Updates from the past month...

It's been about a month since I've posted so I'm just going to go over some of the highlights of what I've been up to. Since my last post I've had 3 projects. The first was invasive removal and re-vegetation on the Virgin River about an hour or so north of Las Vegas. This was an interesting project because we were camped on one side of the river but our work site was on the other, so we had to wade across the freezing water twice a day, once to get there and once to get back. The first time we went across was terrible for me because my feet have always been way more sensitive to cold water than other people's seem to be, so even though I was wearing a pair of old sneakers to help keep my feet slightly warmer and other people went barefoot, I was still in a lot of pain when I got to the other side and had to sit there for a few minutes taking deep breaths and waiting for the pain to subside. Then after we made the crossing we had a short walk to the edge of a seemingly endless forest of tamarisk (aka salt cedar, an invasive tree) that crews before us had cut paths and clearings into. The first day we used chainsaws to cut some more of the tamarisk, mostly cutting stumps that other crews had left behind, and then rest of the time our task was to cut willow saplings from other areas and stick them at least 3 feet into the ground in the clearings. To add another level of excitement to all of this, most of the area we were working was filled with mud and puddles of water, so the first day our feet were completely soaked from walking through the puddles. The other days weren't as bad because we started wearing rubber boots that one of the supervisors had thought to bring, and the boots also helped on the river crossing luckily, so none of the other days were as torturous as that first crossing. Here are a few pictures from that week.

My crewmate, Daisy, crossing the river

A group of us working in one of the clearings

One of the muddy pathways through the trees

The week after that my crew had a local desert clean-up project, so we went home every night instead of camping and we spent 4 days picking up trash in the desert right outside the city. It was an interesting week and sometimes picking up trash could be fun, but at the same time it was discouraging seeing how much people take the desert for granted and just think they can use it was their own personal dumping ground. There were also several areas where people had come out to the desert to shoot things, so in those places everything was riddled with bullet holes or shattered into little pieces that were impossible to pick up because it would have taken way too much time to pick up every little piece. So the places looked better when we were done but I couldn't help thinking it would only be a matter of time before people trashed it again with their garbage and shooting targets. Here's a few pictures from that week as well.

My supervisor Corey carrying an old camper shell

Definitely the cutest piece of trash I found: a tiny birdhouse!

Me, Corey and the project partner, Melissa, rolling a water heater filled with bullet holes up a hill

Afele's solution to the wind blowing our hard hats off: a trash bag bonnet. 

Our most recent project was an 8-day project working with the Bureau of Reclamation. We worked half of the time in Laughlin, NV, and half the time in Bullhead City, AZ, which was a little confusing because the two states are in different time zones, but we just tried to stick to Pacific time even when we were in AZ. The beginning of the week we worked at Davis Dam, which is a dam on the Colorado River downstream of the Hoover Dam. Our task was to remove vegetation from the dam because it is an earthen dam and having plants growing on it could weaken the structural integrity. While we were working there the project partner gave us a tour of the power plant section of the dam, which was really cool! Then the second half of the week we worked at a county park on the Nevada side of the river doing more vegetation removal, but this time it was mostly an invasive plant called brassica and we had to hand pull each plant that we saw. We did 3 full days of this, which basically is the same as weeding, so it got pretty dull at times, but overall it wasn't so bad. For one of the days we also did some trash pick up at a site where groups of people had been camping long-term, essentially making their homes there, for years and then the Bureau finally got around to telling them they weren't allowed to be there so they had to leave. For the most part they did a really good job of cleaning up after themselves but there was still a good amount of trash left over, so we did the best we could to make it look clean. There were some interesting finds, and it was a little weird at times, but also fun. This project also marked the last week of work with the crews we've worked with since the beginning of the year. It was a little sad knowing we were going to be working as closely anymore with the people we've spent the most time with up until this point, but it's also exciting because we'll get to spend time with different people and there are several new members joining the corps for the remaining 6 months. Again, here are some pictures from that week.

Crew pictures inside the dam

Floodgates on the dam

This is what's holding all that water back! 

A hallway inside the dam

The spinning shafts that produce the electricity

Outside of the power plant

Maintenance workers ride these awesome trikes around the hallways with all their gear on them

Pretty picture of the dam from a hill where we were picking brassica

Group photo after the powerplant tour

Another shot inside the powerplant during our tour

They gave us pizza before our tour!

