Zion and recent projects

Yet again, time seems to be flying by and I haven't written as soon as I'd hoped. So I'll jump right in to what I left off with last time, which was the trip I took to Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah with my roommates and a few other people from NCC 2 weeks ago. It was sort of a last minute plan and at first I wasn't going to go because after our 8-day project all I wanted to do was stay home and relax, but visiting Zion was on my "Vegas bucket list" so I decided to go. And I'm so glad I did! I'm pretty sure Zion is the most beautiful place I've ever been. Or at least it was the most breathtaking. Don't get me wrong, the east coast has many beautiful places as well, but since I grew up there I'm much more accustomed to the landscape, so whenever I go somewhere new in the Nevada area it's amazing to me because it's so new and different. We got to Zion around midday on Friday and left around midday on Saturday, and in that time we did 3 hikes. The first was called Hidden Canyon, which was a mile up a developed trail and then you could continue onto the area that was not maintained and required scrambling over rocks and through tight spots. We went about another mile or two past the maintained part of the trail and then turned around when we coudln't figure out how to get past a certain area. Here are some pictures of that hike.

This picture is not from that hike, but I took it as we were first entering the park.

The view that greeted us when we got off the bus at the place where the Hidden Canyon trail starts. This picture doesn't do it justice. 

The view from the top of the mile-long developed trail. So beautiful!

The scrambling begins

Stone arch around the area where we turned around. 

After that we hiked the Watchman trail, which started near the visitor center, and one of the rangers had recommended it for sunset because of the nice views. It was a pretty easy hike, I think about 2 or 3 miles roundtrip, and the view from the top was great. It was hard to get pictures of the sunset but here are a few that I did take.

View from the top

When we got back from that hike, it was time to find somewhere to camp for the night. This was harder than we had anticipated because we hadn't gotten to the park earlier enough to get one of the campsites there because they fill up really fast, so we were going by one guy Jeff's recollection of campsites from when he'd been there before and internet searches on people's phones to find somewhere that would be nearby and open. One place turned out not to exist anymore and we couldn't find the other one, so we just went by information found online to try to find a place that wasn't an official campsite but was public land so we would be allowed to camp there. It involved driving up a rutted dirt road on the side of a cliff in the dark, and we weren't convinced at first that we were going the right way because it kept feeling like we were going to end up in someone's driveway. But we kept driving and eventually passed through a gate with a sign saying we were entering public land, so we knew that as long as we found a good place to stop, we would be able to spend the nigh there. We eventually found a turn off area that served as a good place to park and set up our tents. It was a beautiful night, so I slept with the rain fly off my tent for the first time, and it was awesome when I woke up in the middle of the night and all I could see out the top of my tent was stars. I really wanted to stay awake to stargaze but I almost immediately fell back to sleep. We had all decided that we should wake up to watch the sunrise, and it was probably the best sunrise I'd ever seen (not that I've seen very many because I'm usually not awake at the time of day by choice haha). It was especially cool because since we had gotten to the campsite in the dark, we had no idea what to expect when we woke up, and it ended up being an awesome place. I got some pictures, but again, pictures just don't do things like this justice. Here are some anyway, you get the general idea.

Our plan for that day was to hike Angels Landing, which is one of the most challenging hikes at the park and they say it's not recommended for people who are very afraid of heights. I was a little scared before we started, but like everything else at the park, it was amazing! The first few miles were a pretty average hike, but with some more steep parts than the hikes the day before, but then the last half mile was the hardest and most time consuming part. There were many parts where you could see down the cliff on the side of the trail, and sometimes it was so narrow that there were cliffs on both sides. For most of this portion of the hike there were chains on the sides to hold onto because if you didn't it would be very easy to fall off. It was probably coolest hike I've ever been on, and even though it was scary at parts, it was really fun. Here are some of the pictures I took.

View of the peak of Angels Landing

On the way up

View on the way up

You can't see it that well from this picture, but this is a series of switchbacks built into the side of the mountain

View as we started the hard part of the hike

The peak where we hiked to

So high up!

