Week 19 - Dayton State Park Trail Maintenance

Week 19 and it was back to Dayton State Park. Continuing our work on the trail we maintenanced last time, we were excited because apparently there was a whole other section of trail that we had never even seen and there was rock work to be done!
This is NOT a couch. I could have sworn to you it was, but of course I was wrong. It's a water break made of metal, but it really, truly looks like a coach in the middle of the water....
Day 2, and no lie, we got to do rock work like the bossman promised! It was a staircase to be built by only our crew because of the lack of rock work we got to do in Lovell Canyon.
11 steps later, we had the most beautiful staircase on the entire trail. And I'm not just saying that, I really mean it, it's gorgeous.
Dan and Graham, another two corpsmembers joined us for the week (after enjoying an 8 day with their own crew in Arizona) and worked for their first time on trails.
Part of the job was to cut off various trails of socialness, meaning that people made them because they weren't sure where they were allowed to be. One of the methods we use to cover those social trails is called "vertical mulching", which basically means we dig holes and replant plants already in the area. Though most of them will probably die, it's better then just stacking large amounts of sticks and logs to keep people from going places they shouldn't. The hope is that most of them will live through the move.
These are the two sage bushes that took over those large holes above. Graham and Molly posed for me with thumbs raised high to show the awesomeness of their work!
Ahh! What a sexy staircase! Alongside the stairs are what we call "gargoyles", they keep people on the staircase and along with the extra rocks (read: scree), we can almost guarantee that people will not try and walk up the hillside along the stairs and thus we don't have to worry about erosion.
Group picture of the wonderful people who spent a day and a half building that wonderful piece of art...
Day 3 and there is still tons of work to be done to this park. The bosses were hoping that we would be done with the whole of the park by day 3, but there was so much still to be done that the call was made and we ended up staying the rest of the week working fast and furious to finish everything in time!
Back at camp and I took a few photos to show the life and styles of living in the NCC.
Group photo! Somehow I did not have my camera set up well and it was way off of being like I wanted it. Instead I think it kind of came out better and much more... shall we say, artistic...
Angry, very poisonous centipede! Found him under a rock, and then poked him with a stick so I could get a good picture of him. Nice!
All the cool kids sit against the rock wall at lunch. Haha, it was so beautiful outside, not too hot and not too cold, so it was wonderful during breaks.
Though we did not build this set of stairs, we did put the gargoyles in here.This week was really nice. We worked really hard and the weather was perfect. Unfortunately, this next week I will be in Seattle on a vacation/grad school interviews, so I will not be with my crew. I will be working one day, and I'll probably put pictures up from that as well as ones from my trip to Seattle/Bellingham. I have no idea what we're doing when I get back to work next week, but until then, enjoy!

