So, all that planting I was talking about? Even I was amazed when I saw the numbers on my timesheet:
29Oct – 72 blackbrush and ephedra
30Oct – 274
31Oct – 392
01Nov – 336
02Nov – 360
03Nov – 720
04Nov – 720
05Nov – 360
06Nov – 648
07Nov – 226
I didn’t copy the numbers for the 8th – 12th except for that on Sun we replaced 68 cages with the cones (treepees).
2007 Nov 11 (Sun) Written by hand in letter format to my sister. Mostly copied here.
Yesterday night I just wanted to crash. Half of us had to go back and replace the temporary screens we had installed on the first days of the 4-day tour (Oct29-Nov1) with the tripis (treepees). 
I composed an acrostic yesterday, but I’m not sure I can recall it completely. Installing the tripis was rough enough as a go-along with the planting, but oddly enough, disturbed-by-water desert soil is just as cement-forming as Illinois clay soil is! I have a new cut on the side of my right pinky, so writing hurts.
Tripi
Rough
Intense
Painful
Intellectual
Intellectual because of figuring out HOW to insert it in rock. A tripi is a cone with three metal legs at least 9 inches long.
It sprinkled today. We seeded purple threeawn, globe mallow, a desert marigold, and chia. Apparently, a tablespoon of chia was enough to keep the Apaches alive when they were on the warpath. Good to know, if I could identify the plant and seeds. The BLM chose threeawn because the wild burros won’t eat it.
We finished at 11:30am today and went on an “educational” hike to Ice Box Canyon. The temperature in the Ice Box was a nice midwestern September/late August evening.
My pack doubles as a pillow, if I keep the top of it relatively empty except of spare clothes. I don’t bring many clothes – just my uniform and a change of clothes for around camp, and my pajamas, and of course rain gear. But the raingear stays in my daypack. What’s the use of bringing it if it’s stuck at camp when I’m in the field?
I’ve been thinking of bringing a fleece blanket to curl up in around the fire. That sentence did not flow right. I want to curl up in a fleece blanket while sitting at the campfire. The gold sweater doesn’t block the wind well enough for my comfort.
Nighttime slumber is much warmer in jeans than my pajama pants. That reminds me — I will also be packing long underwear, since it finally arrived with my Carhartts last Friday.
28 posts. 400′ of fence. A bunch of sore muscles.
Half the group worked at Nellis Wash on Thursday morning, installing a fence between BLM and NPS land to stop motorists from sneaking into the (NPS) Lake Mohave park area and destroying the ecology of the wash through illegal off-roading.
Desert ground isn’t sandy. It’s rocky, and digging into rocky soil is tough!
A desert wash is a low area where rains wash through, and it has a different ecology than the ridges around it. Cheese brushes were abundant in the area of Nellis Wash we worked in, giving it a yellow hue compared to the silvery white on the surrounding ridges. A plant that I have seen a lot of in my 6 days in the desert is of the cholla (family? genus? species?). Pronounced choya. On the silver cholla, the spines have a sheath around them that remains in your skin after you pull out the spine. Very irritating. When a cholla dies, its skeleton looks like a formerly insect-inhabited hollow stick, with holes where all of the spines were.