With The Forest Engineers 



193 



for the party and horses can be obtained. 

 Forage, however, is abundant, and in good 

 weather the horses can still pick up a liv- 

 ing. 



'Timber is nowhere abundant, black 

 pine and a little fir, spruce and poplar 

 forming straggling stands. Except where 

 wind-falls have accumulated, the woods 

 may be travelled in any direction with 

 pack-horses. The country depends chiefly 

 on stock-jraising, but there appear to be 

 good possibilities for dry-farming in the 

 future. At present the cost of clearing 

 land is a serious hindrance to development. 

 Even to the rancher, the forest growth, 

 and particularly the litter of wind-fall, is 

 a detriment rather than a resource. The 

 suggestion is repeatedly made that such 

 sections of country should be burned over 

 until the forest has been reduced to a suf- 

 ficient quantity of wind-break, although it 

 is admitted that to withdraw the rangers 

 entirely and permit indiscriminate firing 

 would be a course involving grave danger 

 to property, if not to human life. Possibly 

 some plan of co-operation between the Gov- 

 ernment and the settlers, for the safe re- 

 moval of forest debris, may be evolved in 

 the near future; the expense to both 

 parties would be considerable, but the 

 benefits would be certain and commensur- 

 ate with the outlay.' 



In the Bookies. 



Mr. W. N. Millar writes from Calgary 

 under date of Nov. 26: — 



'I was out so long on my last trip that 

 I am pretty hard pressed to catch up, par- 

 ticularly as I have to make short trips for 

 special cases every few weeks. I had a 

 very successful trip, covering 850 miles, 

 and have practically completed my exam- 

 ination of the Rockies south of the Atha- 

 baska river. In another season we shall 

 have the fundamental improvements well 

 along toward completion, a complete revi- 

 sion of the map with all blanks eliminated, 

 sufficient ground work in the line of 

 volume and growth-tables and primary 

 traverses on which to start intensive re- 

 connaissance, if desired, comprehensive im- 

 provement, fire and administration plans 

 for which nearly all of the data has been 

 assembled, a scheme for game preservation 

 completely worked out, and a reasonable 

 start toward a field organization. All we 

 lack is properly equipped men to furnish 

 the motive power and make the things go. 



'There's great activity here now in the 

 cabin-building line. We expect to com- 

 plete at least twenty six during the winter 

 — maybe a couple or three more, all by 

 ranger labor. We have one reconnaissance 

 crew at work on the Athabaska under 

 Clark, examining a large proposed sale, 

 and another going to work in a week on 

 the Brazeau on several proposed mine- 

 prop sales. We will n)"o "tart: a crew tak- 



ing volume and growth figures on pine and 

 spruce under McVickar next week. 



'We collected thirty bushels of spruce 

 cones and fifty of lodgepole pine cones for 

 the Indian Head nursery, pine on the 

 Clearwater and spruce on the Cypress Hills. 

 This was a most prodigious year for spruce, 

 both white and Englemann,'throughout the 

 Rockies, and I rather think throughout the 

 entire West this side the Divide. Nothing 

 unusual in pine or black spruce. 



'We had a fire season remarkably free 

 of fires. The Bow River head-} the li&t 

 ^^'i^.h only one fire, and that a very small, 

 iiu'lpiont, "class A" one. Wo had only 

 four "class C" fires, one on Clearwater, 

 one on Athabasca and two on Brazeau. . . . 

 Am going to Vancouver next month to the 

 Western Conservation and Forestry Asso- 

 ciation, and perhaps I'll give you some 

 rotes about that.' 



University of Toronto Notes, 



The Faculty of Forestry of the Univer- 

 sity of Toronto reports a comfortable in- 

 crease in its registration, there being 

 twenty new-comers, which brings the total 

 number of students up to fifty. This makes 

 the distribution for the different years, be- 

 ginning with the first year, twenty, nine, 

 ten and five, respectively, besides one in 

 each of five years of the six-year course. 

 The graduating class next spring -v^ill count 

 only six. 



Mr. Asa S. Williams, a graduate from 

 the original New York State College of 

 Forestry at Cornell in 1903, has been giv- 

 ing a short course of lectures on logging 

 operations. Mr. Williams, after serving 

 two years with the Berlin Mills Company 

 in New Hampshire, one of the largest oper- 

 ators in that state, as forester supervising 

 tlie lumber camps, with a view of intro- 

 ducing more conservative logging, thon eu- 

 ^'.iged as forester to the Lidgerwood Ma-i- 

 ufttcturing Company, who are manufactur- 

 '"^ logging machinery. Mr. Williams' 

 bnsiness consists in surveying the situa- 

 tion of proposed logging operations and 

 determining what method and machinery 

 are to be used. For the last three or four 

 years he has been engaged in the same 

 business in Canada, mostly on the Pacific 

 coast. 



Several of the men in the field were pre- 

 vented by snowstorms from returning in 

 l>roper time, but all of them eventually 

 turned up all right. 



Mr. Frank Stanley Newman, who had 

 been employed by the Dominion Forestry 

 Branch as forest assistant in the Duck 

 Mountain Forest Reserve, Manitoba, has 

 accepted a position as assistant to Mr. E. 

 J. Zavitz, forester for the Ontario Gov- 

 ernment, and will probably be placed in 

 charge of the nurseries at St. Williams. 



