Fire in the Park!

Time for another update from the wonderful wild cave! Things are definitely changing around here! We have gone from taking about 1000 people per day through the cave to averaging more like 250 each day. This weekend should pick up a little bit for labor day, but after that we will continue to decline. I guess that works out well because we are running out of people as well. Nearly all of my friends are now gone. Scott is really the last one here and his last day is on Tuesday. So very soon I will be very much alone here at the windy cave! It continues to be rather strange to live alone in the house that was once inhabited by five of us! I do have some company though, in the form of blue birds in the stove and mice running around in the kitchen. And they are smart mice! They keep managing to eat the food on the traps and not set the traps off! 

I am definitely continuing to enjoy giving tours and my job in general. It is quite different not giving any of the specialty tours, but still exciting to be a park ranger! And I have figured out how to effectively include by Alvin signature discovery story in all three of my tours, which does make things a lot more exciting!

I am hoping to go surveying with Rod again sometime before I leave. Even if we don't find anything as exciting going in again, it would still be very fun to get to survey one last time!

I have not had any particularly abnormal adventures in the last few days. Just the normal sort! My biggest news about something coming up in the future is when I head south to Colorado to join Kristen and Corey in a lovely venture into the "highlands" of Estes Park next weekend for the highland games. Until then, I am pretty much just working every day. But I have no doubt that I will find some interesting adventure diversions along the way!

Yesterday was a very interesting day. We burned 700 acres of the park in a prescribed burn. I have never actually seen a prescribed fire in action before so that was pretty fun. :) After getting off work I spent about three hours moving to various locations around the park to view the fire. It actually burned within just a few feet of the buildings directly across from the visitor center. So the park looks pretty different! It was a very successful burn though, and the park will end up being and looking much more vibrant and healthy come next spring. It really really made me wish that I had my red card! If I had I would have been able to actually help ignite fire on the fire line last night. How exciting would that have been!? Getting my red card is definitely a priority for next summer. I would love to work a fire line at least once! I have included a couple of the pictures I took of that fire yesterday evening.