Frontcountry vs. Backountry

Greetings from another frontcountry carpentry hitch! This time my crew is working at the top of the Flume Gorge in Franconia Notch State Park. The rain shelter we are building will be appropriately titled: Top o’ Gorge. The sign is already made—all we have to do is some more rustic carpentry! I could easily follow up my previous blog post and write about our further struggles and realizations of rustic carpentry, but instead I’ll focus on the challenges and joys of being frontcountry on a hitch.

I’ll back up and tell you, dear readers, that my last hitch was the most backcountry hitch our program had to offer. Our group did not do any car camping, no no. We hiked 4 miles up two separate White Mountain National Forest trails (and those trails go straight up, lemme tell ya) with all of our gear for cooking, sleeping, and working. So getting to be on a very frontcountry crew directly after that one is both a relief and a stressor.

Our team in the backcountry spent a few days building tent platforms at a remote campsite. We barely had any human interactions besides the occasional visit from a backcountry ranger, and so we were free to be the weirdest we could be. See below:

We all:

-      - frequently ate food that fell on the ground right next to moose poop

-     -  often shared the same spoon

-     - ate our rehydrated hummus out of a bag with weird bits of pita because the rest of the pita was moldy

-     - slept under the kitchen tarp on a slope because there was nowhere good to set up tents

-     - got way too excited about meeting the strangers we saw on the trail

-     - talked about farts too much

-     -  ate obscene amounts of vegetarian chili mix, sadly

Here we are in our uneven backcountry campsite, about to enjoy the glory that is vegetarian chili mix.

Fast forward to this hitch—we are working directly next to one of the busiest trails in New Hampshire (don’t quote me on that). Dozens of people pass our worksite every hour, staring at us as we dig and hammer behind a string of caution tape. We get a lot of comments like: “Aha! Look at the creatures in their natural habitat!” or “That’s the rain shelter? Better hurry up!”

Aside from the natural features, we are a main attraction on the trail and so we get a lot of stares and comments while we are working and concentrating. It’s a great chance to do some outreach for our program—I personally really enjoy giving visitors a brief introduction to our 10-month internship when they ask us what we’re up to. On the other hand, it has been hard to be in the spotlight at all times—there’s really nowhere to hide! If we have to have a serious group discussion about a decision, we might be having that chat in front of an audience, which adds an interesting spin to group dynamics.

But now, list time!

The frontcountry is great for a few reasons:

-we don’t have to dig a hole to use the bathroom

-no need to scoop silty water from a stream and then wait for the gravity filter to do its thing before having drinking water

-barely any lugging of water because we have a spigot

-we can hang out with our friendly neighborhood interpretive rangers every day and go to their programs

-we can wash our hands with soap and water

-our tents are set up on perfectly flat tent platforms

-many personal ‘thank yous’ from visitors for all of our hard work

-ice cream after work is possible

-cell service

-we could shower if we wanted to

-we are currently baking brownies because we have access to an oven

Even though having access to water is great, I’ve definitely found myself pining for the simplicity and atmosphere that can only be found on a backcountry hitch. I have to remind myself that even though we’re close to civilization right now, we can still be ourselves on hitch and have a grand ol time despite not having the separation of a few miles between us and humans and amenities. We can hear the highway from where we sleep, but on the other hand we laughed about canned peaches for about 5 minutes today so I think we’re doing okay.

Looking at the blueprints, behind the caution tape.

Stretch Circle

Every morning of an SCA trail crew starts off with a stretch circle. So it was 8 years ago on my high school crew in South Dakota (where I vividly remember sharing our favorite kinds of cereal), and so it is now on every hitch and training in New Hampshire. Over the past month or so I have compiled a list of some exciting stretch circle questions that we have answered. Stay tuned for a follow-up post at the end of the season with more additions! 

If you could put a transit anywhere in the world where would you put it?

If you could restore any river which one would you restore?

What is your favorite kind of rain? 

Describe your quality of sleep and relate it to a food.

Do a dance move that relates to part of the shelter-building process.

Describe your perfect morning.

Describe your perfect evening.

If you could use a Harry Potter spell to describe your day, what would it be?

If you could be part of any famous trio, which one would you choose?

If you were a treat or treasure from Treats and Treasures, what would you be?

Give the tree a character trait.

Say your last words to the tree.

If the person next to you had a pull string that made them say one signature thing, what would they say? 

Birthday theme: how old are your parents and where were they born and what is the best birthday cake you've ever had?

If you could unzip your tent to open anywhere in the world/ dig a poop trench anywhere, where would it be?

And my all time favorite: Amphibian/reptile themed! We told a story about different herps as they related to our hazards of the day, and we linked it to a stretch

Open to any suggestions for future stretch circle questions!!

Now, back to the backcountry.

Rustic Carpentry

During training two weeks ago, some of us Conservation Stewards were mystified by the concept of when to measure precisely to the T and when a cut or measurement was deemed "close enough." Our boss referred to this phenomenon as Rustic Carpentry. The "precise" versus "we can live with it" measurements are a strange line to walk. A wrong measurement during the very first steps of laying the foundation can offset the entire project, but a half an inch difference in the diagonals of our timber frame box is ok to move forward with. This level of discernment ability will hopefully come to us with time. For now, our crew seems to be making do (ahem we have almost completed two beautiful camping shelters!) with our combined skills, logic, measuring tapes, and pencils.

Our crew of seven split into two different groups for a good part of our hitch because we had to complete our first shelter left over from training and build a second shelter entirely from scratch. That split left Max, Chrissie and I to start and finish the entire foundation of Shelter 2. We were completely on our own, with only our detailed notes from training and our memories to guide us.

I wish I had kept track of the amount of times we said “Is it level?” during the laying of the foundation. My guess is upwards of 200. The foundation leveling process is the most important time to be precise, at least to my understanding. We used a transit to find out how to make our foundation perfectly square, and to measure how high each foundation block had to be to make the entire structure level. The transit was simultaneously our best friend and worst enemy. If the transit gets nudged and gets unleveled without anyone noticing it could mean that we’d have to take all of our measurements all over again, which would be agonizing because laying our foundation in its entirety took two days. Luckily we kept each other in check and our transit remained a close friend. It’s been locked in the trailer for almost a week now and I sort of miss it, come to think of it. Here is a picture of us hugging the transit. If you look closely, we are hugging it without touching it at all! We must keep it level!!!

We have a bunch of fancy exciting tools to use, such as the transit, the chop saw, the table saw, and the nail gun. We can measure our cuts exactly and make boards perfectly level, just like in the frontcountry carpentry world. So what makes this Rustic Carpentry? Is it the way we have to string lengths of extension cords together to reach the campground bathhouse to get power to our tools? Is it because we occasionally have to hide our generator in the woods to minimize its awful noise pollution? Is it the way we stuff all of our supplies in our small trailer top to bottom at the end of every work day? Maybe, but I think the main thing that defines this fabled rustic carpentry thing is that we have to scrap together our combined knowledge and memory recall and general know-how to make this project a reality. We have to make boards fit by stripping down other boards in half. We can figure out when something has to be exact and when we can just “live with it.” We have to sometimes phone a friend or a boss when we forget how to do a certain task. We have to rely on each others’ moods, energy levels, and motivation to get through the challenges of a huge time crunch, a noise polluting job in a populated area, long work days, inclement weather, and just camping and cooking together in general.

And lo and behold, we are making it work. I’m writing to you from the end of Day 9, and this is what our structure looks like. 

I’m so proud of this crew for giving this project our everything. We managed to build an entire beautiful shelter after getting trained in carpentry two weeks ago. For some of us, it was our first time using any of these tools. Before this hitch, I wouldn’t have taken a second glance at the rows of tools at Home Depot. After this intro to carpentry I wandered the aisles and practically drooled over the miter saw. I’m so impressed with our lingo and accumulated knowledge at this point of our first hitch. If this is just Hitch 1, I can’t wait to see how much we all know in the end (but also I can because it is going to go by SO fast).