Made it!

I know, it's been awhile since I posted. The move took forever (see Mama's blog if you want to read about the road trip and see some pictures). My computer and most of my household stuff is still in storage. Who knows when I'll see it again. So I won't be blogging a whole lot this summer. But I was happy to see that there have been a few visitors. I've got some great pictures of wildlife... this place is crawling with it. Wolves, grizzlies, caribou, moose, Dall sheep, lynx, and little rodents. And people to. The hordes have arrived. I'll try to get some neat pictures up later.

I got to Anchorage on May 4th. We had a week of training, 40 hours of shooting, wrestling around on mats (aka defensive tactics, or officer response tactics, whatever fad name it's going by now), shooting tasers (alas, not at each other, it's against policy to be tased as a part of training), some lecture, and taking our yearly physical test. Once that week was over, I finally made it to the park.

Since then I've gotten my patrol truck. It's huge. Even at my height I've got to hop into it. We had more training. We went to the range to shoot rubber batons and bean bag rounds at bear targets. One of the park biologists lectured us on all kinds of wildlife related stuff. They're doing some neat critter studies here. We also had a day of EMS stuff. Our park's physician sponsor was here to help with that. I really like her and I think she's the perfect Doc for our park.

This last week was filled with a search and rescue class. I got to practice skills that I haven't done in years like tracking and map and compass stuff. It was really nice to get all excited about this kind of stuff again. I used to volunteer with SAR groups. ESAR back in high school and WSAR when I went to college. I did some rescues at Acadia and Mt. Rainier, but those were years ago and didn't involve the search part. SAR planning and ops are fun to and the skills are ones that I'd love to develop.

I feel like a real Ranger again!