Last week we commenced work with
students from the Berlin JAG (Jobs for America's Graduates) program. The crew from Berlin consists almost
entirely of returning crew members. These students are not only returning to
the JAG trails program but also to projects they’ve worked on in the past-
every worksite this month has been worked on by JAG students in the recent
years.
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A portion of the staircase we built on Mt. Jasper |
Our first week was spent building a
staircase on Mt. Jasper. This trail was cut and has since been maintained only
by Berlin high school JAG students. If you’re a frequent reader of the trails
blog, you probably know that most moderately steep grades can benefit from rock
stairs. There are a lot of moderately steep sections of the Mt. Jasper trail,
so there is no shortage of work for the JAG crews past, present, and future. By
the end of the week, the staircase was 21 steps long and nearly finished. We’ll
return to Mt. Jasper for the last week of the program to finish up the
staircase and… probably start yet another small staircase just up the trail.
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Bridge built at WMCC last week |
After Mt. Jasper, it was time for a
break from rock work. Last week we moved down the road to the nature trail
behind the daycare center at White Mountain Community College- another ongoing
Berlin JAG trails project. This year, our job was to replace a very rotten
bridge with a brand new bridge and to replace some ‘corduroy’ in a muddy area
with a bog bridge. Corduroy refers to logs laid parallel in the trail to provide
a drier but very uncomfortable walking surface. As we pulled those mostly
rotten logs out of the trail, the tread became increasingly muddy and soon we
were standing in smelly slop rising over our ankles. A single bog bridge was
going to be totally insufficient for the length of the mess we had made!
Fortunately, there were lots of rocks lying around so stepping stones were an
easy solution. By the end of the week, the bog bridge and stepping stones fully
spanned the mud pit and a sturdy new bridge stood in the place of the old
rotten one.
On the hike in to work each day,
it’s rewarding for the students to walk over their own projects from past
seasons. Up next, we will return to a project on the Rattle River Trail as we
join forces with the Forest Service trail crew.