Hello from AMC NH-JAG 2015! What’s JAG you ask?
JAG (Jobs for America’s Graduates) is a
federal dropout prevention program for at-risk youth. Many JAG programs offer a
summer work component to help their students gain work experience before
graduation. This is the fifth summer that the AMC has partnered with local JAG
programs to offer summer jobs on a trail crew.
After weeks
of training, scouting trail projects, and preparing for the season, we started
work with the Woodsville High School JAG students two weeks ago. The first week
was spent working on the Chippewa Trail (on Black Mountain in North Haverhill,
NH) where we built timber check steps in a continuation of a project started
last year.
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| Crew leaders scouting a project on Mount Jasper in Berlin, NH |
This past
week, the crew worked in
Cooley-Jericho
Community Forest in Sugar Hill, NH. This is an area that was intensively
logged until the Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust purchased it in 2011. Earlier in
the summer, AMC volunteer crews installed bog bridges on a muddy section
of skid road-turned-trail. This past week, our JAG crew added two more bog
bridges to complete this section of trail. However, our main project consisted
of ‘armoring’ 45 muddy feet on another trail. ‘Armoring’ is a
tread-hardening technique for mountain bike trails that amounts to paving the
trail with a mosaic of flat-topped rocks. This project was a great introduction
to rock work for our crew, which will be building a rock staircase on the Lone
Oak Trail (Bath, NH) next week.
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| Armoring installed at Cooley-Jericho |
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| Crew member digging a hole for a rock at Cooley-Jericho |
Stay tuned for more updates from the AMC NH-JAG trail crew
as our season continues!
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| Woodsville High School JAG trail crew at Cooley-Jericho |
-Merike and Sarah, AMC NH-JAG 2015 Crew
Leaders
