Fall 2007 Update

What a long and terrific summer. Full of workshops and the Biennial conference, volunteers on Bear Mountain have been busy. And now we are looking forward to another exciting fall. We had a lot of help and support this summer. Thank you to all those volunteers that came out and sweat with us in the grueling summer heat.

Now, with our focus on autumn, we are looking forward to the crew from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy to join us. Led by Ted Wilson, this crew of seven to eight has been working on Bear Mountain since the founding. This season they will spend 3 weeks camping and building new trail for the project. Most crew members are from the eastern side of the country but the most traveled volunteers, Edward and Alan, will join us from Great Britain. The skill amongst this group ranges from beginner to experienced, but all are hard workers and eager to learn. The newcomers are like every volunteer we see here: quick and willing to learn and have fun!
With their first two weeks completed, this group has completed a great amount of trail, including six stairs. This dedicated team came together to learn specialized skills together, their stone cribbing skills are equal to the masters’. Ted’s crew has been working to connect the work from this summer’s Biennial Conference to the waterfall area just before the boulder field and North face section of Bear Mountain. So far, the ATC crew has built sixty-eight and a half feet of trail with an average crib wall height of two feet. This gives us a total of six hundred sixteen square feet of trail. Not to bad for “beginners.”

With just one more week left of work with the ATC, we are looking for more individual volunteers to come and complete the work. We also look forward to having SCA crew leaders; Mike Johnson, Erin Anderson, and Jon Paulson return to the project. With the temperature cooling down and becoming generally more pleasant, we look forward to an autumn that will be just as busy as summer!