Progress Reports from the Field

This hitch saw us way back out Shoshone way, where the horned lark and the chuckwalla roam. Our workplace was the Salt Creek Hills ACEC, while the Little Dumont Dunes we called home. Due to major last minute changes to our schedule, the job we were tasked with was renovating any and all facets of the interpretive trail at Salt Creek, which has not seen much maintenance since its installation in the mid 1990’s. Our work began with a basic cleanup of the trail; realigning rocks which lined the trail, installing steps at a stream crossing, rerouting around eroded banks, and learning about the sensitivities of the riparian and historical mining area itself. We then moved on to a picnic area beneath an athel grove, from whence we brought light back into that which had nought but shadows. After much chainsawing, pruning, trimming, and brushdragging, we proceeded to produce a prodigious pocket for practical picnicking. From the athel grove we spread out with various trimming apparatus, removing the reach of mesquite branches from passersby and loosing the tamarisk infestation from the runs of Salt Creek. Upon attempt to learn more about the trail, it was discovered that the majority of the informative signs at the trailhead kiosks and within the trail itself were illegible due to vandalism, the elements, and poor material. Thus we took stock of the BLM office yard and pulled forth from its depths a full replacement set of Salt Creek signs, which were soon thereafter fitted and installed in place of the decrepit. The same was done with several carsonites which demarcated the trail; more carsonites were installed in new locations as well to further aid the traveler. The end of the trail furthest from the parking lot bordered the Little Dumont Dunes off-highway vehicle recreation area, which meant lots of incursions and cut fences in to the Area of Critical Environmental Concern. The cut smoothwire fences were mended, incursions swept, and each of the signs indicating “no vehicular travel beyond this point” which had been shot and otherwise mutilated were replaced. A wooden set of fence-crossover steps was also repaired and refitted with a more user-friendly handrail. Our hitch also involved a field trip to Death Valley National Park for some environmental education.

Hitch 8 brought about new adventures. Incipiently this was the first hitch with our newest addition to the crew; of course we did partake in All-Corp together, but this was different in that we went out as a crew, not as the whole DRC. Thus we really had the opportunity to come together as a crew. Queue sentimental awes. Coincidentally, this hitch was idealistic for good ole Sir Sterling Collins-Hill, our new Project leader, who recently hiked the entire lengthy Pacific Crest Trail. Please take note; this ominous foreshadowing. This hitch we worked arm-in-arm with the Palm Springs Bureau of Land Management. Our target goal was to GIS map 400 miles of trails focusing on social trails. For those readers less savvy on technical terms, social trails are none-designated routes created by overuse. They are often unmaintaned. Estimatedly it takes ten people to walk in the same direction to create one of these trails -and once it's started, as the phrase goes “build it and they will come”. We perambulated nearly all of the northeastern section of the San Rosa and San Jacinto national monument. With miles and miles to go before we slept, an early start was the only way to beat the clock, or so we thought. Having neared the end of the hitch, one lesson that other crews may find helpful is that if you are in the Desert District it does not matter what time you start work because the sun will find you, and it will beat down on you with furious rays of ultraviolet beams that with literally make your sunscreen wish it was wearing sunscreen. Oh, and it you are using a Juno tremble make note as to whether the screen is on or not; because if it is off those two miles you just walked? Never happened. One beautiful thing about Sterling Darling, (as Wildcorp affectionately calls him... and if you know this lucky fellow in real life, please refer to him as 'darling', he really likes it. Trust me), is his ability to strategize. While myself and other unamed members believe in the, “eh lets just walk around, its bound to be the right way”, Ole Sterling believes in looking at the maps. Crazy, right? In actuality we were able to utilize this trait and use our time quite efficiently. We did our best and between us walked roughly 400 miles. Wildcorps get yoked, Palm Springs edition. This hitch was not just work, work, work, and no fun. To stick our tradition of lavish accomodations, we camped at the glamourous Ribbonwood Equestrian Camp (horses not included). With delicious potable water, flushing toliets, and temperamental “hot” showers. but The lush plethora of trees, and grass added a level of surrealness not usually found in the desert. With the summery daily weather, and nightly assemblage encircling our campfire, one could say Palm Springs Field Office knows how to spoil its work crews. In fact, we were in such a hot commodity spot that Nissan shut down the road we used to get to work sites to film a commercial. If that doesn't seal the deal for you then Idyllwild will. Just minutes up highway 74 from Ribbonwood is an oasis like none-other. Located at 5,303 feet there are copious pine trees and profusely grassy flat lands, deer and rabbits, bars, gas stations and quiant mom and pop Inns as far as the eye can see. Due to recent rainfall and snowy winter mixes the higher elevation mountains were efforescenic. This is where the wild flowers are. The stunning sunset are unreal. One can stare at the offing of Hemet Lake, as light succumbs to dark. Everything about this fetching little town is glorious. Idyllwild was quite possibly the cynosure of the hitch. Oh, and we also had a table at this pretty hip festival in Palm Desert. No big deal, but we made some radical new friends, and made off with some swanky Smokey the Bear bandanas. Our BLM contact even got us Chipotle burritos for lunch. We appriciated having a nice day off from extreme hiking ventures, while we sat in the moderately cool shade under our EZ-UP tent. Casually sitting in folding plastic chairs sipping cool water, and talking up the SCA to anyone who would listen – So SCA CEOs, HR reps, members (special shout out to our homeboys Jamie Webler and Matt Duarte) and alum, just know if you suddenly get a rise in member applications, Wildcorps has your back.

