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!)