Yet again it's been a while since I've posted so I have several weeks that I need to update you all about. I think the last thing I wrote about was chainsaw training, which now seems like such a long time ago. The week after that since the government shutdown was still happening, we went to our fallback project which was trail building in the Spring Mountains. That was a decent week, but since trail building isn't exactly my favorite thing to do I didn't have as much fun as I might have at a different project.
The week after that was great though. We had an 8-day project at a National Wildlife Refuge called Ash Meadows. It's a beautiful place in the middle of the desert a few hours from Vegas that has many different types of landscape in a fairly small area, including beautiful springs. I don't think I have ever seen water quite as clear as the springs at Ash Meadows, and it had lots of amazing colors in it from the algae and other things growing in it. Unfortunately since I still have no camera I don't have pictures of the area, but I will hopefully have some soon because I'm planning to copy some from the hard drive at the office. My plan is that my next post after this one will be all of the pictures that go along with what I'm writing about now.
Another great thing about this project was the variety of work we got to do. Especially since it was 8 days if we had been assigned to one task for the whole time it would have gotten tedious, but we go to do road decommissioning, invasive cattail removal, trail maintenance, fence repair, and even a little bit of chainsawing! The refuge staff also gave us 2 different educational opportunities by first showing us several sites around the refuge, and also giving us a tour of a new science facility that they are using to try to raise an endangered species called the Devil's Hole Pupfish. The fish is also endemic, which means that Ash Meadows is the only place on earth where it is found, and within the refuge the only place it lives is a body of water called Devil's Hole, which is basically just a hole in the side of a mountain that is not very big but is so deep that no one has ever found the bottom. There are only 35 of the pupfish left in existence right now, so the refuge got special funding to build the facility where so far they haven't brought any of the Devil's Hole Pupfish, but they have been doing experiments with a related species of pupfish to see how likely it is that if they removed the fish from Devil's Hole, they would be able to successfully breed and raise them. It was a cool facility and fascinating work but it also made me wonder how worth it is to spend millions of dollars trying to save this one species of fish that doesn't interact much with the rest of the ecosystem. I'm not saying I'm strongly for or against it, it's just an interesting issue to think about.
After our project at Ash Meadows we had 6 days off, so 3 of my coworkers and I decided to go to the Grand Canyon. It was amazing and so much fun! It was my first trip to the Grand Canyon, and like many other things since I've arrived in Nevada, it was completely different from my expectations, and way better. We started off our trip by taking much longer to get there than we had anticipated because of making multiple stops along the way to buy food and gas, and by the time we got to the park it was closed, so we decided to camp on the Forest Service land next to the park because they allow camping anywhere on the land unlike the Park Service. There was snow on the ground at this point and it was pretty cold, so we made a fire to sit around while we ate dinner and then 3 of us decided that we would sleep in the car instead of outside, although one of the guys I was with did sleep out in the cold. The next morning, I got up around 6am because I was getting very uncomfortable not being able to stretch my legs out in the back of the car, and around 7:30 we got on the road again for the last 15 minutes of the drive to the canyon. It was snowing again, which was something I never expected to see when I went to the Grand Canyon. At first we were worried that the snow would interfere with our hiking plans, but we went and talked to the ranger working at the backcountry permit office and he said that once we got into the canyon and began descending it would get much warmer. So we got a permit to camp for 2 nights in the canyon, and set off on our hike. We spent 3 days hiking from the north rim of the canyon down to the bottom and then back up. Altogether we hiked 28 miles, 14 the first day down to the bottom, and 7 each of the other days on the way back up. The first day it took us longer than we anticipated to hike all the way to the bottom so the last hour and a half of our hike were in the dark, which was a little scary and we were all getting pretty tense because we just wanted to get there. But we eventually made it to the campsite, which was really pretty and had nice sand for us to sleep on so it was very comfortable even though I had not brought a sleeping pad. In the morning we walked to the Colorado River and explored a little bit before starting off on our 7 mile hike halfway back up the trail. This was the easiest day because that part of the trail is pretty much flat, so it was nice to have that sort of restful day between the really long downhill and the really steep uphill 7 miles we did the day after. I thought the last day would be incredibly hard and that it would take us all day, but it ended up taking us about 6 hours, which was shorter than I was expecting. It was hard, but it was so worth it, and when I got to the top I felt so accomplished. That was definitely the most hiking I had ever done and it was amazing! Now I really want to go back there and hike rim to rim, which is actually fewer miles than what we did but it would be cool to see the south rim as well. I also want to go when I came see the view from the top of the canyon. I went to an overlook on the rim but it was still snowing at that point so all I could see was snow, which in itself was cool, but I didn't get the typical view, which I would like to see sometime.
This past week we had another 4-day project, and this one was a local like my crew did several weeks ago, which means instead of camping we came home every night. I was a little disappointed because I wanted to be camping, but it was less weird than our last local because we were working with another crew this time. We spent the week mostly doing planting which was fun, as well as some road decommissioning. It was cool because we got to see some more of what is right outside of Vegas, places that normally we would never think to go. I'm getting used to the landscape around here for the most part, but it does still amaze me how beautiful some of the mountains and rock formations are around here. The weather still throws me off a lot though, especially when we go from somewhere really cold back to Vegas where it's still a comfortable temperature to wear a t-shirt. It doesn't feel like November because I can still wear flip flops and no coat and I'm perfectly comfortable. I was even getting hot in the desert where we were working this past week, so I think my body still thinks it's September. It also doesn't seem possible that time is going by as quickly as it is. It's hard to believe I've been here over 2 months now.
Anyway, that's my update for now. Like I said, I'll try to post the pictures that go along with this post sometime in the near future.
