Monday, October 08, 2007

First Week in California

I've been in Yucca Valley, California now for a week and everything is going great. Everyone in my crew is getting along swimmingly. Four of us live in a house and our crew leader lives in a separate house in Joshua Tree. The house is a normal two bedroom, two full bath house. The only things not normal are no that there are no beds, no tv and no lawn.

I'm fine sleeping on the floor using my camping mattress. It's nice not having a tv around because we all get so much done without one. Instead of a lawn the yard is sand which is cool because I can easily practice tracking anytime. The good news is we have two computers with DSL so when I'm home I can update my blog and check email.


Our backyard is pretty big. A couple days ago we all at dinner on the back porch and watched the birds. It was interesting to see 5 quails walk along the back fence like it was a straight out of a shooting gallery video game.


Having Joshua Trees in our yard is pretty neat too.


Our first five days of work have mostly been prep work for our trips and your standard new job training stuff. One day we drove into Joshua Tree National Park which you can see from the map below is southeast of us.

View Larger Map

There we hiked up Ryan Mountain. It was an easy 3 mile round trip.


Here is my crew at the top of the mountain. (Me, Kevin, Monika, Rosy, Mizuki (bottom right).


Here is my adventurer pose on the very peak of the mountain.


It is nice to finally be surrounded by people who are enthusiastic about nature as I am. We are all here to learn as much as possible. We are bonding well so far. We already run, do yoga, prepare meals, eat, read and goof around together and it's only been one week.

Tomorrow we leave and travel north to the Mojave National Preserve to do training with the other SCA desert crews. We will be learning wilderness first aid and other skills we'll need to do our job. We'll be in the desert with no showers for 10 days. Hopefully I'll have something to share when we get back.

4 comments:

PS said...

Great to see you made it out there alright. Have fun on the big trek.

fooiemcgoo said...

it was good to hear from you. i am glad it is going well so far.

I didn't see any quail in that picture. I did see someone bending over. do you get extra points for shooting him in the butt?

also, here is a survival tip out in the desert. if you get stranded with your crew, make sure to kill the weakest one to both esablish yourself as leader, and to nourish the group.

fooiemcgoo said...

please tell me the context that the above picture of "your crew" was taken.

was the theme "let's look exhasuted"?

Neilio Mikalario said...

Awesome stuff Pinger - Shawn is moving to Vegas soon, you guys will be within a few hours of one another.