Beautiful Lake Mohave, which is the lake that the dam created. 

A great find from the trash pick up

Another great one. If you can't tell, that's a pair of shorts attached to a piece of wood. Very strange. 

Then in my spare time I've done some cool things too. A few weekends ago I went to see Zumanity, a Cirque du Soleil show. It was awesome, and really made me want to go see more Cirque shows. Then this past week, we had 7 days off because of our 6 days off after our 8 day project plus President's Day today, so I went on a road trip to California with 4 of my coworkers. I want to write about that but it's getting late and I have to go back to work tomorrow, so I will save that for my next post. This week begins the 3 months of leadership training for all of us who were selected as crew leads, so I'm really excited! It should be a great week of getting used to working with a new group of people, including 4 crew leaders who were hired from outside the program, and getting used to a new set up of our weekly schedule since we'll be focused more on learning new leadership skills than on physical skills and just working to get projects done like we're used to. So I will write about that in my next post too! But now it's time for me to get some sleep. Goodnight!

Red Rock Canyon, Death Valley, and Snowboarding

The last several weeks have been a whirlwind of activity as I went from one place to another for various reasons, so I will catch you all up on my travels recently. As I mentioned the last time I wrote, the week before Christmas break my crew spent 6 days at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area with 3 other crews doing trail maintenance. The trail we were working on was already a well established multi-use trail that is mostly used by mountain bikers, and we were adding drainages at intervals along the trail in places where water could pool up or cause erosion on steeper areas so that instead of staying on the trail the water would be diverted off. Here are a few pictures courtesy of my crew's work camera to give you an idea of what we were doing:

I'm in the foreground working on one drain and the 2 guys in the back are working on another one, which you can see to the right of them.

Me and Sondra working on a drain. We are standing in the drain and the trail is behind us.

It could get monotonous at times, especially one day when my partner and I got stuck on one drainage for almost a whole day, so at times motivation was in short supply but for the most part I was able to keep a positive attitude, and it helped knowing I would be going on break as soon as the week was over. The same night that I got back from the project I flew out of Vegas on an overnight flight to Florida to visit my mom, where I spent 5 days seeing some sights (including Epcot, my favorite Disney park!) and getting some much-awaited relaxation time with my mom and her dog, Jake. Then I flew to Massachusetts, where I stayed for about a week with my dad and got to see family and friends around the area, which was a lot of fun, as well as a good amount of relaxing on the couch and watching tv which I don't do much of normally. Then I flew back to Vegas on the last day of break on a flight that was supposed to get back to Vegas at 10pm, which I realized after I booked it was a really bad idea because it didn't give me any time to relax from traveling before going back to work the next day. My flight ended up being delayed by about an hour, so including getting my bags, getting back to my apartment, unpacking and repacking for work the next day I didn't get to sleep until after midnight (which felt like 3am eastern time to me) and then had to wake up at 4:30 to get ready for work. So needless to say I was very tired the next day, but luckily we had several hours of driving that day so I got to take a good nap, and I don't usually get bad jet lag so I didn't have to worry about my sleep schedule being thrown off.

So given all of the traveling and not having much sleep or time to ease into my regular schedule again, I thought the first week back would be really hard to get through because I would be tired and missing home and my family, and it was also an 8-day project instead of a 4-day. But it actually turned out to be a great week! It was in Death Valley National Park, which is one of the places I really wanted to visit while I'm out west, and we were using chainsaws to remove invasive tamarisk trees, so it was a type of project I enjoy a lot more than the trail work we were doing the week before break. I also ended up being very refreshed after break and ready to jump back into work, so it wasn't hard to motivate myself or readjust to working and camping like I thought it might be. The week was a lot of fun and went by pretty quickly, and on the last day we got to go to the visitor center and see Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the park which is also the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of that spot, but I do have some other pictures from the week from the crew camera:

Crew picture in front of the visitor center...I ruined it by not being able to see in the sun haha.

Crew working picture: Justin is in the foreground and Corey and Afele are in the background. This is what the area that we spent most of the week in looked like. We had to cut down the tamarisk while fighting with the phragmites to be able to get close enough to the tamarisk. 

