A group of us got together to go collecting for Pinus contorta contorta (Shore PIne) Left to right Mark Patterson, Peter Woodland, Teague (Victoria) Gordon Cowen (Nanaimo) Peter Wilson and myself on the end (Campbell River). A very fun day for all of us. All pictures courtesy of Mark PattersonMe checking out the roots of a nice Pine – Teague was watching but posed for the shot.Tree was growing in a pocket in the rocks, I exposed the edges of the roots and then found the best leverage point to pop the tree out of the pocket.Done got the tree out with plenty of small surface roots.Rootball tightly wrapped in shrink wrap and with bunji cords strapped to my very old Trapper Nelson back pack. My roll of shrink wrap slides nicely over my digging shovel. What you see is all have for collecting secatuers and a small folding Silky Saw in my pocket. Stanfields wool overshirt Nylon pants if they get wet they dry out quickly jeans stay wet all day. Good pair of MEC boots and a wool toque.Peter Woodland pulling out a nice pine.
Fall Yamadori hunting in October presents a few problems I went out yesterday collecting in the sub-alpine. A week ago there was 4 inches of snow which melted when we had a change in weather. I left home on a sunny no cloud morning but upon reaching the higher elevations was fog and wind.The wind was so cold that all the trees had ice on the foliage on the windward side.I cut back some branches on this one so I can the trunkFlat sprawled out Mt Hemlock, something I would ignore in the past but….View from the sideSecatuers showing some scaleThere is a decent sized trunk in there somewhere. This tree in a few years will make fairly decent Shohin after cutting back a lot of the branches.Here is the tree dug out and a lot of small branches taken away. As you can see it has a nice thick trunk. It was growing over a rock so the root mass is spread out and in the future (2 to 3 years) I will be able to expose the nebari and have a decent Shohin tree ( less than 12″ tall) If you look closely you can see Sam sitting on the rock on guard watching over me. We did run into a black bear earlier he was foraging on the remaining blueberries