Adventures in Wonderland

Here's the photo version of my life for the past two weeks. This is the recreating time, not the work time, although sometimes it's a little tough to tell the two apart. Below is Silva Lake, at the south end of the road. There's still a ton of snow up there, as you can see.
Totem Bight State Park is north of town and is just a cool spot. Made way cooler by the peace sign.

Little hobbit doors just invite monkeying around.

The main attraction of Totem Bight is the series of totem poles (go figure). The above picture is the entrance to a pole house with a huge, ornately carved front. Below is just one of many poles around the cove.

When I hiked up Deer Mountain, a peak that looms above town, I started in the clouds and just kept climbing until I got above them. There's ocean below there somewhere.

Along for the ride was Bubba, my friend Carl's dog. He was not excited about getting his photo taken.

This afternoon I christened my friend Leah's boat with an awesome paddle. The clouds broke just as we were putting the boats in the water, and we were treated to a rare window of sunshine and glassy flat water.

I love taking pictures of my boat.

On our way back the wind kicked up something fierce. Still, with the sun and the ocean and boat, how could I not smile?

This is a pretty amazing corner of the world to play in. The weather has been phenomenal to boot. I wake up every day with a smile on my face and so thankful to be here. Life is indeed good.

Trials and Tribulations of a Free Agent

What happens when Curt takes off for some sort of very important training, leaving me bereft and directionless for a whole week? I get to play the free agent, mucking around in as many different departments as possible.

On Monday I was part of the desk crew. Some sort of paperwork didn't go through so I wasn't in the paycheck program. No profile, no paycheck. In order to remedy the situation I had to contact HR, located in New Mexico. The first time I called I was on hold for 45 minutes, and the instructions I received weren't even close to solving the problem. Calling again, I sat there for a full hour, doodling my hands, feet, and deranged imagination while I waited for a human being on the other end. When she finally picked up the gal was very helpful and pleasant, I'll give her that. She even managed to solve my problem (hopefully - we'll find out next week when the checks are cut). It only took two and a half hours. God, I love working for the government.

On Wednesday I pretended to be part of the monitoring crew and partook of their kayak training. After a classy safety video, circa mid-90's judging from the hair styles, we headed out to Ward Lake for some practical application. As there were 10 participants and only 8 leaky dry suits I took the second shift and was forced to work on my tan on the beach while they practiced paddles strokes, wet exits, and re-entries. When it came my turn I threw on a suit and headed out through a film of pine pollen to the deeper part of the lake. I was glad to discover I haven't forgotten how to fall out of a kayak. I can even get myself back in with something resembling grace, which for me is quite an accomplishment.

Tuesday and Thursday were trail crew days. On went the rubber boots, canvas pants, and work-horse mentality. The project is a 45 minutes hike into the woods, which really is a nice way to start a shift. Once you get your breath back it's time to work. There's something satisfying about swinging a pulaski, ripping out roots, and carving a level trail from a slanting, moss-covered hillside. There's also something satisfying about having each muscle of your body in a near-unresponsive state from sheer exhaustion. Fun as it was, I'm excited to have the variety of cabin maintenance to keep me entertained for most of the summer.

The bugs in the woods weren't bad until they bit you. They'd come in swarms, waiting until you thought the coast was clear and you emerged like a hermit crab from your stifling bug net. Then they descended like a horde of ski bums on a large pizza (what's the difference? A pizza will feed a family of four). The welts on my neck weren't the worst part. I didn't even realize insects bit lips; I can assure you they do. I felt the little feet, and crushed a tiny body, but it just wasn't fast enough. Within minutes the middle of my top lip was swollen to twice its normal size and I was having trouble talking. Cursing my luck, I returned to lopping young trees that just happened to be growing in the middle of our trail. Then like lightning striking twice, I felt another one, just to the right of the first. Thank goodness it was about quitting time. When I removed my helmet and bug net my crew mates stared in disbelief for a moment, then burst out laughing. If it looked half as funny as it felt I can't blame them. We all agreed that I was a dead ringer for Angelina Jolie, and that some people spend thousands of dollars on Botox to achieve such a look. If the lumber jack gig doesn't work out, I'm headed to Hollywood.

The Curse of the Cabins

According to Curt, a person always gets wretchedly sick on their first cabin trip. I think he says that because it happened to him (apparently the Helm Bay trip last week wasn't "real" enough). On my first full-on, 40-hour, float-plane-flight-away cabin trip, I did indeed get sick. But I did it with some class - none of this snuffling, sneezing, coughing business, no sir. I went for the total misery of a sore throat, complete with white gunk on the tonsils and glands swollen hard as marbles. It started on Sunday. It's still here as I write (I'm disinfecting this keyboard after I use it, I swear). In the long run all it does is make me appear more hard core, because not only did I schlep gear, haul wood rounds, scrub moss-covered walkways and walls, and repair wood stove gaskets, I did it all when I was sick. Take that, Chuck Norris.

Patching Lake Cabin appears so happy and harmless in the sun...which actually came out of hiding all Wednesday afternoon.

All geared up to head out. What you can't see is every square inch of space behind me crammed full of boxes, bags, pulaskis, pumps and hoses. Kevin, our pilot, must be a Tetris genius.

Coming in to land on Heckman Lake, where we had a brief stopover to repair an aggressive dock. Did you know a plane float costs about $80,000 to replace?

The view swinging around Higgins Point to the Tongass Narrows and Ketchikan itself. You can see the airport on Gravina Island to the right, and a massive cruise ship in the middle of the channel. We got to buzz it on the way down.

A Beaver like our own trusty steed. Float planes are a pretty phenomenal mode of transportation. I'm adding "float pilot" to my list of things I want to be when I grow up.

Illness aside, the trip went incredibly well. It only rained when we were done with work, the bugs didn't bite, and you can't help but love having a 12' by 12' cabin as home for five days. You can check out all the cabins on the Tongass National Forest website by clicking here. There's a map as well entries on all the indiviual spots. It'll give you some sense of scale when I talk about a 10 minute float-plane ride or an hour boat trip.

Somebody Pinch Me

I think I've contracted some sort of terminal disease. I've been in Alaska for an entire week now and there's a ridiculous grin plastered across my face. It's been there for seven days and shows no signs of fading. Didn't my mother always tell me my face could get stuck?

Needless to say, it's been a very good week. I began my first official day of work on Monday and learned that the Forest Service, being a government agency, requires a lot of paperwork. All us newbies signed our lives away, and then I met Curt (my supervisor), and I signed some more papers to check out gear (helmet, eye protection, ear plugs, gloves, dry bag). It was exhilarating. There was a lot of wandering from office to warehouse to office again in those first couple days, but I can do it with my eyes closed now.

Thursday we finally got out into the field after a game on Wednesday of hurry-up-and-wait that the weather won. You don't really want to go boating in 6-8 foot seas anyway, especially in a little tin landing craft (well, I don't). The wait was completely worth it for the glassy smooth ride we had across Behm Canal to Helm Bay. I'll let the pictures do the talking from here: This is Curt, looking studly in his float coat, digging at an old mine site we checked out. The entrance is all foamed over, but there's a decrepit house there as well that's incredibly creepy. I refused to climb the stairs to the second floor.

Zoe the dog and me communing on a skiff ride around Helm Bay. She belongs to Larry, the shop teacher at the high school. Him and his class were doing a volunteer stint with us at the cabin, and those boys did a fantastic job finishing all the projects we had for them. They managed to break three mauls and even fix one of them.

On the skiff ride we checked out this little island that occasionally has seals hanging around. We saw a couple poke their heads out of the water but that was about it. This is the view looking up Helm Bay.

When I Grow Up...

Greetings from Ketchikan, Alaska, the salmon and rain capital of the world. I've been ridiculously spoiled since arriving on Thursday because I haven't seen a single drop of rain. Really, not one. I did get the chance to view several salmon, of the miniature variety. On Friday I traipsed along with several other Forest Service employees to Ward Lake, a recreation area 5 miles north of town, to participate in some environmental education. They led the event, and I pretended I was just another ADD 5th grader that came swarming off the bus. I got to identify some fairy barf (a sea-foam green lichen), stick my finger in a sea lion's mouth (it was dead at the time, although some kids had questions about that), and ogle aquatic invertebrates (did you know they have leeches in Alaska? And that everything's bigger up here?).

My favorite part of the day was when the fisheries gentleman was getting the kids to guess the names of all five types of salmon. "Okay" he says, "This one is also known as a chum, it starts with a D, you've probably got one at home as a pet, and it's a...." One girl shot her hand up in the air, waved it frantically, and shouted out "Du...goldfish!"

The highlight of the weekend should be hard to identify, seeing as it's been filled with hikes through mossy woods, a BBQ on the beach, tidepooling, shuffleboard, and all sorts of new and interesting people, but I'd have to say it was the singular event that made my future clear and answered the age-old question of what I want to be when I grow up: momma, I'm going to be a lumberjack! Seeing as it was "Be a Tourist for a Day" on Saturday, and the cost of entry was only one can of food for the local women's shelter, how could we not go see the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show? It was campy, it was kitschy, and it was pretty dang cool. I've been guaranteed that by the end of the summer I'll be able to swing an ax and chop through a log in 30 seconds flat, not to mention run a chain saw like that. All very well and good, but what I really want to do is strap spikes to my feet, throw a rope around a tree, and run up the thing like a monkey. Tomorrow, I've got safety training for the Forest Service. But after that I'm gonna go sign up for log rolling camp.