A Week of Work.

A trained monkey could do my job. It’s simple; remove snow from walkways. Does anyone want to see a monkey shovel snow or use a snow blower? Who doesn’t? My daily routine is quite boring except for some things. Wake up around 5:30-6:00 in the morning and get ready for work. Sit in the office and drink some coffee while we wait to clock in. After we get everything ready for the day and get our lunches up in Mammoth we hit the road. Travel time is, give or take, an hour, which is the fun part. Seeing the park and getting paid to travel with no tourists are on the road makes things that much better. Work for a few hours, eat, and go back to work. Once we are done for the day, we pack up our stuff and travel again. Clock out between 5:30-6:00PM. Go home, shower, eat and sleep. Thursday’s I typically don’t sleep until after volleyball and a drink with friends. My first weekend, which is now, I have spent resting. Between shoveling and working a snow blower, it takes most of my energy out.

Snow blowing…how hard can that be? I’m glad you asked. The snow is three feet high at a minimum, it’s been sitting there for months and may or may not be ice. These machines are pretty heavy and can get the job done if you do it right. When I use them, I go straight in and try and let the blower do most of the work. Most of the time, I will have to push down on the bars and raise the auger to break some snow up and reverse it while holding down the 200+ pound machine. Repeat that process two or three times and reverse it so the person with the shovel can get access. The person takes the shovel and stabs the snow as if it was a zombie that won’t die. Then making sure the zombie won’t try and put its self-back together, they spread the snow so the blower can scatter it all over the yard. This is a seven hour process that happens 4-5 days a week.

In many cases there are giant snow drifts. The highest amount of snow I have encountered so far is about a seven foot drift for about five feet long. To the left was a building and to the right was a hill. So not only did we have seven foot high drifts in front of us, we also had to chop the stuff to the right for the chute to shoot the snow away from where we were working.

To end the working week, we spent the day in Old Faithful. So much snow. The great thing about working in OF is the extended drive that passes through all the geyser basins. The bad thing about that is we can’t stop and “recreate” while on the clock so that’s a bummer, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t take pictures while moving. So if any of the pictures seem a little blurry I suggest you try and take pictures of landscapes while going 30-45mph. Then again, some may look incredible and that you can thank the bison for. 

Calm and Peaceful.

A river reflects.

Are you sure this is the right way? It's kind of cold out.

We were about to make are way there but the bobcat drive said he would lift some snow and than realized that it was the backside of the cabin. That would have been a huge waste of time.

A nice day to get some rays.

Three trees and the mist ahead.

Go up the flight of stairs and go left...

Go down the stairs and clear the path. It sounded easy but this took us all day.

The Frozen Tidal Wave of DOOM.

Another view of the snow cornice.

A little fun at work. The inside of our igloo had a clearance of about 5 feet or so.

Chinaman's Garden.

Old Faithful going off after lunch behind the Visitor Center.

Break Time.

Hate to be the camper waking up to this. 4/3/14

A mountain in the distance split between two clouds.

Old Faithful's employee pub.

The road bison. Starting to form their "v" to insure none shall pass...but we did.

Midway Geyser Basin. 

Midway Geyser Basin 2.