniferous. I wish James is still in here because I'm sure I read one of his,

one of his posts that said, only two provinces in Canada that aren't doing that are Saskatchewan and one out east, and I'm spacing on it, but it's two in Canada. So there you go. I didn't know that until, I started listening to you guys the other night.

And I'm like, what is that? Like, I didn't know any of this. You know, I don't want to cut a conversation ever short, but I also don't want to keep you guys here all night. Marty, is there anything else that, that's, you know, top of your mind that you want to ask, or vice versa, Liam, is there anything that you think we haven't touched on

that you'd like to bring up? I would just say we need to get to the bottom of why we didn't continue on the excellent job that was being done. Why did it, why did, why did we do a bunch in 2018, 2019 and why did it stop? Why didn't we continue in that four or five kilometer circle around the room? There was enough experts there. There needs to be a deep dive as to why.

And I'm just going to throw it out there. There was the 2017 member of parliament asking about what was going to get done. And it was, I can't remember the environment minister at the time. It might have been Catherine McKenna. McKenna. Yeah, I'd like to talk to you afterwards. And I was like, wow. Like, that was great.

like they talked to each other and then in 2018 we were in there doing it. Who became an environment minister a little bit after that? I'm wondering if he took a bit more of a ideological bent on this. Yeah, I think there's definitely an ideological bent and there's also, it was that? I'm just laughing when we start talking government and ideological bends because they're giving me the bends here over the past five years. So, yes, I can, I would say.

I mean, just, like, just very, just very pragmatically. speaking, there is a lot of bureaucracy. I had fun going online and looking up, you know, I posted an example. I mean, just to cut a tree on your property in Jasper, and you're not even a landowner, you're a tenant basically. But if you have a tree that's growing and it's not, you know, not good to look at and you want to cut it, it's two pages of permissions and then you need you need it signed off by an arborist and this and that. You look at that. You're basically submitting an eight page folder to somebody to get it approved to cut a tree on your property. So imagine that is for one tree. So the bureaucracy in a place like Jasper is is is brutal.

Hey, yeah, I mean, I just want to end with a bit of a joke too. You know, Sean's great at designing t-shirts and stuff like that. I was I was hosting one of his shows the other day and he made a nice t-shirt. But you know, Liam, your logo, I like complex stands might be a tough one to to come up with that. It might not be the bestseller. Yeah, I've been working on that. Bring back the mastodon forest. Yeah, that one would be better. That one would be better. Stop the spray, start the thin.

That's what we need to do, right? Like it's a matter of just complexity. Actually, we didn't talk a lot about that. I mean, do we have a couple of minutes? Sure. Because Liam had, like, I was on a space with him. And then after the space, the discussion continued through messages and whatnot. Can you give an example of thinning?

like because that in fact we didn't talk about that much that's what you guys are known for is thinning the forest give us some good examples of that uh well like so thinning has a lot of different meanings for a lot of different people and unfortunately a lot of people seem to have this idea we go in and take the big trees and leave the small trees uh leave the crappy trees whatever that means so so thinning is actually it has a bunch of different meanings but the best way to think of it from uh what what we do would be like if you had a a a tree plant stand and we just logged one. It was planted in 1989. So I was 10 years old and I probably had aerosmith pump in my Walkman at the time that this stand was planted. I wasn't quite old enough to

plant it. At 35 years total age, so it's 35 years from the time of planting. We went through and we took out about a truckload and a half of wood, which was about one truckload of saw log and about half a truck load of pole. And we remove the smaller trees. So we have strips, the access points for the machines. It's five meter clear cut. And then there's 15 meters between the strips where you just take out the small trees, the crooked trees.

You open that stand up. So you go from about 1,300 stems per hectare. You guys are tree planters. So that'd be like a six down to about a three or a four because that's what you want. And you think about, I think about it like as a lever action. Thinning can be, if you're a hunter, you can think about it as, a thin stand is a great spot to hunt with an open-sighted lever action rifle, right? 60-yard shot, 40-yard shot, 30-yard shot.

You remove, so you reduce the density of the trees, but when you drive by it, you can't tell it's been log, right? Like, and the thing is, in 10 years, that stand will grow back together again, and you can go back in here again, and you can take out some really nice timber out of there. You can do that again. And guess what happens? You take out some of the trees. and the understory, the willows, red Osier dogwood, blueberries, whatever, whatever your understories.

There's about 100 species of understory that are commonly grown in these boreal forests. There's only five species of trees that grow above. We're shifting some of the weight. In this case, it was a sprayed pinesdown, so sprayed in 1993. We're shifting some of the weight. What does biodiversity mean? It's another nebulous term. It's like old growth.

