Zion Day 3

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

So today we had to be up early and ready to go by 7:30a. We drove over to the border to Arizona for the day to do some work at the Pipe Springs National Park. I didn’t realize there were so many parks, what an awesome number of opportunities to find just the right niche.

Pipe Springs is on the Paiute Indian Reservation and is the site of Winsor Castle, a very important jumping off point for the Mormon Church in the west during expansion. One of the things that makes this location so important is the availability of natural springs and what I find interesting is the rationing of this water in a “fair” manner to all involved parties. Amber is the ranger in charge and one of the things she showed us is the water collection and distribution system so that the water is not being deviated for a single group but shared between the reservation, the cattlemen and the park. She said there had been 3 natural springs in this area and that when there was an earthquake in the region a few years back it disrupted the flow of the main stream.

Today was the hardest and most time intensive day so far. We all split up in groups of 2 or 3 and were put on several different projects. Andrew was kind enough to partner up with me and we spent the morning moving wood and helping to straighten up the “bone yard” which is a fancy way to say the junk area…every place has one and theirs was really overgrown with plenty of scrap metal and stuff that had been sitting around for ages. We stacked up several piles of juniper trunks into a single orderly structure so they can use them later, transported scraps to the burn pile and then I helped out with the weeding in their garden.

As part of their educational program they plant one half of the garden as the early Mormon settlers would have with corn, beans, squash, etc. and the other half as the Native Paiute residents would have with the native form of corn, rice, etc. The corn we use today is such a hybrid form, large with seeds that don’t fall off easily while the native form has smaller heads but the seeds can be distributed more naturally and easily. There was a lot of weeding to do to remove invasive weeds from the garden which had been introduced by cattlemen in the latter part of the 1800’s. Amber and Jessica explained to me that the natural grasses grow in clumps which limit the damage that natural fires do while this invasive cheat grass species spreads out evenly and causes a big problem when it catches fire. This combined with the general lack of water makes for a very dangerous combination in this region of the United States.

We elected to treat ourselves to a night out after such a long day and everyone was really tired and went to bed early. I’m going to sleep really good regardless of the temperature tonight. What a great day!