Wow, I'm Tired

This is a post I wrote last Tuesday night. I had to get off the computer before I had a chance to read it over and edit, and then I haven't been on a computer again until right now. So read this pretending that right now is last Tuesday.

So today was the first day of lumberjacking. Um…it’s hard. We spent half the morning searching through a giant pile of split wood looking for unsplit wood (rounds). When we found them, we threw them in the back of a truck (which is kind of fun) for the truck to go dump them about 20 feet away, in the pile that’s ready for the hydraulic wood splitter. After that, we went to the pile of split wood next to the wood splitter and threw them in the back of the truck so the truck could dump it 20 feet away at the big wood pile we were at before. Next, we piled into trucks (one driven and owned by a person who works here, and the other was the cargo truck we brought up here) and drove to the other end of the property. This was quite an adventure. There is still a lot of snow on the ground, but a lot of it has melted. This creates a fabulous mixture of mud and ice. I think some of it was actually mud that had become ice. The road was pretty slippery and very steep in some places. I was really glad to be in the Calwood truck, with the guy who has driven these roads for six years. Once we got there, we split into two groups. The other group went to haul logs, and my group went to the brush piles. There were lots of brush piles that had already been created, some by Team Leaders who came here for a two-day project during their month of training before the rest of us got here. The problem was, the piles were in the wrong shape. For a brush pile to be ready for burning, it has to be in a triangular tee-pee shape. Something about oxygen flow and this shape makes the piles burn faster and hotter, which is what we want. Pretty much all of the piles were in boxy shapes, so we had to turn them into tee-pees. This was actually kind of fun. We had to dig some branches out of the snow and out of the bottom of the piles, and throw them onto the top. Heaving branches farther than you expect you can is really satisfying.

After lunch (which was eaten outside because we were too far away to go back to the lodge to eat), the two groups switched. There was a large pile of logs that had already been cut down, but they needed to be hauled to the road to be ready for a truck to pick them up. No problem, right? Nope. A lot of the logs weren’t too terribly heavy or big, but we had to carry them a fairly long distance, and down a muddy icy hill. I’m not at all clumsy, but I tend to have a really hard time when I’m walking on something slippery. Add a steep bumpy hill and a giant log in my arms, and I’m in trouble. I only fell down in the mud once, but I came close several more times. It wasn’t that bad, I just seemed to be going slower than most other people. Trudge up the slippery hill, grab a log, trudge down the slippery hill, throw the log on the pile, and repeat. Did I mention the hill was slippery?

The work day is usually supposed to go till 4:30, but we got done with the log hauling and brush piles at about 3. There were ribbons around lots of trees to mark them for something, and Angie, our site supervisor, told us to go around and tear them off. Then we came back down to the lodge. There was a little more to do (unload split wood from Angie’s truck, throw it in a pile, load up her truck with some long ponderosa pine logs, then carry the split wood that we threw from the truck over to the fire pit to be used as fire wood), then we were done with work for the day.

Plus sides of this project: It is REALLY pretty here. Snowy mountains all around us, lots of trees, and a peaceful feeling (when we’re not hauling logs – that’s not peaceful). Also, when school groups are here, we get to eat the meals that are provided for them. The cook here is REALLY good. Unfortunately, kids won’t be here for like half of the project, and we’ll have to cook for ourselves.

Have I even explained this project? Calwood is an educational center for kids. Colorado schools have some kind of emphasis on environmental education. Schools will bring kids to Calwood for like two days and teach them all kinds of things. I know there’s a lot of learning by doing, but I’m not entirely sure what they do. They’re the reason we all have to sleep in the lodge right now, because the kids are filling the cabins. They’re leaving tomorrow, and we can move into cabins. Another smaller group will be here Thursday and Friday I think, then no kids for the next two weeks.

So about the hydraulic wood splitter I mentioned: We need to have two people splitting all day every day. We decided to set up a schedule and do two people in the morning and two different people in the afternoon, because apparently it gets boring. My turn is tomorrow morning…yay?

Tomorrow we’re also doing some kind of fence installing I think. I know it involves sledge hammers. Angie had told us that she would alternate strenuous physical days with not-so-strenuous days, but I’m not sure that’s quite true. Hauling logs followed by sledge hammer work? I don’t see any alteration there.

So that’s it for now. I don’t know when I’ll manage to get pictures up, but there are already some good ones. Actually, I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to upload pictures. Since we’re in the mountains, Calwood is only allowed a certain amount of megabytes a day. Seriously. So Angie said we can’t download or stream ANYTHING EVER. Even Youtube videos. Apparently if we go over our limit, internet gets shut off for a day. Calwood needs internet to operate, so we don’t want that to happen. I haven’t found out yet if pictures would count for that, but I’ll ask.