Week 8: Two months!

October 15th, 2007

So my apologies for the lateness, but I had a lot of problems with the pictures from Ash Meadows which is where we were based this last week. This first picture is the beginning of our 6 hours drive, right outside of Reno/Sparks.







I have so many pictures of the drive because it's so different then what we had seen in Lake Tahoe.











The tree you see there is called a Joshua Tree, but it's actually part of the cactus tree, and the "trunk" is all of the sharp "leaves" dead and pushed down into a trunk like apparatus.










This is one of about 40 brothels between Reno and Las Vegas. There are only two counties that can't have legal prostitution and that is Washoe and Clarke county where Reno and Vegas are.










The first night in Ash Meadows, we already had dinner cooked, so all we had to do was set up our tents and play, so we played Travel Scrabble. It was a great time as you can tell!










The first day of work we got split into two separate groups and two of us got sent out alone to deal with cockaburr shrubs. They were in a marshlike place, so we were in water boots that had lots of holes in them. Kind of pointless. But we had a great time and we just sort of enjoyed ourselves working in a new place. All of the white pipes you see are actually a watering system that someone within Ash Meadows put in because there was a fire that ravaged the area a few years ago. Funny story though, the way the fire got started was an NCC volunteer had once worked in Alaska and thought that the correct way to handle toilet paper even here in Nevada was to light it on fire. Unfortunately, that started a 70 acre fire that completely tore Ash Meadows to pieces.
These are less then half of the bags that we had to use to pick up all of the cockaburr plants. Some of these root systems were outrageously large and there was a lot of whole body weight pulling. I got good at it.









This is from our "educational" afternoon with the Ash Meadows people and we had to count all of these different kinds of fish because the entire reason for Ash Meadows is to save an endemic species of fish called "pup fish". I don't agree with killing other animals to save one kind of animal, but there's a lot of other things involved with it too.













These are the crawfish that we are sexing and then killing, rather, we ate them.












As you can see here... Unfortunately (and this may be resolved later) all of my pictures from the rest of the week crapped out on me so there is no more to show or write about as of right now, but the rest of the week was basically kicking tookus and taking out a lot of cattail. Perhaps I will be able to revive the pictures and use them, but for now, that's all there is.

This week's installment is coming sooner then later!