Damian in Montana

Hello everyone. I was told that I should start a blog to document my activities here in Montana, and so here it is. My old phone died right before I left, I suspect sands from Coo's bay, the same sands that messed up my Ipod. You would think that after the first incident I would have had the sense to leave my phone in the car. Ahh well. So now I have a new phone, one with a 2 mega pixel camera on it, which is pretty good for a cell. Ive tried my best to take pictures, so here you go.

Here are a few pictures of the property and the Montana landscape surrounding it.


The property is right next to the Yellowstone River, and is in a stretch of land above Yellowstone park called Paradise Vally. One of the interesting things about Paradise Vally right now is the weather. It seems to change every 30 minutes. One moment its sunny blue skies, the next its poring rain, or the wind picks up and its suddenly very cold. I am constantly taking my sweatshirt off and putting it back on throughout the day.


A quick introduction. This is Hunter, the guy who gave me the job. Hes holding a boot.


This is his wife Janine.


This is Archy. A rescued dog of an unknown age. Hes supposed to be 3-4 years old, but who knows how accurate that is. All in all hes a real good dog.


And this is the guy Ive been working with, Coal. He was working with me and Hunter these last two weeks, but hes off to work for the park the rest of this summer. In a few weeks he might come back Fridays and or Saturdays to give us a hand.


Its hard to say exactly what I have been doing here, simply because we do a variety of different things each day. Mostly we have just been shoveling, weed waking, breaking things down, and throwing away copious amounts of scrap steal. Oh and cleaning up after these guys...


Hunter has a contract with the government to keep these Buffalo on the property. These Bison are from Yellowstone and are pure bred. Most Buffalo have cattle genes in them, so the idea is to take the offspring of these pure Buffalo and reintroduce them into places that no longer have Buffalo. There pretty easy to handle, you walk towards them and they walk away from you. The best way to move em is to throw their food into the pasture you want them in, wait five minutes for them to wander in, then shut the gate behind them. Unfortunately they also have a tendency to mess with whatever else is in the pasture, such as the irrigation system. This leads to situations like this...

That is a large irrigation reel, Buffalo rubbed up against the hose and popped it off when the water was off, and when we turned the water back on, this is the result.

Anyhow that's about all I have time for. More work to do in the morning. Ill try to update this blog as often as I can, hopefully with some details about what I'm actually doing here. Sorry for typos and such, no time to correct it all. Night everyone. Miss you all.