thursday 5/22

On Thursday, we volunteered for the Forest Service doing a wonderful activity called 'Swamping'. When I first heard what we were doing, I was under the impression we'd be wading through large watery bogs, however, 'Swamping' actually consists of making slash piles and then walling them in with logs to create prime bonfire material for the rangers to go burn in the dark depths of winter. 9 am we headed over to the ranger station to equip ourselves with classy orange helmets, sunglasses, and gloves and then drove to the park entrance to start our day.

**(I'll never get enough of that mountain landscape. It looks fake, like someone painted this giant mural outside of the park to lure in tourists who will then drive through ooo-ing and ahhh-ing at the peaks and then drive out without getting down and dirty in that wilderness. They make me itch to climb. I don't know why. Maybe to prove to myself they're real?)

So we started work with these 3 B.A. forest service guys and proceeded to haul slash and get slashed by dat slash for 6 hours. It's a forearm killer....

Still, there's something satisfying about that raw manual labor--I've spent the last 8 months working out my brain to the max and only having a page of penciled math problems or a tedious block of computer code to show for my efforts. Dragging those logs and throwing them on a pile--you can SEE the results. You work, sweat, bleed, but at the end of the day when you get to walk by those 48 towering slash piles, it's extremely satisfying. And exhausting. Kudos to the triple threat rangers who have to make a living that way!

Later, we drove to Longmont to get our chainsaw logging boots that feel mildly like a flesh-squeezing torture chamber with BLISTERS!!! engraved across the black leather. I have nicknamed mine "chip" and "tooth", and I look forward to our adventures together.