Here I am, nearing the end of week three here in the Mt. Hood national forest. I've been a little bummed this week, spirits aren't necessarily high(if you will) because my family is on our yearly trip to Snowbird this week and I've never missed it before this year. All of us interns are getting a bit of cabin fever. Stick a bunch of city kids from around the nation in a huge forest and thats bound to happen.
Thats not to say we haven't gotten to do a lot of cool things since we got here. I've had some great experiences and learned a LOT.
Last weekend we all took a trip down to Portland and got lost in the Powell book store, which is absolutely huge. I didn't even know where to start when we walked in because there were 3 floors of books. The store takes up a whole city block and is really cool. After we were all booked out, we headed to the River to the Saturday market, which was really cool because the annual Rose Festival happened to be going on that day. It was like a giant carnival with rides and booths of jewelry, wood carvings, food, soaps, clothes etc. to look at and buy. There were also dragon races going on on the river which we all wiggled our way into the crowd to watch.
This week has not been super eventful. But you know you're in Oregon when you take your Forest ranger Expedition out into the back country to explore and find a lonely truck stuck in 2 feet deep snow and have to work together to dig the truck out so the driver isn't stuck there for days and days. That was interesting. Good old snow capped volcanoes of the Cascade mountain range.
The other day, another intern and I went over to Wildwood, which is a pretty nature park a couple miles away. We walked on the boards they have over a giant marshland and watched a beaver making his dam. We also watched a bunch of Rough skinned newts swimming around. They are SO cute to watch swim because they sort of waddle through the water. We also watched a family of ducks swim around and there were plenty of birds chirping and flying by, which we are now able to identify pretty well because of the training we've been going through.
Tomorrow I lead my first official tour of the Timberline lodge which I'm glad to finally be getting over with. Now I'm just working on several other presentations I'll be doing with visitors starting within the next couple of weeks.
Well thats it for now. More updates from the beaver state are coming.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I Love reading your blog!! I know you're having a bit of a hard time with some of the peeps and lack of things to do, but it sounds like you're really learning a lot and having some cool experiences (sp?) while you're up there. We have missed you up here at snowbird. I saw a shirt I think you would like, maybe in september we will have to come up and go shopping. Have a super fun time.
ReplyDelete