Mackey Island National Wildlife Refuge

Phoenix 2 was split up.

Because of the hot and humid weather the prescribed burning season is officially over.. bummer!!

It was so much fun I was really hoping to get more experience and get to go on more fires!
Oh well.  At least on this round we get to experience a lot more since when we don't have burns we find other work to do so we keep busy (versus some teams who have one project for the entire 8 weeks).  One of my friends has been painting and staining cabins the entire time and that's all he is going to be doing.  He was on fire round one so he is SUPER bored now.

So to keep us busy our sponsor Steve loaned 4 of us to a neighboring refuge, Mackey Island, that we have a friend on to help construct an electric fence.  On the island there are wild horses (which I got to see!).  They are really cool, but they come up to the house and scratch and pee on the house so we constructed 2600 feet of electric fence around the bunk house to keep them off the land.

It was fun, and really beautiful out there.  We drove out to the fire shop and ditched our truck and boated over to the island.  Then just used the atv's and a ranger to get around.

We were only there for 2.5 days and one of them is was P.O.U.R.I.N.G rain. POURING! There is a big tropical storm on the coast and it's dumping water onto us, so we were soaked!

...But (don't tell anyone back at campus) we did get to go mudding a bit since everything was so swampy.  It was amazing! I definitely understand now why people go out and do that for fun :)

But ultimately we got the entire fence that we were trying to construct up.  All 2600 feet of it, and all the walk arounds (wooden fences that people can walk around the get though, but they are too tight of turns for horses), and dug the trenches for the electric wire to continue underground.  It was a good little trip.  We all agreed that we would do it again.  We also got to celebrate Elias's birthday there so Jordan, who we were working for, and is also an NCCC alum got some food and we had a bbq for lunch.  It was amazing.  It's definitely the little things like food and sun that make great days.

The other half of the team stayed at the Swamp, and did many different projects, such as learn more about the engines, weather, worked at the Foodbank, and climbed the fire tower (which I'm super jealous about).

Here's an article about the big fire in New Mexico at the moment that talks about prescribed burning:
Prescribed burning really does matter....