Field work

My lack of blogging, or online interaction in general, has been due to being very busy out of the house and away from the computer, not from not doing anything.  I have been continuing the beetle project, and have made a first pass through all the data and forwarded it to G to incorporate into his maps and beetle data base.  In addition, I have been working on getting the area of all the affected spots, which entails walking around each area with a GPS, and forwarding the track to G so he can use his software to get the exact area.  The spots range from just a few trees to large tracts of 25 acres or so, and so far I have been very impressed with Dave and Tulio's rough guesses, which have been pretty close to the actual areas I've walked.  I've walked most if the easily walkable spots, and after spending 1.5 hours traversing .5 miles of beetle border the other day, through tiger bush and deep jungle, over fallen pine trees, and up and down cliffs (really!), I am now at the point where I am going to take one of the guys with me to chop the trail, or perhaps to just climb through the really gnarly parts on his own with the GPS and meet me at the other side.  Tulio also has all of the guys chopping borders around some of the chopped beetle spots so they can burn them if the rain has really stopped, so some of those borders will be easier for me to map.  One way or the other, over the next couple of weeks, I hope to have a real measurement of how many acres have been damaged by the animal, aka the beetle.

While I have been hacking my way up and down mountains through deep jungle, Tom has been facing another challenge...learning to operate the bull dozer!  The British Army needed to get their men, equipment, and trucks out to Baldy Beacon, and knowing the roads were in bad shape, they contacted us for help.  On Saturday, Jose drove the bull out to the road where BATSUB would pass, and on Sunday, G and Tom went out to fix, flatten, and reshape the road so it was passable by the military trucks.  As training, G let Tom figure out what to do...

...and Tom knocked some bank into the road so he had material to fill up the mucky spots, and then proceeded to try to flatten it.  At one point he had three or four Mennonite pickups backed up waiting to pass, so G stepped in to help until they were through, but Tom kept at it and by the time the military went through, they all made it, no problem.  Tom went back to clean up on Tuesday, and between Tom and Jose, the road is now in decent shape, so with any luck the British military will be able to get out in a few weeks.  And, Tom is getting more comfortable with the bull!

At this point in our lives/careers, we never thought Tom would be driving a bulldozer and I would be hacking my way through the jungle with a machete, but we can't think of any place we would rather be!