Injuries, Wildlife, and end of summer fun

This past week has been a rough one on my crew and myself as far as injuries are concerned. Monday saw one of my volunteers drop a 200lb+ rock on his foot. We had to take him to the ER right away in fear of a broken foot. Luckily it was not broken, but did tear a bunch of tendons and ligaments in his foot and calf. Tuesday saw an intern cut her finger open on a sharp rock. On Wednesday I smashed my finger between two rocks. Don't think it's broken, but will probably lose the nail.

And Thursday another intern pulled/strained a muscle in her shoulder while moving a rock. The commonality between all the incidents was they all occurred in the first 15 min of the day. We will have to go back to the drawing board to make sure we don't suffer any further setbacks.
However, we still got some good work done this week, including finishing the lower half of a switchback on a mountain bike trail. We moved some gigantic rocks for this wall.

This is a more advanced level mountain bike trail which gave me a lot of freedom to make my switchback challenging. Because we are right by a creek I chose to make the trail so there is no dirt on this section of the switchback to avoid erosion and make the trail a bit more difficult/fun. So cyclists will ride down the stones we have placed in the wall. We now have to construct a retaining wall for the upper portion of the switchback.


We have also seen quite a bit of wildlife this week. On Monday we saw a coyote near our worksite.

Then on my way to the coffee shop this morning I came across some bears wandering around the neighborhood.

From September and Cold Creek

And now with the summer winding down everyone is trying to make the most of our time left here. Thursday night we all went to a pool hall where I went undefeated. No surprise. Friday night they have $15 all you can drink wine tasting and hors d'oeuvres at stateline. Spent most of the day yesterday at the lake and last night a great funk/rock band was playing at the local brewery. I may be coming down to the bay area the next two weekends as well. Head for the Hills is playing at the Ashkenaz in Berkely Friday and then a graduation party saturday. The following weekend is the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco with three days of free music in Golden Gate Park. Then I will be pretty much done up here in Tahoe and will be looking forward to 10 days off work.

One Month to Go in Tahoe

We have four more weeks of scheduled work up here in Tahoe. I say "scheduled" because there is a chance that we will keep one crew up here til October 15th, but that is highly weather dependent. However I do know that I will not be up here that long. I will either be leaving on October 2nd or October 8th. This all depends on if I do a Zion Fencing project at the start of October or if I do one more week up in Tahoe.
This past week of work my crew finished up everything on Mt. Tallac by Tuesday which meant we moved over to the Cold Creek worksite on Wednesday and started a re-route of a mountain bike trail. This coming week will continue work on this same trail and start doing some more rock work projects.
Here is a picture of the tree stump from hell. It took 6 hours to get this out. We broke a shovel and an axe and it finally took a chainsaw and grip-hoist to get it out.

Labor day weekend up here in Tahoe was crazy. TONS of tourists. So I tried to avoid as much of them as possible. However one of the highlights included seeing Machete on opening night down at Stateline. An awesome movie to say the least.

I also had a lot of free time around camp so I got to make a few rock structures including this one here:

And today we moved camp for our last time. This final month should be very enjoyable as the tourists are gone until winter time leaving all of Lake Tahoe to us to enjoy. Additionally the weather is finally cooling off making work more enjoyable as well as life in general(for me at least). It will be a high of 61 degrees up here Wed and Thursday!
That is all for now...