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Show 57 the missing g i r l s and radioed that they were safe. Soon everyone was reunited: the lost campers embarrassed but joyful, the other g i r l s wide-eyed over the bear-slashed backpacks, and YCC leaders relieved that the whole episode had ended viithout tragedy. "On the way back from that campout," Karen remembers, "those kids were really regimented!" By the middle of August the g i r l s went home from YCC camp and Karen changed jobs, doing a different kind of work until classes started in late September. S t i l l a seasonal employee of the Forest Service, she worked at vihat people usually envision vihen they hear the term "forest ranger." Early each morning, Karen joined a crew of eight (the rest men) which studied timber habitat in the Lolo National Forest. The Forest Service had sent out planes to take aerial photographs of the area; from the photos they divided the mountains into "stands" - small units of forested land wiHsto uniform natural features. Every day Karen's crew received a map of the different stands they viere to study. "In late August the vieather vias s t i l l nice," Karen says, "but by September i t got cold up on those mountains. As vie drove to the stands vihere we viere to viork, vie always pulled in at a truck stop on the viay to f i l l our thermos bottles with hot coffee." When they reached the viork area, the crevi members carried six-foot poles to measure the ground. Walking in a straight line for 66 feet, eleven pole lengths, they stoppped to take a "plot" sampling, holding the pole straight out as they pivoted in a c i r c l e . The orbit of the pole's outer t i p marked the circumference of a hundredth of an acre. |