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!