Me carrying a chainsaw. 

Me making a snow angel! Not really, it's actually salt not snow, but it looked surprisingly similar so I had to. 

When seen from a distance, it really did look like snow, which was especially strange because it was 70 degrees. It was disconcerting to come back from Massachusetts, where it got down to below zero while I was there, and go directly to a project where it was so warm. 

Now it is the last day of my 6 days off that I had after the 8 day project, and I did lots of fun stuff this week, including taking a ballet class for the first time in probably a year and a half. It was tons of fun, and I really want to try to take dance classes as often as I can, although with my schedule it is very hard to consistently do things outside of work that happen on a weekly basis. I also went back to Red Rock Canyon, this time to hike. We hiked Turtle Head Peak, one of the most difficult hikes at Red Rock, but it was so worth it because the view from the top was amazing! Pictures never do things like this justice, but here they are anyway:

View of Vegas from the top.

Panoramic!

I also went snowboarding yesterday, which I hadn't done for over 10 years! We went to Brian Head in Utah, about 3 hours from Vegas. It was a little scary when I first started because it was a feeling I wasn't used to anymore and I was pretty wobbly, but after  few runs it came back pretty well and I wouldn't say I was back to the same level I was at when I was younger, but I got pretty comfortable and didn't fall too often. It was lots of fun and I definitely want to try to go again this winter. I also want to try skiing too, which I also haven't done in a long time, even longer than snowboarding, but I remember being better at skiing than I was at boarding, so I want to try both and compare to see which one I like better. I was not used to how much snowboarding works your legs and the stress it puts on your ankles and knees to push yourself along and hold the board up on the chairlift, so I was pretty sore by the time we left, but in a good way, and I'm actually not sore today like I thought I would be. I took a few pictures at the top of the mountain with my new iPhone (I finally was able to replace my stolen iPhone since I was eligible for an upgrade in January!! So I will now be able to take pictures of all of my adventures again):

The view was amazing, with the snowcapped peaks and red moutains. 

The view to this direction wasn't quite as spectacular but I wanted to get the chairlift in the picture too. 

The other important news in my life at this point is that I got the crew leader position I applied for! I'm so excited! That means that in February I will start 3 months of crew leader training and then for the summer I will actually lead my own crew. I will still be an AmeriCorps member and it doesn't change my contract or how long I will be out here for, but it means that I will have more responsibility, learn a lot, get great leadership experience, and also get paid more for the summer months, which I'm not complaining about! I will of course keep you all updated on all of that once training begins. Until then, we have 3 more weeks left with out current crews, which is a little sad because I've really enjoyed being with my crew members these past 5 months. But we'll still get to see each other once crews get mixed around and I'm really excited for crew leader training and getting to know all of the other crew leaders better.

The Nevada Conservation Corps goes to...Arizona?

As I mentioned in my last post, this past week my crew went to Arizona for our project. I'm not sure if other crews have gone there in the past, but it seemed quite unusual to me because I didn't think we would ever leave the state for any of our projects. The reason we did was because we were working with Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which is located in both states, and it just so happened that the work they needed us for was over the border. I wasn't complaining though because it meant that we got to see another amazing place that I never expected to see. The scenery where we were working was breathtaking because we were right where Lake Mead NRA meets Grand Canyon National Park. The work we were doing was road decommissioning and installing barriers to keep people from off-roading in the areas we were closing off, and for the entire week anytime we were working we could just glance up and see the mouth of the Grand Canyon where the river flows out of the Canyon and meets up with Lake Mead. You can't ask for a better view than that while you're at work. It's things like that that are constantly reminding me how lucky I am to have a job that allows me to be outside so much seeing new places and having new experiences.

