How's life been treating ya? Can't complain myself. Life went from a solid three months of no work and hardcore relaxing to lots and lots of work. When it rains it pours it seems. It also seems as though my level 3 status in rope access has helped to haul in some work.
The first of these jobs brought me to a part of the states that I haven't really spent much time in... the dirty south as they say. I spent about a week and a half working in Georgia, and then a few days spent in Alabama. Both jobs were at paper mills and there is only one word that could describe the common state of a paper mill... disgusting.
The work we were doing was pretty cool though. It is called non-destructive testing, and intrigued me enough that I am currently taking a class for NDT. Basically the paper mill wanted us to take thickness readings on a number of holding tanks that they have.
This would allow them to see if any of the substances being held in said tanks were corroding the metal at an unusual rate. I was only supervising the rope access part of the work but the guys on rope were using a method of testing called Ultrasound Thickness Testing. They would carry a little machine with them that would shoot sound waves at different frequencies into the metal and based on how the sound waves bounced back, they would be able to determine if there were flaws or weaknesses in the metal. Pretty cool.If you have ever driven by a mill though you must be familiar with the musk that it is all too happy to invade your olfactory sense with. You can see here a very unnatural liquid being spewed into the earth. This chemical is the very source of the most unholy scent I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing, literally causing your humble narrator to gag from the smell.
The work in Alabama was much the same, but only a few days long. I left the south (a place I would be content to only visit on occasion) and headed back to the land of normalcy and racial tolerance. With only a week off before the next job, ya gotta make the most of it. I have been spending almost all of my free time climbing in beautiful Boulder Canyon.Here you can see me getting ready to decipher the first difficult section of a climb called Gorilla's Delight. Since the weather has just been amazing our here lately I have also been lucky enough to get on some of the rocks that were too unclimbable in the winter. The Flatirons are the icons of Boulder and are amazing playgrounds.
So after a few days of playing in the mountains life led me to Washington. It is hard to imagine more of a contrast that going from working in the southeast at a paper mill to
the northwest at a wind farm. The wind farm was near a place called Clarkston, WA. This was just a stone's throw across the river from Lewiston, ID.Though the temps down in Georgia were already in the 90's with high humidity, the weather in Washington was still cold and dry. We had a number of days were we could not work due to snow.
It
was an awfully pretty place to be working. As a "supervisor", I am not allowed to get on ropes. Companies hire on level 3's to be there for complicated rescues, and rigging. This means most of my time was spent sitting up on top of the turbine (the nacelle). The days can be pretty long but as you can see, it was pretty picturesque.So after about a week and a half in WA I flew back to CO, where I find myself now. The weather has been just great and easy to make the most out of it.
Oh yeah, this was a picture taken from the plane ride home from WA. Usually this amateur photographer doesn't support the cause of plane window photos, but the layer of clouds looked pretty cool.
So tomorrow morning I will be flying to Virginia and will be gone for about a month. I get to work (not supervise) for a new company where we will be disassembling and reassembling what are called radomes (check out an image of one). A radome is a dome structure that goes around antennas and radars to protect them from the elements. So that does it. After returning from VA, I will have a berfday (25), become an uncle, and be hosting my buddy Colin for a few weeks of some hardcore climbing. Stay tuned!
- There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
- There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
- There is society, where none intrudes,
- By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
- I love not man the less, but Nature more,
- From these our interviews, in which I steal
- From all I may be, or have been before,
- To mingle with the Universe, and feel
- What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
- Lord Byron
