Office Space

7/9/03

We spent the day at the Ranger Station–mostly wasting time. We eventually got on a computer and got TopoFusion working. It was a bit of a trial.

The best part of the day was spending over an hour filling out our timecards. It was nothing but hilarious. I was laughing because I came here to get a job done, not to count hours, nit pick or even to make money. My interest in these kind of unnecessary details (except to observe how ridiculous it is) is sickly small. I would not tolerate this in my everyday life. The FS job is temporary for me.

After 8 hours in the office we decided our time was more important to us than the little money they are paying so we decided to take 2 hours of ‘leave without pay’ and go for a ride.

We rode from the bunkhouse, 1 Carl Lane, past the Ranger Station to Wagonhammer Spring. Here was a Lewis and Clark trailhead and our best hope for quality local riding. The start was a dirt road which quickly went to triple-track, quad-track and even pent-track with spurious horse trails everywhere. As we climbed we noticed a carsonite ‘Louis and Clark’ sign in the middle of nowhere and decided to investigate. Surely enough there was a slight resemblence of a trail going up a gulch on the left. We pedaled up the trail and soon were walking. The surface of the trail was very narrow. What little surface had been constructed had been sloughed off and destroyed by powerful hooves. This is bad for earnest young mountain bikers.

Sections were rideable, others weren’t. After ~75 miles of hiking we were looking to ride, not walk our bikes. We pushed on and again saw a ‘L&C’ post off in the distance, seemingly not on any trail. We went through a gate and I realized this wasn’t to become a standard ride. Stock trails were everywhere and we eventually ran into a large group of cows–some of them angry. We snuck by quietly and headed up a wooded canyon. I wouldn’t have thought the trail could get worse, but it did. We hopped over many a downed tree before eventually giving up and heading back. We investigated a contouring trail on the way back but had no idea where it was heading.

So the ride was an out and back and instead of looping back to Trail Gulch we rode highway 93 8 miles back to the bunkhouse; hot, tired and unsatisfied.