One thing I love to do is help out at the Shambhala farm every year doing various site preparation tasks, whenever I can get free time from my concrete company in summer. It is A TONNE of labor every year, but the rewards are ENDLESS. To me, it is like summer camp. The people you meet, the new skills you learn, and the hard work accomplished have made me appreciate myself, the festival, and the grounds so much! One of the first tasks I was assigned to do for site preparation; was to help build the concrete foundations for the giant metal dome in the "Ewok" Village...( Back when we all referred to it as such) It was a bit of a brain racker to figure out, and took some help from my dad to get the engineering right and to make sure it would be SAFE.

When Josh C was The Village stage manager, he came to me with a model built out of table straws of the metal dome..It was to exact smaller proportion and the model dome was VERY well done thanks to Josh C and Peter Showler! The only problem was......it kept falling forwards!!!!! I can still remember the first year and second year the dome was up and running, how worried I was. What if the calculations for the amount of concrete used, and how deep the footings needed to go below frost level, might be wrong?! If they were...Well...You could imagine what would have happened once we started hanging heavy lights and acrobatic artists off of it!

But it held....and it will still be standing long after i leave this world ! Digging the footings was not easy....A machine did most of the work...But my friend Adrian Evil Monkey and I, had to hand shovel A LOT of ground out to get the trench prepped for concrete footings....Each shovel full, was really really harsh.........Not only was it heavy, muddy, swampy soils, but full of garbages and human excrement as well!!! Yech! That area used to be the backstage of the smaller, old, "in the round" Ewok Village stage. It was a disgustinig new smell every time we put our spade shovels into the forest floor!!! After we had finished digging, Jimmy said we could have lifetime passes to the festival! He knew how "no fun" it was from using the machine and digging that trench backstage Never really got his words on paper, or tried to take advantage of what he said....but it is rewarding enough to know that this trench we had all dug out, by machine and by hand, was what we all knew would soon become an EPIC part of what is the Village Stage today!

So I would like you ALL to think TWICE before taking a crap and littering backstage, or in the woods behind camp PLEASE.....Not only for the environment, for the people who live there, for the cows, but also for the poor souls who have to work on digging the footings and expansions of EVERY STAGE each and every year! Pack out what you pack in; and use the porta-potties. It is tough and nasty in there sometimes; but just be prepared with light, and paper, and Wet Wipes, noseplug/mask and the like...One year down the Road To Shambhala, it just might be you who is volunteering and digging up our past!!!