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Return to Loco Mountain

Oct 6, 2011 Leave a Comment

It was late when I got back on Friday and no one was in the office.  I wrote an email to my boss updating him about the week and told him about the truck.  Then I went home.  On Monday, I talked to him about it some more and he told me to take it to the shop.  One of my favorite jobs at work is taking the vehicles to the repair shop.  For one thing, it gets me out of the office for a while, and I also really like chatting with the owner/manager, who is a friendly old Czechoslovakian man.  Sometimes I'm not sure what he's saying because of the accent but I enjoy talking to him nonetheless.  Anyway, he told me that the fuel injector was leaking (For about 2 weeks, I thought he had said ejector until I told J about it, and he was like, no... you're wrong).  Sooo...  the truck was broken and I wouldn't be able to go to the field.  Well, not alone anyway.

It was decided that my boss and I would go to the field together and work on his mapping.  The campsite he chose was in my old quad from last year, so it felt a little like deja vu.  I'd been back on those trails with my old nemesis... ahem, I mean, co-worker, many times. 


And I could see the hill where my boss and I dug out my field review site that we never went back to.  I wonder if it's still there.  I hope no little woodland animals fell in it and died.  That would be sad.

It also has cool looking fog
It ended up being rainy and really muddy that week, so the first day my boss spent a really long time walking down the road to see if it was drivable while I stood around and enjoyed the sunshine.  Nice.  When he came back, he told me it was too muddy and that we would be going to my quad instead.  Also very nice.

The drive was a lot longer than if we'd been staying at Negrito (which we could have because the firefighters were back) but whatever.  We listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh.  Yeah....

My boss spent a bunch of time looking around for a "perfect" spot to dig a site.  I still don't like doing site descriptions because they take forever and there's a bunch of stupid crap to do with them, like counting sticks.  Yes, we count every single frickin stick.  I like coring trees, though.  It's sort of relaxing.  Unless the corer gets stuck in the tree, then it's a pain.

We ended up spending the next two days digging and describing two sites and then went home a day early because of the rain and mud.  It was late when we got home on that Wednesday night, but I couldn't really complain.  I was a home a whole day early! 

Matt was over at a friend's house so I went over to meet him, hung out for a while, went home, and slept in my own bed.  Lovely!

2 comments »

  • PJ said:  

    Your talking about counting sticks reminded me of this: So in an ecology class that I took in unergrad, the prof had us go out to some land that he owned and we, in teams, had to traverse his land (he had it sort of pre-mapped), make little squares every 100 steps or so and describe those squares. I think we even had to make notes on number and type of leaves on the ground. Eventually he even had us set traps so that we could see what kind of animals lived in his woods (well, until he realized that it was illegal to be setting traps with-out a license). He was such a crazy hippie; but, he didn't really care what we did, so that was cool. And I had a good partner.

  • Maureen said:  

    Ahh, yes, that would be a daubenmire plot. Or at least some crazy hippie version of it. We have to do those too.

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