It didn’t take long for the wind to start at the beginning of hitch, and it refused to hiatus until after we left. Day after day, night after night, the endless turbulence made its presence known the entire duration of hitch. To those who are reading this that will start this job next season, this is your forewarning; bring a sturdy clothes bin, lest the wind attempts to scatter your importants everywhere.
This hitch found two crews separated by sex. The males went to Rands, and females to Jawbone. Both felt the full force of the wind and both remained undeterred by its efforts to dissuade us from working. Season high numbers by each crew might suggest that the wind even drove us harder, though the correlation doesn’t seem likely.
At the start of hitch, we men jumped in hard at work on the trail restoration. Everyone working fluidly together led to 5 finished incursions and over 1000 total meters of restoration by the end of the first two days. We then switched our focus to teaching as we joined up to help the Sand Canyon Environmental Education Program. Here we helped a group of volunteers teach local fourth graders about different outdoors subjects in Sand Canyon. Subjects included Birds, Plants, Aquatic Entomology, Archaeology, History, and Art. It was really fun to try our hand at teaching fourth graders, and we were very happy to see the interest in the subjects displayed by some of the students. However, it was cut short after the wind took away the kids… I mean, the high winds forced teachers to call off the field trip.
SEEP was a lot of fun for the day, but outside of the class we were really able to enjoy the Canyon itself. We camped on grass, went rope swinging into a desert spring, and slept to the sound of rustling leaves and chirping frogs, it was hard to leave, but inevitably our work took us back to Rands. There was no complaining however, as we picked up right where we left off on incursions. 1 by 1 we tallied up finished incursions, watching as our total meters restored grew in size. Hard work is easy when everyone is onboard. On the last day we pushed ourselves to our desert landscaping limits as we pulled in nearly 1000 meters in just the 8 hours.
It was a great hitch, even with the wind constantly trying to push us down. High numbers, High morale, and good comradery made Hitch 12 a success.
3648 meters of restoration