Long Time, No Blog

I have not blogged this WHOLE project and i blame this on an upsurdly busy schedule, the fact that I have a boyfriend, and am reading Stephen King. All my time goes to work, eating, Dan, sleeping, work, bathing, and being scared of vampires. This project has been great and I'm both sad and happy to see it go. We have one more week. The kick of being earth day. For earth day we each are leading a team of youngings to basically do what we've been doing around Coralville Lake which is........................
TIMBER STAND IMPROVEMENT!
TSI is us basically taking one huge wooded mountain area. This area was completely covered with invasive species, fallen trees, brush, debris, garbage, you name it. First we were chain saw trained(eh). Seemed scarey at first but turned out to be really fun. The trees that were fallen, we bucked. Bucking is cutting the tree into smaller pieces either used for fire wood or to be thrown in the chipper. The chipper is also my favorite piece of machinery. It looks like this-->
It is incredibly dangerous but SO much fun. After we get all the logs/sticks out of the area we burned it. We set on fire about 15 acres of land. The purpose of this was to get rid of any invasive species that take over the area that kept it from being hikable and basically letting the native species flourish. THEN the area started growing greenery and wild flowers and became aboslutly gorgeous.
This was my day, every day, for seven weeks.
NEXT PROJECT!
South Dakota. We will be in the black hills-->
I am sosossososo excited about this. Mount Rushmore is about 20 minutes from our area and yellow stone is about 5 hours. Out of all the places in the mid west they could have put us, this is the absolute BEST place. The best part is, is that we'll be working on a wild life refuge. They have a lion! and an elephant! I am sosooooo excited.
Alas...I have to go do more work. This round I am Assistant Team Leader and have paper work galore! Miss you all.
-me