Arizona Snow Storm?

I got a ride yesterday from a crazy old Bureau of Land Management employee named Rich. I had been working on a trail crew rebuilding a historic trading trail in a remote mountain valley in southeastern Arizona, and Rich was our transportation. At the completion of our work, he and his BLM partner drove their government trucks into the Gila Mountains to retrieve our crew. During our drive, he noticed a Hawaiian sticker on my nalgene and asked if I had ever been to the islands. I told him only six weeks ago I was living and working in Hawaii. His response: "And now you're here? What, did you have a momentary lapse of reason or something?"

I thought about his comment in relation to the past few months of my life and ultimately burst into laughter. Indeed, about a month and a half ago I was living in Maui, only two minutes' walking time to the beach. My afternoons were spent watching the sun set into the South Pacific while tossing a Frisbee around with a couple of my roommates. If it was a "cold" day I could tolerate wearing a hoodie, but most days were spent in flip flops, boardshorts, and not much else. Palm trees lined the streets, delicious fresh fruit was for sale everywhere, and the bikini beach scenery was not something to complain about.

And just a few weeks ago I was wandering down highly cosmopolitan boulevards in Oslo, drinking wine with a hilarious Norwegian family, and hiking up lushly forested Scandinavian mountainsides. (Norway in January was, to my surprise, rather warm).

But yesterday... there I was, talking to crazy old Rich, sitting in twelve days' worth of sweat, mud, and funk, and thankful to be resting in a warm truck.

So maybe I did have a momentary lapse of reason. To most sane people, living the easy life on a tropical island is much more desirable than living in a tent and doing hard physical labor in cold, wet weather. Kind of a no brainer, right? And yet here I am, six weeks removed from the tropics and now part of a trail crew that just experienced a freakish Arizona snow storm. That doesn't necessarily make me insane... maybe just a little un-sane.


Working on a trail crew in Arizona will definitely have its rewards, though--I am not entirely crazy for choosing trail work over Hawaii. Spring will arrive in the next few weeks, the sunsets and sunrises on the red Southwestern rocks will be spectacular, and my days off will be spent basking in the Arizona sun watching Spring Training baseball games. But most importantly, I am doing something I like to do--and I am getting paid for it. The next three months of work may be rough, grueling, and full of all types of complaint-worthy weather, but I can guarantee that I will be happy and proud of my time spent working on trails in the Southwest.