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.