Well. It looks like it's been a while. I haven't been around very much recently, as you can tell. Actually, I counted it out and, of the last 4 weeks, I have spent a total of 6 nights in a bed (including last night). Other than that, it has been on a sleeping pad on the floor or on the ground. But it's been some seriously kick-ass four weeks.
Training had a good group of kids, which... blah blah blah blah [thats my account of the first two of the last four weeks... once it gets far enough in the past, I dont care to talk about it].
My work partner this year is a Mormon. We get along pretty well. It is amazing that our differing world views manage to manifest themselves in very similar behaviors. We are both considerate of each other, and of people in general, neither of us drink caffeine, don't smoke or do drugs, and I drink pretty little alcohol. I am opting to not have any alcohol during the hitch, to make things a little easier. It's a very small concession that helps facilitate things. She knows that I'm gay, and as of yet seems to have no issue with it. I am trying to not overdo the whole 'gay' thing- I don't want her to feel that I'm pushing the issue- but at the same time I hope she comes out of the summer with a better idea of what it's like and what some of the issues are. Mostly just a better awareness. My hope it that at the end of the summer we will have learned from each other and have a greater acceptance of the other. But when is that not something to strive for?
We worked around Boise for the first hitch, at Squaw Creek around Sage Hen Reservoir. It is where Ian and I were snowed on last year, but this time around the weather was much kinder to us. In fact, it showered us with an amazing, full-length double rainbow. The drive between the campground and our roads was around an hour long, and as we wind around from the top to the bottom of this valley, from pasture to prairie to forest, and as we are walking along these abandoned roads, looking down at the gps and I look up and there is a young male deer standing 40 feet from me, and as we stop and listen and there isn't a sound other than the birds singing and the breeze through the trees, I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have this job. And why I love it so much. I mean seriously, is it fair that I have such a sweet job?
It was a pretty easy hitch, actually. Three full days were spent driving (Boise --> Missoula -->Boise, Sage Hen --> Missoula... long story involving a last minute change of plans). Once we actually settled down and started to feel like we were doing something actually worth paying us for, we re-walked four control roads. The idea is that for every mile of decom road (or stormproofing) there is a mile of control road. When a large storm comes through, we go back and re-survey all of the roads- if the control roads have washouts or new gullies, but the decom roads don't, then the decommissioning works (that's the hope). There was a pretty large storm that ran through the area recently, so we were sent to work on it.
The thing is this, though.... different crews last year might call the same road segment slightly different things. This can cause issues if, say, we walk through the area this year and collect the SAME road segment with different attributes. So it was decided that we were to use last years data to walk the road, and unless there was something REAL that was different, we were to use last year's data. So, if last year someone called a feature a 'sump' and I would call it a 'broad base dip that puddles on road', I called it a sump this year. And if we walked the road and nothing was different, then there was no need to collect data along it. So, in reality we ended up walking all four roads, but only collecting new data on two of them. And of the two that actually did need collecting, there was some pretty impressive washouts to be explored and collected. There were a number of new gullies, including some major ones. Plus, we got to see some pretty terrible stream crossings, which is always fun.
We managed to fit so many hours of work in, as wells as using up some of our credit hours from training, that we ended a full day early. So I got to come home and sleep in a real bed for TWO days before heading back out to go camping again.
Am I nuts? Probably.
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