Yesterday was my first day off, and I managed to hitch a ride into town. Ely is really a cool city and there are tons of little shops here that make it unique. First we stopped at the coffee shop to pick up some free internet time (the internet on base is really slow). We pretty much just walked around for a couple hours, checking out Piragis, the surplus store, goodwill, and and ice cream place. ...
Swamper was absolutely amazing, so this post is going to be really long. We started out on June 11 on Moose Lake and on the first day we paddled through Wind Lake and across Basswood to Norway Island (Really close to where we skied to at Okpik). There we learned the basics of setting up camp, bear bags, cooking etc. Our cooking that night was absolutely amazing. We saved our apples from lunch and ...
Today was a loooooooooong day. So we decided that we would start our day trip withe a dawn paddle. This means that we got up at 3 in the morning and got on the water early to get a great head start and watch the sun rise as we paddled. Unfortunately there was a cloud cover this morning and we couldn't see the sun rise, but we did get to see some pretty sweet stuff. At about 5 in the morning we wer...
Today was Christmas in June. Its basically a day where the alumni association (a group of people who worked at Northern Tier in the past) come and teach various skills and then give us Christmas presents. They put it this way: the past week we have been taking our core training courses, and this day allows us to branch out and take electives for different skills for the trail. So, the first one...
I have survived a week!!! Today was a very interesting day. 20 alumni arrived on base, we got 2 crews in, we continued training, and finalized the rout efor our swamper. The training is finally coming to an end. Today we learned how to use the stoves, packs, put up bear bags, and navigate through the wilderness. Also today, we found out that we are going for a dawn paddle on Monday morning. Our sw...
Today I'm posting early because we finished training early! Finally after all of the lectures and classroom training we got out onto the water today. For those of you who went on the Okpik trip this past winter, we pretty much paddled right to the campsite we were at. I got the shoulder burning experience of portaging the canoe for half a mile also. We learned the C-stroke, J-stroke, Pry stroke, a...
As promised, here are some pictures. I learned how to flip a canoe today. ...
Finally we are finishing the boring classroom training and beginning on the water training tomorrow. Today we did everything to get ready for a trip as if our brigade were a crew. We started out in the morning in the commissary packing all of the food we need for our 5 day swamper. Then we went to the bay post and got all of our crew gear like stoves, pots, tents, packs, etc. Then in the afternoon...
So now that everyone finished up their Wilderness First Aid, I started up again with training today. We learned naviagtion, route planning, radio procedures, trail sanitation, and emergency duties. So after that, the real event of the day was swim tests. Yay! So since I'm a lifeguard they recruited me to help facilitate. We took a one hour van ride to Babbit High School cause their 75 degree pool ...
Great news, today was not as boring as I thought it would be! In fact, we worked so hard yesterday on work projects that they gave us an even greater "project" this morning. We were assigned to check for leaks in the voyageur canoe. In case you don't know what that is, it is a huge 11 man canoe that the voyageurs used in the late 17th century on their fur trapping missions. (Pictures coming later,...