mills here, long time blog admin lurker first time temple post’er!
First truck leaving AmSteel
What a smoooooth load out – big props to the Catbird and her load crew and those STILL at AmSteel cleaning up through the weekend and beyond (love you Thwen, Brian and crew). It warmed the cockles of my heart to see such a ‘stackable and modular’ load! I was helping with the load and after years of trying to stuff huge spiky metal sculptures on a truck it made a nice change to have Gary’s wonderfully organized load.
Frame bundles
The surveying began from the moment the first team landed on the playa on Thursday (or was it Wednesday, last week is all a little hazy), I arrived Friday pre-dawn to a small temple site with the first dune flagged out. The trucks arrived on playa Friday with just enough time for Gary to unload one and be ready for another, it was like clockwork and before you knew we had piles of a temple! Off course big thanks also have to go to the Burning Man heavy equipment and artery folks for helping us out on that one with all our needs just a ride to the esplanade away.
Temple in the desert!
We continued with the survey all of Friday. Lots and lots of math, spray paint and flags. Big thanks to the architects, PK and Ben for giving us such detailed drawings, kinda amazing really – ring-bound, laminated site diagrams with numbers and everything!! A seriously long way from that time Rbca lost our only site map and found it again stuffed down the back side of her truck seat just as the trencher pulled away (no honey, I will never let you forget that, but I still love you)!
Temple survey flags
Jonny's Moroccan tent
As for camp Eva’s kitchen took shape on Saturday and it was wonderful to see the look on her face when that HUGE shade went over her container and she got her dream princess playa kitchen.
Putting the cover on the dome!
The common area’s also started to take shape – tables in the eating shade, the Moroccan tent went up, as did my dome (thank you guys for putting that up so Joshy gets a year off from it)
Horse Power!
Horse, Mark and the boys worked on the temple power grid and by the end of Saturday night survey was done and we had a functioning camp and job site!
- Diggin in the playa
Sunday was a big day. Heavy equipment – trenching for the power grid, bobcat with the auger for the burn preparations and installation of the temple ‘foundations’, lots and lots of digging, grading and stomping to make sure our temple doesn’t dig into the ground and start to lean. As that was happening our resident Rockstar Lou had a crew and before I knew it I turned around and Dumont was on it’s way up! Within a couple of hours they had the whole frame erected – So exciting I actually l yelped when I turned around and saw it.
Lou raising the temple
That is it for me, I had to leave around 3pm Sunday – Josh and I jumped in the truck and I actually started to blub when I got to the gate – I was leaving….BOOOOOOOO…..I knew they could totally do it without me but I wanted to be there too – stoooopid default world job. I took this feeling to solidify the fact that we have such an amazing project and an amazing crew – everyone is wonderful and have worked together so well to get this built and it is well on its way to being up!
Jax and Peter
Dumont!
Last but not least I have another call out for donations to help us push through the end of this project. We are looking just a little short of our budget and could do with some donations to bring us out even on this crazy project. We have dumped paypal due to our issues last week (see previous blog posts) and am now using wepay: http://www.wepay.com/donate/add/5443
Look Catie, look Jess – I blogged!!!!
mills out
