Just another week

Well, I’m sitting here not doing much when I could be hiking Long’s Peak with a bunch of my teammates. But I’ll get into that in a second.

On Tuesday, we went back to Unit 35 to do some more thinning around alpine clones. This is the same unit where, the week prior, we got the truck stuck and did some old mine spelunking. So we managed to start and finish our areas of the unit, leaving only one or two clones left and they were the hardest to get to. It was a bit of a rough hike in and out of the unit, but there wasn’t much to cut so it balanced out. Still, swamping kind of sucked, trying to make piles was a little challenging and dragging the stuff was also a bit difficult because of the hills.

We skipped PT on Wednesday and Thursday because our new cutting unit is an hour-long drive to Evergreen. It’s a clear cutting assignment, so we have big patches where we just cut down all the trees that are marked (and 99% of them are marked). I’ve been cutting partners with Ervin all week, with Fetsch (a FS guy) and Travis in patch and we’ve barely made a dent in it, it’s one of the bigger patches. But then, we’ve also had some technical difficulties that have slowed us down on both days. The first day, Ervin had a tough time with a few trees getting hung up and one that sat back on him to the point where we had to remove the power head of the chainsaw from the bar and try to pull the bar out of the tree. The next day, while I was using our saw, Virginia, it began to sputter and then stopped. I tried to start it again but it wouldn’t stay on, so we began to take it apart to see what happened. It was smoking when we took off the cover. We began to take it apart and then we realized, with Fetsch’s help, that the bearing had completely melted. Oops. We’re still not sure how it happened, but we suspect that the chain was tightened too much. Virginia’s chain had been spinning while idle for the whole week, so we would tighten the chain a lot and that would slow the spinning a bit. But I guess we didn’t realize how tight we had gone with the chain. Luckily, we had a spare saw in one of our trucks, so I grabbed her and we continued with the patch.

Friday was a saw rehab day. Virginia is okay, thank goodness. We replaced the bearing and a few other parts that had suffered as a result. Her chain still spins, but that’s beyond our expertise at this point. Chad let us out early, so we began celebrating Paul’s 21st birthday. We had cake when we got back to the bunkhouse. Later on, we went down into Ned and celebrated.

On Saturday, I went down to Boulder and got my phone situation taken care of (for the most part). My phone had acquired this wonderful habit of shutting off for no reason while I would be in the middle of a text or phone call. It was never the battery, it would just turn off suddenly. So I got a replacement phone and I went to the AT&T store in Boulder to get all of my stuff transferred. They managed to transfer all of my pictures but they couldn’t get my ringtones to switch to the new phone. So I’ll have to call customer service again and figure that out. Whatever. I also got a really cute dress at Ross. It was a normal Saturday.

I was going to go to bed early last night in order to prepare for this hike we had been planning on all week. A bunch of us were going to try to hike Long’s Peak, which is one of the 14,000+ ft hikes. When I got back, though, I heard from Nikki and Joanna that they had been with Mary (a FS girl) when she got a call from Tim (a FS guy) who told her to be ready as early as Sunday to leave. There’s the possibility of a dispatch heading to the Gulf to help out with hurricane relief, especially with all of the downed trees and debris. Nikki said that they might want an A faller for every B faller that goes. They were also cleaning one of the trucks yesterday in preparation for the trip (allegedly). So I made the decision to not go on the hike the next day. I asked Ervin about the whole thing and he said that, while he hadn’t gotten a call from Chad or anyone saying anything definite about a dispatch, it would suck if I went on the hike and then we got the call because that would be a huge turnover of time before I could make it back to the work center.

So I didn’t go. And now here I am, sitting around, waiting for someone to join me for grocery shopping. Everyone else left for the hike around 3 am. Bah. I swear, if I don’t get some indication of a dispatch today, I’ll be miffed.