The government shutdown has now been going on for 2 weeks, so I'll start by talking about how that has impacted our projects. At the start of our work week 2 weeks ago there was a lot of talk about how the potential impending shutdown might cause us to be pulled from the projects we were working on, but we were sent to those projects anyway hoping that things would work out. The project my crew was at the week was at a place called We Thump, which is Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land about an hour south of Vegas. It was a really cool area with lots of really old Joshua trees, and the work that first day was planting native plants, which was fun because planting is a nice change from the killing invasive plants that we often do. The first thing we did that day was go to a nursery near Lake Mead to pick up the plants, and then when we got to the worksite, the project partner had set up a tour of a ranch for us. The ranch was called Walking Box Ranch, and was owned by Clara Bow and Rex Bell. It was really cool to hear about the history of it and see all of the old pictures of the two of them and their family that were hung all over the house. Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of it since I did not have a phone at that point, and even now that I do I haven't figured out how to get pictures from it onto the computer, so you'll have to forgive the lack of pictures in my posts for a while. It's going to be very frustrating for me to not have pictures to remember all the cool places I'll be going in the near future, but hopefully I can get pictures from other people until I can get a smartphone again.
After that we got started on the planting, which took us the rest of the day. Altogether we planted over 100 plants, which was almost all of the plants we had picked up from the nursery. Then we went to our campsite, which was so cool because it was in the middle of a huge area of Joshua trees, and that night was pretty much the perfect temperature to sleep outside. The sunrise the next morning was beautiful as well, but then when we got up we learned that the government had indeed shut down and that we had to leave and go back to the office. So we sadly packed up and drove back to Vegas and spent that night at our apartment. The next morning we went back to the office and were sent to a different project, which was a project 2 crews were already working on and it was the only one that wasn't cancelled. Somehow we were able to keep working there because it was Forest Service land that we had an existing grant to work on, or something like that. That project involved trail building at the same trail we practiced on at orientation, and even though the 2 days we spent there were good, it wasn't as fun as the project we'd been working on originally.
Luckily this past week our plans were not impacted by the shutdown because we were already scheduled to do chainsaw training, which didn't involve working with a government agency because the organization that runs our AmeriCorps program was paying for it out of pocket. So we spent a week in a place called Indian Valley about 5 hours from Vegas learning how to use chainsaws, which was fun. We spent the first 2 days learning about proper techniques and how to maintain the chainsaws, and then on the third day we finally got to actually use them. I'd used a chainsaw once last year when I did a day of informal training, but this training built on what I already knew and allowed me to get even more comfortable with it. It was fun, but since there were so many of us all being trained at once it involved a lot of standing around waiting while other people used or maintained the chainsaws. It was also really cold the first 2 days of actual chainsaw work, which made standing around even less fun. It also snowed, which was cool since I like snow, but I was not expecting it to be quite that cold and I didn't think I would see snow this early. Many of my preconceptions about Nevada have been proven wrong since I got here, most of them relating to the weather. I guess I had the idea that most of the state would be similar in weather to Las Vegas, which I can now see was clearly wrong. By the end of the week it got a little bit warmer again, but the last (and most beautiful) day we were there we only got to chainsaw for an hour before we had to leave. Overall it was a good week, but it also showed me that I need to start being more prepared for the cold.
My roommates and I also experienced snow this weekend when we went hiking. The process of finding somewhere to hike was more difficult than we thought because the first 2 places we tried to go were closed because of the government shutdown, but we eventually found a trail in the Spring Mountains, which is the same range where we did the trail buiding project during orientation and 2 weeks ago. It's right outside of Vegas so, again, I was not expecting it to snow, even though I now knew to expect that it would be cold. Almost as soon as we started the hike it started snowing, but it wasn't as bitterly cold as it was during chainsaw training so it was very enjoyable to hike through the snow and look up and see the mountains clouded in falling snow. We hiked 2.5 miles and found a rock alcove where we decided to camp for the night. By this point it had stopped snowing and the sky was clear, and it was a beautiful night to be out in nature. Then we got up this morning and hiked back down, and it was perfect weather to hike and enjoy the scenery. Again, I wish I had pictures, it was beautiful.
Since the government is still shutdown, our schedule continues to get messed up. This week my crew was supposed to go to Desert National Wildlife Refuge, which is near the Spring Mountains very close to Vegas. But instead, we are going back to the Spring Mountains to work on the same trails that crews have been working on since the beginning of the year, since that is still one of the only projects that is able to get funded. Hopefully the government shutdown will end soon so we can go back to normal. Once the government opens again we'll probably be sent back to the projects that got cut short by the shutdown initially, which I'm excited about since I really liked that project. C'mon government, get your act together!