This part of the trail was really narrow

This is not where we hiked to, but it's a part that juts out from the peak

Same as the last picture, from a different angle

View from the top!

We made it!

There were cute little chipmunks all over the place that would come pretty close because they wanted food. 

So pretty!

The whole experience at Zion was amazing, and I hope I get to do many more trips like this during my time in Nevada. There are so many places I want to explore in the Southwest, and I want to get to as many of them as possible in the next year. I'm hoping next weekend to go to the Grand Canyon, which is on the top of my Vegas bucket list.

Since Zion, my crew has worked at the same site for 2 weeks, which was Wetlands Park in Henderson, NV. Henderson is the city right next to Las Vegas, so we didn't have to go very far and it didn't even feel like we had left Vegas. We also weren't camping during these projects, we just went home each night and met at the office each morning. That was sort of nice because it meant I got to do errands and get other "real life" things done each day after work. The park we worked in was cool, it used to just be a deserted patch of desert that was used a dumping ground, but the county decided to restore it and turn it into a park. Water runs through it which means things can grow more easily than in other parts of the desert, and it has many nice walking paths that people can explore. The main projects we worked on here were clearing views of the water to help them prepare for their school education events, remove invasive tamarisk plants, and clear cattails from a channel so water could flow more easily.

During the weekend between those two weeks, my liking for the city decreased slightly when my phone got stolen while I was at a concert. Someone opened my purse and took my phone out without me noticing, although they didn't take my wallet or my passport, which were both in my purse too. They did the same thing to my roommate Kaitlyn, and then a few hours later my roommate Jake's phone was taken out of his pocket, I assume by the same person. I've never had any issues like that anywhere else I've been, but I guess since there is so much money being spent all the time in Vegas, thieves see it as the perfect place to get lucky, which unfortunately they did with us. This makes me much more wary of going out to clubs and other crowded situations like that, and I'm definitely going to keep a closer eye on my stuff if I do go to those places from now on.

Something interesting that I've noticed since I've been here is that I've actually started to get used to the heat, which I didn't think was possible. There was one day the first week that I was at Wetlands Park that it was over 100 degrees, and I got so hot that I could barely do anything without feeling like I was going to pass out or throw up so I had to take breaks every few minutes, and I felt like I drank my weight in water trying to stay hydrated. After that day though, none of the weather I've worked in has made me feel very hot, even when it's in the 90s. So once it started cooling down this past week, it's felt really weird to me. Yesterday evening I was outside and it was 75 degrees, and I felt cold! I've definitely lost all the toughness from living through a New England winter last year. I guess I imagined that it would just feel like summer all year here haha. I'm sure I'll get used to the colder weather again, and it's nice that we got to turn the air conditioning off the other day, so we'll save money on that. I guess I'm in for a big shock when I go home for Christmas.

Our project next week is also somewhere close to the city, but not as close as the past two weeks, so we're actually going to be camping, which I'm excited about. After being in the city for two weeks I'm starting to feel hemmed in and getting some fresh air again is going to be great. I'll post another blog post as soon as I get a chance, although unfortunately until January when I can upgrade to a new iPhone, there probably won't be as many pictures with the posts because my phone was also my only camera. Each crew has a camera for documenting our projects though, so I'll try to get pictures from that camera if there are any good ones I want to share.

My first 8-day

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote, and it seems like time just got away from me. I meant to write about my 8-day project right when I got back but here I am more than a week later finally getting to it. Oh well, better late than never, right? So here goes.

Like I mentioned at the end of my last post, my 8-day project was at Great Basin National Park, which is about 6 hours north of Vegas right on the border with Utah. So the first day consisted of driving there and working for a few hours clearing some trees from the sides of the road up to our campsite, then going and setting up camp. Our campsite was about 30 minutes from the main road up a dirt road into the mountains. The whole drive up the road, and the whole way to the park intially, I was just staring out the window at all the beautiful mountain scenery. Everywhere I go around here is so different than anything I'm used to on the east coast, and I find myself constantly mesmerized by the beauty of the mountains and the cool colors of the rock. At first it was almost like being on another planet. I'm getting more used to it now, but I still think it's amazing to look at. Here's some pictures of the scenery around our campsite.

