Saturday
Sean and I set out to Visalia and Fresno to buy the majority
of the food we’d need for the next three and a half months. We went to the Farmer’s Market in Visalia
first, mainly because I think it’s an awesome farmer’s market, with a wide
assortment of fresh food grown in local areas.
I like to just wander around and see what is being sold, and watch the
people select and buy their food.
Anyway, it was a good way of seeing what was available for when we
actually bought fresh produce for the season the next week. We then went to Grocery Outlet, where the
selection of food was not that great, and then spent the majority of the day
(and money) at WinCo. The most stressful
part of WinCo was that I didn’t realize they only accepted debit cards until
all $300 worth of groceries had been rung up, and I ended up maxing out my
checking account. Some rapid phone work
switched some funds from my savings account over, so there was really no
problem, but I’d rather not do that again.
We finished the day with Target and Trader Joes, and probably ended up
spending $600-700 each on food, which isn’t too bad when you consider it should
last ~70 days in the back country, but it was still hard to spend all that at
one time.
Sunday
Christi, Christi’s boyfriend Dan, Sean, and I went to
Mineral King, a part of Sequoia National Park that is near-ish to where we are
currently living (~25 miles on a winding road).
We ended up hiking about 9 miles total up to 10,500ft elevation to a place
called Monarch Lakes, near Sawtooth Peak/Sawtooth Pass. I think we all felt pretty good after our
hike, which was the goal. J
On our way home we stopped by a little town inside the Park
called Silver City, which has a gift store/restaurant. We decided to try out the restaurant for
dinner, and were treated with abysmal service – the girls in charge didn’t know
the store hours, the menu, didn’t refill our drinks, got orders wrong, and were
very stingy with their avocados. In the
end it was more humorous than irritating – the kids in charge were probably
still in high school on their first summer job.
Monday and Tuesday consisted of finishing mending the last
of the gill nets and getting new nets (140 of them!) ready to be sent out to
the backcountry. My site, Sixty Lakes
Basin, is starting a new lake, so we get 17 new nets. The project is also starting a new basin this
year, Amphitheater, and gets all new nets for that. Tuesday night we went to a potluck party
hosted by some girls in the Park who are also in Park housing. They ended up inviting the whole housing
complex, and had quite a showing, with some really yummy food. Oddly enough, I ran into three people who had
met me last year (who recognized me, but I didn’t recognize them at first – sigh)
and another person who worked with one of my close Tucson friends this past
spring. Small world. It was a really fun party.
Wednesday and Thursday were orientation days. Half of Wednesday was a safety day for all
Ash Mountain employees, and the other half was seasonal orientation stuff where
we learned all the different parts of the Park and what people do. Late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning
the other three people on the frog crew showed up after finishing their finals
Wednesday. As of today they are still
recovering from their long week of finals/starting work. Thursday we all drove up to the Giant Forest
(sequoias!) and had resource management orientation. This time we separated into groups and went
to different “stations” manned by resource employees to tell us about the different
things that are done in resource management in Sequoia Kings NP – air quality,
caves, invasive plants, plant restoration, lake restoration, inventory and
monitoring of birds, lakes, and forests, bear management, big horn sheep
monitoring, fire effects, and hazard tree monitoring (to mention a few!). It was really cool, and a good way to wander
around part of the Giant Forest while learning about what goes on and meeting
people who are working in the Park this season.
Afterwards we were treated to a barbecue of hamburgers, salad, chips,
cookies, watermelon, and lemonade – yum.
Today was a little crazy with getting the last of our gear
checked out and getting the supplies ready to be shipped out to the various
sites in the coming weeks. We also went
through radio training, and were treated to a presentation by our boss of the
status of the frog project so far and what was going on with the project this
year in each of our basins – pretty cool.
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