What does old growth mean? Like we talked about in Alberta, you're rarely going to get a tree over 120 years. What we want is a complex forest with a mix of diameters and a number of species, but mostly what we want is lots of different species. And you can't have that if it's all conifer that's closed off the bottom, right? The wills are gone. The berries are gone. And Liam, when you're thinning like that, it's not, you don't need to be subsidized or anything like that. You can still do it commercially, right?

With modern equipment, you could, you can, you're basically, there is commercial, there is commercial value. Marty, I'd say it like this. So in Sweden, they get 95, 96 million cubic meters last year of delivered wood. From that 55 million, 50 to 55 million was coming from thinning young stands. And so that's more, that's three times as much wood as what Alberta cuts. Now, Alberta only has half the timber harvesting land base of Sweden, but similar sort of landscape, right? So like, like, we can do it. We can make a buck.

we keep the mills open, keep the jobs going. We protect that forest from forest fire, so we're not going to get that carbon emission associated with the burn. So it's a great climate change tool. If you don't have forest fires, you can store carbon in the forest fire. The public is happy. They don't even know what's going on.

You get more moose. The hunters are happy. Holy shit. Win, win, win. You know what else? Gosshawks. Gosshawks are an endangered species. So goshhawks eat redback bowls.

Red back bowls are these little mice that run around on forest floor. You know, Marty, when you pick up a branch on the ground, it's got that white fungus on it? You know, it's like that. There's an ubiquitous white fungus that grows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's on really rotting wood, what do you mean? Like, where there's that? It almost like a, it looks like a sweat stain kind of thing.

Exactly. Red back bowls eat that mycelium. It's a type of fungus. And red back bowls feed fishers and Martins, which are old growth species. And red-tailed hawks and just all these different species do better. when it's not all pine. And it's not rocket science. If you look at Jasper, take your average hector around Jasper and take all the weight of the pine,

how much did it weigh compared to everything else in the stand? 100 times more than everything else in the stand, 90 times, 200 times. There wasn't much. It was pine needles, especially if you don't count the pine needles, or if you count the pine needles as part of pine tree. They got a little bit of moss, a bit of grass, and a bunch of pine trees. That's not biodiversity. Sorry.

Why not? It's not. Nothing eats pine anymore. Bring back. I mean, it's one of the number one questions. I, you know, I face three questions on over the last decade on YouTube. You know, why do you drink the water directly from the creeks? Are you scared of bears? And do you see animals?

And people don't like the answers to any of those questions. And the one on, do I see animals? I don't see animals, man. I can, hiking in the back country of Jasper and Banff and places like that, I never see wildlife. The only place you see wildlife is in the front country. and I always tell people, you want to see wildlife? Come on my acreage, man. I live in the shadows of the Rockies,

and I have more elk on my property than I, than there are in the Rockies. You want to get people out to Jasper, have a Maglodon go walking by. I bet you that would get a few million people descending on that place. Yeah. Triastic Park, man. Jasper Park.

Yeah. Well, here's an interesting thing. So they are de-extincting mammoths in Texas right now, colossal bio sciences. The CIA is actually invested in that company. company, I think it's more to be partly control some of the DNA technology that they're developing. But an Asian elephant is only a million years different from a mammoth, maybe two million years. No one's exactly sure.

But a mammoth and an Asian elephant are quite closely related. The idea is you can take a slightly modified baby Asian mammoth, put it into an Asian elephant, and it'll give birth to a mammoth. And the idea is that these mammoths actually fought climate change because the north is these spruce trees are growing right up to the Arctic now. And these manus kind of knocked the spruce trees over the eat. They did eat spruce trees too, but it's not their main diet. They ate a lot of grass.

But they trample the snow. And anybody knows if you want to freeze your road in, make sure you can haul logs a little bit longer. The first thing you've got to do is trample the snow and get it out of the way to get the frost down. So if you had one one, one dabbath per square kilometer, you push that frost down permafrost. It's a good thing to keep. There's a lot of methane sitting under that permafrost, right? Gee, the CIA In On Mammoth Technology

Somehow I don't see that ending great But that could be me Boys, I appreciate you hopping on On a Sunday evening to do this You know, I was joking to you boys Before we started, it's my daughter's seventh birthday So I snuck away from the end of a birthday party So I appreciate my family letting me do that as well

Fellas, thanks for doing it. Nice to meet you, Liam And thanks for hopping on this side. Marty, as always, Thanks for answering the call when called upon. Either way, yeah. Don't forget, Freya Facebook page and the Stop Spray Facebook page, there's about 12, 14,000 followers, I think,

all together on those two pages. But if you want to learn more about that, just some pretty good. And you're on X as well, yes, boys? You got you. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Thanks, jents. Thanks for hopping on. And we'll, well, to the folks listen and watch and we'll catch up to you on the next one. Sorry for talking so much.