The Compass Blog

Color Your World – February 26, 2017

Greetings CoolWorkers,

It has been a long, cold, icy winter in central Montana. Gratefully, we’ve had some spring teasers; for me, the best of the best is our fabulous Big Blue Sky.

I can’t seem to get enough. Born with an artist’s soul, color plays a vital role in my world. My brother once commented that I think in shapes and colors. (Uh, yup – guilty as charged.) Every crayon in the Crayola Box of 64 – the holy grail of color – holds its own identity – and jump starts an emotional reaction and wanderlust.

“Intoxication with color, sometimes subliminal, often fierce, may express itself as a profound attachment to landscape. It has rightly been said: Color is the first principle of Place.”  – Ellen Maloy

In hindsight, it shouldn’t surprise me that my first visual taste of The Big Sky State – Montana – burned an unforgettable image in my brain. “Oh THIS, this is what mountains look like!?” I’m not sure if I thought it to myself, muttered it under my breath or half shouted it out loud. I was on a bus – with a fresh group of college students turned summer seasonal workers heading west to Yellowstone. We had just traveled together through many states and the darkness of night, and we were greeted by the dawn of a new day, the unknown promises of a new adventure, a new Place, and … the biggest blue sky I had ever seen.

Maybe you’re brand new to the CoolWorks world. Welcome! Maybe you’re a seasoned veteran, knowing exactly what you’re looking for in your next adventure. Welcome back!

CoolWorks understands you are unique – and what you want and need from the site varies from person to person, moment to moment, and season to season. That’s all good! You can search the site by a very specific job title – let’s go with Server. If a travel bug in you wants to check off Colorado, California or Connecticut – see Jobs by State. If your free spirit loves to spin the wheel of fortune – go big and check out Summer Jobs. And, if you wonder what types of jobs are possible, the Categories will offer the amazement you seek.

Click here for more Job Seeker Tips


We encourage you to get to your Next Great Place and use all your senses – sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell – with good intention and with respect for the past, present and future, all the while filling in the coloring book of your soul. Stay inside the lines, or dare to drift beyond. Choose your own palette, or let Mother Nature lead the way. Trust that the universe will take you Places your dreams haven’t even imagined.

“For a homebody surrounded by the familiar or a traveler exploring the strange, there can be no better guide to a place than the weight of its air, the behavior of its light, the shape of its water, the textures of rock and feather, leaf and fur, and the ways that humans bless, mark, or obliterate them.” More from The Anthropology of Turquoise

What’s your strongest memory of Place? What’s on your Bucket List of wonder?

CoolWorks has been around awhile – yet we remain starry-eyed as we stay true to our niche of Jobs In Great Places®. Humbled by knowing that several generations have experienced hundreds – thousands! – of Great Places traveling in the vehicle a.k.a. seasonal employment, we are so glad you’re here with us. You’ve got “next”, and that drives us to work harder for you, our beloved CoolWorkers. Nothing makes us happier than to hear of your search – score – success!


“Winter on the Colorado Plateau has not been arduous, only a thin cold without storms, a lucid map of stillness. Caught in the abrupt instant of its rising, our faces take the tangerine sun, our backs dissolve to silhouette in the brilliant dazzle of its incandescent beam. The nights come less as a smooth pause than as a steep, enduring purity of eye-blink dark. The mesas creak and strain in the frigid air, audible only if I lay my ear to them. The colors in their flanks – terra cotta, blood-red, salmon, vermilion – bear the temperament of iron.  On the days of winter I climb to the top of a sky-raking spine of sandstone and sit beside a juniper tree.” – Ellen Maloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise – Reflections on Desert, Sky, Stone and Sky