Worth the wait!

Ok... So it's been a few weeks since my last post.

And I said I wanted to post more regularly too.

It appears that I have not done very well at keeping that goal.

Actually, I have held off on posting on purpose because I wanted to show you what we've been up to for the last month. We've been so busy doing the work and we needed to finish it all before I would be able to tell you about it. Thus, the lateness of this posting.

Back in the fall our first tunnel had a pretty dangerous rockfall and we needed to close it completely so that no one would get hurt by additional falling rocks. This also presented us with some problems that we had to address since a large part of what we do includes going through that tunnel (the train, tubing, rappelling, the Via Ferrata, hiking, the expedition program, etc.).

Anyway, an engineer was brought in to evaluate the situation. It was decided that the remainder of the loose rock and unstable portions of the side of the tunnel would need to be brought down before we could open it again to the public.

We did this by using airtools (jack-hammer, drill), ropes and cables, two Bobcat loaders, and dynamite. Yeah...we got to blow stuff up! The interesting part was that the demolition guy had no experience hanging on ropes which was a necessity for the side of the cliff that needed work.

All of us adventure guys, on the other hand, had LOTS of experience on ropes but ZERO experience with explosives. In the end we were elected to go up onto the rock face and both prepare the area and place the explosives (under the watchful eye of the expert!). Everyone would then evacuate the area as he pulled everything together and we would all retreat to a safe distance for the BOOM-BOOM!

We were interested in seeing what the explosions looked like so we set up a video camera to record the whole thing. Sadly, we missed getting the first two blasts (battery went dead on the camera both times!) but we did get the last three. As you can see I've included videos of the last three shots we did.

February 1, 2008 - Third shot. Notice the flash (like lightning) that happens just before the blast...that's the fast burning fuse (we are hiding about 500 feet away on the other side of the tunnel). Notice also that the camera narrowly escaped being destroyed by several large rocks bouncing past!

February 8, 2008 - Fourth shot. It took us a week to get the next blast ready. This shot was bigger than all the previous ones so we set up the camera furter away.

February 19, 2008 - Fifth (and final!) shot. This one was almost twice as big as any previous shot and brought down the last of the really big stuff.

So you can see that we've been busy! Now, most of the excitement is pretty much over and we are trying to tie up the loose ends of the project. But the projects don't end until summer is here!

Watch this space...

Jefe