ITA – Total Immersion – (Week Two Begins) – Frank Church Wilderness, Idaho

Our quasi rest weekend was over and it was time to start Week 2. After a few work days on the Middle Meadow Trail, we now had a commute from Meadow of Doubt to the tools and start of our work.

An early start in the cool air was quite refreshing.

While the group steadily made their way to the work start, I stopped in Middle Meadow for a selfie and sunrise shot. Our work started today about a mile or so past Middle Meadow on the Dillinger Meadow Trail.

Pam grabbed “Sissy”, a name she gave her crosscut saw feeling that she needed to name our second crosscut a strong feminine name to offset “Spike” who obviously exudes masculinity! Which, by the way instantly made Spike our second crosscut and Sissy our first…. This discussion is making me uncomfortable therefore I digress!

Progress on this section of trail remained slow but we managed to work within about a half mile of Dillinger Meadow. We sent in a scout team and decided that to reduce our daily commute, we would bump camp tomorrow.

We again stashed tools and made our now over an hour commute back to base camp in Meadow of Doubt.

I mentioned in my last post that Mel had brought us some treats! She hauled this beauty in the day before and we set it in the creek. On our long hot commute back from the Dillinger Meadow Trail we had been thinking and talking about what awaited us back in camp!

Kjell pulled out his knife and we all eagerly awaited!

Not much was said over the next few minutes as we devoured the cool melon like a bunch of jackals around a wildebeest!

The next morning, we packed up our camp and headed to our new home.

Middle Meadow.

We got to the start of our work section which was the last half mile into Dillinger Meadow so we dropped our full packs and starting clearing trial. Our scout team had walked the route the day before so we knew that about a half day’s worth of work would be needed before we could haul in our packs.

By lunch, we had cleared enough to get our packs in and set up camp at Dillinger Meadow. The meadow by the way is located just a bit below the camp site which was nice because the flies were not as bad up here.

After lunch, we headed back up the hill to cut out everything we had skipped over.

Mel, Pam, and Sissy went to work on this jumble….. I pretended to help but mostly just took pictures.

Tough and bad ass only begins to describe Pam, Mel, and Sissy.

Cue the dramatic music please!!!!! The next dramatic event was about to start!!!! After an afternoon of working back up the trail, we fell back to camp, had dinner and relaxed for a bit. As I headed off to my tent, through the trees I noticed a smoke plume which seemed uncomfortably close. We spent the next hour or so using our satellite communicator trying do get information about what was obviously a forest fire somewhere reasonably close. What happened next was not in the original plan!!!! Stay tuned!