Oof, another long day ...

A bunch of us participated in an ISP that Adrienne scheduled for today. We worked with a wildlife restoration group, reclaiming an big old gravel mine and turning it into a sustainable wetland. There were a lot of muddy, flooded areas so we broke up into groups with a bunch of volunteers that showed up and we planted marsh grasses and other wetland plants in those areas.


It was a great time, but it was really tiring. It’s starting to hit me more now. We left the bunkhouse around 7 and we headed back around 4:30. The most challenging part was wearing big galoshes and constantly getting stuck in the mud. It was really difficult to move, which made the whole process move very slowly.
It was another really good day. I got dirty, fell in the mud at one point. But it was all good fun.

Oh! Hehe. So, on the drive home from ISP, we were approaching the road that takes us up the mountain to Ned and you won’t believe what we saw – a mob of naked or scantily clad people on bicycles! John was driving and he almost stopped in the middle of the intersection we were driving through. I mentioned it to a Forest Service person later when we ran into some of them in town and they were like, "Oh! It was Naked Bike Ride Day! I totally forgot!" I guess it’s a normal thing. One of the reasons I really like Boulder – it seems anything goes here. (Well, anything of the liberal persuasion, but I’m not arguing with that, call me biased.)

Yesterday, another three of our team went down to the airport to mix retardant like I did on Thursday. Apparently things were crazier than when I was there, though – they were mixing just to keep up with all the planes that would fly in to fill up.
The rest of us spent the day at the work center. We did a six-mile run for PT. The Forest Service people call the route Gates of Hell, but I’m not sure why – I really enjoyed it. It was the most pleasant run and I felt really good during the whole thing. After PT was over, we had a class on different ways to do things like burn fuel or do prescribed fires. We had a mini field demonstration after the class portion in which we went to the bunkhouse parking lot to play with drip torches and fusees. They also set off a fire grenade. We’ll be finishing it up next week.