Eight years ago I came north to teach a weeklong fish health workshop at a community hatchery outside of Terrace. For some unfathomable reason, in a moment of insanity, I agreed to do it, at the beginning of February. I felt into Terrace on the weekend, was to run the workshop starting Monday, ending Friday at noon, and then fly home in the afternoon.
Oh, and I had a flight to Amsterdam booked for Saturday morning.
It almost went very wrong.
Winter came on in full force as soon as I arrived. And it dumped snow. Every. Single. Day. Snow like I haven’t seen since I was a kid. It was insane. The fellow who’d invited me up was stressed….he kept telling me how unusual it was for that time of year to have that much snow. I almost didn’t get out. I almost didn’t get back to Vancouver in time for my flight out the next morning. But I did, and it was all good.
So when I offered to come up for a few days this year, to hang out and talk fish heath, I said “But not in February”.
Late March seemed safer.
Emphasis on the “seemed” part of that.
I was delayed a bit getting out of Vancouver this morning. Lots of water coming out of the sky. They boarded the plane, and then kicked us back off the plane, something about needing a different plane that had some winter mechanical sets or something. And then they told us that they’d try to get us in, but that they might have to turn around and come back to Vancouver. At least it’s only an hour and a half flight each way.
In the end, we did get in, and we landed safely. But what a mess up here. About 30-40cm of snow has fallen in the past week, and now there is an atmospheric river soaking it. The place is a giant slurpee. But I made it to Kitimat, and there is no pressure of something backed up against it at the end of the week.