Hitch 8 brought about new adventures. Incipiently this was the first hitch with our newest addition to the crew; of course we did partake in All-Corp together, but this was different in that we went out as a crew, not as the whole DRC. Thus we really had the opportunity to come together as a crew. Queue sentimental awes. Coincidentally, this hitch was idealistic for good ole Sir Sterling Collins-Hill, our new Project leader, who recently hiked the entire lengthy Pacific Crest Trail. Please take note; this ominous foreshadowing. This hitch we worked arm-in-arm with the Palm Springs Bureau of Land Management. Our target goal was to GIS map 400 miles of trails focusing on social trails. For those readers less savvy on technical terms, social trails are none-designated routes created by overuse. They are often unmaintaned. Estimatedly it takes ten people to walk in the same direction to create one of these trails -and once it's started, as the phrase goes “build it and they will come”.
We perambulated nearly all of the northeastern section of the San Rosa and San Jacinto national monument. With miles and miles to go before we slept, an early start was the only way to beat the clock, or so we thought. Having neared the end of the hitch, one lesson that other crews may find helpful is that if you are in the Desert District it does not matter what time you start work because the sun will find you, and it will beat down on you with furious rays of ultraviolet beams that with literally make your sunscreen wish it was wearing sunscreen. Oh, and it you are using a Juno tremble make note as to whether the screen is on or not; because if it is off those two miles you just walked? Never happened. One beautiful thing about Sterling Darling, (as Wildcorp affectionately calls him... and if you know this lucky fellow in real life, please refer to him as 'darling', he really likes it. Trust me), is his ability to strategize. While myself and other unamed members believe in the, “eh lets just walk around, its bound to be the right way”, Ole Sterling believes in looking at the maps. Crazy, right? In actuality we were able to utilize this trait and use our time quite efficiently. We did our best and between us walked roughly 400 miles. Wildcorps get yoked, Palm Springs edition.
This hitch was not just work, work, work, and no fun. To stick our tradition of lavish accomodations, we camped at the glamourous Ribbonwood Equestrian Camp (horses not included). With delicious potable water, flushing toliets, and temperamental “hot” showers. but The lush plethora of trees, and grass added a level of surrealness not usually found in the desert. With the summery daily weather, and nightly assemblage encircling our campfire, one could say Palm Springs Field Office knows how to spoil its work crews. In fact, we were in such a hot commodity spot that Nissan shut down the road we used to get to work sites to film a commercial. If that doesn't seal the deal for you then Idyllwild will. Just minutes up highway 74 from Ribbonwood is an oasis like none-other. Located at 5,303 feet there are copious pine trees and profusely grassy flat lands, deer and rabbits, bars, gas stations and quiant mom and pop Inns as far as the eye can see. Due to recent rainfall and snowy winter mixes the higher elevation mountains were efforescenic. This is where the wild flowers are. The stunning sunset are unreal. One can stare at the offing of Hemet Lake, as light succumbs to dark. Everything about this fetching little town is glorious. Idyllwild was quite possibly the cynosure of the hitch.
Oh, and we also had a table at this pretty hip festival in Palm Desert. No big deal, but we made some radical new friends, and made off with some swanky Smokey the Bear bandanas. Our BLM contact even got us Chipotle burritos for lunch. We appriciated having a nice day off from extreme hiking ventures, while we sat in the moderately cool shade under our EZ-UP tent. Casually sitting in folding plastic chairs sipping cool water, and talking up the SCA to anyone who would listen – So SCA CEOs, HR reps, members (special shout out to our homeboys Jamie Webler and Matt Duarte) and alum, just know if you suddenly get a rise in member applications, Wildcorps has your back.

