I’m now several paddle trips in with my new inflatable stand-up paddle board and I’m having a hard time believing I had to sell myself SO hard on buying it.
I’ve taken it out a good half-dozen times now: Both on weekday sunset cruises around Lake Mary, and on some longer weekend excursions! I went to East Clear Creek right before the Pipeline/Haywire/Double fires broke out (seriously, more on that later I swear) and spent this past weekend up at Lake Powell.
WELL. Haven’t done one of these in a hot second.
Thought I’d take a blog post to return to my quarterly trend of recapping all those little moments that ended up stuck in my phone camera roll because they weren’t deemed worthy enough of an actual blog post.
So, keep reading to see a few under-the-radar things that happened in my work and personal life over the last four months. Here are a few of the miscellaneous things I bought, trails I hiked, meals I cooked, books I read and people I saw this past spring.
So, I got my Red Card!
Which reminded me… you guys probably have NO idea what a Red Card is.
And… you probably have NO idea what I’m talking about half the time when I recap my Forest Service PIO (huh!?) experiences on Type 1 incidents (what!?) like the Backbone Fire and the Tunnel Fire.
Ah, the joys of working for the government!
During my stint in the Peace Corps, I ended up writing a quick blog post explaining all the acronyms, initialisms, slang and jargon I commonly used during my service… and here on my blog.
So, I’m going to do the same for my current job.
This one’s a long one.
Heheehe I’m back to let you all know that I still wear the same pair of Prana hiking pants.
Every day.
Kidding.
Kind of.
I’m in the process of revamping my “Things Randi Likes” page to include all of the things I wear on a weekly basis — my Danner hiking boots, Prana hiking pants, Lululemon Energy bras and Luxtreme Wunder Under leggings (RIP), Patagonia base layers, etc.
I just got a lil distracted by fire season… hope it’s understandable!
Which means… I have to get a little more creative now because I can’t simply cycle through the seasons going like “mhm yes, Birkenstocks and Lululemon Sculpt tanks this summer, Timbs and Levis Wedgie jeans this winter.” Oh no. I have to find NEW things to wear.
So. Without further ado!
If you’re a northern Arizona resident with a paddle board, kayak, pack raft… any kind of recreational watercraft, odds are pretty high that you’ve been to Clear Creek Reservoir.
(Hey, have I mentioned that I bought a new inflatable paddle board?)
Riiiight before the Pipeline/Haywire/Double Fire complex broke out on my forest (more on that later), I had the chance to head on a day trip to Clear Creek with a few of my friends. It was (unsurprisingly) a blast.
I’ve been a little hesitant to post about this because, well, what if everything goes wrong… but so far (fingers crossed) we’ve gotten seedlings started and transplanted, and some crops are taking off!
Which means… we have a garden!
I first tried paddle boarding (and paddle board yoga) during my unemployed summer in Michigan while I was looking for anything and everything COVID-safe to entertain myself with.
I fell in love IMMEDIATELY, and would have bought a paddle board right away if it were not for the pesky logistical things like… yunno, planning my move to an apartment. In Arizona. With little room to store a paddle board and few places to actually take said paddle board.
My two really good friends Vandy and Breanna, who live in Seattle, bought paddle boards sometime around the start of the pandemic, too, and seeing their constant social media posts around all the lakes, sounds and bays in Seattle did absolutely nothing to dissuade me.
So, after almost two full years of indecision, I finally pulled the trigger and bought myself a brand new inflatable stand-up paddle board (iSUP) earlier this month!
After an entire spring season of straight-from-the-farm local produce pick-ups, our CSA share has come to an end.
I wanted to take a second to share a little bit about our first experience with the Flagstaff CSA program — and share some of the recipes I threw together with some of the produce I received.
Well. Fire season came earlier than expected this year on my forest.
I know it’s not really a surprise. Most of the Southwest is in a 1,200-year drought, and we’ve been discussing preparedness levels (basically how many resources we have and how adequately those resources can support the number/scale/type of wildfires we’re dealing with) internally for the last several weeks, now.
On April 19, I got the call from our dispatch team that the Tunnel Fire — located about 14 miles northeast of Flagstaff — had rapidly expanded due to wind.
The fire went from a few acres to a few hundred acres to a few thousand acres in the span of a few hours, prompting rapid evacuations and the assembly of a full team of incident-qualified personnel.
The Tunnel Fire ended up as a Type 1 incident, which means we had to pull out all the stops and pull in a specialized Type 1 Incident Management Team trained to respond to large-scale and complex wildfires.
It’s been a minute!
I’ve been so busy with wrapping up my detail in northern California, onboarding for my new part-time gig as a yoga teacher here in Flagstaff, getting ready for fire season here in Flagstaff and fundraising for Ukraine that I haven’t had a chance to give an update on Yukon.
