My Colorado summer so far...

It has been quite a while since I have posted anything, so bear with me on this longer post. I will attempt to sum up what I’ve been up to throughout the past month.

Moab (June 11-14)
I took a weekend trip with three of my other crew members to Moab, UT, where we did a bit of hiking and they did some bouldering—which I watched and learned from, but also learned that it isn’t my thing. Our first night we slept under a giant tree in the soft, fine golden-orange sand of the area after pulling in at 3:30 am from an 8 hour long drive. (We left right after work). We also enjoyed the views of Arches National park and did a beautiful and fun hike to a swimming hole a few miles outside of Moab.




Hewlett Gulch (June 15-18)
We backpacked this week, hiking several miles in to a high meadow where we set up camp for the week. It was quite the hike in with all our gear and tools, but fortunately we were able to set up camp before we reached the ridge known as the “asteroid belt.” Instead we hiked up that ridge each morning to our work site where we constructed new trail and also did rock work building a climbing turn. The asteroid belt got its name because the one-mile length of tread at a treacherous 37% grade is made up of a bunch of loose rocks ranging from fist size to cantaloupe size. We worked under the tutelage of a man named Mick. He was of great assistance and taught us a great deal both about creating tread and doing rock work. We learned to safely transport giant rocks (4 of us were able to carry a rock weighing just over 600 pounds!). I admired the Inca’s handiwork before having this internship, but now their work seems incredible and nearly impossible to create. I marvel at their works and wonder how they worked to create massive structures of such precision. Two exciting events of the week were finding a black widow spider underneath of a rock that we turned over and also being run off of the ridge by a terrible lightning storm that came out of nowhere.

Windsor (June 19-21)
I went to Windsor, a little over an hour away from the cabin where we stay, to visit my cousins Zach and Sarah. We had a great time going for walks, eating freshly baked bread, conversing and even got to have the experience of changing a tire.

Mount Margaret (June 23-25)
The ACC crew from Rawah came to our area and joined us in working on rerouting the Mount Margaret trail. For this work, our ACC Red Feather crew was able to share what we had learned at Hewlett Gulch about trail construction and ways to minimize our impact with the Rawah crew. It was a lot of fun having new people to work with and hang out with in the evenings after our long days of work.

Grey Rock and Shamhala Mountain Center (June 26)
Sarah and Elizabeth (2 girls from my crew) and I went hiking at Grey Rock, which is located in the Poudre Canyon. It was a steep 3 miles up to the summit where we enjoyed the lunches that we had packed and the spectacular view. Just as we started the 4 mile descent via a large, gorgeous meadow, we ran into the forest service trail crew that we knew. That was fun, especially because it was so unexpected since none of us are from the area and Grey Rock is a little bit of a drive from our base. On our way back, we went to Shamhala Mountain Center which is the largest Buddhist retreat center in the nation and happens to be located only about 10 miles from our cabin. We visited the great Stupa which is a place of meditation and was a beautiful ornate building that took 14 years to create with over 200 ft² of gold leaf sheets and has a giant gold Buddha statue inside, that I estimate to be 20 feet tall.





Estes Park (last week of June)
We went to Estes Park for an all crew work day on Gem Lake trail. We continued the project that the ACC crews from last year started. We placed capstones on their log checks and put in more log checks. It was definitely a day in training my patience, because after putting digging in soil that had previously been mixed with concrete and setting 10 log checks, the parks service ranger came to check our work and discovered that our supervisor had made an error in calculating the placements of the log checks so we had to rip them all out and start over in the afternoon heat. On the bright side we certainly felt a sense of accomplishment when that was complete. We then had 2 seminars during the week. I went on a hike with an extremely knowledgeable naturalist learning about the flora and fauna around the Cub Lake area of Rocky Mountain National Park. The following day, I participated in an excellent wildflower seminar. We were able to see and learn about the alpine flowers as well as lower flowers, but the sub-alpine flowers were still under several feet of snow. I was surprised by the amount of wild roses in the Rockies. A few interesting facts that I learned were that the orchid family is believed to be the largest plant family in the world—and many orchids can only be pollinated by a single insect species. There is one species that owes its survival to the mosquito which is its sole pollinator! Alpine sunflowers grow to be about 4 inches tall and usually face east in order to absorb the morning sunlight. They are nicknamed the “Old Man of the Mountain” and grow for as many as 30 years before blooming once and dying. The state flower of Colorado is the Columbine which was made the state flower by a petition written by school children in 1899, who wrote that the the blue represents the blue skies of Colorado, the white represents the snowcapped mountains and the yellow/gold represents the gold that originally brought many people to the state.


