40 down 10 to go

I've now reached the milestone of having visited 40 of the 50 US states.  I'm quite proud of this, and feeling ambitious as to knock of 3 or 4 more by the end of the summer.  Upon arriving back in Laramie on Wednesday morning, Kory and I threw all of our stuff into his jeep and headed south to Colorado to do some Laundry at his dad's and then hit the road.  We finally left around 6pm and by the time I had played almost all of the songs I wanted to hear on my I-pod, we stopped in Frisco off of I-70 for a really deliscious meatball pizza that we took to go.  We finally got to grand junction around midnight and realized that in order to get to the camping area in Colorado National Monument, we had to drive 19 miles of winding roads with extremely steep drop offs.  In 30 mph winds, we set up our tent and went to sleep.  Driving out of the park in the early morning was beautiful and the dramatic landscape made the 19 miles seem a lot shorter.

We hit the road to Utah and arrived in Moab around noon.  We drove into Arches national park and did the 4 mile roundtrip hike to see delicate arch, famous for its spot on Utah licence plates. We drove around Moab in search of camping and wound up staying at the KOA.  After enjoying a beer and some dinner at Moab Brewery we enjoyed the wi-fi that's available at all KOA's.  We planned to wake up around 5 to watch the sun rise on landscape arch but overslept and decided to sleep in a bit longer.  We finally left at 6 and hiked in to the arch only to find out that due to a rockfall 20 years ago, you can no longer actually walk up to it.  Bummer!

This is Landscape Arch

and this is the view of Delicate arch through another 

arch where the wind was so strong that I almost got 

blown over.  I am wind surfing in this shot in case you

can't tell.

Upon returning to the parking lot at landscape arch, Kory concluded that for the sake of being able to take either of our cars on road trips this summer, I MUST learn to drive manual.  Lucky for me we had Kory's Dad's dodge diesel pickup truck which allowed me to accidentally shift from 2nd gear to 5th gear without stalling the beast.  After a few miles we switched back so Kory could get us to the highway.  I managed about another 100 miles of driving on I-70(through a narrow canyon I might add) before I put putted my way to a stop about 50 feet past an off ramp.  Kory drove the rest of the way back to Fort Collins and then decided I needed to drive from the grocery store back to his dad's house in a different vehicle, his jeep.  Hopefully with some practice, my passengers with no longer need cervical collars to protect their spines while I drive.  Now that I can drive both manual and automatic, I figured that I'm twice as likely to see my last ten states before I ever even leave north america.  Sweet!

Hitch 1:Glendo Reservoir

A couple months of adventure have led to a total lack of blogging.  My most sincere apologies to my sturdy fan base.

Anyway, project 1 at Glendo State Park began Monday May 23rd.  My best description would be that it was a memorable learning experience.  The town of Glendo is in southeast Wyoming and home to 229 residents.  The towns only attraction is the state park, which dams the North Platte River before it continues south to the Guernsey reservoir, where another crew was doing pine beetle mitigation work.

We left the cabin Monday morning around 10 and arrived to nice weather in Glendo to set up our camp at the two moons campground where we had a huge pavilion all to ourselves.  Each day between 3 and 4, an afternoon thunderstorm either hit Glendo or blew by not far south.  For most of the week, we struggled to get much work done as communicating with our agency was difficult and its impossible to build trails in the rain.  In total we had 3 days where rain prevented us from doing any work outside of the garage.  To compensate, we spent quite a few mornings sharpening tools and washing park vehicles just to pass some time.  By friday, the agency finally had sandbags for us to distribute throughout the park.  This was great, as we were all anxious to work, but we had finished by 10am and once again had nothing to do...so we picked up trash for 2 hours.  I'll just say for the record, that even though I'm all about public land improvement, picking up trash when you're expecting to build trail is a HUGE let down.  We dabbled around with a bit more sandbagging in the afternoon and then called it a day.

Saturday, which would have been a full day off, wound up being a half day off because we weren't putting in enough hours to meet our expected 80 hours of work.  We went down to Guernsey in the afternoon to visit with the other crew and go out to eat for the coveted 'night out' meal.  Eating out wound up being a great crew bonding experience as there was no pressure on anyone to cook or clean, a really great treat after camping for a week.  Another day of crappy weather kept us from the trails on Sunday and somehow we would up painting 'road closed' barriers instead.  Monday we put in 11 hours and on Tuesday we put in 10, giving us some satisfaction and plenty of blistered sore hands.

Overall, the hitch was good.  Even though we didn't get as much physical work done as I expected, we did work in other ways.  Taking 8 people who are mostly strangers and packing them into a GMC yukon and saying 'here's you're equipment, go get stuff done for america' to say the very least, is a challenge, and we made it.  Next stop is pine beetle mitigation in our own backyard, medicine bow national forest.