A Day Off Work (Almost)

Friday 27th, 2018

I don't usually get paid to go hiking up a mountain, but when I do, I doubly enjoy every second of it.

It started as an average payday. I awoke at 3:20am with enough time to pack a lunch and drive all the way to Casper to be on time for the safety meeting. There was plenty of amusing conversation before we got started, probably the most notable of which were the comments when Lorne walked in. Lorne is a 50-something year-old guy who's been working here for at least twenty years. It was his day off today though, so he didn't come in his work clothes, because he only had to be there for the safety meeting and that was it. And therein lay the problem. When he walked in, he was wearing khaki shorts with a matching Hawaiian short-sleeve shirt with sandals and hat to boot. It was... something. We definitely weren't prepared for it. Somebody said, "I could've gone all day without seeing that, Lorne!" We all laughed and joked about it for a bit.

After the safety meeting we all were handed our paychecks. Besides only getting paid for 98.5 hours for two weeks of work instead of the correct 145 hours, it went off without a hitch. But I didn't let that dampen my spirits at all, this was going to be a great day; hopefully we'll get the hours fixed later. Anyways, everybody else loaded up and left, leaving Kylie and I behind. We had to go to a different location today to do a little job real quick that should only take a day to do. Kylie started telling Van (the big boss man) about how excited I was for this job, and how I'd specifically asked Kyle (our foreman) to get put on this job. Even after they both told me how steep it was, and how it might rain and be super muddy, I was just as stoked, if not more so. Van then said, "You know there is such a thing as a suspicion-of-use drug test, right? We might have to send you down to Cedar's Health today." hahae, it was pretty funny. After that Van ended up showing me how you can text a picture to an email account. My mind was blown at this new prospect of technological prowess, and it worked! Van and Kylie were pretty amused at my lack of tech-acumen, especially for being a twenty-something college student. Kylie said, laughing, "That's why I love working with this guy! You get stuff like this all the time!" Eventually though it was time to head out to the mountain. First though we had to wait for the dump to open at 7:30, so we basically sat around for another hour before leaving. Besides getting lost in the dump for half an hour and not knowing where to dump our trash, it went off without a hitch.

By and by we made it to the main event of the day. We pulled up a little gravel driveway-like thing that stopped close to the base of Casper Mountain. From there on it was just a pipeline right-of-way leading up and over the mountain. A good ways up there was a parked excavator where they had dug to reveal the pipeline beneath. There was a knick in the pipe that needed to get fixed, so they were going to cut out 28 inches of pipe and replace it with some new stuff. This of course required a welder. And everybody knows that welders require welding machines. This is slightly problematic, because welding machines weigh several thousand pounds and are not moved up steep mountains easily. Even if they're in the back of the welder's truck. This grade was simply too steep to drive up with anything but a trackhoe, and that's why we were there. Since the welding machine couldn't make it up there, we'd have to drag a couple hundred feet of leads up there so he could connect his machine to them at the bottom and weld with them up top. It was going to be a great hike!

Kylie and I each threw half the leads on our shoulders and we started up. By the time we got to the bottom of the part where it got really steep, we had to take a quick breather. And then the real fun began. It wasn't quite so steep that you needed to climb it with your hands, but it was steep enough that if you didn't lean forward dramatically the weight of the leads would pull you backwards and make you tumble down the mountain at a decent speed. How do I know this? Well actually I just decided it was true at the moment I was teetering on the edge of my balance and was wondering what would happen if I fell backwards. Imagination is a great motivator, and so I didn't actually lose my balance and fall backwards, but I'm still convinced it would've been fun for about five seconds before it started to hurt. Anyways, we made it to the top without incident. Besides the leads being all tangled up and having to untie them for twenty minutes, it went off without a hitch and we strung them out down the mountain successfully.

After that we had a little bit of barb-wire installation to do and a little of gravel-grading as well, and by the time we were done with that it was almost one o'clock. Now all we had to do was tow the broken-down truck that was there back to the shop. We found a clevice and got the towline we had brought, and thankfully both trucks had tow hooks on them, so it went on without a hitch. Then it was only a matter of driving down the mountain in a truck with manual steering and manual brakes being towed with a short rope. It's been a couple years since I've gotten to do this, so it was fun to drive it again.

And that was about it. We got off early at two for a nine hour day and that was that. It felt like a day off! Now I'm all rested up to hit it hard tomorrow morning when I get back to work. Lez do it!