Another week in paradise...
Okay, so the weather wasn't that great this week. I can finally
sympathize with everyone who is still stuck in Maine. It's been
gray and rainy for the last couple of days, and I'm ready for the
sun to re-appear. I don't think the weather has broken 70 degrees
here yet, except in the extreme Northern part of the park,
essentially a desert. Yeah, with little prickly pear cacti all
over the place and everything. One of my roommate's bike tire
succumbed to the thorns of a cacti this weekend while trail riding.
But hey, at least the animals are starting to become interesting.
This morning, an Elk gave birth on the lawn in front of my work
building. Unfortunately, in my insistence to find a working camera
to capture this wonder of nature, the elk finished up and moved to
the sagebrush down the street, effectively hiding the newborn from
prying eyes. And I never did find a camera.
It was a hectic week in the office, with a new person starting in
the GIS lab and our #2 Administrator (and most delightful person in
the building) out for a few weeks with a spinal injury. Seems that
she was biking with some friends, hit a rock, and went head over
heels with her feet still clipped into her bike. Her helmet broke,
and her C7 vertebrae became cracked. Her biking companions had the
right frame of mind to do everything right and perhaps prevented
further damage. She was taken by ambulance, then helicopter to
Billings where she spent several nights, and is now enjoying some
R&R...As much as one can enjoy sitting in a la-z-boy with a hard
neck brace on. No permanent damage, thank god...Just a single
summer sitting on the sidelines.
This week's holiday made a mess out of our plans to get any field
work done, so we're hitting it hard next week. Monday through
Thursday of all day GPS'ing of Electric, Water, and Sewer features.
One advantage of living in a very small community is that you get to
meet all kinds of interesting people. For the second time in 2
weeks, I'm going on a "training run" with one of the local
Whitewater Rafting companies. In order for their guides to be
certified, they have to go on a certain number of practice runs with
non-paying customers. I ran into one of the folks in charge of this
process at the bar last night, and got invited to come back for
another run. Hey, who doesn't like free stuff? The Yellowstone
River's gone down in volume considerably since my last run, but it
should still be a nice (if slightly cold) trip down the river.
Later in the summer, it'll be warm enough to float down in a tube
without a wetsuit. Ah, but the ice just let out of Lake Yellowstone
a week ago, and we're still getting fresh snow in the mountains in
the park (another thing that disappeared before I could find a
camera).
This weekend we shall officially open our new dorm deck. My
roommate Carrie and I obtained a bunch of discarded wood, mostly
from boardwalks and concrete forms destined for a burn pile for fire
fighter practice, and assembled a pretty sturdy (and much improved
over the original) deck. I knew that summer of working for a
carpenter would come in handy somewhere down the line.
That's all for now.
Nick
