Personally, I quite like the adventure of leaving our makeshift campground, crossing a stream and walking through woodland, carrying a netbook and a bottle of water, just in order to get to a place with wi-fi. Wilderness meets technological dependance.
Today is my second off-day from project, and I'm lucky enough (well, I consider it lucky anyway) to be not so far from civilization to make the necessary journey to update this blog. The chances are that on my next project I may be in the backcountry somewhere, and then there really will be no chance, but for now I take pleasure in retreating into the comforting arms of news.bbc.co.uk and facebook after a gruelling week's work.
My first project has been cutting down pines that line a meadow. It's hard to communicate here just how incredibly hard, tiring, and mind-numbingly boring each day's work is.
Firstly, though, I suppose I should say that I am staying in the most incredible place. Yosemite, for anyone who's not had the pleasure of visiting, is just beautiful. Here is the view that greets us at 7am each morning when we arrive on site for work:
Pretty nice really. And a few times through each 10-hour day I have to look up and tell myself again that I am incredibly priviliged to be able to be here. But those of you who know me well will know that I sometimes have difficulty sitting though one two-hour film, and so ten hours of the same thing - cutting, carrying, cutting, carrying... in the heat that's caused forest fires throughout California and just down the road from where we're working... it's not easy at all.
The 10-strong ACE crew is a great bunch really, with representatives from America, Holland, Canada, Estonia, and a couple of English kids. We're led by Chris, who celebrated his 22nd birthday a couple of days ago (which makes me feel pretty old!), and who is a typical Californian dude, if you know what I mean. Upon arrival at the campground on the first day we were given very little instruction but were expected to be ready for work within about half an hour of getting to the site, which included making lunch, pitching tents, etc... when I said to Liz, a Canadian volunteer who's already spent three months in Flagstaff with ACE, AZ, that I felt more than a little hassled/rushed, she said "yeah, that's because there's no order". I like a bit of order in my life, but I guess different people operate differently.
Many of the volunteers have been on other projects together and it's easy for me to feel a bit like an outsider, but after talking a bit to a couple of other people I realise that I'm not the only one struggling a bit with the whole thing.
I guess you could put it down to homesickness, or just exhaustion, but I am finding the whole thing kinda difficult. I'm sure it will get better as I get used to the pattern of life with ACE, and later today I'm going rock climbing with some people in the valley which should be a pretty cool day! In fact, I should really get going - there's a lot more I could say but I think I'll just put some pictures up instead.
This was my favourite view on the way to Yosemite. Reminds me why California is so cool.
Here are some of the thousands of trees we cut down (it's partly a firesafe project -they're planning a controlled burn of the meadow and don't want it to spread to this old fence that you can see here.
Me and the other girls on the project - I'm the idiot in the bandana.
Me, Ben (English) and Julie (American)
Our campground for our work days. We don't spend much time here - breakfast at 6am, then after work we go in the river for a swim to cool down and feel slightly human again, and then usually in bed by 9pm through sheer exhaustion!
The view from our off-days campground.
Me, eaten alive by mosquitos. I have to try not to look at myself in the mirror at the moment as I've also recently acquired bites all over my face which look like really bad acne!!!
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