Thursday, September 10, 2009

Monadnock and SPNHF

I have less than a week left in my hitch, and I'm enjoying my last day off, which is much deserved. We finally finished a bridge in McCabe forest for SPNHF out of natural lumber, so a rustic bog bridge. The only bad thing that happened, besides the bugs, was that both of chainsaws broke the day we were going to start canting the logs to flatten out the logs and actually make it into a bridge. Thus, we had to do all of the cuts that were 2 inches apart on 2 17' logs by hand, with a bow saw. Luckily, our site contact, came to visit us and bought us two more bow saws, which made things go a lot faster. We're really proud of that bridge, but it took forever and the bugs were horrible. Not having a chainsaw literally added on a day and a half of work. But it's done, and we got to get pizza afterward with the gift certificate our site contact gave us.

We also had yesterday off, and so I hiked up Mount Monandnock, the most hiked mountain in the country, and the second most hiked in the world. It was lots of fun, and I really enjoyed hiking the second half by myself to the very top. It was very peaceful. I took a ton of pictures, which will go up once I'm done with this hitch and not on a library computer. Tomorrow, we go back to work, and we'll be putting together another bridge for SPNHF that will probably only take us a day to do, and then they're going to find us more work to do. But in the meantime, on Saturday, we're going to go back Heald forest and work with Bart on clearing more blowdowns from the trail, which is always lots of fun. We worked with him last Saturday, and totally wore him out, because we're used to working all day, and he normally only works half days. We would be totally cool with only working a half day this Saturday, and then chilling out elsewhere for the rest of the day.

I'm really excited for my parents to be coming up to NH between my next two hitches, and especially beading with my mom on Wed and Thurs.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

SPNHF

I just got done with my first 8 straight days of my third hitch, and so far we've worked in two different sites, one in Concord and one in Wilton (Heald Forest). It's been tons of fun. We've built two bridges, did one trail reroute, and fixed another bridge. Some major hightlights of the past eight days:
*Temperature drops the first night in Heald
*Swimming in our underwear in the Connecticut River during our lunch break
*Jumping stones to get across the river while we were building the bridge in Heald
*My first backcountry camping experience, and all that entails
*Jim falling off the bridge and into the water, because we sat on the edge of boards that weren't nailed in
*Flying the stringers for the bridge, which were old telephone poles
*Watching a group of runners come through with 5 dogs, and watching the dogs try to decide whether to use the stones to cross of to just jump in the water
*Getting dumped on Saturday, and having to still cross the river with no bridge, when a lot of our rocks were underwater
*Working 8 days straight, and then getting 2 days off for all of our hard work.

I'm going to work on putting pictures up from the first week, so check them out!