We woke up relatively early this morning, as we had a long
day of work planned ahead of us. After our granola bar and fruit breakfast, Jessica
met us at our camp at 8:00am, and we drove to the site of our day’s work: trash
analysis. Rangers Josh, Emily, and Amnesty were waiting for us with four large
tarps laid out on the ground, along with several large bags of trash, collected
from various areas around the park. Our task would be to open the bags of
trash, and sort all of the contained garbage into metal, plastic, paper,
cardboard, glass, compost, hazardous waste, and landfill trash. This proved to
be an extremely disgusting job, but with the proper safety gear, it was a ton
of fun as well. The goal of the analysis was to help the park, and especially
the Rangers in charge of recycling and sustainability, to determine which areas
need more recycling bins for guests to use. In the past few years, the park has
reduced their landfilled trash significantly, but even loftier goals were set
for them to reach by 2015 and 2020. To keep things interesting, we had a “weird
finds” contest, where the person who found the weirdest thing in all of the
trash was given a prize. Emily found a pair of pink granny panties from one of
the campground’s trash bags, and that took home the gold.
We finished working at 1:00pm, about four hours earlier than
the Rangers expected we’d finish. With so much time on our hands, we had
another quick PB&J lunch before heading out for a couple short hikes. We
went on the beautiful Riverwalk trail, where I was able to test the water-tightness
of my boots (they hold up quite well, if you were wondering), and the Weeping
Rocks trail, a quick and easy walk to a constantly-dripping rock formation.
Our relaxed evening consisted of a delicious baked potato
and baked beans dinner, and another peaceful nighttime campfire with S’mores. I
love hanging out with this group before bed; it’s our time to talk about the awesome
day we just enjoyed, get pumped for the exciting things we’ll be doing in the
coming day, and joke and laugh with each other. All of our personalities and
characters are so different, but we’re already great friends, and I’m constantly
fascinated by the unique things that each of us brings to the group. Our group dynamic
is nothing less than incredible.
We spent the next night under the stars; there was no need
for tents when the weather was so perfect.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
ReplyDeleteDay 4
The work of the fourth day was something I was NOT looking forward to. Digging through the trash from the park. The day started early and cold. There was a lot of wind and no sun. I absolutely hated it. Then we started in on the trash, it wasn’t bad, not too gross. Then the sun came into the canyon, getting better. Soon after the sun came, the wind left. Now I was actually having a great time. We looked through the trash, sorting out recycling, looking for interesting things to put into a contest. I’ll move to the end of the trash picking and get to the good stuff. There were a few interesting items that were in the trash→ KY gel, a wine glass, a hotel keycard, some sort of syrupy stuff—we called this the date night package. There was also some other items of interest like a piece of paper that was literally a Shit-List and a grocery list with vodka starred. Overall, this was a good (and short and easy) work day. It completely overcame my sadly pessimistic view of the day when I woke up. That made me so unbelievably happy.
After working, we got presents from Jessica for our work. They were pretty cool, pretty fun.
Anyways, we had a quick lunch and headed off on a couple of short hikes to finish the day. The River walk was flat and easy with a good view the whole way. 2 things of interest happened along that hike. 1- we saw the narrows, which made me want to go back and hike the narrows with a burning passion. 2- we met an old Italian cop from back east who basically told us his life story. He could have talked for hours without us saying a word, the stereotypical Italian, but he was awesome anyways so we listened for a long time then made up an excuse to get going. What a nice and interesting guy though. After that we did another short hike and that more or less concluded our day.
Minibear out.