Opening up Camp

Since no one but one New York Forest Ranger and one New York Department of Environmental Conservation employee are working anywhere near Santanoni all winter, it is pretty much up to the interns to open up the buildings, clean things out, and get them ready for visitors to tour in the fall. This post will show you some exciting pictures of the buildings and work that we have been doing.

The Gate House is where us interns live for the summer, and consequently it was the place where we first did any work for Santanoni; mostly cleaning the house which is vacant each winter. Everything had accumulated a sizable layer of dust. We swept, mopped, and sucked up a lot of scary spiders and cobwebs with the vacuum cleaner.



On Monday we rode our bikes out to main camp. We like to say that the road is 5 miles up hill both ways, because there are sizable inclines in both directions. It's a good workout, and on days that have not had the opportunity to bike out to main camp I have actually found myself missing the ride.



The main lodge was the most important building to get cleaned up. I will write another post that describes the lodge in detail because it is a very unique building. When we swept the porches we found that an owl had decided to make the lodge his home for the winter and had left presents for us all over the porch.





Here is the same spot after we cleaned it.



Hopefully I can post some more interesting things soon. Stay tuned!