Hot Spot.

It has only been a couple of weeks since leaving the sweltering heat of the South and the scorching temperatures of the high plains of Texas and desert of Arizona but they have already faded into distant memory after being where the daytime temps only briefly exceed the mid-70's and mornings are just one side or the other of the 50 degree mark.  My five-cup mug of hot tea is thoroughly enjoyed each morning and not one watt of electricity has been spent on running air conditioners.  All we do is adjust how many windows we want open, usually not more than one or two.

Since the last post Cyndee and I have celebrated our anniversary.  Thanks, Mom for the text message.  You did better than me on remembering how many years it was. 

The day of our anniversary we were on duty, which meant we would be working from six to ten pm.  So we were going to celebrate later on one of our days off.  But our co-camp host got all wound up about it being our anniversary and since it was such a big one, 35 years, that we should celebrate it on that day.  He disappeared for a couple of hours that morning and when we were in camp for lunch he informed us that he had been to the lodge and had made dinner arrangements for us at the lodge dining room, with a table next to the window looking out over the canyon.  He was going to take our evening shift and we were to have a good time.  Thanks, Don.

But there were daytime duties to get done first.  In the last post I put up photos of Cyndee and I cleaning fire pits.  Every campsite that is vacated on that day gets a fire pit check.  We look to see if there are any ashes that need to be removed and especially check to see if anything has been left burning or hot.  Occasionally we have run across some hot embers but we carry water with us and simply put the hot ashes in a bucket and drown them.

But the five or six little metal pails that we carry around in the back of the Polaris fill up pretty quickly when you are cleaning an average of 40 pits a day.  When they do fill we take them over to the little blue Chevy truck with full-size metal garbage cans and transfer them over.  But these too fill within a couple of days and when they do, road trip!

This is how you haul ashes on the North Rim

There is a designated place where we take all the biodegradable things like the ashes, fallen tree trunks and mulch, it is called Lindberg Hill and it is down a road that is marked for service vehicles only.  For me, this is a cool part of the job.  I get access to parts of the park that would not be an option for me if I were here as a camper.  It is a nine mile drive to get to Lindberg Hill and Cyndee and I loaded ourselves into the little blue truck and headed out.

We enjoyed the nine miles of Ponderosa Pine and Aspen and wheeled around to back up to the ash pile.  In my forgetfulness I neglected to drop the tailgate of the truck before backing all the way up to the ash pile, so I was climbing over the side of the bed to walk out to the end and unlatch the tailgate from the inside, and Cyndee was getting out on her side when I hear; "Joohhnnn".  Now, you have to know that when my name is called in that manner and in the tone that goes with it, something is up.  Our son, who can sleep through a hurricane, marching band or rock concert will bolt straight out of bed if even hears the faintest hint of that call.  I'll bet that even with him 2,500 miles away his eyes popped open and he was asking himself; "what was that?"

What "that" was, was Cyndee discovering that she had stepped out into the ash pile on her side of the truck and that it was HOT!  I came around after dropping the tailgate and took a look to find that not only was it hot where Cyndee stepped out but it was hot twenty feet out in several directions in a pile three feet deep.  Uh-oh, not a good thing since this ash pile is on the edge of the hill and trails off into a heavily wooded ravine.  At the moment the heat was up on top of the edge of the hill but just in the time it took us to dump our cans it had moved out another foot or so.

We did not dilly-dally around getting back to the campground and got with the ranger on duty in the check-in kiosk.  The response to my concern about the burning ash pile, shall we say, left me a little wanting.  I was told that all fire crews and any vehicles they had that could carry water were 40 miles away at the Jacobs Lake fire.  I wrote about that fire a post or two ago.  And, since it was Sunday, none of the maintenance crew were on duty.  The only thing that could be done would be to leave them a voice mail that they might get to on Monday morning.

We got back to our campsite, a little perplexed, and relayed what had just transpired to our co-host.  Within a couple of minutes we had hatched a plan to get some water up to the ash pile.  Both Don and I have what are commonly referred to as 'blue totes'.  These are little wagons of sorts that campers use to haul gray water from their camper to a dump station when there are no sewer hook-ups.  They are plastic tanks with a couple of wheels on one end and a hook on the other.  You just throw the hook over the ball on your hitch and pull it (slowly) to the dump station.  These are great little accessories, allowing you to extend your stay without having to be super-frugal in the use of dishwashing water or bathing water.

