Arizona-bound

Here I am again.  We’ve been having a bit of a weekend here, well, sort of a working weekend.  Still trying to move ourselves in to the apartment and finish up some training bits and pieces before we head to our second training in Tucson.

On Friday Tyler and Alex (who are, by the way, my venerable bosses) took us to dinner at a Vietnamese place in downtown Boise.  It was delicious food, and afterwards they walked around the downtown with us and pointed out all the hot spots to eat and hang out in.  We saw the capitol building, the library (which in Boise has a big sign that says: Library!), lots of good restaurants, the Basque district (although “district” is a bit of a misleading word for this block-long neighborhood).  We didn’t stay in the downtown too long that night, but the next day some of us went to a rock climbing gym to play around on the bouldering wall.  After that we went to the Boise coop and found an amazing cornucopia of good food and drink.  Mmmmm!  I want to live there.

Our apartment is a bit more on the homey, furnished side these days.  Today we bought a table and chairs, some hanging shelves so we can finally move our clothes out of our suitcases.  And other boring but necessary items like brooms and toilet brushes. 

So on Tuesday we are flying to Tucson for a member training.  I think there will be about 40 people at the training, including my old project leader on the PCT.  We be put through all kinds of enlightening things like Risk Management, Drive Safe Drive Smart, How to Use Your Chase Card, and probably community building, because they really like that stuff.  Following the member training our crew will have a short field training where we’ll actually do the work we’re here to do for a few days.  And following that most people will return to Boise to plan the next hitch, while four of us remain in AZ to work on some refuges there.  Myself and three of the boys are staying to do that work—two of us have lots of trails experience and the other two are good with GPS/GIS work, so we are kind of the guinea pigs being sent into the field first.  We’ll be working in the refuges on the border—I believe the names are Buenos Aires NWR, San Bernardino NWR, and Cabeza Prieta NWR.  Part of the reason they are having four of us work on those refuges is because of their proximity to the border—there is a good chance we might come up against some shady characters.  But they’ve warned us of the potential and we’ll be plenty safe—so don’t worry, MOM!

I’m really looking forward to getting out into the field and getting into the work.  I think it will be good for the group to be broken up and go separate directions.  And when we all come back to Boise we’ll be a whole new group.  You get to know people in a very different way when you go out camping with them for three weeks at a time.  It’s hard to imagine but I won’t be back in Boise until the beginning of March. 

So I guess I’ll be posting again in March!  Enjoy February ya’ll.  I sure will, down in the sunshine and heat of Arizona.

Home

Well here I am in Boise, my home city for the next ten months.  Since arriving on Monday it’s been a packed schedule of meeting my crew, meeting all the other people we’ll be working with in the office, moving into the apartment, and slowly finding out the details of the season.  Its almost deceiving to call Boise and this apartment my “home” for the next ten months… while my few nice clothes I brought with will live here, I will be traveling all over the country for about three out of four weeks each month.  So… home?  Home is in the woods I guess.  Airports might start to feel overly-homey as well, I suspect.  My boots will be home for my feet.  My sleeping bag  is my traveling home.  The smell of coffee is home.   Guess I’ll start to find it in all kinds of places.

There are ten of us traveling interns.  Well, nine at the moment.  The tenth will be arriving shortly.  Five guys, five girls.  Two apartments.  Approximately 250 wildlife refuges to visit between us, located in all 50 states plus US territory in Puerto Rico and some Pacific islands.  Yeah… it’s overwhelming me a bit at the moment too.  Luckily before we jump into it all we’ve got this week of training in Boise and then about ten more days of training with some other crews in Tucson, AZ.

I guess I can explain the purpose of this job a bit, because it IS a job.  As much as it may sound like a year of touring US wilderness areas there is Work to be done.  We have been hired as trail inventory interns.  Our objective is to travel to Fish and Wildlife Refuges throughout the US and walk the trails.  While we walk the trails we will be mapping them on a GPS and collecting data on the trail.  Noting where the trail is eroded, sunken, impassable, non-existent, etc. Who knows really what we’ll find.  But we’ll find it and then we’ll mark it so future trail crews can be sent to these places to repair trails and keep public access open in these areas.

There are going to be plenty of challenges: travel delays and the airport run-around, encounters with alligators and grizzly bears, walking trails in the deep south or on the border, and learning to live with one person pretty closely for three weeks at a time.  But I’m really looking forward to seeing places very few people will ever visit.  Few refuges have the notoriety of National Parks, rather they are expanses of land protected mostly for the sake of wildness and wilderness, research and study, and as a retreat, or refuge, from development.  At least that is my thought as I go into this… 50 wildlife refuges later I might have a different perspective.

Much love to everyone!  I’ll try and keep this updated with photos and such.