Friday 15th - We then departed the park after giving some portly woman a jump start that was next to us in camp. She left a light on in her car and came crying over to me…PLEASE, PLEASE, strong man there, can you give me a jump and I said, “yeah whatever, sure” Which was true but but maybe I didn’t use those words. Then we hit the road and made it into Montana. We had to stop in Billings though because of a cabelas store that just opened and Mike wouldn’t take no for an answer. After that we continued to drive and started seeing Rocky Mountains and Mike and I started screaming like 16 years old girls at a boy’s band concert. Then we had lunch just before Bozeman at a rest stop and who do you suppose we see, but the same portly woman who we gave a jump start that morning! What are the odds of that?! Yuck. Then we all made it into Bozeman we I had the sad part of saying goodbye to ole D.R. and Mikey. I made it on my own to MWW and pitched a tent and crawled into the sleeping bag.
Saturday 16th - I woke up with frost on the outside of my tent. It must have gotten down to atleast 28 degrees that night, but I am just estimating. The 1st day of swiftwater rescue was interesting. Mostly everyone seemed to have awesome gear except me, but I didn’t care. The ladies still shuddered at my good looks in a tight wet suit. That day we learned how to throw rope bags to swimmers as well as learning how to use the current to swim out to unconscious victims. Others things we learned were how to move as one unit into a shallow river with a swift current. This is used in a scenario where you need to reach a victim caught on a rock or stuck out in the river. We also learned how to tie special knots and how to rig up a “Z line” to get boats or raft unstuck. This is the day where I acted as live bait and had to swim to unconscious victims and get them back to shore. I actually saved two in the same rescue operation. After that I was exhausted and said, “I can’t get anyone else, just leave the rest and we’ll all go get a beer”! That all finally ended. Sorry no pictures of the swift water class because I was constantly wet.
Sunday 17th - This was the last day of swiftwater rescue. This was the best day by far. The weather was perfect and I wasn’t completely frozen. We got to do zip lines today where you would run from the upstream side of the river to the downstream side with the current. So you would hook on with a pulley and grab the rope and go! The rest of the day after lunch we did rescue scenarios where the instructors would drive down the road and four minutes later we would drive down and respond to the scene they presented use with. We did this all the way down the Gallatin River back to the MWW office. Everyone got a run at being team leader and my scene had a guy caught between a rock and a canoe. Another guy was stuck
