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.