Beaver Creek Recreation Area–week 3

The weather has been beautiful, the lake has been busy with boating and fishing and the campground was busy on the weekend. It’s been in the upper 80’s and lower 90’s this past week and weekend, with humidity and mosquitoes. We were lucky to get some rain yesterday.

          

When we’ve got campers, we make a couple of rounds through the park to check who is here, check the comfort station and vault toilets and check for litter. The rangers stop in at least once a day, more on weekends. After people leave on Sunday, we clean the litter from their sites. We’ve got a lot of free time for fishing or sight-seeing.

                    

Beaver Creek Recreation Area–Week 2

We started off our week with some much-needed rain. We got 2.5 inches last week Tuesday and about a quarter-inch Wednesday. Most of North Dakota is in a drought, so this was so nice to see! There were some areas that also got strong wind and hail; luckily we didn’t. A ranger called us early in the morning to let us know severe weather was coming our way; Curt had been watching the radar already. We were lucky the storm split and we only got rain and some wind. Another evening the rangers and us went around the campground and let the campers know of a severe storm warning; again, we were lucky.

You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them.

     

We aren’t as busy here as we were at the two State parks. We don’t have to clean fire pits, and there’s a lot less sites to clean. There is a small amphitheater area, but no interpreter or programs. We have a Polaris electric vehicle to drive. When we were at Fort Stevenson State Park, we bought a “grabber” to see how it worked for picking up litter. We were impressed and got another one at a shorter length that works better for me. It’s a lot easier on the back and knees.

                            

There is a fishing area across the highway, a day use area, that you can fish off-shore. 

       

Some scenery pictures
                   

For more pictures (mostly scenery), please click here.

Beaver Creek Recreation Area–camp hosting week 1

After leaving Fort Stevenson State Park, we moved on to Beaver Creek Recreation Area, which is 16 miles west of Linton, or about 53 miles south of Bismarck. It’s an Army Corps of Engineers park, which is new to us.



You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them.

             

For 20 hours of work a week (10 hours each) we get a free campsite with full hookups near the ranger booth and can watch people come and go. We pick up litter, check the comfort station and vault toilets, check the roster and walk campground, greet guests and answer questions. They have a contractor who comes in to clean the comfort station and vault toilets, empty fire pits, and empty cans at the fish cleaning station.

       

There are 61 total sites, with 30 amp electric and primitive sites. They have a comfort station with showers, vault toilets, dump station, fish cleaning station, a couple water spigots in the campground, boat docks and two playgrounds.  A pontoon comes from Prairie Knights Casino on weekends to take people back to their casino and returns them, a minimum of 3 hours.

     

Most of the electric sites were taken this weekend, only a couple primitive. The weather was hot, upper 90’s, and air conditioners were running pretty constantly. It was windy on Saturday, but nice on Sunday and there were a lot of boats on the water.

     

We went to Linton on a day off to talk to someone in the post office to see if we could get mail sent there. Curt has been able to go fishing on our down time.   
     

For more pictures, please click here.

Fort Stevenson State Park–last week

The 4th of July holiday was busy and there was a lot of turnover. It wasn’t windy and we aren’t in a burn ban yet and fire pits were being used, so cleaning was pretty constant.  Other than that, we did the usual cleaning, selling ice and firewood, empty the mosquito trap, spraying weeds, answering questions, picking up litter, etc.  Our temperatures have been in the upper 80s to upper 90s with one day of 100.

You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them.

       

Friday night the interpreter made fluffy slime with the kids. We didn’t realize the program was moved up an hour to 7:30, so we missed this one.  There was no program Saturday morning. Saturday evening was a game of FORTS with one of the rangers leading it. They were giving away Fort Stevenson State Park tee shirts as prizes and popsicles.

     

We’ve noticed a lot of dragonflies lately, which is good as they eat mosquitoes. It’s hard to get pictures of them though; they move so fast.



We will be leaving here this week and going to Beaver Creek Recreation Area, a Corp of Engineers park, for another volunteer camp hosting job. We haven’t worked for the Corp before, so it will be interesting to see what differences there are. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do blog posts from there, as the Verizon signal is supposedly spotty, but we’ll see.

       

For more pictures, please click here, there’s only a few this time.

Happy 7th birthday to our granddaughter, Alaina!