AmeriCorps 2020: Field Trip

This post continues the story of my AmeriCorps service term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series can be found here.

August 24, 2020 was an unusual day during my AmeriCorps term in Colorado. It began normally enough, but in the afternoon we went on a field trip.

The morning started the same as always: we made our way to the Fern-Mesa reroute project, and then got to work. For me, this meant backsloping, which involved cleaning up the backside of the trail and giving it a nice, gentle angle.

After I’d finished backslapping one section of trail, though, Jo had an idea. For those of you who haven’t read every post in this series (heathens), Jo was a figure of singular terror. Thus, any idea she had was likely to be laced with malice.

With that in mind, Jo’s idea was for my crew members and I to visit her husband’s worksite.

You heard that right, Jo had a partner-in-crime, and he also worked for the City of Boulder’s Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) department. He was leading a trail project a little ways away from ours, and Jo wanted us to stop by his worksite for “education.”

I was sure that we would never be seen again.

Thus, onwards we walked through the picturesque landscapes of the Front Range, knowing that we trudged towards certain death. When we reached Nathan’s (Jo’s husband) worksite, however, his crew didn’t immediately murder us. Rather, they lured us in by acting warm and friendly.

Nathan’s crew was working in a steep ravine, which meant that they had a much more technical project than ours. They also had lots of boulders to move (in Boulder, lol), and therefore had to do lots of grip-hoisting.

A grip hoist is essentially a pulley system that you can carry. You hike it into location, and anchor one end of the pulley to something stable, like a tree or a large rock. You then loop the “working end” of the grip hoist around the object that you’re trying to move, and use a lever to winch the object in the direction that you want it to go.

Grip hoist systems can get very complicated. Nathan and Jo apparently thought that making four people disappear without evidence would also be complicated, because they let us go. Grateful to be alive, we returned to the Fern-Mesa reroute, puttered for a while, and then went home.