Alpine Flowers

Alpine Sunflower

Alpine Terrain

Spotted Corral-Root Orchid

Bee pollinating wild rose

Columbine

Cub Lake Trail Hike

4th of July Weekend
I was blessed to be able to spend the weekend with family. We camped about 10 miles outside of Estes Park and were able to enjoy several hikes and watched fireworks on Monday evening from atop Old Man Mountain.


Big South Trail in the Comanche Peaks Wilderness (July 6-9)
The Rawah Crew and our crew joined up and worked on the Big South Trail for the week, camping about 7 miles in from the trailhead. The lush green forest was a beautiful change in scenery, but along with it came a ton of mosquitoes and rain. The nearby Poudre River was high and even flooded over our trail one day while we were working, forcing us to walk through flooded areas to get back to our camp. Much of our work for the week consisted of attempting to raise the tread, putting in logchecks and clearing the corridor. We saw several animals including deer, fox and moose and also saw mountain lion and bear tracks. Thanks to the engineering student on my crew, we had an amazing bear hang about 15 feet in the air. It was a tough and enjoyable week, but it was wonderful to have a warm dry bed to come back to.

North Lone Pine Trail
Yesterday, the three other girls on my crew and I went for a ten mile hike (there and back) and enjoyed the tranquility of the lodgepole pine forest and the spectacular view from the top of Red Feather Lakes and of snowcapped mountain peaks.

ABC’s of my summer…

American Conservation Corps
Backpacking, Big South and the boot dance
Cabin and crew
Diesel water
Estes Park
Flora and fauna
Grey Rock
Hiking
Igneous rock
Jokes
Kick-test… is that rock or log stable enough?
Lakes and lightning
Moose, McClouds and mountains
North Lone Pine hike
Outdoors
Pine trees
Quiet and peaceful atmosphere
Red Feather Lakes and Rocky Mountain National Park and Roosevelt National Forest
Scenic views, snow-capped mountains, and spider bite
Trailwork, tools, tents and thunderstorms
Utah’s scenic desert
Vicious mosquitoes
Wildflowers of all sizes, shapes and colors
X-tra long (3-day) weekends 
Yellow-bellied marmots
Zest

First week of trail maintenance...

Since moving up to Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, our six person crew has completed one week of trail-work, through which I’ve already learned a lot.

Each day of work this week was accompanied by gorgeous weather. We work 10-hour long days Wednesdays through Saturdays. We all get up around 6:15, pull on our uniforms- which are blue t-shirts and tan-colored Carharts. Then we make our lunches, eat breakfast, fill our Nalgenes with water, scramble out the door to get our tools from the shed and bale into the fire-engine-red truck to head towards the trails by 7 am. We hike to the trail heads with our packs( full of extra clothing, water, lunch foods, snacks, sunscreen and first aid supplies), our orange hard hats, goatskin gloves and tools. We have 12 tools, so each day we choose two tools.

On Wednesday, our first day of work, we hiked a few miles to Colombine trail where we spent the day constructing a waterbar, filling in a ditch with dirt that we dug up and transported with pulaskies, shovels and dirt bags. We also spent a lot of time brushing, which means taking dead timber and laying it in divits or other places where we do not want hikers to walk. That day we also drained an enormous puddle over the train by creating a route for a stream to run off.

The next day, we went to Frog Pond Trail, where we assessed what needed to be done to improve the trail. Because the first part of the trail is through a marsh land, we ended up rerouting the trail in two places and built a bridge. On other parts of this trail we did brushing, cleaned out a drain that had been completely blocked by fallen timber so that water could drain away from the trail, and cleaned out water bars. We also say a moose at the end of the trail. It was neat to see, but a bit unnerving for all of us because it was young and we knew its mother must have been nearby, but we didn’t see her.

We spent our last two days working on a trail between the two that we had already improved. This posed numerous challenges for us because it lies in a marshland. We attempted to create a bridge but encountered one problem after another, because we misjudged the slope of the land, didn’t notice the slight current of the water beneath the marshy grasses and had to walk quite a distance to gather rocks and timber. While crushing rocks, we broke the sledge hammer which slowed us way down. The second day we realized that we needed to dig a ditch and also reinforce it, which was difficult because rocks are not easy to set firmly into soggy ground. When we tried to split a log (evenly) for the planks of the bridge with just a small hand saw, 2 pulaskies (which is like a double bladed ax of which one blad has beed twisted to serve as a hoe) and a tiny mallet and all six of us, it took 3 hours and was exhausting!

One other thing that happened this week, is that the sewage system in our cabin broke down and backed up in our basement. This was a bit inconvenient, but the good thing that came out of it is that we were then notified that the water from our faucets (which we’d been drinking…although it tasted bad) that looked yellow and murky, is not safe to drink, because it contains a lot of diesel. We were repulsed to know that we’d been drinking diesel, but it has given us many laughs and we now know where a pump is (about 3 miles away) where we go to fill up jugs of water after work for drinking and cooking. So, despite the inconvenience of no toilets for a few days, the sewage problem was a blessing in disguise.

After enjoying a few relaxing days outside, we’re preparing for another week of fun, but physically demanding work. Now a glimpse of this week in photos:

From Estes Park to the Red Feather Lakes

I began my internship with the American Conservation Corps on a little over a week ago in Estes Park, CO. We stayed in the only Victorian style house in Estes Park during our first four days of training. During that time we learned a lot about the area's history as well as took a course on basic wilderness first aid and learned about trail construction. In our free time, we (interns) cooked, ran and hiked together.

I few things that I found interesting while learning about the area are that many of the mountain names are the translations of what they were called by the Arapahoe, Estes Park was actually a recreational destination for about 50 years before Rocky Mountain National Park was established, and hiking did not become a recreational activity in the United States until the end of World War II.

Up here at 8200 feet in elevation, I live in a log cabin with 3 other girls and two guys who are all a part of the same crew as me. Over the past few days we've been on a few hikes together exploring the area, examining beetle-kill and trail maintenance that we will need to do. Yesterday, the girls and I went hiking at 10,900 feet and were wading through snow somtimes almost waist-deep. It snowed on us the whole time and continued to be windy and snowy off and on throughout the rest of the day after we returned to our cabin.

Today's weather is beautiful and we've seen several mountain blue birds.

Here are some pictures to show you a bit of the area:

blessings of this past semester

This last semester flew by. Sometimes it felt like I had so much to do that I didn't know how I would get it all done, but somehow I managed to get my work done, play, run, and relax. I was blessed to get to spend the semester teaching English as a Foreign Language to an adult beginners class. I thoroughly enjoyed this job.

I didn't run the kinds of times I would have liked to during this past track season, but I enjoyed practices and had fun during some of the races. I finished up the season at conference on May 7th and ran a full marathon on May 14th in Brookings, SD. I ran with my cousin Katie and had a great time!

Now I have a week to relax at home and then I'll be off to Colorado for my internship with the American Conservation Corps. I'm looking forward to a summer outside. Have a great summer!

Kontakt with Korea

As usual, it's been far too long since I last posted anything...nearly a month.

Here is a brief overview of a wonderful experience in northeast Asia with pictures to follow.

In March my brother, Tyler, and I (who both won full scholarships from the Korea Foundation) went to South Korea. There we encountered a very unique culture rich in its own history, language, foods and dress. We flew from Omaha through Dallas to Seoul. The latter of the flights was wonderful, because we got our boarding passes nearly too late and all the economy seats had already been filled, so we were upgraded to "prestige".

