Week 7 November 14 - 17

This week had all kinds of great weather ! Monday was willow staking in the wind. We spent the first half of the day putting stakes in the ground at the La Salle site with the other Yakima Crew. The wind was crazy ! Sarah almost got blown away. The rest of the day was spent finishing all the tool handles in the facility.

Tuesday was a beautiful and warm sunny day that was mostly spent putting plants in the ground. Most of the plants were red osier dogwoods, but there were also a few black

cottonwoods and quaking aspen.

Wednesday got flippin cold ! Somebody said it was 28ish degrees when we got to work, then it dropped to 20ish when we got to the La Salle site. The pots were slightly frozen, making it difficult to get the plants out and the roots broken up. Eventually the call was made to put the plants in the creek to get them to thaw a bit. It worked wonders! The plants came out easy peasy. Around lunch break it started to snow and didn't really stop til after we got off work. The snow muddied things up a bit, but there wasn't a whole lot of it sticking. The end of the day was pretty fun. We needed to make some more room in the dumpster, so it was kinda turned into a bouncy castle =)

Thursday morning we went up to around Rimrock Lake to do some chipping and found the snow ! This was a nice snow that had big floating flakes and was a good few inches deep. It was lovely and made for some good snowballs ! We got the chipping done in good order and made it back to Yakima before lunch. The rest of the day we helped the other crew put black cottonwoods in the ground at a site on the Yakima Greenway.

Week 6 November 7- 9

Our week started off around Bumping Lake doing fire assessments. We found some pretty neat natural wonders up there. There was an awesome mountain spring shooting out ice cold water. It tasted pretty darn good ! I loved how the water iced up where it hit the ground.

We also found a tiny cave in one of the rock walls that we drove by. Sarah decided to check it out. Turns out it was only a few feet deep, but it was still neat.

The rest of the week was spent helping out the other Yakima crew cutting willow stakes. The second day started with willow cutting at a site around the Nile. Then we met up with the other crew and we all went to a site past Moxee.

What a beautiful lookin stand of willows.

Chris somehow fell down . . .

So Mike and Jeff helped him up.

This is only a few hundred willows, but not a bad start. When we finished there, it was back to the facility for a little more cleanup duties. This time it was stringing pots together.

The last morning our crew went back to Moxee to get 600 more willow stakes. Then it was out to the planting site out at La Salle to meet up with the other crew. We got a good number of stakes put in the ground before we went back to the facility.

The water pick made it a bit easier to put several stakes in the ground at a time.

Our crew had tools to rehandle and the other crew had tools to sharpen. It was a lot of fun working with those guys this week.

Week 5 October 31 - November 3

Back up to Conrad Meadows ! Still beautiful up there, even though most of the aspen leaves were on the ground now. The western larch were all kinds of pretty yellow and orange. Frost covered the ground early in the mornings and ice would stay on the puddles for most of the day. The first half of the first day was spent getting to the cabin and then up to the site. We got to start a few fires to get things cleaned up.

Then we got all the trees we needed cut and dragged down to the appropriate spots for more log worm fence. There were 3 corner fences of 2 sections and one straight section of three, so thats about 36 logs and about 26 posts. The second day was spent setting out and building fence. We got all but the three section fence finished, but we quickly got it up first thing the next day.

The rest of the day was spent starting and babysitting fires around the meadow, making sure things got cleared up.

Found a tree across the road on the way back. We were thinking that we were going to get snowed out so we packed that night and headed home.

The last day we went up to Rimrock to chip for a bit. When we got back we cleaned the truck and did some work around the facility. Some of us fertilized the pines and some of us cleaned up weeds.

All in all, not a bad week.