12 Jun

My living quarters in Sitka

If you’ve been wondering what the Forest Service bunkhouse looks like, here ya go. One story, four bedrooms, two bathrooms. It’s on the edge of a gravel parking lot, which is surrounded by three buildings – a FS warehouse, another FS building which I suppose is a shop for working on boats/ATVs/cars/whatever, and ye olde bunkhouse. I say ye olde bunkhouse, because yesterday someone was visiting from another ranger district and said it looked the same when she first stayed there in the 1980s.

Also, the truck, as all FS road vehicles, are called “rigs.”

Above is my bedroom. It’s double occupancy, and I do have a roomie. Below is our kitchen.


Finally, here is our living room. As many buildings here do, we have a great big pasted together map of maps to show the area where we are. These vary in scale; the bunkhouse map shows Baranof Island and a bit of the surrounding islands. I think it would be 200-300 miles, north to south, in the territory it covers. We also have a television, and two vcr/dvd players because one of them is crummy on dvds, or maybe it was just the dvd from the public library was crummy. What you can’t see is the 15 vhs tapes that are part of the bunkhouse collection, including the entire set of the X Files. If I were into the X Files, that would be pretty exciting.



Also, here’s my bike. I’m glad I waited and refused to take any of the rusting mountain bikes that were offered to me, because not only were most of them too big, they were not nearly as nice as this bike.


Although I have been to the bikeshop with it three times in the first week – first to get it checked over and air in the tires, second to fix a flat because I went through the spare tube I bought, and third because a piece of the derailleur fell off, and I didn’t really want a single speed bike even though it is super flat here.