This started just like any other hitch; we were hard at work in the kitchen, packing the trucks and the trailers. Not long after we started, Cat had some awesome news to share with us about next hitch. That news was, drum roll please… That we will be hosting All-Corps. With being the hosts, that really changed our hitch schedule. The next couple of days were spent planning All-Corps, such as the type of work that we will have other crews do, how we will break up into groups, meal themes and of course we had to make an invite video. We worked long and hard on our invite video, so we encourage you to watch it via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4FB4uhUIuc

This hitch was a lot of fun since we had a good variety of things to do once we were done with All-Corps prep. We got to spend a day at the China Lake Naval Base see the Coso Rock Art, which is the largest collection of Petroglyphs in the western hemisphere. Went out to Sand Canyon a couple of times, once for a dip in a watering hole, second time we were doing some trail clean up. Did some sightseeing at Fossil Falls and learned about the history of it. Cat coordinated with Leigh to have her helicopter fall over us and give our own personal air show in Grass Valley. The next day, Leigh came out with us to help us with fencing, which was nice to have someone new with us.

We had some inconveniences this hitch, we were ready to head on out into the field, we were heading to an auto shop to replace the headlight for one of our trailers. We had a little accident and ended up getting the tire for one of our trailers flat. Once we got that all fixed up, we decided it would be nice to reward ourselves with a Starbucks to give us that burst of energy we would need before going into the field. We got into the field, we set up camp with Kiavah and started cooking dinner. We were all fairly comfortable until we found out there was a wind advisory for our area, the gusts were predicted to be up to 75mph. So we packed up and went right back to town. At least it was nice to get another night in town.

We managed to do all this, plus we nearly finished lining up and sighting the rest of the fence in Grass Valley, built more H-Braces, rolled out more wire, and set more T-Posts. I can say with confidence that this was both a productive and fun hitch for all of us.

Our planned work has nearly run out for us, but luckily we had several other events to occupy us this hitch. The first was helping with the Sand Canyon Environmental Education Program (SEEP). Over several weeks, fourth grade students from area schools have a field to visit Sand Canyon to learn about the natural history of the area. Groups of students rotate through several stations set up in the canyon. In them, students learn about birds, plants, aquatics, and archaeology. Most students were especially thrilled to catch a glimpse of the Red-tailed Hawk that was nesting in the canyon.

Soon after SEEP, all of the DRC crews united to see the petroglyphs on the China Lake Naval Base. After undergoing a thorough search by military police, we were allowed onto the base. An hour long drive brought us to the canyon where all of the petroglyphs were located. Immediately upon entering the canyon, we were surrounded by petroglyphs. Every rock face seemed to have something chiseled into it. Our guides offered many explanations as to what the images were. These ranged from aliens to shamans to rams to medicine bags. Many were definitely aliens.

Our final foray was to the Maturango Museum for the annual wildflower festival. Docents of the museum had travelled all over nearby canyons to gather specimens of everything in bloom. We had seen many of them during work, but now we could put a name and family to the flowers; definitely the most helpful way to learn plants. We were also told by the docents that flowers this year are even worse than last year. The desert seems to be getting drier and drier.

The rest of our days on hitch were spent attending to the usual tasks of restoration and effectiveness monitoring. However, after closing an incursion that was already half finished, we reached our goal outlined in the grant. One of the trucks also had an exhilarating ride while monitoring. While marveling at the rampant destruction caused by OHV use in the Dove Springs Area, Andy began to tell us a tale of his 4x4 training. Pointing out the steep hill climbs, he told us of his instructor who tried to drive up a similarly steep hill and failed. Not even halfway up, his jeep began to slide down. Later on, Matt was descending a hill that at first seemed very manageable and nothing to worry about. Luckily, Andy suggested putting the truck in 4 low. A very wise call since the road seemed to drop off the side of cliff. As the wheels dropped, everything in the truck slid down with gravity. It felt as though the truck would flip over if the road became any steeper. This did not happen though and we survived only losing control of the truck and sliding off the road for a moment. Turns out, this was same hill that the 4x4 instructor failed to climb. Earlier in the hitch, we had another terrifying and exciting encounter with a Mojave Green Rattlesnake. Matt nearly ran it over, but Corinne spotted it basking in the road just in time.

Hitch was a success; we all survived and are ready for the final All-Corps that is on the way.