Kev's Super Happy Travel Blog

My last tour with the N.C.C. was a four day jaunt back to Dayton State Park for more trail work. We were finishing the trails off that we'd started before and then tidied up a whole new set of trails over the road at an abandoned mill.

The work was a lot harder this time as most of it involved carting huge rocks around and digging/chiseling holes to put the huge rocks in. It did look damn good when finished though, if I do say so myself. Pity my camera battery ran out before I got a photo...

We invented a new term: "denascarifying". That is the act of removing a banked curve (a NASCAR turn if you will) from the trail by digging up the earth from the banked side and moving it over to the other side until the turn is level...

The last day. More fence destruction in the wild. Luckily we managed to get hold of some machetes.

I got the path clearing job. That was fun; hacking the hell out of wildlife with two machetes in the name of conservation. It's only a pity the machetes were as a sharp as a wooden spoon. Whilst they worked fine on the old, dead trees the reeds were having none of it. Many of them fought back, smacking me around the face with carefree abandon.

We ended the day clearing out the remnants of a previous team's fence destruction, i.e. lugging large coils of fence wire around the place. Fence wire that had clearly been sitting there for several years given that plants and shrubs had decided to grow through most of the discarded piles of wire. This job is never simple...

No more wading today; the other half of the crew got the remaining rubbish cleared out. But there were still plenty of fences to rip up and rubbish to cart around. Lucky us!

However our new fences were quite near our campsite, which wasn't too bad. The only problem was they were in the middle of a large number of trees, reeds, mesquite and various other spiky plants. Nature is sure good at hurting your average conservationist.

Day four got a little tricky. The morning was more carrying and transporting of rubbish, but the afternoon got tricky. There was one tiny little piece of fence in the middle of nowhere. Half the crew had ripped it out in the morning leaving my half to carry the rest of the rubbish back in the afternoon. There were no really large posts and most of the stuff wasn't too heavy. However we had to carry it for a 30 minute walk through swamps, bogs and streams. In very attractive waders:

I say waders. For me usually waders are waterproof. These had more holes than a second hand dartboard.

I'm still not sure why we had to rip out this fence. We were removing fences to make access easier for the general public. But no member of the general public in their right mind would ever wander out there. Even if they had good waders.

The work suddenly got a lot harder... We moved to a new area to rip out more fences, however this time all the posts were very large lumps of wood. Cue a day carting heavy stuff... Helps keep me fit I guess, although it did rip the hell out of my shoulders.

Hardly the romantic way one usually spends Valentine's Day. But then again Al Capone once ruined a romantic night out for many diners by massacring them so there have been worse.

The sunset did help increase the romance content of the day, but the lack of shagging brought it right back down again.

More barbed wire fences on the second day, but only for the first half. The second half of the day was an educational day. We get these every trip or two where we learn about the local area from someone who works there. Amber, the project manager at Ash Meadows, gave us a talk about Ash Meadows and some of the endangered species there. The one that we learnt most about is the Devil's Hole pupfish. This little fish lives only in Devil's Hole which is a small geothermal spring in Ash Meadows. There were various caves formed in Ash Meadows around half a million years ago. These got separated over time, meaning various species were cut of in the caves and evolved slightly differently over the years.

There are only 38 pupfish currently in Devil's Hole. Man made irrigation earlier this century caused the water level in the hole to drop which in turn killed a lot of the pupfish. After various court battles in the 70s they were eventually protected. However the population has still declined since then. Largely due to the people 'protecting' them; in 2004 they put a few cages down there to trap pupfish for studying, came back the next day to find the traps had fallen into Devil's Hole and trapped and killed about two thirds of the population... Attempts to get them to breed in hatcheries aren't having much luck either; currently most of the fish that are bred are born with leukemia. They also currently have a feeding station which gives the pupfish food everyday at the same place from three. Of course this has had the effect of domesticating the pupfish which doesn't help for the long term survival of the species...

Personally I reckon let them die out. The little buggers have had millions of dollars thrown at them so far which I'm sure could be better spent elsewhere.

Towards the end of the educational day we noticed a dust storm starting in the distance.

I'd never been in a dust storm before; it's certainly an exhilarating experience. I just wish it had died out quickly so we didn't have to camp in it that night...

Our next eight day tour was to Ash Meadows. Ash Meadows is a wildlife refuge in the Mojave Desert that is home to several endangered species. I guess it's kind of an oasis of sorts in that there are lots of springs which makes it rather wetter than your average desert.

Our first day was spent ripping out barbed wire fences. This meant trimming the barbed wire, rolling it up, removing the posts and transporting the old wire and posts to a container nearby. Pretty easy work to be honest, although it does tend to cut and bruise the hell out of you. And being in the middle of a desert makes it pretty damn hot during the day, so it did end up being quite demanding work.

We finished tidying up the trail by lunchtime and packed up in readiness for our next site. However first we were given a tour of nearby Buckland Station, an nearby building currently being restored. The building is not yet open to the public and the restoration is only half complete; they ran out of money before they could completely restore the upstairs portion of the house. The plan is to charge $1 for a tour of the building when it opens so hopefully they should soon get the cash to finish the restoration.

Next stop was Dayton State Park for more trail work. (With a brief stop to indulge my chicken wing addiction) Again the trail was already there so only tidying was necessary.

More trail work, most of it on the banks of the Carson River this time.

It should be noted that the banks are unstable and can be dangerous; please be careful if you're ever there!

For some reason after a hard days work we decided to go and climb a nearby mountain.

I'm not exactly sure why this was a good idea at the time given that I was stone cold sober. But it was. Of course we are muppets and missed the easy route up. Thus meaning we only got halfway up. We could have probably climbed further but wouldn't have been able to get down without plummeting so we decided against it. Call us unadventurous if you will.

Another 4 day trip, this time actually doing some conservation work! Who'd thunk it.

We started at a place called Fort Churchill which is a small state park around the ruins of an old fort.

We were doing trail work. The trail was already there which helped; just giving it a bit of a tidy up. Which basically involved clearing up the trail with a McLovin, chainsawing the crap out of any big trees in the way, lopping overhanging plants and blocking of unofficial trails. Or 'user developed routes' as some people have termed them.

It was quite a nice area we stayed in; very picturesque with wildlife that didn't want to kill me. I increasingly find such wildlife to be a bonus in this country.