3 rules

If you are an employee in a national park and your job involves driving a vehicle in the park there are 3 rules you Cannot break.

1. You Must wear your seat belt at all times.

2. You must keep your headlights turned on.

3. When stopping or parking the vehicle you MUST pull the emergency break.

If you have ever been the Mesa Verde, you know that the road into the park is narrow, twisty, and steep. Last night there was a man from maintenance mowing some grass on the side of the road. As he is mowing, he looks up just in time to see his truck flying off the edge of a Thousand foot cliff, one of the highest points in the park, and suddenly remembers. He forgot to pull the E Break.

Since he wasn't actually In the truck, they waited until today to figure out how to pull the completely totaled truck with 100 gallons of gasoline on the back of it (which by some miracle did Not catch of fire when it hit the bottom) back up onto the road without it catching on fire. They brought up tow trucks, they flew helicopters in to see what would be needed, and had 3-4 fire trucks on the road to prevent catching the forest on fire. All of this on the one road used to get in and out of the park. They decided to start at 12. so from noon on they would close the road for 30 min, then open one lane for 30 min, then close the entire thing again.
I got off work at 3 today, and normally there is a shuttle leaving the park at 3, so it would have worked out pretty well. except for the fact that the shuttle got stuck in stop and go traffic on its way down and then stuck on its way back up. One of the restaurants here opens at 5, so all the servers take the 3:45 shuttle up to work. At 4:30 we got a phone call from one of the servers on the shuttle saying they were stuck about 25 min away from work and the road would be closed for 20 min. At this point, I've been waiting for the shuttle for an hour and a half, people were starting to get a little frustrated, and now the servers couldn't make it up to work.... Awesome.
Thankfully the cooks come to work before 3:45, so they were there to prepare the food and feed all of us :)

I don't think I've even been more happy to see those servers than I was when they walked through the door and announced that the shuttle was there. I got home at around 6. Looking back on it, its actually pretty funny. One guy forgets to pull the E break One time, and it throws off the system of an entire national park.


Oh! And they finally managed to pull the mangled truck up onto the side of the road. It took a couple really big special tow trucks, but they got it :)