Busy and Restless

Man what a random set of days I've had in the past few. Our last day of SAR training on Thursday came with a few surprises. The first one was snow:






I knew it was suppose to storm the night before...just not that kind of percipitation. I awoke to about 2 inches of snow on the ground that was steadily melting. The hills behind our house look like those out of the rocky mountains below the timber line.

Nothing necessarily with the class, however. Our class finished up normally. We worked more with raising systems and Mechanical Advantages and we added a stokes basket in the mix. The day before, however, drained me pretty physically...so much to the point where I laid down at 1900 to take a nap only to wake up at 0600 the next morning. When I woke up, I was pretty groggy and out of it. So much that I was walking down my stairs to get in my car when I realized I had put my boots on my socked feet without any pants on what soever. After correcting that issue. I got into my car only to neglect a few missed phone calls (Sorry Anna) including one from my boss to head into the air center before I left for class because I was to head out to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to help with a project for a permitee leasing the land (It's a BLM monument) for grazing rights. After I woke up a little later on that morning it dawned on me what was fully going on. I left class from the park and drove for 3 hours (1 of them being down a dirt washboard road for 40 miles) till I finally met up with the rest of my crew. What we were doing was we were sling loading a whole bunch of shit (And I mean that in every sense of the word) up on top of this mesa for this guy to build a cabin of some sort to run his grazing operation. When I say shit I mean just that. This dude had cut up sections of a 40 foot steel millvan container, he had random pieces of word and furniture...it was amazing. The most amazing part of it all were the two air freight containers he somehow acquired that he wanted us to fly:



It doesn't look big but that behemoth is 8 ft by 8 ft by 10 ft and ways 1050 lbs. The first day we tried flying it...after 2 hours of rigging it to fly, our helicopter had to turn around because they could make it up on the mesa with the winds. The next day we cut it in half and flew it that way. The second of the two containers we cut the plexiglass out of it and flew it that way. All in all, it was a good day for a lot of training took places while we worked this project. The one thing that did suck throughout the entire ordeal was that my camera broke about 2 hours before I took my first flight in N420RL (our helicopter). So no photos of the flight or the beautiful plot of land the permitee was taking care of.

Today was spent doing initial attack training and Cargo Let Down training. Cargo Let Down is a way to deliver supplies and equipment to firefighters from a helicopter with out having to deliver it at the end of a long line connected to the belly of the helicopter. The equipment can be carried inside the ship then "belayed" or lowered from the ship to the selected drop point on the ground. Our training consisted on selecting said drop points, guiding the helicopter in, and basic radio communications all around. After all was said and done we got to experience packing out all of that crap we had dropped which I'm sure we'll do sometime this summer on real calls. I think one load I packed out weighed 40 lbs in itself asides from my 35 lb pack and my 8 lb tool. Needless to say I'm beat. Today was the last day of my 4 day tour. Tomorrow I drive to Bozeman, MT for a couple days and I'll be back in Cedar City. Until then, every one stay safe...if not, whatever you do, do it here in SW Utah and start a fire...we're all getting restless...