Hello all and Merry Christmas! Dave and I send you greetings from the City of Rocks National Reserve and Castle Rocks State Park. We're in a tiny spot of Southern Idaho about half an hour away from the Utah border and about an hour and a half away from the Nevada border. I'm sure if you look us up on Google Earth you'll be able to see where we're at. Look up Almo, ID 83312 and that tiny dot is where we live. The town has a 2-room school house (originally built in 18something but it burned down, so the current one was rebuilt in 1902), a general store (apparrently you only shop there if you're desperate) whose claim to fame is being the longest running general store in southern Idaho--I think it opened in the 1870's, the LDS church building and...not much else. This town makes Sanford look huge!
CIRO/CRSP are really awesome! The California trail runs through here and rumor has it that there is one site where you can actually see some wagon ruts still, although we haven't had time to check it out yet. There are also several huge rock formations that have lots of immigrants' signatures on them. They are pretty cool. The rock formations here are amazing, both at CIRO and CRSP. The City and Castles are about 6 miles apart, and we live east of both of them by about 5 minutes. The rocks are all granite and are world famous if you're a climber--we hear the park is absolutely bursting at the seams in the summer. In the winter it's more used as a snowshoeing/ice climbing kind of place, although the climbing ranger, Brad Schilling, says the ice isn't very good currently. We have already been snowshoeing in the park and really love it.
We are living in park housing that has just been built to house seasonal employees. Currently we share with one of the maintenance workers; her name is Krinn. She is really nice, although we don't see her too much. The house is really nice--it has a huge kitchen, a large dining room and living room, a huge master bedroom with walk-in closet and an amazing master bath and two smaller bedrooms that share a bathroom. Dave and I have the master bedroom and we love it! The house has tons of windows and it has the most awesome view of Castles. We love living there, especially at the astronomical cost of $25 a month. Aah, the perks of being a state/national employee!! Everything is brand new--carpet, stove, fridge, you name it. I guess you could say we're living in luxury, and it will definitely be hard to go back to whatever we go back to when we leave here in April.
Dave is fulfilling his Senior internship while we're here; his position is the Park Management Intern. He gets to spend two weeks each in five different areas learning all about park management, from maintenance to law enforcement to natural resources. Once he's done, he'll have rehire status in both the state and national levels and we're really excited about that. I am also doing a little bit of work for the park, revising their bird list to get it ready for publication and digitizing their herbarium and getting it ready to go online. Both of these projects are going to take some time but if there's still time left in Dave's internship, I'll also begin revamping the park's library and getting that organized. Yay for work that's in my field! I have really enjoyed staying home the last week and have been reading several good books and working on some really fun projects. I anticipate only working about 12 hours a week, which is perfect. Dave says he really likes having a stay-at-home wife--all his meals are ready when he comes home, all the chores are done, all he has to do is look handsome and maybe put away a dish or two in the morning! I think we both have it really good here.
We thought you might want to know what everything looks like here, so I've included lots of pictures of the City and of Castles--we'll give you some pictures of our house later.
This is the view of our valley from inside City of Rocks
these are some of the different rock formations inside the City. It is kind of a unique ecosystem because it isn't quite the Great Basin but it isn't the Snake River Plain yet either--we have Pinon Pine, Rocky Mountain Juniper and Utah Juniper here. It's pretty cool.
This is called Window Arch, and it kind of sneaks up on you. Dave and I were looking for about 5 minutes before we realized we were looking AT the arch!
This rock is called the Shark's Fin in Castles. You can really see why! As you may have guessed, we've been having some pretty henious weather lately--snow on and off for the past 3 days and wind like you can't believe. Highland, Big Piney, Rexburg and the San Luis Valley have NOTHING on this place for breeziness!! Well, that's all for now from this part of the family. We hope you enjoyed seeing our new digs! We just wanted to let you know that we love you and we hope you all have a very merry Christmas as you celebrate the birth of our Savior.
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