I Hate Thinking of Titles

You know, sometimes the events I'm getting ready to write about just don't lend themselves to a good title. It's really very frustrating.

Monday: All day Monday, we worked on the trail to Longview (remember the place where I burrowed into the forest to find barbed wire?). Angie and Rick had dumped a huge pile of trail mix at top of the hill to Longview, and we had to bring it out to the trail. When we were about to leave for this, Angie told us that Rafa, the director of Calwood, was out hunting elk with his son kind of in the area, so don't be scared if we hear gun shots. (This tidbit will be important later.) Anyway, while some people had more wheelbarrow action, Heather, Tomm, and I dug out water bars. You know how sometimes on trails, there's a log going across the trail to be like a step? Water bars are like that, except they have more purpose. When the trail is on a hill, you have to dig out a little trench on the uphill side of the log, so the log is raised a couple inches. Off the the side of your little trench, you have to dig a bigger trench. So the water runs down the trail, hits the log, then runs off the side of the trail into your bigger trench. This is to prevent erosion on the trail. The water bars had already been dug, but they had filled with dirt. We just had to sort of clean them up a bit. Most of them weren't too difficult, but the ground was pretty frozen for some of them.

We were done with the water bars by lunch time, so after lunch we had to help the others with the trial mix. By this time, the others had gotten pretty far down the hill. This makes it VERY hard work. You have to wheel a full, heavy wheelbarrow a LONG way down a bumpy hill that has several of those log steps, many of which are pretty high. Then, you have to push the empty wheelbarrow a LONG way up a bumpy hill. Each trip with the barrow took about 10 or 15 minutes, since we had to go so far away. Even the strongest people on the team were exhausted by the time they got back up the hill. After us water bar people joined them, we had enough to have two people for each of the three barrows, and we could switch off. Having a 10 or 15 minute break between trips made it not too horrible. By the time we finished in the afternoon, I think we had gone at least a quarter of a mile down the hill. When you make several quarter mile trips with a wheelbarrow on a hill, that adds up to a pretty hard day.

Monday was also a day we had all been waiting for, because we found out our next project! My team got our first choice - Habitat for Humanity construction in New Orleans! Woo hoo! When you add that to our current project, we are seriously getting spoiled. Right now we're doing hard work, but it's usually fun. We get to have an amazing view any direction we look. We have a lodge and two cabins almost all to ourselves. Our sponsors are amazing - super nice, informative, helpful. Our next project is our absolute top choice. Want to know what the other Sun Unit teams will be doing? Jordan's team, the other team in Boulder right now, will be on Habitat construction with us, so they got lucky also. Julie's team, who is in New Orleans right now working in a Habitat warehouse, has a local project, with the Red Cross, and they have to live on campus. We're on our local project right now, and we get to live here. Scott's team, which is currently in New Orleans doing Habitat construction, has a regional project. They have to do taxes in Texas. Seriously. There are like four projects next round that are just helping people in whatever community do taxes. I think they're on the Texas coast, so at least that will be nice, but they're still doing taxes for two months. Dani's team, who is working at the Arkansas Children's Hospital right now, has what everyone calls Poop in a Bag Project. There's a project in Arizona, which a team from another unit is on right now, where they build trails and stuff in some really remote area. They have to camp out. They can only shower once a week. And you know how when you camp, you're supposed to leave no trace that you were there? Yep. Poop in a Bag Project. How did my team get so lucky?

Also on Monday afternoon, Vaughn (our Unit Leader) came to visit, along with Nichole (the Sun Unit Development Assistant) and Sarah (the Sun Support Team Leader). Sarah and Nichole work in the office. Sarah was actually my first Team Leader when I first got here. I was supposed to have Dani, but a bunch of TLs, including Dani, got sent to American Samoa soon before we all got to campus, when they had that tsunami. So Sarah had to take over Dani's team for a while. Anyway, the three of them came to visit and see how we were doing. Chirstina told us later that they were all really impressed with how we seem to be handling the work and how good our attitudes are.

