One Week to Go

This is Richard. He offered to make us pancakes Saturday morning before our work/play day. 7:00 am we were eating pancakes...thanks Richard, then met up with David to pick up our crew for the event.

We don't usually work on Saturday, but David really needed us. We had had a pretty full week already, but we can't say no, and I really like working in our HUGE 110 acre garden here at headquarters. I just wish people would not prune azaleas!!!

Again, we had a really great crew.

The girls enjoyed pulling vines...girl power!!!

We had a couple of guys who were wonderful, and we got a lot accomplished to improve the looks. The person who was picking up the debris said we had the most!!!

For all their hard work, they are provided with lunch and a canoe ride up the bayou.

We are here for the Christmas tree drop this year.

This is Shelly, Bayou Sauvage refuge manager, giving us instructions before we hit the water.

We had three airboats and were divided up accordingly. The media was there doing their thing for the news.
We all left the dock and waited
for the action.

Here comes the first helicopter.
Everybody made a mad dash to get out there for our part in this job.

Brian, our airboat driver backs off. He will just wait for the next
available drop.

We eventually close the gap with each drop.

After the drop, we close in to quickly unstrap the sling. There are two helicopters from the Army who fly the copters with precision.

They flew in 65 bundles, four bundles to the load that hold 55 trees each.

No pictures of our crew, but I was able to get this to show you what we do after the drop.

There are four yellow cables with chains around the load, and we quickly remove them for the next copter is on the way to drop the next load. We actually walk on the trees to remove them...some of us anyway. I walked on trees, not water!!!

Wallace hopped off to let one of the interns take a turn...we are ready to go out again after unloading five of the slings on shore, to collect more. Even that is a chore as those cables and chains weigh quite a bit.

Sue, a fire fighter just sits down to do the job. She is short but mighty.

Why, you might ask, are we doing this?

The trees are collected by the city of New Orleans and brought out to store until time for this.

The Army has a land crew at the dump (trees) to strap them up for the helicopters. Then they are brought out and dropped to create a barrier in the water which helps with erosion, kinda like a dam. They also build up the wetland habitat for migrating waterfowl and wildlife. Today, they were dropped at Bayou Sauvage. This is an annual event, and we were so happy to do our part.

These two people were on shore to help pull in the slings.

They are the new volunteers who got broke in good.

They had a tough job too just maneuvering over those rocks!!!

We were all treated to lunch at the pavilion at Ridge Trail.

This is just part of the Army crew. They landed on the grounds there where we had a group picture taken. 

We had perfect weather for this.

We were supposed to be on our cruise when this took place, but there was bad weather while we were gone. It got rescheduled, and were we glad!!!

We trained the new volunteers this past week as how to do the brochure run and the route. All Dale would say is, "this sure is a lot of walking."

We will be heading north next Monday...making our way to Wisconsin for our next gig...Horicon NWR near Lake Oshkosh.

Until next time...