First days at Beaverfoot

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It's 14.10 on 20th June. We have now been at the lodge for 5 days, and in this blog I will write about the first 3 full days we have spent there.
Monday night the temperature dropped pretty low, and I had underestimated the amount of clothes I needed to wear in bed, so I was woken up several times by the cold. Weirdly, it was my face primarily that was particularly chilly - which was a novel and fairly unpleasant sensation - I guess because it was the only thing that wasn't wrapped up in my sleeping bag.
We didn't need to be up until about 10am however as work didn't start until 11am, which made a nice change from the 7am get up at MSF. I came out to my cabin to a bit of a shock - two huge dogs, wolves I thought at first - about 10 metres away, who then came bounding towards me. Luckily they were friendly (if they weren't I probably wouldn't be writing the blog), and I found out later they were the two huskies Luna and Mitsy.
We headed to the lodge for a breakfast of toast, granola, bacon and eggs and Raph allocated jobs for each of us for the day. We were tasked with heading down to the campsite where we were to take all of the stuff in storage out of a cabin and give the whole thing a wash down. So we got to work, spending the morning moving everything out of the ground, and then top, floor of the cabin. The stuff in there was beyond varied. There were the usual things you'd maybe expect to find - TVs, kitchen equipment, books, lamps, beds etc, but there was also some weird and wonderful items. Old dolls, rabbit salt and pepper shakers, skis, sink basins, slipper socks, and a whole host of things that seemed to have no discernible function or use.
Anyway, we'd taken all of the stuff out of the cabin by lunch, spending the last half an hour struggling with beds, cots, chests of drawers and file-cabinets down stairs that had a tight 90• turn at the bottom. After lunch, which was another good chance to begin to get to know everybody, we headed back out to use the power-washer to clean the thick dust off floor and walls. However, as the power-washer's only source of power (or so we thought) was a stand alone diesel generator that was unreliable at best. That afternoon, it decided to be completely unco-operative and consequently we could only sweep the floors. A few minutes before we clocked off we discovered there were working power sockets in the cabin, but it was too late to start the cleaning, so decided to return to it in the morning.
After dinner that evening the wwoofers held a party up at the boys house, the mountain house, just up the road. The rules were 'no clothes, no cups' - meaning that everyone had to wear something that wasn't clothes and drink from something that wasn't a cup. I wore a towel and drunk from a measuring cup, while others wore bags, bin-liners, blankets, shower curtains and drank from frisbees, rubber gloves, pestles, balloons - you name it.
It was a really fun evening, there was beer and wine aplenty, and we talked and played games way into the night. I suppose I should briefly mention who the wwoofers are. We have the Germans: Felix, Denise, Natalie and Rico; Swiss Nathalie; the English: Laura, Josh (veritable man mountain, lived in France for 12 years but talks like a tradition English stereotype) and Georgie; the Polish: Alex and three others - 1 girl two other guys whose names I can't remember; the French girls: Selenn and Florienne and the American: Adam. All are wonderful people and of course everyone has their own individual qualities and personality which I'd love to go into but I have neither the time nor the patience.
Matt wasn't feeling too bright that evening so stayed home, Rosie and Kate left about 3 and I about 3.30 with a group of the girls that lived back down at the lodge. I fell into bed at around 4. When I woke up Wednesday morning at 10 I felt unrefreshed and foggy headed. I headed up for breakfast without a shower and found I couldn't really stomach anything, so just had a glass of OJ. The work that day primarily consisted of loading the flat-bed truck up with stuff from the lodge's basement and moving it into deep storage in another building on the property. We worked with the Polish guys, who were so friendly and too possessed a grasp of our language that puts the British education system to shame. I, however was still not feeling so rosy, and so spent the lunch break sleeping rather than eating.
The afternoon saw us finishing our work with the Polish by, depressingly, delivering more stuff to the outside of the cabin we had cleared the day before - adding to the mountains of junk already piled up there. We had an hour left, so we set about trying to get the power-washer to work again. This time it wasn't the power supply but the water supply that was the problem. The tap was 100m or so away from the cabin so we needed 3 hoses in order to reach. However, the hoses had been taken up the hill to the horse stables so needed fetching. Once we'd got them, we realised we had brought down a hose with a bad leak, so the water pressure was off on the pressure-washer - a factor, as you might imagine, that is pretty fundamental for such a piece of kit.
Anyway, we got the right hose, finally, and vowed that tomorrow we'd give the house a damned good clean now we'd got the setup finally sorted out. Rosie and I napped in the wagons until dinner that evening, and after dinner I sat out looking at the incredible view of the mountains and writing my previous blog and other assorted note-books I have now accumulated.
Thursday morning I was feeling right as rain, and headed up to the dining room to find no one there. After 5 minutes or so Natalie appeared and told me that many people had gone on a camping trip that they had planned a while ago up in the Banff area. This meant there was only the 4 of us, the Polish, Natalie, Rico and Georgie. As it turned out, it was nice to have the house a little quieter. Work that day, as promised, was taken up by power-washing the whole cabin down, sweeping the water into big puddles and sucking these up with the Shop-Vac. The work was easy but a little tedious and by the time we were finishing the ground floor we had done enough power-washing to last a life-time.
The cabin, however, looked so much better - clean and refreshed and ready to be made into a habitable place. After work I begun my little routine I now have - spending an hour or so reading or writing, then an hour training out by the river, having a shower and then some dinner. Natalie had made a fantastic vegetable chilli, and after eating we sat for several hours talking to the Polish about their travels and plans, and of our own.
It was 11.30 before we had decided to watch a film on the projector in the sitting area. We decided on a film called Rosewater. It was a true story about an Iranian-British journalist travelling to Iran for the election, but then ending up being arrested for bearing witness to the army opening fire on protesters and posted his footage online. It was an excellent film, and definitely worth a watch. The film finished at about 1.30, and so we headed quickly to bed. And so, that's the first few days at Beaverfoot lodge. Already we have made several new friends and I'm very much looking forward to getting to know everyone a little better.

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