This is just a quick update because it's late and I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow, BUT, the week has started off great!
This morning everyone was in the office, which really changed the atmosphere. The visitor's center was about as busy as it gets (5 visitors by noon!), and everyone was in an overall sunny mood despite the dismal weather outside.
In the morning I tried to learn a bit from Phil, the SCA intern who basically has the same job as me. He's a photography wiz though, and all I really learned was that I know absolutely nothing about film, photography, and editing, especially on a Mac computer. I have SO much catching up to do. I'm not sure if it was obvious that I didn't understand half of what he explained to me, but I tried to pretend I was at least competent enough to repeat all the steps he showed me in compressing files, stitching panoramas, and rendering raw footage. Ack!
When my supervisor Jennifer arrived, she started me off with some totally riveting online government courses about awesome subjects like security procedures and why you shouldn't give your password to people. Then I took some more courses on interpretation and the history of NPS policies. It was about as exciting as it sounds so I'm going to stop there.
What was more exciting however, was the meeting I had with Jennifer, where I learned more about the details of my job. She told me that I would be using InDesign the most, probably, and she would give me a whole tutorial. Much more reassuring! Even better, she pulled out a map and showed me that I will be traveling and backpacking through at least 4 parts of BELA: Serpentine Hot Springs, a lava field area with archaeological sites, the maar lake area, and a rarely visited site near the village of Wales. In this last area, I'll be working with a ranger from another park and interviewing a 91-year-old reindeer herder! It should also be noted that Wales is the westernmost village in AK and Russia really is visible from the coast on a clear day. Go figure!
As I suspected, most of our fieldwork will be done in the next 3 months or so while the weather is still decent, and then the winter will be spent putting everything together.
After work I was pretty tired from staring at a computer all day, but Kathi, my floor-mate at the bunkhouse, convinced me to go on a bike ride with her down to the mouth of the Nome River. I'm glad I went, because even though it was a bit of a ride (about 2 hours round trip, into the wind and uphill one way), we found a good salmon fishing spot that we're going to return to tomorrow on the beach. It's just now the beginning of the salmon season, and fishermen were pulling up 7-10 salmon an hour.
Well, tomorrow we're taking our staff trip out to the village of Council and then fishing after work, so it should be another exciting day. Rumor has it there are actual trees in Council (I haven't seen a tree since I got here), as well as areas where you can see Horned Puffins and Beluga Whales. I shall have my camera ready.
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