Sugar Pine, Project Work

Life at Sugar Pine moves both slow and fast simultaneously. How this is accomplished escapes me, but we have barely a week left here!

The days pass a little slower here than what we were used to living in Portland. The Habitat work days always had a sense of urgency to them that simply doesn't exist here. Couple that with the two 15-minute breaks per day in addition to the half-hour lunch, and it seems like the day barely gets started before it's time to quit for dinner. Not to mention the fact that, on this SPIKE, all of our meals are prepared for us. This means that we don't go grocery shopping, cook for ourselves, or clean up crazy amounts of dishes/cooking space. This puts a bunch of time back into our days, but we're finding interesting ways to fill it. More on that later.

Our work days find the team being split into small groups. For the first couple of weeks one or two groups (of rotating team members) were running chainsaws, bucking up fallen trees and sawing down small ones or any brush along the side of the road that could potentially be hazardous. We've accomplished a lot in this area so far despite the tricky footing, our prey getting stuck and compacted in the snow, and the fact that we need to walk or drive to our work sites multiple times throughout the day.

Another group works further down the road in a small meadow area splitting wood – by any means necessary. We've used axes, mauls for the bigger rounds, and a wood splitter. The main purpose here is to accumulate firewood for the camp, the staff and their families and the small community of Sugar Pine, which is around the corner from the camp. We've had some fun with this task, creating a Fortress of Doom out of the stacked wood.

Unfortunately, we had to fill in the fortress. It was sad, but it's great to have such a strong visual representation of our work. Our team won't be around to see the fruits of our labor once the summer camps kick into gear, so it's nice to be able to have something like the firewood piles because we can see the impact of our work in a more timely sense.

When the weather conditions are right, there is another group in the meadow that works on burning all of the cut brush and reject firewood in order to reduce the overall amount of fire fuels in and around the camp. It's a little tricky to start the fire when everything is covered with snow, but the diesel helps!

More recently, Silver 5 has been working on clearing some trails throughout the camp. These trails are blocked by downed trees from over a year ago and the staff has already said how appreciative they are that they'll be able to take the kids on these trails in the summer. I think this is my favorite job so far at Sugar Pine. It's great to go and get our tools in the morning (axes, Pulaskis (link), rope for pulling down stubborn trees, hand saws and a chainsaw) and bring them and our packs with us as we trek through the snow-covered trails to hack up trees and clear the trails. My skills with the axe and chainsaw are definitely improving, through I prefer the axe.

Working at physically demanding jobs outside in the snow isn't nearly as bad as it could be because we're working here:

Thanks to Ellen for letting me steal this photo!

Beautiful! I'm so glad that I didn't miss winter. I thought I would get sent someplace warm for the winter months, but no! I've had snowball fights, been sledding and I've shoveled my heart out and I've loved every minute of it.