My coworkers are, simply put, very awesome and fun to be around. I have no problem working with any of them and would have been fine being paired with any of them – it is quite a tribute to my boss that he hired such awesome people.
My partner for the month of July is a field tech/Musician from Mammoth who is a crazy-fast hiker and enthusiastic about exploring the Sierras on foot and ski. He at first struck me as a serious dude, but has a dry sense of humor that comes out with the best comments at times – I think we will get along just fine. He also knows his aquatic insects and wildflowers really well, which is fun. He plays the banjo (and mandolin!) and talks music with my boss. He had the foresight to bring out speakers with his mp3 player, and thus we often got to mend gill nets to music.
The “boy” of the boy/girl team is a highly talented Punster who can turn almost any sentence to have a different meaning – it is quite humorous and keeps us all on our toes. He is also an avid hiker (and fast!) and spends part of the year working at Antarctica (Big Red!), which I think is cool (no pun intended). The Punster has hiked the Appalachian trail and has lots of stories about his time on the trail, in Antarctica, and about growing up – sometimes we don’t know which ones to believe (for instance, he has no music preference and has never owned a CD) – but dinner times at Sixty Lakes were always lively and fun.
The “girl” of the boy/girl team has been a backcountry ranger for both Denali National Park and Death Valley National Park and has a slew of other professions in between. She has been a seasonal employee for so long that she now travels from job to job with all her possessions in a small trailer towed behind her car. These possessions include a dirt-bike and mountain bike, which is pretty cool. Due to a back-story I will not explain here, her nickname around camp was “El Freezin.” El Freezin brought a Cosmopolitan magazine and toe nail polish to camp in an attempt to get a rise out of our boss; on the first night she and I sat down and painted our toes while reading Cosmo articles. Her plan to wig out our boss did not work; he barely looked twice and thought nothing was odd. The Cosmo, in fact, became an almost prized possession in camp, with everyone reading from it throughout the week, especially at dinner time where ridiculous articles and stories would be read out loud and giggled at. In the magazine was a full page photo of Justin Timberlake (JT!), which we ended up ripping out and posting at Snaggletooth Boomer. Later on in the week El Freezin put Vicks under her nose to help against the fish smell and then put some dirt on the Vicks, resulting in a pseudo-mustache. She got me to do the same, and we were finally successful at getting a reaction from our boss, who thought we were ridiculous and funny at the same time. We pretended we were “dudes” for the next couple of hours, saying “dude” a lot and saying that “we liked sports.” Doesn’t every guy talk like that? J
While it was really nice to have another girl in camp, it was especially awesome that it was El Freezin – she and I ended up talking (and laughing) a lot throughout the week and, I think, becoming close in the way that constant companionship in the backcountry can bring. One of the major drawbacks of this job is that you make such close connections with the people in the first few weeks, and then only get to see most of these people the rest of the summer through careful planning ahead of time to meet up on the weekends, since there is no phone or internet contact while we are in the back country.
The boss who came to Sixty Lakes is a guy who is finishing his master’s thesis on turtles while working at SEKI and supporting his wife and young son. He is an excellent leader – very understanding with me while hiking up, very patient while teaching me and the Musician different knots that are necessary for tying gill nets and screen tents down, and very fun to be around on our off time. He is very passionate in his love of the job and the Sierras and yet is also very passionate in his love of his family – you can tell how much he loves being in the backcountry and working toward restoring the high elevation lakes and you can also tell that he misses his family quite a bit by being up there. I can only hope that someday I meet someone who will think and talk about me and my (future) kids in the same way that he does about his wife and son. While there is much more about my boss than this (including being very funny) these are the things that struck me most about him.
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