Tuesday: Yesterday morning, a few of us got some experience with the wood chipper. We drove out to where Angie had cut some pine trees, and fed the branches into the chipper. It was kind of fun for a while, until we realized that this particular chipper wasn't very good. It was way too small. There were several branches that were pretty small, but the chipper wouldn't take them. We spent way too much time trying to wrestle branches in. After only an hour or two, Rick got a radio message that we were supposed to get like four or five inches of snow that day. The chipper had to be driven back into town, so Rick and Angie decided to take it early to avoid having to drive back up the snowy mountain. Plus, it was kind of a waste of time having to wrestle with the small one so much. I think at some point later, they'll get a bigger one, and we'll continue that project.

In the afternoon, we got to clean out bird boxes. Calwood has about 50 bird boxes on trees all over the property. Each of the educators here have certain boxes that they take care of and use to teach kids. They take kids to the boxes and record data about what kind of birds had been there, what kind of nests are inside, if there are any eggs inside, etc. A few different kinds of bluebirds and wrens use these boxes, but they won't use them if there's anything inside already. We got split into small groups, and each group got a bird box map with an area circled, and sent out to clean them. We also had to do a little repair on the tops of some of them, to make them latch better. Heather, TK, and I got the area we had to drive to. I think we lucked out though. All but one box was pretty close to the road, so we'd drive until we saw one. I got to drive the cargo truck. That thing is just fun. That one box that wasn't on the road required a hike up a fairly steep hill, but it was kind of fun.

We were the second group to finish and come back to the lodge, so Angie gave us another project. Someone, at some point in the past, was doing some kind of research project near the lodge. She had put metal spikes in the ground with string connecting them. I don't know what it was for. Angie said she and the kids trip on them all the time, so she sent us out to remove them. While we were doing this, the other groups came back. When we were almost done, we saw Angie, Rick, and several of our teammates come down the road, and stop and stare. We went over to see what they were looking at. On a fairly treeless part of a hill about a quarter mile away, there was a herd of elk. They kept pouring out of the trees. Rick said there were at least 80 of them. It was really pretty cool to see. Angie said something about how it was too bad Rafa wasn't there, since he was trying to let his son Brooks to shoot his first elk yesterday, and then we saw a car drive down the road. It was Rafa and his two sons. We heard a couple shots, and saw an elk go down. At the first shot, obviously the herd ran up the hill into the trees. A second later, they all came running back down, and split up. Angie said there must have been a mountain lion up there to scare them back down. We all REALLY wanted to see the lion, but it didn't come out of the trees. After they split up, they still just kind of stood around in the clearing. Rafa came on Angie's radio and said he needed help, so Angie went to get her gun. Apparently, two elk had been shot. Sometime before Rafa and his sons drove up, pretty much the entire Calwood staff had come out to see the herd. When all the shooting was over, everyone was allowed to go over to the hill. I tentatively went over, but left soon after the skinning started. That was a little too much for me. I suppose the whole thing was kind of interesting, mostly just because when will I ever have this experience again? But I really don't like the idea of hunting. I guess last night Rafa and the staff started skinning and butchering them, but it got dark and VERY cold really soon, so that was finished today.

Wednesday (today): We woke up today to about 8 inches of new snow, and a high of like 15 degrees. It was determined too cold to work outside. Calwood gets TONS of donations of outdoor gear from an REI store nearby. Apparently, you can return pretty much anything for any reason at REI, but then they can't resell it. We had to go through tents that were donated, see if anything was wrong with them and if they could be fixed, and label them with how many people would fit inside. So we had to fully assemble all the tents, and figure it out. Lots of them didn't have poles. How can you have a tent with no poles? Calwood also had a big box of spare tent parts, so at the end of the day, we had to try to match up spare poles with poleless tents. It was fun for a while, but setting up and taking down tents all day gets a little old. At least we got pretty good at it.

I think tomorrow will be another inside day. I think it's supposed to stay pretty cold for the next few days. I can't really imagine how many more indoor projects they can think of for us to do though.

Tomorrow night, I'll be flying to Chicago for K-Spang's memorial service on Friday afternoon. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, but I SO wish it were for a different reason. Apparently on Sunday, when I'm flying back to Denver, there's supposed to be a lot more snow. Which means I might not be able to come back up the mountain. There's a plan in place for if that happens: I'll stay on campus in Denver, live in my empty dorm room in my hall of other empty rooms, and eat and work with one of the teams that is living on campus this round until the roads are clear enough to get back up here. Obviously, I'm hoping for no snow this weekend.