Back to the mountain ...
There are quite a few things I should have written about the last three months ... I feel bad about not doing that. So it goes, I guess.
But it's time for another fire lookout summer! I started my season with the forest service two weeks ago, and amazingly, this will the the ninth year I've spent all or part of the summer living on a mountaintop. I am so freaking anxious to get back up to Baptiste.
There's a lot to do beforehand, though -- five old lookout towers to get ready for the summer, training classes to take, other training classes to give. I spent all last week in various mandatory Forest Service orientation sessions, most of which were pretty painful, but the government also treated me to a day of first aid training, and I was grateful for that.
We've started opening up a couple of the lower-elevation lookouts, too, and I'm hopeful I'll get to make an overnight scouting trip up to Baptiste in the next few days. If I make it, I promise a post from there!
To start off the summer, here's a shot I took a few days ago -- one of the guys on our fire crew admiring the view from the catwalk of the lookout tower on Firefighter Mountain:
But it's time for another fire lookout summer! I started my season with the forest service two weeks ago, and amazingly, this will the the ninth year I've spent all or part of the summer living on a mountaintop. I am so freaking anxious to get back up to Baptiste.
There's a lot to do beforehand, though -- five old lookout towers to get ready for the summer, training classes to take, other training classes to give. I spent all last week in various mandatory Forest Service orientation sessions, most of which were pretty painful, but the government also treated me to a day of first aid training, and I was grateful for that.
We've started opening up a couple of the lower-elevation lookouts, too, and I'm hopeful I'll get to make an overnight scouting trip up to Baptiste in the next few days. If I make it, I promise a post from there!
To start off the summer, here's a shot I took a few days ago -- one of the guys on our fire crew admiring the view from the catwalk of the lookout tower on Firefighter Mountain: