June, July, beginng of August 2008

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The end of June through July was mostly spent working. I worked a three week trip, had one week off, then worked a two week trip.

First I worked a week of Ridgewalking, then I worked a boys group for a week that was already on the "West Side", which was great. We went to some waterfalls and got to swim a bit. There's usually no water deeper than your ankles in Idaho so that was fun. We had a couple of grueling hikes where more than one student was cursing my existence.

After that I worked "O" camp, where the student come for orientation when they first get to Idaho. We had one student who couldn't hike due to medical concerns. He had a really high heart rate and we had to check it several times a day until the doctor could clear him to hike. So that week was spent staying in one spot, it was boring and easy…and I finished a book.

I don't even remember what I did on my week off…must have not been that exciting. After that I came back for another week of Ridgewalking then I worked Family Camp. It was a huge Family Camp…like 8 students and 14 parents or something like that. There were three instructors, but we ended up spliting the group into two groups and I was the head of one…but I had never done Family Camp before. Luckily Kelley was the head of the other group and nearby so helped me manage the kids and parents.

On the second day of family camp we saw some smoke from a fire on the horizon. It seemed far away and chatter on the radio said it was over ten miles away and across a freeway.

Within two hours the smoke was definitely closer and we began to get concerned. We were told by the office to continue with what we were doing, they were monitoring it and would let us know if we had to evacuate.

Still at our campsite, which was the farthest west and thus the closest to the fire, we continued with our day. A brush fire truck came by and told us to evacuate. We called base and they told us to head over to the old school house. I was impressed that when we told the parents we and kids we were moving that no one freaked out. As we quickly gathered our things a plane dropped fire retardant about 100 feet from us.

They took us back to base…at which point the firemen told us to evacuate the are while planes were dropping more fire retardant around base. I was terrified that base was going to get torched and more importantly to me…my truck, along with all the other instructors' vehicles. To many of us our vehicles were our homes and had most of our worldly possessions.

I was within a couple hundred feet of the vehicles. Everyone in the group was in a couple of suburban's waiting to figure out where we were evacuating to. I took a spare moment and ran to base and got my truck, just in case.

We were evacuated to the Gooding County fair grounds, where we spent the rest of the day. After we weren't allowed back to base yet, so they sent us to the "west side" for a couple of nights until we were cleared to go back.


In the aftermath of the fire Base was spare and only about a mile of the desert got burned. We were all worried that the desert would get torched, but thanks to the firemen it didn't.

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