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!

Week 16 - User Defined Routes/Trail Work

Feb. 8th, 2008 - As our next 4 day tour, we started at a place called Fort Churchill to restore some "user defined routes" or otherwise known as trails. Like other trail projects this was pretty boring to me, but overall it was probably one of the easiest projects we had done as well.
My father came in to town on the Saturday after we finished this trail, so I took him on a little nature hike. He found a sweet cow bone and posed for me...
This is the actual trail, and much different from Lovell Canyon is was almost a completely flat trail. This changes how much work we actually do because for human (and human only) trails, there is much less destruction that has to happen.
This was a really nice area to work in, filled with wildlife (hawks, bald eagle, rabbits, robins, etc) and we were right on the Carson River which is a great little river. Wonderful camping and not even too cold, in fact during the day it was in the 60's (SUPER!)

Next week, Ash Meadows!

Week 15 - Dirtiest Job with Mike Rowe

Well, we're up to week 15, and thankfully we have managed to stay out of Lovell Canyon for a while longer. But instead, we were put on a 4/3 day rotation for two weeks because of a little disaster in a city called Fernley not far outside of Reno. Fernley is an agricultural city, and they have levees all over the place. A levee broke in a residential area and over 800 houses were flooded several feet. In a desperate attempt to curb the possibility of mold setting in, or even worse, the proliferation of nasty diseases, they had quite the number of volunteers ready to help clean up. Though Americorps is not a religiously affiliated group, we were sent to work with a Southern Baptist disaster relief team. Since most of them were older, we were sent to do the dirty work... cleaning out crawl spaces still slightly filled with water...
Sweet yellow suits (that liked to break regularly) kept us "mostly" dry. Thankfully most of the houses were like the above, stripped and not even remotely ready to be lived in. There were two houses that were fully furnished and being lived in, we had to be very careful there because we came out of most houses looking like the crap monster from Dogma.
That's actually me somewhere in there... Because of the face masks, I couldn't even wear my glasses under, no one really could. The tight spaces prevented us from wearing hardhats, and the gloves would get so completely trashed just after half the house that most of them were tossed regularly. We didn't really know what we were going to be doing when we got to Fernley, so we didn't exactly come prepared to be throwing away so much. Needless to say, the last day of work I was wearing two different size gloves, from somewhere I found in the truck that had been kind of not really washed out to decrease the amount of dirt on them...
The relief team set us up in the local S. Baptist church! We had heat, cots, food made for us, and showers! It was magnificent! Those are three of the trooper internationals we had with us. I say trooper because one of them is claustrophobic and still went under two of the houses and helped pull insulation out. Thoroughly impressed.
These are the marshmallow suits they had to get for us after we ran out of the yellow suits, which broke at the first move your made. That's me in the blue bandana, looking like the Michelin man, and we were ready to go under! It was our last house of the tour, and it was by far the worst. Though it didn't take as long as others, there were literally pools of water in certain areas with almost frozen water in all of them. Exhausted and ready for a shower, we hurried home after this house and it was only day 3 of our 4 day tour, we were out of houses!
To remedy this situation of being out of houses, we ended up working with Goodwill, sorting through all sorts of donations, preparing for families to take what they needed to start their world over. Not nearly as tiring, but a good bit easier and probably a little more fun, we left Fernley on Thursday afternoon and headed back to Reno, prepared for a weekend of fun!

Next week, Dayton Valley bank restabilization!