Orientation Mon

This blogging thing is a lot of work, but I'm determined to keep up with it!  Since I've gotten here it's been pretty crazy and I felt like I was becoming bipolar or something being super happy one minute and then sad and lonely the next.  I didn't expect it to feel so weird but I guess moving to a location that you have only ever seen in movies will do that to ya.  Luckily my roommates are really cool and once we started doing things together it wasn't so bad.  We spend most of our time at home sprawled out on the floor since we have no furniture and murdering mini cockroaches so I think that's  progress.

Last Monday I finally started work but it was mostly involved hanging around, eating a lot, and learning about the wildlife in the desert.  We found out our crews at our field station, got an overview of the week and then went up to the mountains where we camped until Friday.  The first few days we listened to a lot of speakers from organizations that we will be partnering with this year discuss the types of projects we'll be doing with them.  We'll be doing a lot of trail building so we spent some time learning the physics behind how we build them and why.

Thursday the plan was to have a full work day of building trails but we ended up only working for probably an hour or 2.  We drove in trucks a little ways down the mountain to where we'd be working and then we had to hike in a mile or so with all of our tools.  We had barely started working when it started to lightning at which point we were told to drop our tools and disperse, sit down, and wait 45 minutes after the last lightning until we could resume work.  There's even a lightning pose for when you actually feel your hairs rise where you crouch in a squatting position with your heals touching and your hands on your knees.  Eventually it started pouring and after a while we heard a weird noise and then saw the head of a flash flood! It was pretty cool.  Of course it was going through a ditch at the bottom of the hill the went along part of the path we had to walk on to get back to the trucks.  The crew leaders decided that we couldn't work in these conditions anyways so once the lightning stopped we hopped through the flash flood and then walked straight back to the road instead of following the path.  When we were almost all the way back to the trucks there was a lightning strike super close so everyone dropped there tools and had to run the rest of the way back.  I live for this kind of stuff so it was exciting!

Other than that we spent a day learning wilderness wildlife training (which is pretty scary to thing about all the horrible things that can happen out there).  And we spent a lot of time cooking/eating.  I was expecting something along the lines of loaves of bread and occasionally some undercooked rice for dinner each night but it turns out we'll be eating better than I normally would at home.  We made pita pizza, pesto pasta, and falafal while camping whattt.  So that basically sums up my orientation week!  It was really fun but I can tell it will definitely be tough.


The cool thing about Las Vegas as that as much as being in the city kind of sucks you can do just about anything by only driving a matter of hours.  Yesterday my roommates and I went to see the Hoover Dam and then we drove through this abandoned town and went cliff jumping in Lake Mead!  Whenever I'm wondering what I'm doing here I look around and remember I'm in this amazing location surrounded by mountains and crazy landscapes and getting paid to go camping.  Woohoo!