One part of the experience recently that has not made me feel quite as lucky is the cold weather. It did get colder much more gradually in Vegas than I am used to from New England but usually it is slightly colder than Vegas in the areas where we work, and this week was no exception. I don't know exactly how cold it got during the nights but it was definitely below freezing (which was quite apparent when the milk in my cereal began freezing to the side of the bowl while I was eating breakfast). Sleeping in weather that cold can be quite uncomfortable, so I've taken to sleeping with all of my layers on, including hat and scarf, and using my sleeping bag liner inside my sleeping bag to add more warmth (this past week Corey lent me his liner also so I had 2 liners in addition to my sleeping bag), then pulling my sleeping bag over my face to keep it warm. My feet also get very cold during the night so my strategy for that is to put hot water in my metal water bottles before bed and stick them in the bottom of my sleeping bag to warm up my feet. Unfortunately the heat usually dissipates completely by around 3:00 am, but for those first few hours my feet stay wonderfully warm. The morning also presents several challenges of it's own, other than frozen milk. Since we have to wake up before dawn it hasn't started to get warm yet so getting out of the sleeping bag can be a challenge, although sleeping in our Carhartt work pants instead of changing into more comfortable pajamas makes it slightly easier because you don't have to undress or put on freezing cold pants in the morning. The boots are a different story though. There is no good way to keep boots warm during the night, even if they are inside the tent, so putting my boots on in the morning can feel like putting my already-cold feet into ice boxes. Then breakfast involves trying to eat as quickly as possible so I don't have to expose my hands to the cold for too long, and then on the last morning of the week when we have to pack up our tents it can be a difficult choice between trying to finish taking the tent down without gloves on before your hands are completely frozen or fumbling with the buckles and clasps wearing gloves and possibly taking twice as long. On these cold mornings it can be a blessing when the worksite is far enough away to require driving because then we can put the heat on in the truck to warm up. As much as this might sound like a terrible situation to deal with, and sometimes it feels pretty terrible, it's worth it because it's all part of the experience. If there were no challenges the job would not be as rewarding, and by the end of this year of service I will feel very accomplished being able to say that I lived in a tent most of the year in all types of weather.

I realized that I haven't written many posts specifically about what our experience is like at camp when the work day is over, so hopefully this post gives you a little bit of an idea of what camp life has been like recently at least. I'll try to remember to add some more about camp life in future posts. This week we have a 6-day project (my crew will be working with 3 other crews at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area doing trail maintenance), and then we get 2 weeks off for Christmas! I'm really excited for the break because I've been missing the east coast a lot recently so I'm looking forward to going back.

Pictures and update from the past few weeks

As promised, here are some pictures from the Ash Meadows project and my Grand Canyon trip. It took me a little longer than I thought, but better late than never, right? Here they are.

Ash Meadows:

This is a really bad picture of Devil's Hole, where those endangered fish live that I mentioned in my last post. We could only see if from a fenced in walkway above the hole so that we weren't disturbing the fish. 

This is inside the facility we toured where they are doing research related to the Pupfish. That's me in the picture to the right. 

This is one of the amazingly beautiful springs that are all over the place at Ash Meadows. They are breath-taking!

Big Horn Sheep!

Grand Canyon (these are a little out of order, sorry):

It was snowing where we camped for the night. This is what it looked like in the morning when we woke up. 

The place we camped, on Forest Service land outside the park. 

The edge of the Grand Canyon. We couldn't see down into it because of the snow. 

During our hike. 

At the bottom. I was so excited!

Another shot from the beginning of the hike when it was snowing. 

Lunch break

Yay Grand Canyon! 

Another snowy shot

This is when we just got to the river. I really like this picture. 

Our campsite at the bottom of the canyon.

Now for an update of things since the last time I wrote. The project after our Grand Canyon trip was at Desert National Wildlife Refuge, which is only about an hour from Vegas. We were there for 4 days, which has started to feel really short compared to working for 8 days, and we worked on putting down concrete on a wheelchair accessible trail and removing Russian Olive, an invasive tree. We got to use chainsaws for the tree removal, and it was really cool because I felt like I had a breakthrough in my comfort with using a chainsaw, and I got to the point where I didn't feel the need to ask my supervisor, Corey, what I should do before making each cut, and he felt comfortable letting me work without watching me the whole time. 

That weekend my roommates and I went to Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. We camped there one night and spent the next day doing some hiking, and even though it was a short trip we got a good taste of the beauty of the area and how cool the rock formations are there. Here are some pictures from that, although they are from Facebook so the quality isn't great, and as always pictures never quite do the place justice. 

