BURNING the midnight oil

Yesterday I worked 14.5 hours, from 8 am to 11 pm with a half hour for lunch. We burned 100 acres of Kellogg-Weaver Dunes, a beautiful collection of prairie-covered sand dunes in the Mississippi valley south of Wabasha. I was one of the assigned ATV operators, which meant I kept busy putting out our half-mile-long lines, and when the other ATV died I had more to do. After the fire ended, we had many standing trees burning. We used the ATV winch to pull one stubborn tree down, but we left quite a lot of trees smoking and flaming if they were far enough from unburned grass. By the time we towed the dead ATV off the prairie (by pulling it with the functional one) and loaded everything, it was after 9, and we rolled into St. Paul at 11 pm.

Other recent news:
Friday: Burned four small areas at Cannon River Wood Turtle SNA, ~10 hours
Monday: Burned a bluff prairie at the above site, then burned River Terrace SNA, also on the Cannon River, with abundant kittentails, 12.5 hours
Tuesday: Rainy, pulled garlic mustard all day at Wood-Rill SNA, Wayzata
Today: Returned to Oronoco Prairie SNA near Rochester to burn three small restorations with 6-foot Indian Grass in variable winds. (12-foot flames going unpredictable directions makes for some excitement)

Weekend: I went down to Carleton for Spring Concert and a friend's Polish sausage barbecue. The concert gave me a chance to reconnect with most of my friends still at Carleton and a few from my class who returned for the day. It rained lightly the whole time, and the area in front of the stage quickly turned into a mud pit. I forgot to pick up the guitar from Aaron, so I will have to return!

Tomorrow we will likely hit the road to southwest Minnesota for an 8-day road trip to burn such sites as Prairie Coteau. We are pretty much done with our burns for the metro/southeast part of the state.

On the road with fire

I spent last night in a hotel in Kasson, Minnesota after burning Iron Horse prairie near Hayfield yesterday. Iron Horse is a 30-acre remnant that was once enclosed and protected by a railroad wye. The tracks are gone now, but the prairie remains. We had winds to 25 mph but the ground was wet with standing water in places and lots of green brome grass. It burned but not well and we had to leave some areas unburned.

Our pumper truck blew a power steering line as we left, so Russ muscle-steered it to Kasson where we found an open NAPA store with the needed part in stock, and Russ and DJ installed it in the parking lot. It was 8 pm when we checked into the hotel and grabbed dinner and and beers at the restaurant across the street.

Today we burned two restored prairies at Oronoco prairie near the town of Oronoco. We had little wind and a hot Indian grass fire, though again the fuel was green and sparse in places so we couldn't get everything to burn. I drove our big rig home and got some experience merging a 50-ft-long vehicle in rush-hour traffic.

In other news, I was offered a summer job with the DNR doing bird surveys in June and vegetation surveys in July and August. I had been envisioning something a little more stable (regular hours and less travel), but I can't turn down the chance to get paid to watch birds and work outdoors!

Cinco de Mayo, the Living Green Expo, and very happy gnomes

Last night was Michele's birthday dinner at the Happy Gnome. I had two glasses of amazingly tasty beer (Schell Einbecker Doppelbock and Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter) which left me rather tipsy though not too drunk to enjoy the equally amazing hazelnut-crusted walleye.

This morning I drove to Carleton to pick up my friend Jenna, and we explored around the cities for most of the day. We started at the Cinco de Mayo parade and festival near the Lightsmith building and migrated to the Living Green Expo at the state fairgrounds. It was great to see Jenna again (and she's living in Minneapolis this summer!), and the expo provided plenty of good food tastings and free stuff. The highlight was the chance to try out Segways (two-wheeled personal transporters that balance themselves and move forward or backward based on posture changes). If they didn't cost $3,000, I might get one.

The weather looks great for fire at least for the next six days, so I will probably be on the road burning for a while starting tomorrow. Let's hope the overtime adds up - I need it!

Burnin' the woods

We burned three days this week, all in deciduous oak forest. I hadn't heard of this type of burn before, but as it turns out oak leaves will carry fire, and a good fire will kill invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle while not harming oaks. Much of the time was spent cursing at the leaf litter and running with drip torches trying to get something to burn, but on Wednesday we had a great fire on the bluffs above the St. Croix River. Since there is no way to drive ATVs on the steep, narrow firebreaks, woodland burns are a real pump-can carrying workout.

When the fire has burned through the underbrush, the next task is to put out all of the rotting logs and dead trees that caught fire. Affectionately known as "mop-up," this process takes hours as our saw men cut down burning/smoking trees and the rest of us put them out with pulaskis and pump-cans. (I have plenty of chainsaw experience, but as I have not taken the two-day DNR saw training course, they won't let me saw.)

Tuesday and Wednesday were both 11-hour days, and yesterday was 9.5 hours. We are off today and tomorrow (rain, wind, and cold again), but on Sunday we are going to hit the road to western Minnesota to burn some real prairie.

Tomorrow is my mom's birthday, and we will be celebrating tonight at the Happy Gnome (a bar/restaurant known for good food but primarily for its excellent selection of quality beer). As my mom doesn't drink, I'm not sure why she chose it, but I am certainly looking forward to it :-)

I updated the photos of the day page with pictures of the Northfield derailment site and last weekend's snow.