Summer is just around the corner and our new crews are amped and ready to go! We’ve got a little info on what you can expect from our crews during their Summer of Service!
This season, we are going to have four amazing crews out of our Denver office:
The Trail Blazers are a sawyer crew that will be working on invasive species removal in the Denver Metro area. Then the crew will move up to the foothills to work on forest health and mitigation of wildfires like we saw last month. The Trail Blazers will be running chainsaws during the entire season so we wish them the best in keeping the summer injury and incident-free!
The Rock Climbers are a hand crew who will start their work this summer in Golden Gate State Park. They will begin with a 4 week fencing project and then bounce back between more fencing and some great trail maintenance projects.
The Path Finders are another hand crew who will be starting their summer off with the Rock Climbers in Golden Gate State Park. After a week of fence construction, The Path Finders will begin heavy maintenance at State Parks throughout the Front Range from Louisville to Conifer.
The Ridge Runners are our fourth crew and our only camping crew out of Denver this summer. The Ridge Runners will be camping in remote areas for 10 days at a time and continuing the trail construction work that our Colorado Springs team worked on last summer.
Each of the Denver crews will have 3-4 ACLCs (pictured above) who will serve as Assistant Crew Leaders in the field.
Mile High Youth Corps – Colorado Springs is also hosting four stellar crews this summer: three camping crews, who will all camp for 5 or 10 days at a time, and one brand new day crew in Pueblo. Photos soon to come!
1. The Bobcats will be our saw and trail camping crew. They will spend most of their time in remote regions of the Southern Front Range. They will be thinning forest with CUSP, spraying to eliminate invasive tamarisk in Trinidad State Park for two weeks, building trail in Bosque del Oso, and more.
2. The Marmots will be our standard camping crew. They will perform a variety of conservation work, mainly trail maintenance, all over the Southern Front Range; around the Canon City area, Florissant Fossil Beds (Post-to-Parks), and beyond.
3. The Hayman Crew will return to the Hayman burn area for yet another year of restoration. They will be working alongside Rocky Mountain Field Institute and CUSP all summer to help bring the area back to its pre-wildfire state.
4. The Steel City Day Crew is a very new development: a day crew in Pueblo, consisting of only local, Pueblo youth. If all goes well with them this year, MHYC’s presence and influence will continue to grow in the Pueblo area. This crew will work for the City of Pueblo for four weeks, then the County of Pueblo for two weeks. Specific projects are pending, but work could include laying sod to building fence to planting trees.
We hope all of our crews have a safe and productive summer! Of course, we will be doing our best to bring you more pictures and stories from the field as these crews work tirelessly throughout the summer. Keep an eye out for posts about our Summer crews with the “Summer of Service” tag!
Some of us forgot water bottles. Sleeping bags. Mess kits. Some of us didn’t know what a mess kit was. Some of us had never been to the mountains. Never been camping. Never gone five days without a shower. We are the seventeen AmeriCorps Leadership and Conservation (ACLC) 2009 corpsmembers, working for Mile High Youth Corps (MHYC) since February. Shockingly enough, we survived and — gasp — some might even say enjoyed our Colorado Youth Corps Association (CYCA) camping trip.
On Monday morning we loaded up our backpacks, jammed coolers full of food and headed up the winding roads toward Golden Gate State Park. On the drive up, some of us slept, some of us daydreamed about building the perfect fire, and some of us watched the tall buildings of Denver and the noise of Federal Boulevard fade into the rear view mirror. We said goodbye to cell phone service and flush toilets and said hello to tall pine trees and marshmallows browned on sticks.
We spent the week learning how to properly build trails and rock walls, how to become successful leaders, and we embedded ourselves deeper into the culture of youth corps, learning the importance and magnitude of being a part of something bigger than ourselves. Each day, we woke with the sun after freezing nights bundled in sleeping bags, packed our bags with PB and J’s, water bottles and rain gear and headed out to workshops. 
