I just found out a few hours ago that I have worked the last week on the trail for this season at Anasazi!!!
Why? Not because I was fired, not because I quit… but when I called BYU-I for the Meso America Tour information she told me that our classes started on April 9th… a week sooner than the semester begins! It was a last minute change they had to make. Whoa, that was news to me so I had to cancel my plane tickets, tell Anasazi I was leaving sooner, and now I’m trying to get everything done this weekend before leaving for Utah on the 4th. I’ve got a final project for my Online Media Class, car maintinence, vaccination shots (for the Tour), and stuff to finish in AZ. Not to mention taxes are coming up.
So my plans are to drive to Utah on the 4th, do the family reunion thing with Mom and Dad, then drive to Idaho in the 7th or 8th. It’s moving so fast!
So, now, this week on the trail was an adventure all on its own, as is usually is. I worked with Kat in the Badgerstone Girls group (the young-uns). The first three days were raining a lot and when that happens you just have to accept the fact that you get wet. Plus we were hiking along a river and that meant you had to cross it. We have old army tarps to make shelters with, so we mostly stayed dry. The tragedy of rain (though I consider it to be beautiful and it helps the fresh spring plants grow) is that all the wood gets wet; and that means it is hard to get a fire going (we use bow drills to start fire). Plus, our food must have a fire so we can cook it (lentils, rice, flour, etc), so that also means we go hungry while eating only apples and some raisins if we don’t get fire. Oh yeah, and that also means no warmth and no light in the dark. It really makes for a miserable experience. To make matters worse, we had to hike in a big circle. The girls don’t know this of course because that would create mutiny. Luckily the girls don’t pay much attention to the scenery and they really had no idea. It was actually quite funny. The adult men pick up on stuff like that quickly and are fast to complain. When you see a huge mountain… and it is always on the left side of you while you are hiking… you might be going in a circle!
But going in a circle proved to be beneficial for our group. We had one girl, who is really sweet, but a slow hiker. Very slow. We made 2 miles in just over 5 hours of hiking along the river. Eventually it got really cliffy and we had to choose to cross the river or climb out of the canyon to the ridgeline and hike the mountains. The map showed an adjacent canyon which had one of my favorite creeks to camp on! It would cut our hike in half though (remember the circle thing). Well, I hate drinking out of rivers and prefer creeks (because people recreate by rivers and poop in them). So we climbed up the ridge and over into the next canyon. A hard hike for some of the girls, a fun one for others; awesome for me and Kat! We found a sweeeeeeet camping spot and decided to lay over a day. The rain stopped and we began to dry off, and the best part… make good food by the fire!
The girls were angry at the slow girl and began to form a separate ‘friends’ group that didn’t include her. It is a bad situation and doesn’t make this job seem fun at all. But to make a long story short, by the end of the week we got two new girls, and everybody around the campfire agreed to have a “new beginning” with each other. Everybody became friends again and they were all working on skills and stuff (I love seeing them work on skills!). I saw some people grow this week. It ended on a natural high.
Well, I can’t believe I am going back to Idaho so soon! I really do miss you guys; in fact I had a dream that I was in Idaho this week. How ironic when I didn’t know I would be coming back so soon. It made me long for the times we’ve had. Well I think I’ve said all I have to say because my mind keeps going blank. It’s all out of things to say.