Staff Retreat

Yesterday the Pelister National Park staff and I went up to Golemo Ezero (Big Lake) and had a quasi staff retreat. Golemo Ezero is the same place that I hiked up to in March and what a difference four months can make. What was covered in snow is now blanketed with wildflowers and the remnants of rocky trenches from World War I are now visible. Battle waged in what is now Pelister National Park between 1916 and 1918, with shelling of Bitola (up to 10,000 shells per day) and many civilian casualties in the villages near the future park, not to mention amongst the soldiers fighting from Germany and Bulgaria (Central Powers) against France, Serbia, Britain, and Greece (Entente Powers). Each side had about 600,000 soldiers along what was known as the Salonika Front.

In the winter, I hiked up to the lake and this time we drove in jeeps. Driving up takes about 2 hours each way but frankly I'd rather add an extra hour and walk rather than drive up the bumpy path, but it was interesting for the sake of comparison. Along the way, we also saw Malo Ezero (Small Lake) and views of Prespa Lake. At the Golemo Ezero mountain hut, we did about an hour of trash pickup and then sat down to lunch. There's still something novel about having rakija with my coworkers, especially before noon, but it was paired as usual with copious amounts of salad, bread, and other traditional foods. Photos of Pelister in summertime and the Pelister staff are up on Picasa, but check out below for a quick summer versus winter comparison.

Before we left the park, we stopped at the visitors center that Pelister has built but not yet opened. The building itself is quite nice and just needs to be furnished. Furnishing the visitors center is part of what we put into our EU grant application which did, to my pleasant surprise, get turned in on Monday. The park director actually wants us to start working out of this new space as early as next week, which is logistically challenging for me because the visitors center is about 10 miles outside of Bitola. Likely I will be carpooling with coworkers but I'll sort that out after I get back from camp. Boys camp, that is, which kicks off tomorrow--90 teenage boys for a week in the woods. I am one of the outdoor instructors and more to come afterwards, of course.