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.