Day 2 turned into quite an adventure. In the morning we had to drive about an hour to get to the site where we were working, then we had to hike about 2 miles carrying our tools. Then we worked for about 4 hours maintaining a trail that was starting to get overgrown, then we hiked back the 2 miles to the trucks, leaving our tools cached at the work site so we could come back to them the next day. As we got back to the trucks it started to rain, so we tried to get out as quickly as we could. While we were driving down the dirt road, we started to see water flowing over the road from the hill on one side, which was worrying because of the potential for a flash flood. We though we were doing good and were going to beat the water down the mountain, until we came around a corner and saw tons of water coming down the mountain from the road that was about to intersect with ours. We stopped to assess the situation and it turned out that the huge flash flood, although not a danger to us where we were parked, came dangerously close to the road down a little bit farther, so we couldn't drive past it. We radioed to the park rangers to see if they could come pick us up, and it turned out that the flood had washed out a part of the road farther down so the rangers couldn't get all the way to where we were. The only solution was to leave the trucks where they were and hike down the road to where the rangers could pick us up. By that time the flood had calmed down a little but had not died down completely so it wasn't dangerous to walk, but debris had been pushed onto the road by the water so we couldn't drive to where the rangers were, walking was the only option. We made it to the rangers without any incident, found a safe place to jump across the water, and they drove us back to our campsite. Here are some pictures from that adventure.

These pictures don't do justice to what the flash flood looked like, but at least you get the idea.

We got to see this awesome double rainbow. By far the best rainbow I have ever seen.

Some of the aftermath.

There had also been a wildfire a few months earlier, which meant the flood carried more debris than normal because there weren't as many trees left to keep things from getting carried away.

The rangers!

Then the next day was a little of a logistical nightmare because we had no trucks and still had tools stuck at the work site. The plan we came up with was for the project partner to shuttle us by crew (my crew was working with another crew for this project) back to the trucks and then we'd go back to the work site to get the tools. But since the trucks were about an hour away from our campsite the shuttling process took hours, the first few of which my crew spent waiting at our campsite for the project partner to come back for us. Once we got back to the trucks we only really had time to make the hike to the campsite, get the tools, and then leave again, so that's pretty much the only thing my crew accomplished for the whole 10-hour work day. Those two days reinforced yet again how much plans can change in this type of work.

Day 4 was back to actually getting projects done. We didn't go back to the original work site for obvious reasons, so we moved onto the next project. This one involved hiking 4.5 miles from our campsite over a mountain and into the valley on the other side. The hike was really steep on the way up and the way down, and it took us over 2 hours of the hardest hiking I'd ever done to actually get to where we were working. Once we got there, we worked on removing downed trees that were blocking a path so that more work could be done on the trail later on. Then we had to hike the same 4.5 miles back over the mountain. So after hiking 9 miles, we were all pretty tired at the end of the day. Here's me at the top of the mountain, about halfway through the hike. The view was awesome!

Day 5 we hiked the same hike again, but this time it took less time. I think we all went faster just so we could get it over with sooner haha. The work was pretty much the same, but it rained for parts of the day so we were all slightly less enthusiastic because of that. Rain is never very motivating when you have to be outside all day.

Day 6 we hiked the same mountain for a third time, and this time was by far the hardest because I was so tired from the other 2 days of the same hike. By that point in the week we had hiked almost 40 miles altogether, so I was really struggling. On the way back up the mountain in the afternoon I felt like I had to stop every 2 minutes to catch my breath. I had learned in the past few days that I was one of the slowest hikers in the group on the steep uphill sections, and that last day was even worse than usual. But eventually I made it, and was really happy that it was the last time I had to do that hike.

The last 2 days we did more of what we'd done the first day clearing trees from the sides of the road. The last day we only did about an hour of actual work because we had to drive back to Vegas and then do about 2 hours of "de-rig" once we got there. It was a long, tiring but good week, and the 5 days off afterwards was great. I went to Zion National Park that weekend and I will write about that soon, but right now it's almost my bedtime so that will have to wait for another day.