I'm on the home stretch of the season. It's been an interesting summer - a beautiful place, not the greatest of jobs. A lot of it boils down to the scheduling. In a place with such a high volume of visitor contacts and such a high number of repeated questions, it's usually common knowledge that you need to schedule your people on and off the desk and break up the day so they don't fold under the pressure. But here, you could be on the desk for anywhere from 4 to 6 1/2 hours STRAIGHT in your 8-hour day. Yuck. I reached my limit sooner than I thought I ever would; I got burned out sooner than I have in any other visitor services position, and I'm ready to be out of here. Unless there can be some visible show of improvement/change (and maybe even then), I doubt I will come back to this position next year.
But there's been some good things. I've managed to see Jack about every 3 weeks on average, and often every 2 weeks. I'll be seeing him this weekend (he's hiking out to me for once!... now that he's only 7 miles away. ;) and I saw him the weekend before last. The weekend before last was a biggie: I hiked 50 miles in 4 days. The first day I met Jack at Hamilton Lakes (16 miles), then hiked with him to Big Arroyo trail camp (9 miles); we hung out with folks from a couple crews that night and the next day we hiked back to a little below Hamilton Lakes (10 miles), and I hiked back to Lodgepole (15 miles) the next day. Phew! I was really sore, but by the end of it I felt very strong, so that was pretty cool.
Now I'm back in Three Rivers, getting my car worked on (parking brake this time - gotta have that for SF and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival), and then I'll be picking up a couple things from the grocery store and driving up to Mineral King. I'm surprising Jack by planning/prepping meals this weekend. I made some turkey feta meatballs and some pasta sauce last night, and I'll be picking up a couple other things for meals for Saturday and Sunday before I head up the mountain.
So now for a few pictures from Jack and my little backpacking trip!
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| Spiderweb! |
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| My man looking cute. |
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| Precipice Lake - my new favorite. |
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| Precipice Lake from further back. |
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| Doe on an alpine meadow, above Precipice Lake. |
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| Looking up toward Kaweah Gap (Mt. Stewart?). |
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| Big Arroyo. |
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| Camp shenanigans. |
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| Our last camping spot - excellent sunset views. |
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| Jack relaxing in the evening sun. |
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| Scary chasm that I hiked over at night on the way out - I could only hear how deep it was then! |
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| Looking back at the trail up and over Kaweah Gap (between two peaks left of center)... somewhere along there is a teeny tiny Jack, but I have no idea where... :) |
So there you go - another beautiful adventure. This weekend we're going to take it easy, more, and hang out around Atwell/Mineral King. At least, I'm assuming that's what's going to go down, and it'd better, since I'm going through all the effort to get food stuffs prepared for the weekend! :) I managed to track down the mail truck for Lodgepole and get him to leave my package (containing a new sleeping pad that I wanted to use this weekend!) at the Three Rivers post office for me to pick up before I go up the mountain. Hooray! One little success for the day, and hopefully my parking brake being functional will be success number two before I head up for the weekend!
Until next time!
