Happy Independence Day, everybody.
So I don’t know if my body enjoys this job as much as the rest of me does, it probably would shut down in protest if I signed up for another season. It’s been a good two weeks of muscle-building (where there was probably no muscle before. Doing half-assed yoga and going for walks don’t give you much
in terms of buffness).
Last week I went to some mountain in Kolob around Zion National Park some pristine place nobody goes to except for the occassional cow.
The Natl. Park Service guy in charge had a map of where the noxious weeds were hiding, and it felt like we were ghost busters man hunting these thistles with GPS and once we found them we sprayed them with this blue pesticide from our backpacks and yelled “I got a mullen!”
Mullen by the way are those one plants that make really good backcountry toilet paper. softer than Charmin! Peeing in the forest makes me feel like an animal more than anything else. Finding the special spot, marking your territory… I don’t know, you really take for granted how toilets haven’t always been around. Out in this place, with barely any trace of humans, you feel like such a mammoth crashing through the grass and bush. I started to think about how many insects I was killing just by stomping around.
Here’s a picture of the summit of the mountain we worked on (supposed to be highest point in Zion).
And this is the view from top of angel’s landing, a beast of a hike.
This past week we were in Palisade Lake state park, just this RV park with a pretty nice-looking lake and a golf course. Our job was to widen the tread on this 1/2 mile fishing trail. Sounded like piece o cake, but that trail was a beast. So many rocks and trees to knock out. I got to use a sledghammer and a pick for the first time. Wham! on the rocks. And I got to swear like a sailor cause my whole crew was made of guys. Mostly I swore in Japanese. “Kuso! Shine, iwa!”
Our bodies were so sore it got harder to move the fingers or touch the toes, worse each day. I was kinda glad to get out of there, away from the screaming RV children. Yay for weekends! I’ve been starting to really look forward to the weekends. For many reasons. 
This is a shot of the lake taken early morning. I have to admit it was pretty fun lake, a few of us took a paddle boat out and went for a little swim in our life jackets. The land on the right side is part of the trail we worked on.
