Do You Know What Tumbleweeds Taste Like?

Because I do. And the reason why is most of my team's favorite task at this project so far.

So a couple times before, a Park Service guy has come to take three people away to Wupatki to clear tumbleweeds from a barbed wire fence. Sounds thrilling, right? Both times, the group came back talking about how fun it is. Or maybe not fun, but satisfying. No one really got it. But last week, most of the rest of us got a chance to do it.

There's a really long barbed wire fence about half to three-quarters of a mile from the highway. So we park on the side of the highway, put on our aggressively bright orange vests, and hike on out there with our rakes and McLeods (which is pronounced like McLoud). I found a picture to post because most people probably aren't familiar with McLeods, but I'm on my govy laptop, which is not the greatest. So you can do it yourself! Just Google Image 'McLeod tool.' Anyway, the wind tends to blow in one direction around here, so tumbleweeds just blow into this one fence all the time. There are antelope in that area and the silly things crawl under the fences when they're running from coyotes instead of jumping over. The Park Service only clears this fence like every five years. Five years of accumulated tumbleweeds is really kind of a lot.

This tumbleweed project works best on the days when the wind is strong enough to push you off balance a little. You can just hack into a thick patch of tumbleweed to loosen it, raise your McLeod, and let the wind whip it over the fence. It's kind of hard to describe why it's so great. It's fun when you get a really big bundle of tumbleweed when the wind is gusting especially hard and you can just watch it fly. It's also so satisfying to walk up to a section of fence with tumbleweeds four feet high and almost two feet thick that you can't even see through, then walk away with it completely cleared. It's also kind of nice to think about helping the antelope out, but I suppose that one comes at the expense of coyotes being able to eat.

The only bad part of the tumbleweed project is that you end up finding super sharp little bits of tumbleweed all over you, including inside your clothes and pockets. And sometimes little pieces can fly into your mouth. They don't really taste like anything, but your mouth is a fairly unpleasant place for tumbleweed to be. But everyone, including me, still loves doing tumbleweeds. We get excited when we hear that's what we'll be doing today. And there was one time when our regular supervisor said he thought we were doing tumbleweeds, everyone got excited, then the guy we were actually working with that day said we were doing something different. That was a disappointed team right there. (Luckily, the other project was right by a road and was deemed unsafe after only a couple hours by our regular supervisor due to the especially strong wind, so he sent us to go do tumbleweeds. Yay!)

Packing for Nothing

Well. If you've been watching the news, I'm sure you know about all the craziness with Congress not agreeing on a budget. After having continuing resolution after continuing resolution, finally it came down to if there wasn't a budget by last Friday, the government would shut down. And everything the news was saying implied that there really wouldn't be an agreement by then so a shut down looked likely. All NCCC teams were told that if the government shut down on Friday, we all needed to leave and come back to Denver on Saturday morning. So on Friday, in accordance with instructions from both Vaughn and our project supervisor, we packed up our entire campsite. This included everything. People's personal stuff and tents, the kitchen tent the park service provided for us, and all the kitchen equipment from both campus and the park service. This also apparently included my team cooking and eating as much food as possible so it wouldn't be wasted. The plan was to pack up everything, sleep in the maintenance garage, then hit the road as early as possible Saturday morning. It snowed a little on Friday morning, then just stayed cold and really windy for the rest of the day. While no one actually wanted a shut down, people sort of got into road trip mode and started getting used to the idea of spending a few days in Denver, sleeping in a hotel on Saturday night on the way back, and just having a break from camping and the icky weather we've been having. I have to admit I was feeling the same way. (And the theory was that if there was a shut down, it wouldn't be for very long, and we'd all go back to our projects when the government was up and running again, so we probably wouldn't even miss that much work at our projects.) I had to spend some time in town Friday evening finding a hotel for our trip back. After calling 12 hotels and having them either be too expensive or sold out, #13 was a miracle. It would have been far too expensive, but it just happened to be the general manager who I was talking to, and she brought the room prices down about $35 each after we got to talking and I explained the situation. (It helped that she just had a huge group of 25 rooms for several days cancel on her.) She asked what my budget was, and then just said she could make that work. And it would have been pretty nice too, with a hot breakfast that sounded really good and I think a pool and hot tub and everything. If you ever find yourself needing to spend the night in Moab, UT, you should look into staying at La Quinta. So after I made this amazing hotel deal, I went back to the camp site feeling all victorious and excited to tell my team about it. As soon as I got out of the van, my Corps Members told me that Obama came on the radio and said that they had agreed on a budget. I called Vaughn, and he confirmed that yes there was a budget and no we weren't going anywhere. Well let me tell you, my team wasn't happy. They were completely exhausted and cranky from packing everything up and they were really looking forward to a break in Denver and getting to see friends and everything. Most of us went downtown to get some food then we went back and slept in the garage. ...And then woke up Saturday morning to fairly heavy snow with about 6-8 inches on the ground already. My poor team. Obviously, no one wanted to go set up camp again in all that snow, so I called my project supervisor and he said we could just stay in the garage all weekend and set up on Monday. Whew. The main problem now is that everyone packed for just spending one night in a hotel and then being back in Denver, so most of our stuff is buried in the back of our cargo truck and no one wants to dig anything out. So for example, I'm pretty sure no one has showered since at least Friday (Thursday for me) because our towels are packed away. Well, actually, several of them got a hotel room last night, so I would hope they showered there. I want a shower too! So yeah. I think morale might still be a little low. But we're hanging in there. At least the weather is supposed to be better this week. Still fairly cold at night, but nice and sunny during the day. And I think we might be done with that stupid walkway at Wupatki. That thing was really draining people's energy because it was pretty frustrating. So things are looking up!

