Hot Why Not

Today was amazing! Despite the torturing 102 degree weather we accomplished alot of work today. We had an old member, Mike, return and showed us how things were done. I worked with Mike, Colin, Abby, and Liz and we concentrated on doing the rock staircase. We had unfortunate accident were a rock that we were going to set, flipped and hit an already set rock. That was my thorn of the day. Once we reset the rock we tried to move a very large rock but were unsuccessful. This is when we had lunch and hiked back down the mountain. After a long day we went to Polar Cub which was awesome. We topped off the day by going to the gorge and cooling off in the river. All in all it was a good day.

And thats all she wrote

-Rex

july 6th, first day of "heat wave"

Well Now, having worked with the SCA for 3 years so far, we never really had that bad of weather. Though today it had to be over 95 degrees for the whole time we worked. Other than that we had a quite standard day of placing rocks, making tread and doing "Phil". We also had silly ideas of "if you leave a piece of bread out in the sun, will it become toast when we get back to the parking lot?", possibly from dellusions from heat exhaustion and dehydration. Though it was still a good idea...

Rocks, Rocks, Rocks

In the words of Zach Heyman: "I work on top of a mountain in a pile of boulders." true that.

Today it was my distinct pleasure to work with the Cushetunk crew....They move giant rocks...the project has been broken down into a few amazing stations...Arielle's crew worked to build a staircase at the entrance to the maze of boulders...its awesome. Lauren and her montly crew worked on moving other giant rocks the size of my kitchen table. I kind of wanted to eat my lunch on them. Colin led a crush crew that Hephaestus (the Greek God) would have been jealous of. I was fortunate to work with Anthony and Liz, wrestling with a few rocks for yet another staircase. (we won in the end.)

The weather was hot, I mean really hot today....102...but everyone worked hard none the less. I never cease to be amazed by what can be accomplished by a group of determined young people...It really fascinates me.... I want to take this moment to share a long time favorite quote...."Never underestimate the power of a group of committed citizens to change the world, in fact it is the only thing that ever has."-Margaret Meade.

Rock on,

DJ. Pajamajon

PS. I am also enclosing a riddle from Doug...

"Sometimes when I'm running in dreams, I dream like I'm running like a wolf on all fours..."

So today was our first friday with the crew, and it was rather exhilarating. We decided that a half day of work would be optimal considering our schedule for the coming week. Our expectations for the week had been met so we elected to further projects that we would be tackling in earnest on this coming tuesday. Arielle took a few members to do some much needed lopping along the beginning part of the trail, and her efforts showed wonderfully. Colin took on the staircase Arielle had been working on, and made some serious progress despite the difficult terrain. He and Taylor also got to use the pulaski today. They looked totally boss. I was working in the rock pit area of what had been dubbed "the boop" (the name given to the series of rocky hills around which we would be working). there was some serious work to be done and we encountered some massive setbacks. While moving a particular rock (the crew dubbed this rock "Lauren's rock"), said rock shattered into what seemed like a thousand pieces. As if this rock shattering like my dream of being a roller derby star was not enough, the rocks above it began to shift into unstable positions. We spent most of the day brainstorming as to how we should approach the new problem of facing the dangerous possibility of a rockslide. Totally bad news bears.

The second half of the day consisted of caching and hiking back down the trail so we could go on a Pirate Treasure Hunt set up by DJ PhenomaJON aka Jon-a-thang aka Jon Wolfman aka Jon. The treasure hunt was at the Arboretum where we ran around looking for Pirate jokes/plant identification/CANDY! After a very thrilling search, we went to Sunnyside park where we went GEOCACHING! We managed to find a teeny tiny "bison tube" (think about half of your pink finger small). Very frustrating yet delightfully fulfilling. We then visited Arielle's personal cache then went back to school.

ALAS, this week is coming to an end and I leave you with this final tidbit.

Totally funny

Sincerely,

Johnny Law aka Lauren

Fainting Goats

So today was a great day. We had amazing weather and we got a lot done. After our stretches and "Ancient Hawaiian saying", we hiked up to our trail to get started on our work. We split up into four groups to get all the jobs done. We all, to no surprise, worked with many rocks. My group, which was Arielle, Marissa and me. We got one check step set and it looks perfect, but our second step came about as more of a challenge. As we were digging deeper and deeper to fit in another step, we came across a huge boulder that couldnt be removed.
It seemed like spiders came up in many conversations i had today. Daddy long legs are everywhere and many of the crew members arent too fond with them. Arielle decided that its best to pick them up and throw them..far into the woods. haha.

I wasnt completely aware of what the other groups were up to today, but i know much was accomplished. I noticed that most of the trail was easier to walk on because of the awesomeee rocks set in place. A quote i was told to add to this post was "Paper DOES NOT beat rocks" said by Jevon. And as Arielle would say about the rocks, "We have a love hate relationship".