This Week.

So. Sunday is always my favorite day when I'm on the road. Actually Saturday is pretty good too, its always a lot more relaxed and everyone is kind of excited that we are on the verge of a day off. I always try and get done a little early so that I can can get wherever I decide to go that night before it gets dark out. The past two Saturday nights I have spent in Klamath Falls, mainly because its only 2 hours away and I have been too tired to attempt anything farther.

Today I'm kinda sad because its fathers day, and I miss my Dad I just want to hang out and go fishing with him, but that has pretty much been impossible with this job given that I can't get any time off and I'm 2,000 miles away.

I'm really in love with Northern California and Oregon, and I am pretty hopeful that I will be moving out here. When I do, I can get my Dad out here to do some fly fishing for wild Salmon and Steelhead in the incredibly rugged and beautiful rivers that seem to be everywhere in this region.

This past week we started staking some of the Right of Way for this pipeline, whenever they decide to build it. In Oregon, there are a lot of trees, so often using GPS is not a possibility so we spend a lot chopping through the trees to be able to see where we are going.

Telling my crew where to "cut line"



Towards the end of the day, doing my notes and watching my crew work.


There were 4 Bear sighting and one Cougar sighting this week. I didn't see anything, but my crew saw 2 of the bears.

Melting snow days...

The Mountain snow is really melting now, its mostly gone and I'm thinking in another week or two it will all be gone except for the snow on the highest peaks.

Here is a cool snow tunnel that I found on the side of a mountain.



Here are some "roads" that we will be using as access roads when the snow is all gone.





All of the melting snow is creating some ferocious looking streams.






And some cool little water falls.


And a lot of little ponds.

Boring week

Progress on this project has been really slow thus far. There are still a few major hurdles that we have to make before we can really get going, in the mean time we have been busying ourselves by marking roads that we can and cannot use for access on this project. There are a lot of rules and a heck of a lot of people/agencies monitoring everything that we do in regards to this project. Which roads/trails that we use is one of the things that people are currently making a big deal about.

Here is an example of a nice road that for some reason, someone has decided that we can not use.



Here is an example of a decent road that we can use.




The biggest hazard that we are running in to while staking these roads is getting our vehicles stuck. At least daily, one or more of us will get our truck stuck. It can often turn in to a pretty big task to get the truck unstuck. Due to the remoteness of where we are working, it is not uncommon at all for a truck to be stuck overnight or longer.

Here are two trucks that I helped get unstuck this week.

This one we got out at about 10pm, it made for a long night.



This one had to stay overnight and ended up getting out the next afternoon.



I'll need to knock on wood, but thus far I am the only Surveyor on our part of the project that hasn't gotten stuck yet. I'll chalk it up to luck for now, but I suppose having plenty of past experience in the mountains doesn't hurt either... I know when its best to just stop driving and start hiking...