Section 1: My Earth Camp Commitment

In our day and age we have become comfortable with receiving vegetables and fruit from all around the country unaware of the immense amounts of gas, water, and energy used in obtaining it. The average eco footprint for the US food consumption is 5.5 acres. My commitment to earth camp is that with the extra space in my backyard I will construct a vegetable garden to cut down on the transportation of goods purchased in supermarkets so I can lower my eco footprint. With my vegetable garden I will be able to devour tasty produce while cutting down on air pollution and water use. I decided to make this commitment because the people here at earth camp explained the amount of effort and work it took to receive vegetables from out of state.

journal 7/13/09

As we wake at a time I believe to be way too early the camp is bustling with life, our active river guides are preparing for breakfast and the other items on the agenda for today. Everyone around me seems so sluggish I am only fully awake after me and Franklin has our coffee fix for the morning. With my new and renewed energy I am ready to tackle the day’s activities. In the morning I got paired up with Juliet to ride a kayak, or a "ducky", as Amy and Lynn called them, never really understood why? Most of the morning was some light kayaking through 1 and 2 class rapids, finally for lunch we stopped at 3 canyons which’s name is self explanatory.  From there we split up my group went on a mile or 2 mile hike up to a big stone bridge formed by water. The hike itself wasn’t too hard except for the fact that my water shoes were a tad large so they continued to scrape and slide against the side of my foot scraping away the skin on my feet. Each step truly felt awful. The final destination though was something truly extraordinary. A giant stone bridge towering about 70 to 100 feet over my head. It leaves me in awe to know that so many thousands of years ago the river that we are now kayaking on used to stand hundreds of feet taller than were it is now. At the end of the trail Franklin showed us his affinity and knowledge of scat and gave us a detailed talk of how to figure out what animals scat you are looking at and where and which direction it as heading. After we hiked back down we got back on the river. It appeared that the river gods were against us that day for they sent us a torrential wind worthy for being a low level hurricane. The next couple hours was what seemed to be 7 small little ducky's attempting to power through this wind and no matter how hard we tried it still appeared that if we stopped paddling for even a short while  that we would lose ground and move backwards. These couple of hours were something I could envision being a prime workout for Olympic bodybuilders. The only consolation I received was that maybe I would have a body like one by the end. The struggles of the day left me tired beyond belief I was beyond content when the time came that I was allowed to lay on my cot and prepare for the next day.