Hiking for a day job

Greetings from Carlsbad, NM. I'm here on my first pair of days off after starting my internship last week. So far I love what I get to do, which is basically answer visitor questions about the park. The location where I answer those questions will probably end being about 60/40 visitor center/on the trails, but for now I get to hike every day. I have to have the hiked the trails before I can answer questions about them, so my supervisor is sending me out on a new trail each day. This coming Saturday my job will be to hike up the highest mountain in Texas. That fact that I'm getting compensated to do this is awesome.

So far I've hiked all the easy trails and seen all the buildings in the park that people might visit, and I'm already feeling mostly competent answering questions at the visitor center desk. I've spent the evenings reading up on the region's geology, flora, and fauna. The geology is really cool, but really boring to people who aren't rock nerds like I am, but the short version is that mountain range is a fossilized barrier reef. The vertical relief today (see photo) is similar to what it was when there was water filling the whole basin during the Permian period 250 million years ago.

The living arrangements are interesting. The nearest gas is 30 miles away. The nearest grocery store is 55 miles. I have cell phone reception if I stand in a certain parking space at the visitor center, hold one arm up the pointing roughly southeast and stick a leg out towards the west. I live in a house with 2 fire rangers, and share a bedroom with one of them, but the place is spacious, and I have my own fridge (though I'd trade the fridge for my own room). The only people my age are the fire rangers, all the interpretation people I work with are older, either guys in their 30's to 50's who made a career of this and live in Carlsbad, or older retirees who volunteer. The fire rangers are all cool, but seem to have their own clique thing going, so making friends could prove to be difficult. At least I brought a lot of reading material.

The one key thing that has made the transition to living here much easier is the satellite TV. With no cell reception or internet, I'd have no contact with the outside world without that TV. With the TV, I've been able to watch all of OU NCAA tournament games so far.

More later as I get more settled in. Tomorrow I'm off to hike the Permian Reef Geology Trail, which I'm excited about. Finally, here's a couple photos of the mountains:


El Capitan and Guadalupe Peak (highest point in Texas at 8,749 ft).


Smith Spring (all the trees), with desert plants in the foreground and the limestone ancient reef escarpment looming in the background

What's Next

Since I graduated in December, and really for the couple months before that, I've been looking for jobs to occupy myself for at least the next 20 months. 20 months from December being the earliest I could find myself back in grad school.

After 0 job offers before I graduated, I was starting to get worried. I was still trying hard for a ski industry job, and in January I was offered the opportunity to teach skiing at Loveland Ski area in Colorado, but there was a catch. I would have to move out there in 5 days (meaning a CO to WI to CO drive and packing) and find housing, all for the chance to maybe work full time for $9.50 an hour. I made that much in 2004 to sort boxes of rocks in a warehouse in Oklahoma. I said no.

At this point I gave up on being ski bum, at least this winter. I instead focused on applying for SCA conservation internships, which are generally offered through the National Park Service, BLM, or Forest Service. It took a couple months, but last week I finally accepted an offer to work as a Visitor Services intern at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in west Texas. I think I will spend most of my time in the visitor center answering questions, selling books, and doing other miscellaneous tasks. The other 40% of my job is what I'm really looking forward to. When I'm not in the visitor center I'll either be hiking trails or working on some geology related projects, though I don't know what they are yet.

The tricky part about this position is that it's in the middle of nowhere. The nearest internet is I think 20 miles away. The nearest grocery store/town is 60 miles away. I think the park employee housing I'll be living in has a rec room with satellite TV, and I think there's cell phone reception, so I'll have connections to the rest of the world. Still, this is going to last longer than the other times I've been removed from internet/TV/cell phone on the Stretch and in Dominica, and unlike those times, I don't know how many other people close to my age, if any, I'll be able to hang out with. It's going to be interesting, and there are going to be bad/lonely days, but I'm excited. I'll be there from March 18th to June 6th.

My luck continued last week when I offered another position for the summer through the Geological Society of America's GeoCorps program. From June 22nd to September 11th I'll be working (and getting paid!, the SCA position is volunteer; I only get a small stipend for food) as a Geothermal Resource Assistant in Yellowstone National Park (come visit!). I am really looking forward to doing this.

