Interns Work Alongside Park Staff

The week started off with a park meeting, specifically for new employees. During the meeting the various departments of the park took a moment to speak about what was going on in their world of the park. The park also had a speaker come in and talk about stress and various ways to curb stress from having a negative impact in the work as well as in our own lives. The rest of the day was spent with the safety aspect of our jobs.

The biggest portion of the week was spent with the reveg crew. There is a huge section of the Wonderland trail that is being re-routed and the plants that are in the proposed new trail corridor are being transplanted to other areas that can use them. Washington Trails Association (WTA) had a huge volunteer project with REI and the park asked for some our help with the volunteers to do this task of salvaging these plants. It was a pretty crazy day, but at the end of it we had accomplished what we set out to do. I also assisted with spreading of wood straw in areas that had been disturbed by the flooding. The wood straw helps stabilize the soil and prevents more erosion. We also spent a day removing exotic invasive plant species along the west side road. The area is extremely beautiful and not a bad way to spend a work day.

I also had the opportunity to spend a day receiving some pretty cool training. We had a climbing ranger come and talk to us about safely walking on steep slopes of snow. We also had a lot of time to actually try it out and become familiar with it. We also had a lesson in self arrest with an ice ax, used in the case that you lose your footing and start sliding down the steep slope. It was a useful training exercise because we may be up in the snow and need this. We just had a few members the other day asked to go up to the Muir snowfield to assist in carrying down an injured climber.

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