Today brings another cool, yet beautiful day. We are off duty and so will be travelig to do some shopping and see a few sites, shortly. As promised, here is a bit more about our duties here at Angustura and Shep's Canyon.

Shep's Canyon is about a mile by water from the rest of the park and 26 miles by road. As such we operate in a pretty independant mode with our staff organized quite differently than the main park. There are Pam & I as campgound hosts, a soon to graduate college student/summer intern, and a part-time employee who does cleaning and works on the intern's days off. While there are defined duties for the hosts here like in the main park, we are unique in that the other two employees are assigned here all of the time. The four of us just workthings out such that all needed work gets done and pretty much do things our own way. Officially the intern is in charge of we hosts and the part-time worker but we operate more as a team of friends than a work group.

Pam & I are officially on duty from noon on Friday through noon on Monday, but we do have allownace to go to town if need be for church or to eat out. Our days off are flexible if any need should arise as the intern also works weekends. His days off are Tuesday & Wednesday and the part-time worker (Dawn) is on duty those days. Since we & Nathan both live in the park, we are available in the hours that Dawn is not here.

Our duties are to greet guests, rextock bathroom supplies(as needed), clean fire pits, and help the paid workers if they should need assistance. We are supplied a full hook-up site, a Kawsaki Mule to use and an annual parks pass for a year. We also receive a VIP discount card that gains us free or reduced admission to most of the attractions through out the Black Hills. While this park does not yet have many large trees, there are trees planted and keeping them watered is one of the things that all of us do.  We enjoy the independent, team nature of our work relations here and consider this to be the best volunteer position in the park.

On the other side there are 5 campgrounds, three of which have camping cabins that the volunteer clean. Each of those  campgrounds have a host couple and two of them have two host couples. In addition there is a couple who are roving hosts to cover when other hosts are off duty and a couple who work maintenance in the park. In addition there are about a dozen permanent park employees and three of four seasonal employees.