After that, I plan to spend the rest of September and October looking for ski instructing jobs, improving my GRE score, and figuring out which grad schools I want to apply to for fall 2010. After a couple months of uncertainty, it's nice to know what I'm doing for the next few months.

Cell Phone Disaster

I think most of us are still old enough to remember life without cell phones. I remember phone trees in high school between my friends as we arranged a place and time to meet, and then promised to be there. If one of us didn't make it, we either went on without him, unconcerned, or waited a few extra minutes for him to show up, which he usually did. I remember going to Disney World in middle school with my parents, and them letting me wander off alone for an hour or so as they rested. I promised to be back by a certain time, and I was usually. Can you imagine parents today letting their kid do that without a way to be in constant contact? And to think my parents were pretty protective of me.

Nowadays we can't arrange anything without a cell phone. And I'm guilty of this too. For example, leaving for a frisbee tournament with the Pimpdags. Our driver tells each passenger what time he'll be there to pick them up. It'd make sense to be out there waiting for him right? But no, everyone waits in their room for the car to arrive, at which point the driver calls again to tell him he's arrived, and then waits as the passenger drags his crap down the stairs. If the driver is late by even a minute, straight to the cell phone, "where are you?", in spite of the fact that had the person been outside, he'd probably be able to see the driver coming down the road.

No one makes back up plans any more, "if you can't find me earlier, I'll definitely be at ____ at 11pm". Instead its "call me and I'll tell you where I'm at".

This fact of our technologically enriched lives came back to bite me in the ass a couple weeks ago in Vail. I had recently become single again after 3.5 years and Mar told me she'd show me a good time in Vail Village. She certainly did. We ended up at the main dance club and I had managed to integrate myself as complete stranger into the groups of people of dancing (my loathing of the 'dance party' attempted hook up dynamic is material for another post however). Mar and I ended up separated as she left the club to deal with some boy drama. Apparently there are drawbacks to working to the 4:1 male:female ratio in the Vail valley to your advantage.

The fact we were separated didn't concern me. We were exchanging texts about where we were and potential departure times. But then something really shitty happened. My cell phone died despite having been fully charged that morning. Attempting to maintain a signal in the basement dance club had drained it completely. Now I had no clue what Mar was up to, but I figured she knew where I was and would come get me at some point.

So last call comes around and the partygoers spill out into the streets at 2am. Mar is nowhere to be seen. I'm talking to a girl I met in the club as we walked to a bus station, and I almost ask to borrow her phone, but realize that due to the simplicity of saving contacts on my phone, I only have two phone numbers memorized anymore: my own and my home in Oklahoma. Neither is of much use to me at this moment. Mar is one of my best friends and I have no clue what her number is. In middle school I had the numbers of at least 6-8 friends memorized.

Without any way to contact Mar, I proceeded to wander about Vail village for the next hour. I probably covered at least 2 miles of ground with no sign of her. It was nearing 3am and I was approaching being royally fucked and having very realistic thoughts of curling up next to her car in the parking garage for the night.

Ironically, it was another amazing technological networking tool that saved me that night. At 2:45 I walked into a hotel lobby to warm up and saw a computer with a web browser open. I then realized there was one way I could get Mar's number: the 'My phonebook' application on Facebook. I logged on, found her number, wrote it down, and then successfully begged the front desk person to let me make the long distance call. In the second fortuitous moment of the night, Mar actually answered her phone at 3am. She had been crashing on a friends couch in his condo. We met at her car 15 minutes later and drove the 20 minutes back to her place.

This all makes a decent story, but the thing I took away from it was that I almost had to sleep on the concrete floor of a parking garage in 20 degree weather because my cell phone battery died.

And this whole thing could've been avoided if Mar and I had had this conversation as we entered the club:
Mar: If we end up getting separated, call me, but worst case scenario, lets meet outside the club at last call.
Me: Okay.