My Project!

Well, here I am at my project! North Central Arizona National Monuments in Flagstaff, AZ. I don't even know where to start with this, because I don't have much time. My team got 3-week free passes to the YMCA, and we go pretty much every day. No joke. We get home from work, eat dinner, then go to the Y till it closes at 9:00. I felt like alone time tonight, so I just dropped them off and came to a coffee shop. So much to talk about but so little time! I'll do my best to do a quick summary.

First of all, my team is absolutely wonderful. They work really hard and when I ask them to do something, they just go do it. They're also silly and ridiculous a lot of the time. I got super lucky there. I have 10 people, five male and five female. I think I have the best shuffled team too. Most of the other teams have like four people from one regular team and none from another or something, but I have three pairs of people from the same team, then one from each of the other four teams. It doesn't get any more shuffled than that. I think that's a plus, since it avoids having people only hang out with the people from their regular team who they're really comfortable with.

Second, we live in tents. We have two porta-potties at our campsite and get all our water from a tap on the side on the maintenance yard garage at the nearby Walnut Canyon. You know those Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck if" jokes? We make a lot of "You know you're homeless when" jokes because we wait to brush our teeth and put in contacts if we know we're going to be in a public restroom soon. Also, a few times when it's been super cold at night, we've brought our sleeping pads and sleeping bags into that same maintenance garage to sleep. Yep, we take shelter in a garage when it's too cold to sleep where we normally do.

My project is...interesting. Or something. The scenery is beautiful. We've only worked at Walnut Canyon and Wupatki National Monuments so far, but we'll probably be at a few others before we leave. You should go Google those right now since I don't have any pictures yet. There have been a few frustrations so far though, including:

Job #1 We've Had to Redo: At Walnut, in the parking lot by the visitor center, there was a HUGE dirt pile. Our first task with that was to pull out the pieces of asphalt, concrete, and rock from the dirt and make separate piles. That's right, we sorted rocks. Then we brought out wheelbarrows to bring dirt out to the Rim Trail and spread it out to be like a shoulder off the newly-paved trail. (That's what all the random pieces of asphalt came from.) We thought we were done, then our supervisor walked the trail with me and pointed out all the places that could use more dirt, so we did it again. Then after I had not been on the trail for a while, my team told me they were done again, so I told the supervisor. He then walked the trail with me again and pointed out MORE spots. Bleurgh.

Job #2 We've Had to Redo: At Walnut, we dug up a bunch of signs and moved them to other places along the Rim Trail, which turned out to be much more of an ordeal than it sounds. The ones we had to dig up all had big pieces of concrete on the bottom. Then we were told we could put the in the ground in the new place with the concrete still on, but it turns out there's really no way to make them sturdy that way, so we had to go back and break the concrete off and pour new concrete. I can't really complain because I was off the work site doing paperwork and getting some van maintenance done when they had to do the new concrete, but my team wasn't happy about it.

Job #3 We've Had to Redo: We then moved on to Wupatki. We were met by an archaeologist who explained that there was a historic stone walkway that led up to an employees-only area. The stones all had to be removed last fall because they had to put in a gas line that ran the entire length of the walkway. The archaeologist had taken 40 pictures of the walkway and the stones all got placed on numbered palates, so we would at least have a general idea of what area each stone should go in. The archaeologist didn't have any tools for us and had no idea of the technique for doing this. The project was literally "Here are some pictures of how it used to look. The stones are over there. Make it look like this again." So it began with a massive puzzle, laying the stones out to match the pictures (most of which were super distorted due to the archaeologist being pretty short, so the pictures were taken at a fairly sharp angle). We then spread ourselves out along the walkway to start digging them in once we had tools, but we had a few different opinions of how to go about doing such a thing. We were visited by another archaeologist one day, who went along looking at everyone's work and basically told us we were all doing a good job. The next day, our regular supervisor (who hadn't been with us for several days) informed us that that second archaeologist told him which group he thought was doing it right, and that everyone else would have to redo their work. That walkway was only supposed to take us one of our four-day weeks, but tomorrow will be day # 7 on it because no one told us how to do it at first.

So yeah. My team is generally pretty happy, so even though they get frustrated at having to redo things, everyone's attitude is still pretty good.

If you want to try a fun game, keep an eye on the weather in Flagstaff, then think of my team living in tents/a maintenance garage. There have been some pretty cold nights. I've started amusing myself with counting how many articles of clothing I wear. I frequently get up to 13 at night. That's ridiculous!