It’s week 10 of our Teen Trail Crew season – that means
summer is done and school is upon us! As
we close out the busiest part of the full trail season, it’s time to start
looking back at what we accomplished.
We’ve done more of the same of course, heading back to Imp
trail for our usual staff rock work training.
It was a muddy mess and the Crew Leaders may not have realized it at the
time, but if they didn’t learn a mountain of rock work skills while mired in
the mud, they learned a far more valuable lesson of the importance of tenacity
and fortitude.
Once we unleashed the Crew Leaders and crews on the trails,
we went back to old standby projects, like our local neighborhood trail,
19-Mile Brook. There, we helped our
fellow trail workers on the AMC Pro Crew tidy up a new section of trail. And this week, as is the tradition with the
last week of each season, we headed across the street and up into the Great
Gulf wilderness with a smaller crew to chip away at the more remote projects in
the Whites.
Not all was old hat this year; we did go to new places as
well. Like the alpine zone trails all
around Madison Spring Hut, where we had the chance to perform some much needed
alpine trail maintenance thanks to a generous $2,500 grant from the Waterman
Fund. The two weeks of Teen Trail Crews
we had up there with Waterman Fund support went a long way to helping to keep
people off the fragile alpine flora and on the rocky, ever-worn trails.
Even though so many of our trails up here are beaten paths
of exposed earth in desperate need of some TLC, we don’t worry because we’re
always educating and preparing the next generation of trail workers and
conservation leaders. We develop teens
throughout their high school career from simple base camp crews to the 4-Week Leadership
and Conservation crew. On the 4-Week
crew, the teens complete loads of trail work, but learn about all the efforts
the AMC and our partners like the Waterman Fund put into protection and
promotion of the wonderful White Mountains!
