can you imagine seeing this every day?
hallo there....well...have you ever heard of SCA (Student Conservation Association)? it sounded like fun so i applied and well...i headed off to Utah for five weeks in summer `99 to go camping and hiking and to work on trails. the point being to do something for the environment AND to have fun. so yeah...i left July 10, '99, with my humungo backpack (which is like..twice as big as i am)...and flew out to Utah to go to Zion National Park and meet my crew.
there were 6 people other than me...5 crew members, and 1 crew leader. i was the only one from california...sloane was from tennessee, amy from massachusetts, jake from hawaii, sam from virginia, trevor from new york. jason, our crew leader, was raised in iowa. neat huh? the trip was unlike anything i'd ever done before (my family's not big on the camping thing)...from hiking miles and miles with a huge pack to rappelling to building a rock wall to pitching tents to swimming in green water holes to not showering for weeks...the trip was really hard (esp for a blob like me) but fun and, well, an "experience of a lifetime"...okay, yes, i know this sounds like cheap advertising, but really.
Us sitting in front of a rock wall thing we built. (Ok, so you can't really see our faces and you certainly can't see the rock wall...but well...there's me on the left, above sam holding his required hard hat, next to amy in the blue bandanna who's below trevor in the green shirt next to sloane in her blue shirt and above them, jason our crew leader. ^_^) There was a large hole in part of the trail that we had to fill in and cement and stuff. Making cement is fun =) It would have been even fun-er if we didn't have to hike another mile for water though...
Oh and here're some pictures from our recreational hikes (we went to the Grand Canyon in Arizona during our very last week, as well as wandering around some less-traveled parts of Zion itself...okay, perhaps they were not-traveled-at-all parts judging from the brush we had to whack through...it was a while before us girls could shave again because after that trip we had so many gashes and scabs covering our legs...manzanita bushes are a curse).
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1)That's Sam, I think, walking underneath a log that just somehow ended up lying across this narrow place...Everyone started calling being a klutz "being a jen" because I kept doing really stupid things like walking smack into logs (like this one. oww.). And people wonder why I'm not intellectually up to par....
2)And..look! it's me!! rappelling! (I prolly spelled that wrong) Sorry..I just couldn't resist putting this picture up...I was just so excited to be able to do something like this (as well as manically freaked out)!
3)Hahaha...Sam and Jason being fruity. They were hilarious throughout the whole trip...this picture is from the Grand Canyon...I also had another picture of Sam and Jason lying on the trail striking up the California slim-fast girl-in-bikini pose...they were competing to see who was more "womanly"...unfortunately I left that picture at school so I didn't scan it in...But this is cute. ;)
...hmm..a couple more things to mention for now...on our second-to-last night, we kind of got lost driving around so we spent the night out in the middle of nowhere in Utah (or was it Arizona? eh..) at this place called the Coral Pink Sand Dunes or something. There was this little campsite where a lot of people with trailers and little buggies were staying, and there were these beautiful beautiful sand dunes...they were pink and smooth, or ripply, and it was just really peaceful to look at them. That night it was pretty warm and after trying to eat 40 servings of rice stew (we were just trying to finish all our food supplies at once...we were all really hungry, but we kept eating cheese and crackers so by the time the stew was done we couldn't eat anymore...and we'd just dumped the whole bag of rice in the pot...which was 40 servings..eheh..for 6 people...that's a bit much) we all decided to sleep outside on the tarp. THE SKY THERE WAS AMAZING. There were hundreds upon hundreds of stars...I've never seen any other place where I could see so many at once...they were so close together it was frightening...and every few seconds, there would be a shooting star...
on our very last night...it was hilarious! we were all back in Zion by then, after our ugly old suburban finally died five miles from the park (hehe...we got stranded by the side of the road in the rain...). we were going to spend our very last night camped out in the public campgrounds (we had a site staked out for us by stuart, this really helpful ranger who showed us what to do for our project and brought us supplies and mail. i loved stuart! he brought me vending machine brownies when i went into chocolate withdrawal! what a guy!), and we all wanted to sleep out on the tarp under the stars. the ground at our campsite was really rocky and gross, so it was pretty impossible to stake our tents down, so we decided not to bother setting up our tent. we all remembered the previous time when we didn't set up our tent either, and we were taken unawares by a sudden thunderstorm and everything got soaked (we had to sleep in wet sleeping bags that smelled like stray wet dogs for the next week). stupidly, though, we were like, "that couldn't happen to us again.." so we were just drifting off when we heard faint peals of thunder. all of us were lying there, unmoving, debating whether we wanted to move our lazy butts and set up the tent...when we finally decided we better do it, just in case, jason came back from the bathroom and said, "you guys, maybe we should try setting up the tent...."
at that strategic moment, the heavens burst and we were enveloped in driving rain. yayyyy....
jason just told us to throw everything into the suburban (don't remember whether it was the old one...i don't think it was, maybe it was an explorer. hm.) and that we'd camp out at the maintenance yard instead that night. so we all ran chaotically back and forth shoving things into the car and finally stuffed ourselves inside and headed back for the maintenance yard. (where, might i add, that evening we took our first "real" showers since we'd gotten to zion...jason said from past experience that it was better if we didn't stink on our way home, since we'd be on big airplanes back in the midst of civilization and all...) we camped out in the halls of the rangers' office that night..by the time we'd settled down it was already around 3am and we were tired...but around 6 or 7, we were awakened again by the rangers coming to work. bet we scared them, with our sleeping bags and everything, lying across their hallways and on their office floors...we had to get up before 9...so needless to say none of us really got enough sleep that night. oh well. it was really funny though...well actually, i suppose it's funny now that i think about it...at the time, i don't think any of us were really guffawing over the situation...
hmm..i had another random comment to make, but i can't remember it now. so maybe later. =)
i learned so much from the trip, and made some good friends along the way. i totally recommend everyone trying it at least once in their lives. it makes you appreciate modern conveniences like plumbing and electricity so much more. i guess the trip put a lot of things into perspective for me...after all, when you've got dirt and sweat and cement plastered all over your stinky body, you don't worry about what your hair looks like or whether your shoes match your shirt. sure, there were painful experiences (try bushwhacking through something like 8 miles of dry manzanita bushes, wearing shorts) and stinky experiences (5 crew members taking off their boots in the same tent...whew!) and embarrassing experiences (eating beans for two meals a day and feeling the results) but overall...i want to do it again!
oh yes...and since SCA crews work in national parks all over the country (even in hawaii and alaska), the scenery is so beautiful it's scary. every morning we woke up to see the sun rise over a canyon. (Ok, not this particular canyon, but this was basically what it was like all over Zion...at least, the touristy parts of it)
meanwhile...back to main page