Campground Hosting

The last couple of days have just been doing our campground host routine; running the traps.  Putting out the reserved signs at night for the people that did not make in by the time the ranger station closed, pulling the reserved signs in the morning and giving a list to the rangers of who showed during the night and who didn't.  Not rocket science but it does get you out of bed before six am and keeps you available to the campers until ten pm.

We also do what is called the 11:00 purge.  Everyone that is leaving should be out of their site by 11:00 and arriving campers can not check in until 12:00.  That gives us hosts a one hour window to clean fire pits and pick up the campsite, if necessary.  But at 11:00 we go around with a list provided by the rangers showing all that have not returned their little paper camping permit that hangs on the post at each site.

Most of the time the campers have just forgotten and left their permit on their post and are long gone, some take their permit off the post but forget to stop at the ranger station and turn it in.  But occasionally you have folks that are a little slow in getting it together and being on their way.  This is where diplomacy has to be engaged and you give them a little encouragement to pick up the pace because there is a good chance that the person with that campsite for tonight is already in the parking lot waiting for the sight to open up.  So far most folks have been pretty good about it.

Technically, we are off duty between 11:00 am and 6:00 pm but we have been doing the purge for the rangers since they are short-handed (there were a few in the last weeks that decided for one reason or another that they could not finish their assignment on the North Rim and left).  Even with picking up this extra little chore there is still plenty of time for fooling around on our own.

Around lunch time yesterday we went to the lodge to check out the Heritage Festival.  Local tribes were putting on arts and crafts displays of glass blowing, jewelry and pottery making.  Stuff right down Cyndee's alley.

We stepped out on the large veranda of the lodge and looked across the to the South Rim to see that what had been a small, prescribed burn that had been underway for several days had now gotten a little bigger than what they wanted.  We were told that they had gone from just observing to actively doing fire control.

 While a fire on the South Rim poses little or no danger to the North Rim, we do have our own to worry about.  There was a lightning strike a couple of nights ago at Jacobs Lake, just north of us by about 40 miles.  It too just started as "one to watch" but has now evolved into fire crews being brought in and they are actively engaging it, trying to keep the fire to the several hundred acres it is burning in from becoming several thousand acres.

We have a small, log building directly across from our campsite.  It started out as some kind of project for an interpretive use, something about a 1930's style park cabin.  But the project ran out of money and they just stuck particle board over the openings that were not finished.  One of those openings, a door, directly faces us.  After a couple days of sitting in our camp chairs and waving at incoming campers, reading and visiting, Cyndee decided that "door" was just too ugly to look at for the next three months.  We located one of the full-time maintenance guys, John, and asked him if he had some National Park Service brown paint and some brushes.  He got a curious look on his face and was unsure about a couple of total strangers wanting some of his paint.

But when we told him what we wanted to do he said that he thought that was a great idea and that he did not know why someone had not thought of that for all the years it had been that way.  He even got creative and offered us green paint too, so we could match the trim.  Well, Cyndee took off with this and immediately designed a fake door.  She went around and looked at the cabins that the park service people were living in around us.  They all had an old-fashioned screen door over a solid wood door.  Cyndee then drew out a screen door design that blended in, but not exactly the same as the doors in the area.  We taped it off and started painting using the government issued paint. 

 

As we painted in the fake door it became obvious that some of the logs of the cabin were in sore need of a coat of paint.  What the heck, we had plenty of paint, the brushes were already wet and we were there.  But when we were finished and the paint was dry, oops, the new brown paint was the color of milk chocolate and the old brown paint was mocha.  We're ambitious but painting the whole cabin is not an option.  I hope that we have not caused a problem for the maintenance guys.