Work

I suppose I could say a few things about actually getting back into the field this week. The experience was overall very good.

Last Friday was a sunny day spent pounding wooden stakes (lath) into the center of a road to let construction crews know where the real center of the road should be. It was a beautiful day and I just rode on a 4-wheeler down a road pounding in lath. I got a little sunburned and got to hang out with a friend of mine. Definitely a good day.

Then on Monday I went up to Big Sky again. This day was spent not really working as hard, but the weather was getting pretty crappy. There had been rain over the weekend and it was raining throughout the day as well. All of the roads we were working on were soon-to-be-roads and were just mud. The little Ford Ranger we were in handled it admirably--we never got stuck, though we did slide a few times. My boots picked up giant gobs of mud with each step as we walked along the roads, but most of our work happened off the side of the road and wasn't too bad. Plus, we seemed to get lucky and always had to drive to a different place when it rained.

On Tuesday I went up to work on some roads again but it was a little chillier. The weather report was saying that there would be snow above 9000 feet so we felt a little safe considering that we'd be down in the 7000-7500 foot range. When we actually got to the job site though, it was a different story. There was snow on the ground at probably 7400 feet and it was snowing all the way down at 6500 feet. So it was extra muddy all day and cold to boot. It was never too bad as I was bundled up but the wind could be pretty biting sometimes. One other thing that I got to stand around and watch was a concrete pour. My co-worker had to do some tests on the concrete to make sure everything was alright. The tests went through fine and I just stood there and watched her do it (in the snow and the cold). After the tests we went to see the guy who was actually mixing all of the concrete (they were pouring all day long, they needed something like 170 yards of concrete for this huge wall of a parking garage) to talk to him and he offered us some hot chocolate, wasn't that a nice surprise? The day stayed wet and cold and muddy until we left. Quite a time!

Then yesterday (Thursday) I went up with a different guy and we had a not too bad day either. The only bummer was that we had to leave the office at about 6:45am to meet a pipe laying crew at 8am. So it was an early one. The day turned out beautiful, got a little sunburned and didn't have to work all that hard.

So it was an up and down, but not bad, week in the field.