So between the two of us we were able to take on about 60 gallons of water.  We unloaded the ash cans from the little blue truck and put our totes in their place, went to the dump station where there was access to non-potable water used for hosing down the dump station and filled the tanks to capacity.

When Don and I got back to Lindberg Hill the ash pile had gone from just being hot to giving off plumes of smoke in several spots.  It was a pitiful site, the two of us out there with just a gravity-fed trickle coming out of a garden hose.  As soon as the water hit the ashes it instantly converted to steam and blew volcanoes of ashes into the air.  Luckily there was no wind and they just settled back onto the ash pile.  We did manage to cool off a couple of spots but we really just barely scratched the surface of what needed to be done.  Making eighteen mile round trips for sixty gallons of water was not the answer.

It was mid-afternoon now, we had done what we could and had stopped by the fire station on the off-chance someone might be around.  They were not.  And every bay in the station was empty save one truck left here in the event of a need to fight a structure fire.

We went on about our daily routine, but could not stop worrying about what was going on up on Lindberg Hill.  As afternoon turned to evening we got ready for our special occasion (took a shower and everything).  We arrived at the lodge early so we could enjoy watching the sun set on buttes that rise up and block the view of the Colorado River from the North Rim.  It was stunning.

At one point I looked up from the viewfinder to take in all the people around us sharing this beautiful evening.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man sitting on a rock wall, it caught my attention because it is not a place that was meant for public access.  I took a closer look and what a stroke of luck, it was Grant, the manager of maintenance for the North Rim.  Grant is a formidable presence, not tall but built like a tank with large, thick hands of a man that knows his way around the business end of hand tools.  He has piercing blue eyes set in a sun-reddened face adorned with a large moustache that curls down around his mouth all the way to his jaw-line.  I made my way up to him and gave him the abbreviated version of the situation up on Lindberg Hill.  He squinted at me with those piercing eyes and asked me point-blank if we had been dumping hot ashes.  Whoa, no way!  Besides, the pile was three times the size of what we could do and it was comprised mostly of charcoal ash, not the chunks of unburned firewood that makes up 90% of what we collect.

Grant was very appreciative of the information and he wasted no time in heading out to investigate even though it was his day off and it was getting dark.  We later found out that he did take a fire truck up and 2,000 gallons of water later had things cooled off. 

While Grant was being a one-man fire fighting crew, Cyndee and I were enjoying an evening of what is fine dining on the North Rim.  The prices are what you would expect for a luxury dining in the city (six bucks for two glasses of iced tea), but the food was about what you get at an entry-level sit-down restaurant.  The view was priceless.  Just as it got dark a thunderstorm ran the length of the canyon and it put on a awesome lightning display as it passed by.  From the gasps, oohhs and aahhs of the people in the dining room you would think you were watching a 4th of July fireworks display.  A good time was had by all.

This is a poor excuse of a photograph, but you get the idea.

Long shadows and sunlit points.

When the sun got low it just barely raked the bottoms of the approaching storm clouds.  Looked like it was raining fire.

But there was still the mystery of how the ash pile ended up hot and burning.  To our knowledge, only the campground was using Lindberg Hill.  The lodge has an enormous fireplace on the east veranda but it has not been used and besides, they burn whole trees in that thing, not charcoal.  Could it have come from the in-cabin fire places?  Unlikely since they do not use charcoal either and the amount was far in excess of what would come from the cabins.  Everybody in every cabin would have had to burned a 20 pound bag of charcoal on the same night to account for what was on the hill.

While contemplating the possibilities we could here the ring of the bell on a little 'train' that comes through the campground every afternoon.  It is both a shuttle and rolling billboard for the nightly live entertainment and bar-b-que.  DING!  The light came on, these guys were the only ones that had cooking pits large enough to hold more than a thousand pounds of charcoal at a time.  They must run for a week or two at a time before they need to shovel out the ashes to make room for a new fire.

At the time of this post it is not confirmed if the nightly cookout is the source, but I am pretty sure that if Grant tracks it down it won't be happening again.