Wild50 2014 Crew
Last month, the WildCorps crew spent two hitches in the Eastern Sierra. We had the opportunity to assist members of the Bureau of Land Management’s Bishop Field Office with a number of projects in varying beautiful locations. Some of our favorite projects and work sites included hiking and camping in the Inyo Mountain Wilderness with Kirsten, our main Bishop contact, working on top of a mountain at the Saline Valley Salt Tram historic site. We were also able to restore vegetation and remove invasive plant species at the Happy Boulders on the Volcanic Tablelands near Bishop, we had the chance to build a rock staircase at the Birch Creek Mill historic site. One pleasant surprise was working and seeing a majestic wild horse in the Granite Mountain Wilderness near Mono Lake. As part of a Wilderness 50th event, we were able to teach archaeology to kids from a local summer camp in Bishop City Park, which made for a fun morning. Later that night, the crew was able to monitor bat populations in the White Mountains, which was also exciting. Last, we were able to scavenge through Pleasant Valley Pit Campground- finding the last of the desert treasure while working at a popular rock climbing campsite, and the crew also maintained the trail to Wild Willie’s hot spring near Mammoth Lakes that was previously worked on by other SCA crews. It was quite a busy month.
In addition to all of the great projects that filled our workdays, Wildcorps was treated to some extracurricular luxuries as well. The BLM invited us to an office barbeque, for which we are eternally grateful. There was a ton of amazing cookout food and Jen and Leslie did an excellent job attempting to eat all of it. The crew got to go on a field trip to Devils Postpile National Monument to hear Leslie talk about all of the cool facts she could remember from being an SCA Intern there last summer! If you haven’t been yet, we highly recommend visiting the coolest columnar basalt structure south of the Yosemite.
We couldn’t get enough of some of the work we did on hitch, so we even volunteered some of our off time to participate in projects we really enjoyed. Jen spent a few nights enjoying the nuances of night vision goggles and monitoring bat populations at the Tungsten Hills and Leslie went out to the Bodie Hills to perform an archaeological survey of a mountain biking trail and ended up discovering prehistoric artifacts and historic features!
This is the part of the blog where we give a shout out to all of the wonderful people who made the Bishop hitches possible and helped our crew in the field: Kirsten! Becky! Greg! Hannah! Becca! Steve! Tyler! Jarrett! Martin! Sherrie! Richard! Nick! Ryan! Blake! Sure hope we didn’t forget anyone- for you all made our month in Bishop enjoyable, and your hard work set our crew up for success.
This concludes our shout outs and the blog as a whole. Stay tuned for tales from the Central Coast—coming to you sooner than we think!
WILDCORPS 2014