We stayed at an extremely fancy hotel in which we ate several buffet style meals, which included both Western food and Korean foods- always including rice and Kimchi. Kimchi is a spicy fermented cabbage dish that is served with every Korean meal. I also ate my fair share of Bibimbap- a dish that is made of a pile of white rice mixed with sprouts and a red (supposedly spicy) sauce.

We got to meet several students from Yonsei University (the host university in Korea) and also attened lectures there. These lectures were each very interesting. They included topics on Korean language, North-South Korean relations, US-Korean relations and Korea's history, culture and society. All the Koreans with whom I interacted were extremely friendly and respectful.

During the days, various activities and excursions were organized for us. We went took a walking tour of Yonsei University, where we saw the Samsung Library, which is a paperless library. I must admit, this defies every sense of what I think of when I think of a library, but it was very interesting. All books, magazines, newspapers, notes, etc are on touch screens of varying sizes like iPads and overgrown iPads. We also saw the largest women's university in the world, which is located nearby in the same district of Seoul. We had the evenings to ourselves to explore Seoul.

Other sites that we saw in Seoul included a reconstruction of a palace, the president's home, known as the Blue House for its blue roof, the site of the G20 Summit talks, the Korean War Memorial with an enourmous hallway which lists the names of all the fallen troops from other nations who helped fight in this war, including giant plaques listing the members of each US state.

Outside of Seoul we visited the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) which was extremely fascinating. It was an interesting atmosphere mixed with tension, armed soldiers, passport checks, barricades and live mines along the edges of the road, yet with gift shops as tourist attractions- asking for our contributions to support their economy. we saw the uninhabited North Korean propaganda village with its flag which weighs 600 pounds and is raised on a pole 160 meters tall!

In addition to the DMZ we visited a Hyundai car plant where a new car rolls off the line every 57 seconds. Hyundai along with SK, Samsung and LG account for the majority of South Korea's economy. Before returning to Seoul we went to Everland (South Korea's Disneyland). This was my least favorite part of the trip, but I can now say that I have been on the world's steepest wooden roller coaster, and I never need to go on a roller coaster or go back to an amusement park again.

During our final evening in Seoul we saw attended "Cookin' NANTA" a primarily non-verbal, comic, cooking, dancing and musical show. I can draw several parallels between Nanta and Blue Man Group.

This is not all that we did, but a brief overview of the wonderful opportunity provided to us. One last note...we tasted Corn Icecream! This was not exactly delicious...but after seeing it we decided we must try it. The corn icecream came in a wrapper and was encased by a thin layer of chocolate surrounded by a wafer-cone in the shape of an ear of corn. The icecream was corn-flavored and had real kernels of corn in it. Where do people get ideas like that?!

Time flies!

I have definitely fallen behind on posting! Much has happened this semester. A brief recap and I'll try to post again in the next two weeks.

Being back at Doane has had both its ups and downs. In some ways things are seemingly much easier, since I usually know who to see about a problem or where to go or how to behave myself in different situations, but in other ways it is difficult because teaching styles here are much different than those to which I have been exposed for the past year, many of the people I knew are no longer here and I broadened my world-view which makes it difficult sometimes for others to see where I am coming from.

I've been working on getting back into running track after being quite out of shape at the beginning of indoor season. Indoor season has now come to a close. I only competed once in the 5k and achieved a disappointing time. Our men's and women's teams both won the conference championship and it was fun to watch them compete. Now indoor season in over and the first outdoor season meet will be in a few weeks.

I started out volunteering with Adult English as a Foreign Language classes again as I had done before I left to study abroad. After one teacher resigned, I ended up taking over her class. They are all wonderful students and I love working with them. They are enthusiastic about learning English and I always end the day in high spirits.

I'm leaving for South Korea in 2 days. I'll be there for about 1.5 weeks to get a taste of the country's language, culture and history. It's almost time for take off...ready or not, here I go!