Passport In Time Adventure

This past spring I became acquainted with an opportunity to do exciting volunteer work with the U. S. Forest Service. The program is called Passport In Time and it allows everyday people to work alongside professional Forest Service archaeologists doing really cool stuff such as "archaeological survey and excavation, rock art restoration, survey, archival research, historic structure restoration, oral history gathering, and analysis and curation of artifacts".

Can you see me salivating as you read this? If you can't just believe me that when I saw this opportunity I did indeed slobber all over my computer screen. These volunteer opportunities are available all over the United States but they are particularly numerous in Colorado.

After looking at all the available projects I decided to apply for one in far southeast Colorado, not far from the Kansas and Oklahoma borders. The project is scheduled to run from September 28th until October 3rd.

Much to my delight I was picked to participate. To make things even better, Guitar applied as well and was selected to participate also.

There will be between 8-10 volunteers working with a Forest Service archaeologist doing a surface inventory of historic and pre-historic sites. We will also evaluate the condition of currently known sites that include Indian rock art sites.

Our base of operations will be a very remote site thirty-five miles from the nearest town at the entrance to Picture Canyon. There will be no facilities whatsoever so everything we need in terms of shelter, water and other staples we will have to bring with us. The one exception is food. The Forest Service has arranged for a cook to prepare meals. We will have to split the cost of the food itself but the cook will do all the hard work.

Guitar and I plan to use his truck camper and will leave the Denver area early Sunday morning (next week) to travel down there.

I am so excited, I'm like a little kid getting ready to go on his first camping trip. This hits three or four of my top interests so I'm in curiosity overload!

So stay tuned to see how this thing turns out.

I may even get in a mini adventure sometime this weekend but you'll have to wait and see if this one pans out.

Thanks for visiting.