by Katie Sobalsky
I'm an SCA intern this summer for my second time. I just couldn't get enough of the trail work! There are eight of us on the crew building a reroute up the trail on Petersburg Mountain. Residents here seem grateful for our work as the trail is currently mighty steep and run down and in parts quite impassable.
Although we've yet to do much trail work because we've been doing training for the Forest Service (like how to escape a helicopter that has crashed into the ocean, or what to do when a Grizzly Bear's sitting around the bend), we have gone up the mountain a few times and spent a couple nights up there building our base camp. The mountain is steep and rugged and our base camp is no exception. We had to build platforms that jut out of the mountain's side just to provide a flat, dry spot for our tents and kitchen. It's quite a luxurious base camp, and although I usually find pleasure in "roughing it" I admit that after eight hours of working in the rain I don't complain about coming back to a heated urt with a refrigerator stocked full of fresh seafood!
A summer living in the rainforest is more than I could have dreamed of endless green, giant 700 year old trees, wildflowers and ferns and bear and moose and this is work? I absolutely love the feeling of working my body hard all day and getting dirty, then coming back and cooking dinner with everyone and resting up to do it all again.