I haven't updated in a looooong time. This will probably not be very well written either.
Since June I have;
Spent the summer working in Yellowstone, it was an amazing experience. I worked in the Tower Falls section (where most of the Bears and Wolves are) which is the most remote section of the park as the First Cook in the dorm kitchen feeding all the residents and rangers of that area of the park. There was only a dorm phone and very slow internet to communicate with the outside world and the internet was down probably 95% of the time and when it was up you could only use 1 computer to access it, no wifi so everybody would take turns using it to pay bills or send emails if they had to and it was a headache. It was amazing to be able to hike in all the locations I did, I didn't get to every trail in the park but I got to an amazing amount of them. You see the animals mostly when you are out hiking (though I did see some while driving and just walking around the dorm) and I saw a lot of black and grizzly bears, moose, foxes, wolves, buffalo and bison (way too many, you tend to hate buffalo and bison about 2-3 weeks in because they are everywhere and a pain, constant road blocks and they are dangerous, dangerous and stupid) elk, deer, crazy group squirrels, lots of stuff. The closest town was an hour drive (out of the park) and there was nothing there except tourist shops and a subway that charged 9 dollars a sub and a Motel 8 where I would sit in the parking lot to use the internet to download new episodes of Breaking Bad and music. The weather is always changing in the park, I got used to that really quickly. I went camping a few times, hardly noticed when it would rain. 2 people died in the park over the summer from bears, there hasn't been a bear related death in 20 years and then 2 this summer, crazy. There was Christmas on August 25th and Halloween the week after. Why? Because its tradition for some reason. For Christmas we cooked a HUGE meal, the traditional turkey and fixings but lots of other stuff and we had the dining room decorated (there were residents who came and did that) and before on July 4th we had a decorating party and then had a huge steak dinner. The steaks were cooked out on a outdoor BBQ and a bear showed up, it had to be shot 5 times (with rubber bullets) by Rangers before it would leave. Every time I used the outdoor BBQ after that I was paranoid bears might show up again. Christmas night we had karaoke and a show with skits and someone (Jerry) even dressed up as Santa Claus and we all got presents. There were lots of Karaoke nights during the summer, in a rec hall that was probably at least 40 years old. There's a small TV room and then in the other room we had a pool table, ping pong table and darts. There's so much free time on your hands when your not working you quickly play as much ping pong, darts and pool as you can and get sick of it or just keep doing it because its something to do at least. Everyone who worked at Tower Falls was great to live with but most of the people there were 50 or over, not a problem but makes it difficult to find people to hang out with at night. The only stuff to do at night was the rec room stuff, drive an hour to Mammoth (the northern part of the park) and use their gym or go to Roosevelt (closest other part of the park) and have beers and hang out with the people who worked there. There were people who came from other parts of the world to work there too mainly Slovania (just one guy) and Taiwan (group of kids who would work at Yellowstone for the summer to get a 30 day visa to travel the United States afterwards) they were fun to make friends with and fun to cook for, Slovanian always wanted Sour Cream for everything, the Taiwanese put ketchup on everything and some couldn't eat beef because of their beliefs, I'm not exaggerating about 'everything' I really mean everything, the Taiwanese would put ketchup on their spaghetti sauce, they put ketchup on pizza, they all drank endless amounts of sweet tea and milk (mixed together, half/half) because milk and tea are expensive over there and they could have as much as they wanted here, none of them had cars so they would get rides or hitchhike wherever they could, you would always get the same days off every week so they would always be asking the same people where they were going that week and if they could tag along. One place everyone liked to go was Bozeman, MT. Not because its amazing but because its the closest place that most resembles being back in society, there's a movie theater, a mall, restaurants, grocery stores, target, walmart, fast food etc. Each way was a 2 hour drive and to get there you had to drive down a highway with white crosses lining each side marking all the fatalities that have happened. There's another highway you can take from West Yellowstone to get to Bozeman but it has even more white crosses and is one of the top 10 most dangerous roads to travel in the US.
I took lots of pictures, I'll put a few on this but I took probably hundreds to maybe a thousand. It was an amazing summer and I dont know if I will go back to work there but I've already signed up for next summer so maybe I will. It was nice to get out of the city and appreciate the quiet of nature for a while.