Tumbleweed Tag

My ranking of the worst states in the country to drive through:
1) New Jersey
2) Kansas
3) Illinois
4) Nebraska
5) Texas

Reasoning: New Jersey has a ton of traffic, and every car is driven by someone who is pissed about the fact they are in New Jersey. Jersey also makes you pay tolls in about the distance interval it takes my 15 year old Jeep to get back up to 70 mph after stopping for the previous toll. The tolls are also very odd amounts. Once I got stuck in this lane at the booth: "toll 65 cents, exact change only". I almost rear-ended another car because I was too busy frantically searching my car for a nickle.

Kansas and Nebraska are on there for the same reason. Both are very wide, flat, states that you always have to drive lengthwise across. Takes forever, nothing to look at. Kansas is worse than Nebraska because Nebraska at least has a river next to the road most of the way if you're on I-80. Illinois is in between these two states because while it's not quite as boring to drive through (though it's very close), Illinois one ups Kansas and Nebraska by adding traffic and tolls. The Chicago area is the Jersey of the Midwest, driving wise. However, while the boring scenery + traffic pushes Illinois past Nebraska, not even that combo can beat out the overwhelming blandness of Kansas.

And Texas? Well, I just plain don't like Texas.

And really, both Kansas and Nebraska should include Eastern Colorado. In many ways Eastern Colorado is worse to drive through than either of those states. It's even more desolate, and you keep expecting to see mountains and they take forever to show up.

The one saving grace about driving in eastern Colorado (or western Kansas or the TX or OK panhandles), is playing tumbleweed tag, seen in the video above. It's so dry in this region that all you need is one good windy day and half the dead bushes in the state are blowing across the road in front of you. Tumbleweeds are the one thing that is fun to hit with your car, because tumbleweeds shatter. You nail a big one and can look in your rear view mirror and see the broken remains flailing about the road. It's fun to be able to completely and utterly destroy something with no consequences, like throwing glass bottles into the recycling bin. After a good long stretch of tumbleweed tag I'll stop the Jeep and pause to remove bits of snapped off twigs stuck in its grill. Then I'll pat it on the hood, a job well done.

As you can probably tell, I didn't have video games growing up.

Experiment

I was perusing youtube a while ago and happened upon a real cool video type: the time lapse of a road trip. So on my latest trip from Madison to Vail to Norman, I tried to make my own version. Unfortunately, I don't have a super sweet camera with a timer like this guy, and I didn't want to burn too much camera battery, so I ended up with one photo every 15 minutes. I increased that at times to 20 minutes in Nebraska because Nebraska is boring. The end result I end up with is a bit on non sequitor because of that; there's no continuity between images.

Still it's decently cool, especially the Vail to Norman leg. You can see the rainstorms I drove through in Iowa and how flat Nebraska is. It's almost better as a very fast slide show where you can pause the video to look a more interesting picture longer. In any case though, I won't be doing this again. At least not until I have a better method of pulling it off. I certainly won't run out of road trips to capture.

Travels

I am back in Oklahoma now, which is actually where I was when I wrote my last post, but in between I've been to Colorado twice and hung out in Wisconsin, where I continued to coach the Pimpdags and went to tournaments in Alabama and Baton Rouge. I also got to see Dartmouth in Louisiana, which was cool. Other than that, I continued my Wisconsin life as usual, played some indoor ultimate and soccer, looked for internships, made some revisions to the journal article on my masters research, etc. Nothing too interesting.

I did find the time to go skiing in Colorado twice. I skied probably my steepest slope yet (50 degrees at Breck), and have upped my cliff/cornice hucking success height to 15 feet (at Vail). Related to those events, I also purchased a helmet. Oh, and I tried telemarking for the first time. I think I caught on pretty fast and look forward to trying it again.

My main point of this post is that I've traveled quite a few (thousand) miles by car in the last two months, and when you spend that much time driving, you see some interesting things. See photos and captions below.


Near Amarillo, TX. "If you can see Jesus, you're not going to hell"


A Rural New Mexico traffic jam.


In hundreds of miles of interstate, this is the only interesting thing to see along I-80 in Nebraska, and I don't even know what it's there for. Still, it's good for looking at for about 30 seconds.


Massive ice storm in Paducah, KY, on the way to Alabama


Sunset in west Kansas near the OK border.