2/7 First Day of Work

We had a lovely time at the Super Bowl party. Unfortunately, it poured for most of the afternoon so we couldn’t sit out on the decks, but we did enjoy chatting with people from all over. People brought food to share and there was plenty of it! Ruth gave us bunches of bananas to take back to camp which she grows on her farm. We ate and decided that the one meal would serve for both lunch and dinner. We met the Macphail’s who are from Niantic and will be working for two weeks up at the camp. We led them up to the camp and helped to get them settled in. It was a much quieter night than the one before – no wind and very little rain. We woke up this morning to bright sunshine – yeah! We had breakfast and made our lunches to take out to the field and then met the staff for an orientation and safety talk. The six of us, Dave and I, Smidgie and Alastair McPhail, Leilani and Alan from Alaska, were joined by a couple of ladies for the party who live locally. We went to the shed and got geared up with utility belts on which we carried a machete, a pair of clippers, and a bottle of poison. We also got rubber gloves, a compass and a clicker (to count the number of plants we killed). Today we worked on just one species of invasive and that was the strawberry guava. The small ones we were able to pull out. The larger ones had to be frilled (cut all around with either the clippers or the machete) and then had poison applied. We ended the day by killing over 6000 guava! We came back to camp, showered and ate dinner and I know that we will be going to bed soon as we are all beat. Our bodies will have to have a few days to get use to the work so maybe we won’t be so tired tomorrow and the next day. The picture of the camp shows the largest building to the right which is the community kitchen and great room. The second building behind it is the sleeping quarters. The three buildings in the back are empty at the moment. The closest one to the sleeping quarters is the new bunk room. The second to the left is going to be a wood working building and the third one is just an empty shell. All of these were barracks during the CCC time.