I love my job

Well for the past two weeks I have been camping in two of the territory's parks - Lady Evelyn Falls and Sambaa Deh Falls. I went with two others from the office, Glen and Rebecca, and it was so good.
Well...  it rained the whole first week in Kakisa (where we worked first).

We showed up on Monday and it was beautiful!
Did some canoeing, found a beach, were devoured by horseflies and dug some test pits.  It was a glorious day! I even managed to find some flakes in my first shovel test, it was fantastic. I honestly thought to myself "excellent, you didnt forget everything from school!" Well, I did forget the correct terms for various aspects of the flakes when I was trying to describe them to Glen, but he knew what I was trying to get across. Success. It thundered for a while that night... and then we woke up to dark clouds. Ugh. The rest of the week carried on like that until Friday morning around 10:30. Seriously. We went out everyday with our Elder/Guide who took us around to old camps that were scattered around Kakisa Lake, and to the mouths of various rivers so we could shovel test.

 - Shovel testing is to dig  little squares in locations where we want to see if there is any trace of occupation without actually going through all the effort of a full scale 1x1 excavation. We were testing on raised beach ridges to find pre-contact sites around the lake and rivers. If we found a high percentage of successful test pits, then we could decide to fully excavate or not. -
We tromped around in the bush, getting drenched, but I totally underestimated our weather forecasters when it comes to being accurate. It hasn't been right once this summer, why would it be right this time? Ugh. We played a few games of scrabble, doused ourselves in muskol and had a grand ol' time :)
Identified a few multi-component sites (different occupations in the same place), got a lot of flakes, bones, and two tools!
One site on the Muskeg River was so promising, that we actually spent Friday doing a 1x1 unit excavation. As we were there the sun came out and dried up all the rain (ha) and it became quite fun. But we didn't really get anything from it... and it was time to head back to town.

The following week the three of us headed back out on the road. This time we drove to the Deh Cho to work with the community of Jean Marie River around three specific lakes. The goal was to map out and inventory old camps, caches, trails and spiritual places.
Unfortunately, the day we arrived the lady who was organizing everything for us quite! Argh! So we arrived and no one was expecting us. Poo. Fortunately we rounded up some willing Elders to take us around Ekahli Lake. We spent the next few days paddling around Ekahli and Sanguez Lakes searching for trails and camps. It was pretty successful. I also learned all about their local berries, to add to my expertise of berry knowledge! They also had the biggest trees I've ever seen in the territories there, must be because of the Mackenzie Valley, and the fact that they are also the warmest area of the territory.
The falls where we were camping were cool too, we did a little one unit excavation at the first set of fall - Coral Falls - it was chalked full of flakes! On the last night we walked down the river the other way to the Sambee Deh falls. They are call carved through limestone canyons, the bottom was riddled with fossils! We were technically hanging out on an ancient ocean floor. It was cool.
The second week was completely different from the first in almost every aspect: it was clear and sunny every day in the Deh Cho, we did our own paddling, and there were hardly any bugs!
I cannot wait until I get to go into the field again!