Yesterday – St. Patrick’s Day – I was working the gate at the trailhead answering questions, giving advice, and pointing out interesting things to visitors. One of the guys in the parking lot had on something I had never seen before and I thought it was actually pretty cool… a cargo kilt. It was a good-looking kilt and it had cargo pockets on both sides. Freedom AND storage all in one handy piece of clothing. It got me to thinking… perhaps I need to get one and give it a try. Except on my motorcycle.

Today I went out to the lighthouse and cleaned up some large pieces of flotsam off the beach. I ended up with a full cargo bed on the Mule, and a full trailer. If I woulda had that cargo kilt I could have gotten a few more things! It was pretty windy, however, so a kilt may have been a bad idea.

The rest of the Volunteers start in a few weeks so we will be gearing up for the visitor onslaught coming our way. It is going to be really busy but I am still looking forward to it. We get upwards of 80-100,000 visitors a year here at the refuge so it will be challenging to say the least. It is fun to talk with people, answer their questions, and be outdoors with other Volunteers. We will resume our monthly beach clean-ups in May, where I take groups of Volunteers and a box of trash bags out on The Spit and drop them off in various places along the way and they walk and pick up everything they see that should not be there. My part of the puzzle is to get them out there, and go back and forth removing the bags and piles of debris, then make sure everyone is accounted for getting them off of The Spit. I did one two weeks after I started and it went very well, and I know more about what I am doing now so it will go even better when we start up.

Here are a few pics I have taken the last few days: