First day of work and mountain adventures!

Today was my first day of work!! After stumbling out of bed at 6:25am, I made it to work at 7:30, the ridiculously early time we were told to arrive. After meeting my supervisor and hanging out for about an hour, I found out we were going on a little road trip into the mountains and had to go home and change into appropriate mountain clothing (who knew that running shoes were required?!!). Luckily, the other VISTA working with me also had to run home, so I didn't feel so dumb.

Then the fun began. There were four of us in the van - myself, the girl I will be working with and our two supervisors. We headed first to a forest restoration project on a private plot of land. I learned a ton about forest needs, how human fire suppression has changed the forest landscape and how the forest looked/functioned prior to human manipulation. The purpose of this particular project is to create a more sustainable forest ecosystem that is less likely to be destroyed (and destroy nearby homes with it) during a forest fire.

We then visited three sites throughout Jefferson County (where I am working) and the neighboring Douglas County where there have been catastrophic forest fires. Although much of the ground cover is re-grown in these areas, it is amazing how little new growth can be seen even seven, nine and twelve years, respectively, after the fires.

The reason that there have been so many catastrophic fires in recent years is multi-fold. Basically, when people work to suppress forest fires, they allow lots of new trees to grow. The forests then become more dense. Then, if and when a fire naturally occurs, it is more easily able to jump from tree to tree and, because many of the trees are young/small, to kill the trees in its path.

In addition to killing vegetation, forest fires tend to cause serious floods. When rain falls on an area that was destroyed by fire, there are no plants or soil to absorb the rain. The water then flows into nearby streams and rivers, causing them to overflow their banks and flood nearby lands. In addition to the obvious damage floods cause, these floods carry huge amounts of sediment, dead trees and rocks along with them. We were able to see several examples of this sediment movement and it was unbelievable that so much debris could be carried and deposited by generally small streams.

There was only one real negative today and, luckily, it had nothing to do with resource management. It seems that, because I am AmeriCorps and therefore an "indentured servant" (according to my supervisors), my supervisors are nervous/reluctant to actually manage me. They wouldn't give me a specific answer about how many hours a week I'm supposed to work or when they want me in the office. Also, DR (the other AmeriCorps VISTA member I'm working with) and I are supposed to work on two main projects, an urban agriculture project and a forest restoration project, but they seem unwilling to make any decision about how they want us to split the work and, to a lesser extent, even the direction they want us to head. I'm hoping they were just trying to be nice on the first day and they will actually willing to manage me a little throughout the year.

Sorry this post is very information heavy - I have a lot of information running through my head and I wanted to share it all!

Oh, and on a side note, I spent four days last week at an AmeriCorps Pre-Service Orientation in Albuquerque, New Mexico and there will be a post or 2 about that experience over the next few days. Stay tuned!