Lots of pictures in this blog!! The trees were planted!! My journal entry from March 5th simply says 'Tree planting, exhausted - enough said' That first day there were 8 of us and we planted 600 trees , 8-10 foot tall willow saplings with diameters ranging from 1-3 inches. The next day 35 folks from the regional office showed up and fortified with doughnuts we all planted 1200 more trees for a total of 1800. The purpose of the planting is to restore habitat for fly catcher that used to nest in the area. We continue to tour the area on our days off and on one of our weekend outings we headed west to the small mining town of Magdalena. The area was alive with people during the late 1800's mining zinc and lead. The ... read more

If anyone actually reads the location stuff - it says we are in New York!!! For some reason, perhaps operator error, I'm not able to change it to New Mexico - but we are still here. We finally saw the Mexican Grey Wolves - up close and personal. In 1980 these wolves, the smallest and most southern species, were almost extinct in the wild with only 5 left living free. These 5 were eventually captured with cooperation between Mexico and the US with the intent of beginning a captive breeding program. The goal is to reintroduce the wolves in areas of their former range. Sevilleta is one of the locations involved in the program. As you can imagine, this program is controverisal - especailly with ranchers. We were part of a wolf capture yesterday which ... read more

Our time here has been busy and exhausting - in a good way. Wednesday was a typical day. When we checked in we found there was going to be a meeting set up by the refuge biologist. We were asked to sign people in and take money for a lunch order. Once that was done we took one of the official cars and headed into town to go to the bank, the post office, the car wash and finally the restaurant to pick up the lunch order. After lunch we picked litter on the entry road to the refuge and finally finished the raking, seeding and pegging. It was a full day. On Friday we were drivers for a field trip to the east side of the refuge since we had been there ONCE before. There ... read more

We arrived at Sevilleta (pronounced Sev-ee-eta, no L sound) National Wildlife Refuge today, January 4. We met Jeannine the Visitor Services manager and got our official T-shirts. We start tomorrow at 7:30!!!!!! We haven't seen 7:30 am in a long time. Anyway we are all set up and enjoying the beautiful sunshine and blue skies. If you have a need to mail us something the address is Ron and Tam Milostan PO Box 1248 Socorro, NM 87801 It did take a while to get here though. We left Lake Bob on Dec. 28 to continue our trip across Texas. After 2 hours on the road a car pulled up next to us with a woman frantically gesturing that something was wrong with our camper. We slowed down and took the next exit off the highway thinking ... read more

We arrived at Escalante, Utah on March 30, and set up at Petrified Forest State Park. There was a great trail right in the campground that was loaded with huge pieces of petrified wood - tree size pieces - BIG trees. This area was once a flood plain and also located near the equator, a VERY long time ago. It was tropical then with ferns and palms and huge coniferous trees - and that is what we were looking at - seems incredible. To get to one of our hiking areas we took Hole in the Rock Road for about 27 miles to Dry Gulch Trail. This was the beginning of two slot canyon trails. The first, Spooky, got so narrow between the canyon walls that it was too spooky for us. We did hike through ... read more