The week after that we got even more chainsaw experience because we spent most of an 8-day project using them. We started out the week in Alamo, NV, using chainsaws to remove invasive tamarisk, or salt cedar, and then spraying the stumps with Garlan, a pesticide designed to kill the roots when it gets soaked in so the tree can't re-sprout. We did that for 4 days, but then on day 5 it started to rain and get too windy to safely use the chainsaws and chemicals, so we moved to the next project site in Carp, NV, where we spent 2 1/2 days building a barbed wire fence to prepare an area for invasive removal and native plantings. Then we went back to the first site for the last day and a half to finish that project when the weather improved. That week was usual for several reasons, first of all having to move our campsite twice because of the weather changing our plans, and we were also working on private land. Usually we work on public land but this time we were working with a woman from the Fish and Wildlife service who works with private land owners to do conservation projects on their land. So it was a different experience because we got to meet the landowners, one of which was quite a character. It was also the most difficult project we have had so far for many reason. It was the first time we had spent multiple days in a row using chainsaws for the entire day, and by the end of the week my entire arms were in pain and my hands kept cramping up, especially while I was sleeping. Then even when we weren't chainsawing for those few days, I thought my arms and hands would get a break, but having to hold onto the barbed wire to twist it around posts and things like that made my hands cramp up even more, so by the end of the week I could barely do anything and had to stop using the chainsaw for the last few hours because I couldn't even grip it without being in pain. It was also some of the worst weather we've had on any project. It rained for about 3 days, and the first day it rained it was really windy too and when we got back to our campsite my tent had blown about 10 feet from where I had set it up and the wind had driven rain into one side of it under the rain fly and the bottom half of my sleeping bag was wet. So that night I had to sleep curled up in a tiny ball in the top half of my sleeping bag to avoid getting my feet wet. Even though the conditions were not great, my crew did a great job of staying positive and keeping each other motivated. We had several nights where we ate dinner in the truck and just sat there for a while being completely ridiculous and silly, and I think that is what saved us from letting the bad weather and hard work get to us. By the end of the week though I was ready for those 6 days off!

For the 6 days off I went to the San Francisco area to visit the Hanley cousins for Thanksgiving! It was great to see all of them, and I was glad I was able to spend the holiday with family even though I'm so far away from home. On Thanksgiving morning I ran the Turkey Trot 5K with Terry and Will, which was really fun, and it was the first race I've run in so it was a great new experience! Over the weekend I also got to see a friend from college, Julia, who I hadn't seen since graduation, and it was great to catch up with her, even only for a few hours. It was a great trip, but then on Sunday I had to take a 13-hour bus ride to get back to Las Vegas, so I didn't feel very rested when I had to go back to work the next day. Luckily the work this past week wasn't hard, so it was a good recovery week after 2 weeks of not much downtime, but I wasn't as into it as usual because I was looking forward to being back in Vegas and just getting to relax and catch up on everything I hadn't gotten to do in the 2 weeks before. The project was at Ash Meadows again though, which is one of my favorite places we've worked, so it was still a fun week. We were removing Coyote Willow, which normally isn't something we'd remove because it's native, but Ash Meadows is removing it because it's been growing near water in several places and shading out important fish habitat. It's an interesting situation because they basically had to choose between two species that they normally would want to keep, but in this case the fish won because they're threatened or endangered, I can't remember which. We were using loppers and handsaws this time because we were mostly just taking out small sprouts that had come up since the previous treatment, so it wasn't physically hard, which was good because my arms were still recovering from the chainsawing we did, and we got to hang out with Abram and Will, two guys who work at the refuge who are really fun to work with, so over all it was  fun week but I was really happy to get back to Vegas and relax this weekend. I haven't done anything exciting this weekend but that's fine with me, I've just relaxed and gotten errands and things around the apartment done that I've been putting off. 

Then next week is another unusual one because we're going to Arizona. Interesting since we're the Nevada Conservation Corps, but we're working with the BLM on Lake Mead land so it's an area that crews have worked on before, it just happens to cross the state line. Then after that we have one more project where we're working at Red Rock Canyon, and then we have Christmas break. I'm really excited for that because I've been getting homesick recently and I can't wait to go home and see family for Christmas. I will try to write again at least once before Christmas, but I can't guarantee anything based on how infrequently I've been finding time to write. If I don't write before then, Happy Holidays everyone!

Ash Meadows and the Grand Canyon

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.

Government shutdown and chainsaw training

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!