It has been a wonderful summer, living in the Colorado Rockies.  We are both Colorado natives and we lived in two mountain communities, Granby and Grand Lake, in the 1980s.  This is our first time to live in the forest in the mountains and we have loved it.

These is a huge spruce tree outside our front window.  The warmest it has been has been 75 degrees.  The scenery is wonderful and this park is so very quiet.  On Friday afternoons, there is a lot of traffic of incoming campers.  But when you walk around Mueller, most campers are in the campsite, quietly sitting around the campfire or reading.  Even the children tend to be quiet--very little yelling.  Boaters tend to drink and party more than family campers.  Mueller has no lake.  Yea!

The park is located in Pike National Forest--a mixed conifer and Aspen forest.  Long familiar with forests, I came to really appreciate the trees.  I finally had to stop taking pictures of them and posting them in my blogs.  There is infinite variety here, but just how many photographs can I post?  We are surrounded by trees and we have seen them move through the seasons.  They have been ice-covered, bare and stark, stunning in their size and shape.  They frame everything, from the hiking paths to the meadows to the rising full moon and a stunning rainbow.  We will miss these trees when we return to Arizona for the winter.

On our trip through Canada and Alaska last year, we saw a great variety of wildlife. Colorado has more people and, thus, less wildlife.  But we have thoroughly enjoyed the deer, chipmunks, golden mantled ground squirrels and fox in our front yard and around the park.  John even saw bear twice and me, once.  Mueller has a fairly good-sized herd of elk.  We saw them early on.  But they moved to the north end of the park for calving season and we haven't seen them in the park since.  We are sorry Colorado elk aren't as comfortable around people as those we encountered on two different trips in Jasper, Alberta, Canada.

Mueller has received quite a bit of rain this summer, resulting in a profuse array of wildflowers. They started blooming in June and we still have quite a few yellow and lavender ones showing their colors in September. It has been fun to see new ones every couple of weeks. It is amazing how many things thrive at this altitude. I just wish I could identify all of them.

The American Robin seems to thrive all over North America and they were very prevalent here in June and July. We haven't seen any the past two or three weeks. I guess they have begun their migration south. We have seen a good assortment of birds throughout the summer. The wild turkeys here look almost as big as the ones we see in the store at Thanksgiving. I'll bet they aren't as tender, however.

The hiking, trees, wildlife, flowers and birds have all enriched our summer here. But, it has been the people that have really made this volunteer assignment special. The staff of Mueller State Park is the best, the most friendly of any place we have volunteered over the past nine years. From the park manager through the Visitor Center staff to rangers and gate attendants and maintenance staff, we have been impressed and really felt a part of the team that makes this such a special and popular state park. We have worked hard and we are tired and ready to move on. But we will miss the people. And we plan to return in future summers--as regular campers, not volunteers.

What Else Goes On Here?

Our main responsibility is cleaning cabins here at Mueller State Park. So, what do the other people in maintenance do with their time? From 10 to 11 each morning, they clean the shower house. There are four showers on each side (men's and women's), as well as four toilet stalls in each. The time is the same each day so campers know when the facilities won't be available. It would be nice if they observed those hours, but as anyone who has worked in a park knows, campers often push the limits.

Another daily task is to clean each of the vault toilets. We have been impressed that this is done daily. In many parks, I am sure it is a weekly task, at best. Our first couple of weeks, we helped with this job, but haven't done it since then. During July new plastic toilets were installed in each building.

We caught John and Randy cleaning vaults one day.

John is retired from the US Navy, where he became proficient spray-painting metal surfaces. He took on the task of scraping and painting the metal garage doors at the maintenance building. After all the old paint was scraped off, he suited up to keep the paint off his clothes.

Now he is ready to do the painting.

And here he is, admiring the completed job. Don't the doors look good?

With 132 campsites, there is a lot of work in the campground area. A couple of weeks ago, the crew did some improvements in the Turkey Meadows walk-in camp loop.

Dan was supervising when we first went to check out what they were doing. We could hear the tractor backing up and went to see what was going on.

Jeff was using the tractor to pull out a tree stump and removed railroad ties that outlined the tent sites. They were expanding those sites by removing those tent area borders and leveling the surrounding ground.

Dan and John were using a very large hand-help electric saw to cut some of the railroad ties to shore up the edges of the camp sites.

Randy, who is still in high school, is a talented welder and he has built a rack to store signs in one of the garages and a framework for the new sign at the park entrance. He also helped put together a trailer for back country fire fighting equipment. Sorry, no photos.

We're Almost Done

And that is true in more than one way. Late last month I blogged about the work we have been doing on signs here at Mueller State Park. We only have a couple of hours more work on that project. We finished putting back all the hiking trail signs almost 2 weeks ago, right after we finished hiking all the trails in the park. Here I am, sprucing up the brown paint on the edge and back of the last sign we put in place.

The last trail we hiked was the Wapiti Nature Trail. The trail guide has 17 numbered posts so you know what part of the guide to read. This is what those signs looked like.

But what number is that on the post? They are in really bad shape. So our next project is to fix them up so they are readable. John paints the numbers and I paint the poles.

Now I think the large numbers of people who hike this trail will find it easier to follow the guide. Doesn't this look better?

It will take an hour or two for John to put a second coat of paint on the numbers, then that project will be complete.

I said we are almost done in more ways than one. We will leave here on September 9, three weeks from tomorrow. We had planned to stay through the end of September, but we learned our new 5th-wheel trailer will be built Sept. 9-17 in Indiana and we will be able to go see it before it is complete, so we know how it is constructed and can learn how everything works. We are so excited!

We will then travel for 2 to 3 weeks while the trailer is completed and shipped to the dealer in Kansas. Then we will be off to Arizona for the winter.

What Else Do We Do?

We don't have cabins to clean every day we work. So, how do we fill our time? We spent a lot of time the first month or so helping clean vault toilets and restrooms. After all the summer seasonal workers arrived, we cleaned and organized the maintenance shop and cabin storage areas.

For the last month we have been refurbishing some wooden signs that are posted at hiking trail junctions. We remove the signs and sand off the old finish, then John repaints the letters.

I varnish the front of the signs and sometimes the back. Then we go out and reattach the sign to its post.

One of those poles had rotted out and had to be replaced. That meant we had to dig a new hole. John used a heavy bar to break up the ground, then we took turns with the post hole digger.

In some cases, the edges and back of the sign are painted to match the pole, so I touch up the brown paint on the sign after we put it back on the pole.

We have enjoyed the task. Not only can we do the work whenever we have free time, it allows us to hike the trails, picking up the signs and putting them back in place. We only have a couple more to do, however. So we will be looking for more new tasks in the next two months.

It's Our Job

Mueller State Park has three very nice cabins. They are 2-bedroom, 3-bedroom and 4-bedroom cabins with fully equipped kitchens, great living rooms and decks, and all linens are furnished. Here are some shots of the 4-bedroom Ponderosa.



Our position here is cabin technician. That means we were given our RV site in return for cleaning the cabins each time they turn over. We work 20 hours a week, each. On our days off, the rest of the maintenance staff does the work.

So, what do we do? John cleans the bathrooms. First he folds the towels.



Then he hangs them on the towel racks and fills the extra-towel rack.



He cleans the toilet (I didn't take a picture of that) and the sink.



And mops the floor.



I make the beds. when cabin guests leave, they are asked to strip the beds. So, I start with a bed with just a mattress cover.



First the fitted sheet.



The top sheet and blanket need hospital corners, of course. I always made our beds in the stick house that way, so it is no problem.



We split the rest of the tasks--cleaning the kitchen and outdoor grill, dusting, vacuuming and sweeping.

Today, we cleaned the 2-bedroom and 4-bedroom cabins. I made 6 beds; John cleaned 3 bathrooms and 2 grills. All of that took almost 4 hours.

On days there are no cabins to clean, we find other tasks. I'll blog about them some other time.

I have really come to appreciate my RV sheets. The top sheet is fitted at the bottom end. That means I never have to make those hospital corners or tuck in the comforter.