(Karkaraly is getting green!)
Last Monday one of the guys I work with and I decided to head off into the woods. We were going to try to hike to a lake and back. We never made it to the lake- it took us longer than we had thought it would, so we turned back short of destination so that we could be back at a reasonable hour. But the hike was pretty.
I thought the picture above was interesting. On the left of the trail was birch. To the right was pine.
There are several areas on this trail where there are long rows of piled rocks for no apparent reason. I don't know the history- just thought it was interesting.
(large ant pile)
What I didn't show was the 1 hour of rain that we got. With it was the first thunder I've heard while in KZ. Also, we walked through an area with tons of moose scat and after the rain we saw many fresh tracks on the trail- so we were in prime moose country. Sounds like a good place to camp and do some moose gazing to me!
Tuesday came and we began working on some tourism stuff for the park. We moved a gazebo and an outhouse to another location.
Loading up the outhouse. You can see (on the right) that it was really close to the water- and the hole was mostly full as well.
Digging the new outhouse.
The outhouse is in. Next we made a trail to the gazebo.
Almas, the park director, helping out. On a side note, Almas found out yesterday that he will not be able to go to America after all. His supervisor told him that he could not leave during the fire season. He is pretty disappointed. It's highly doubtful that the park would burn to the ground in those 10 days, but the boss said no...so that's it.
Wednesday morning we show up to this. Tuesday was graduation for local schools and all the signs (two vodka bottles) point to a destructive after party. The gazebo didn't last a day before it was knocked down.
Deciding the next move (L-R: Irog, Kanat, Almas, Shamil, Sergey)
We got the gazebo rebuilt and the trails to the area dug. We ran into a roadblock with the sign, so we'll have to do that next week most likely. It felt good to get out and do something. That's about it for this week. I know its only Thursday, but because of other commitments by the park guys, my week is basically done for stuff like this.
