Oh ya, I work for the federal government...

This whole thing with the federal budget over the last week has been rather stressful here at Camp Stevens. Silver 4 is on loan to our camp for the week from their project, and for the last week Coli (the S4 TL) and I have been fielding questions from CMs about what would happen if the government shut down. To be completely honest, I had no idea what to tell them because we had no information about NCCC's contingency plan, what would happen with our sponsors, what staff would stay on in the case of a shutdown, and what our fate would be for the rest of the year. I got to play the fun game of treading between being reassuring and managing expectations.

Friday afternoon the TLs received a text calling for a conference call. On the call we were told that if there was a shutdown then the teams would all be recalled to campus and would stay there until a new budget was passed, or it became impossible for them to keep us there. Beyond that, there was really no information about what our fate would be, or at what point in a shutdown the class would be scrapped and people would be sent home. Basically, we were promised food, housing and medical benefits. To add to all of this, Amanda's parents arrived to take us all out to dinner and take Amanda into San Diego for the weekend until Monday night. Given that our marching orders in the event of a shutdown were to pack up and be back in Sacramento by Sunday at 7 PM, this presented a problem. I got to tell them the deal, have them promise not to tell anyone because it was not supposed to be common knowledge, and then refresh the CNN page at the dinner table to see whether Congress would put something together.

In true NCCC fashion, life went on. Today we finished the trail work that we started at the beginning of the week, putting in over a mile of trails over some pretty serious terrain. We also had a raging burn pile once we got the fire going with brush that had 2 inches of snow on it from the previous night. Tomorrow we're planning on climbing Granite Peak, which is out in the desert and presents a 3000' gain over only 3.5 miles. SHould be interesting and hopefully beautiful.