Week 18 - Lake Mead/Athel

Ahh, Lake Mead... welcome to tour 3 of Athel killing and garlan spraying. Seeing as if you've read those previous posts, there isn't any new information I can give you on what we've done, I'm instead going to let you look mostly and add little commentary about how the week went. This week was different in that there was a lot more walking (read up to 7 miles or more a day) and a lot less killing since there wasn't much out there.
On the drive in, the snow capped mountains of Hawthorne are still there, and it's quite beautiful.
Further along on the drive, while on the Extraterrestrial Highway (yes, it exists and it goes right around Area 51), we came across several cattle on the road because it's all open range and they have no brains. Silly cows.
Day 1: We started our journey at Roger's Spring, a warm spring that bubbles up into a rather manmade (almost Disney like) setting. Nothing in the picture above is natural. Palm trees, athel, and exotic fish that live in the pond have taken over.
Break! and in the kind of heat we were encountering, it was highly necessary to find shade. From the low to mid 80's, it was gorgeous outside, but the sun could bater anyone down.
Athel's were originally planted for shade in the desert without the knowledge that they take 100 gallons of water a day to sustain, so we used them while they were still around to use.
Beautiful sandy hills made a wonderful picture. One of the internationals thought it looked like an Egyptian pyramid... I agree.
That is budding tamarisk, another invasive species very similar to athel that has begun to be green, because unlike athel, it is not an evergreen. It actually made our job much more difficult because the way we spotted athel before was by seeing a patch of green amidst a sea of dead tamarisk. That was not to be this last week. There was a lot more searching and actually looking at the plant to make sure it wasn't the less harmful tam-tam (as we like to call it).
That's Luke, another English international. He's going town on a rather large athel that we retreated because whomever came through before did a less then stellar job.
Daily job, and sometimes hourly job of sharpening of the hatchets. "A sharp tool is a safe tool", sounds weird, but it's true. The sharper your tool the less likely it will bounce off the bark of the tree and strike you. One of our fellow NCC members, on a different tour showed himself that the hard way... Group photo on day 4!
That buoy shows where the water line once was for Lake Mead. The lake has diminished in size since it's inception, but more recently, far more quickly then they expected. There are numbers/data showing that by 2021 there will be no more Lake Mead. Not that I believe that the lake is a good thing necessarily, it does provide the Vegas area as well as Arizona and Southern Cali a large amount of electricity and water. When the lake dries up, there will be much larger problems then the integrity of damming the Colorado River and its effects on the ecosystems surrounding it.

Next week, a 4 day in Dayton Valley doing bank restabilization... finally!

Week 17 - Ash Meadows Take 2

Ash Meadows: This was our second time to this place, and as always it was a most magnificent trip. Warm during the day (read: high 70's and even low to mid 80's) and remotely warm at night, at least above freezing. This week we were sent to take down barbed wire fences. Though it has the possibility of being boring work, we had so many different fences that it wasn't hard to enjoy the time...
The beginning of the week, and we were enjoying the beautiful surroundings.
You might have to enlarge the picture to see the important part of this, but that is a huge pile of barbed wire. That was after 1st break, which is only like 2 1/2 hours.
One of my roommates was on my crew for the week, and he was going crazy on the wire! He and I rocked the line so that everyone else could roll it up easily. It was super!
Lunch time Day 2!! Kevin (one of the English internationals) decided to have a little fun!
It was a much needed break in the days sun... finding a little bit of shade was totally necessary.
Education afternoon! Though this was the second time we heard a similar educational speech, we definitely learned a few new things, which was refreshing.
More educating.
During and especially after education time, it was ridiculously windy so we ended up cooking inside a random building. It was hilarious, because it was so loud in there, but at least we could actually cook.
My father came to work with us for a day!!! It was the hardest day I've probably ever had in the NCC, but he and I had a great time, and enjoyed working together.
He was a brilliant barbed wire roller. I was very proud.
After morning break, we moved on to another area that was FILLED with huge pieces of wood. Some were as long as 10 feet long and 1x1. Ridiculously heavy. That's all I can say.
Some even took 4 people to carry. Almost a month later I still feel like I have bruises on my shoulders from carrying.
Father decided that this would be a great picture, sooo, I obliged him. Rawr!
Group picture with father right there in the middle! After a ridiculously hard day it was nice to gather with my fellow coworkers and take a picture in the dwindling sunlight!
Day 4, and it was time to get heated! Throw on some sweet waders and hope that the water was warm. Thankfully, it was, and the work took us so long back in there, that we couldn't carry it out until the next day...
The next day and we had to carry "Loggy" out! Holy wah, Loggy was heavy! I thought I was gonna die, but I carried it 2/3 of the way, and it was almost a mile out of where we were working. I was proud to say the least.
This is what we walked through with Loggy, soo watery and fabulous. The last day in Ash Meadows we ended up mostly driving around all of the piles of barbed wire that we had created earlier in the week. It was a great time to calm down and not use my shoulder for a while...

Next week, off to Lake Mead, once again!