General Site Information

Some Haikus about
Painting Docks and a Dam Tour
Conservation Day, Cordell Hull

PT 1

Groggy bodies move
Drive through green hills and arrive
Hills murmuring calm

Rangers and fences
Lead us to the beastly Dam.
Water/human machine!

Unyielding to trout
Obstructed, the Cumberland fuels
Homes for the people.

Old-school control board
Panels, TVS, blinking lights
And one man stares, sits.

No-nonsense tour guide
Flicks her cig in the spillway
“Those mills are covered in led!”

Toils of a machine
Clogging with trash and seeping water
Pondering the future

a smiling “bye!”
better than some, not so bad,
Yankees and liberals.

Pt. 2

We are handing out
Comment cards to spread
Safety to swimmers

Sitting by the lake
Eating lunch chatting with our
Two friendly rangers.

Defeated Creek camp
Kind couples, demure, in sun.
Grinning in hammocks.

Painting WEAR IT, bold
orange life jackets on docks.
we work as a team.

Written by: Carolyn Boyd

A week of new and exciting experiences and skills learned, under cover of lightning…this is one way to describe this past week in the Indiana Dunes.

As we began the week on Monday bright and early in the field, it was shaping up to be a fairly regular work day. The Teams split into an herbicide team and a planting team and the guys trained Emi how to properly mix and use herbicide in the wetlands, while Kristina and I planted with Adam in the unit. We arrived early into the field and with some of the heat abated this week and temperatures only reaching into the low 90s it was a welcome relief and we had a fairly productive day planting a mixture of species in unit 23.

Tuesday started fairly cool but turned much hotter as noon approached, and the teams finished herbiciding and planting. We spent the remainder of the day catching up with the updates for our final project we are to create. Related to the hot weather as of late, we’ve all been extremely depressed about the sad state of affairs many of the plants are facing. With the recent drought in what should be the rainy season, the continued absence of rain clouds is never far from thought, or our rose-bud-thorn meeting at the end of the day to discuss our good and bad experiences. From our tour of the JFNEW facility we learned that because of the drought, many of the plants have already produced seed and the number and quality of the seed is greatly reduced, and even if the rain does arrive, many cannot play “catch-up” to make up the deficits.

Some of these concerns we alleviated with the high possibly of rain the next two days. On Wednesday we went into the field with our bucketed plants and tools under the overcast sky, but as soon as we unloaded our plants we saw flashes and heard the first resounding rolls of thunder. So back to the safety of the truck to wait out the storms. Sadly after more than an hour the thunder still echoed and we joined team 2 at the Beverly Shores train station to wait some more. It rained for a while, but not really enough to make a difference. By 9:30am the storm had not passed so both teams loaded up and we adjourned to the NPS office to learn some greenhouse skills.

Our NPS contact Dan Mason came out to the greenhouse and taught us how to prepare the soil and properly transplant the young seedlings into the trays to mature. This day we mixed the teams up, and this was our first opportunity to work with members of the other team. Emi and I worked in the older greenhouse, and Kristina in the newer one (which would later prove to be a better choice with its improved ventilation system and air flow than the older building) while Patrick and Jason worked on reinforcing wooden pallets with the folks of the NPS for a board walk into Cowles Bog. After lunch we finished up our tasks, and with the skies clear and the sun shinning we returned to the field to plant at least a portion of our buckets.

Over Wednesday night and into the morning of Thursday though, our wish for rain was met, and not counting the power outage and ice run before work, we were extremely thankful for the 3-4 inches of rain that fell. At least practically replenishing the wetland water levels, nothing makes you happier than hearing that tell tale squishy noise a trowel makes in properly saturated soils. But early that morning, we still had to work in the greenhouse for a portion because of the lightning, but the routine was broken again when we assisted the NPS crews installing the pallet walkway, using the fire line technique to move the 249 wooden pallets farther into the bog to connect with the Walker trail. Mission accomplished and some a little sore and bruised with the awkward work of pallet moving, we returned to the field and continued planting in unit 23 and we are now 2/3 of the way completed with this unit.

Aside from planting the many species of flora today we also experienced quite the range of fauna today. We started with a praying mantis in the greenhouse, a Black and Yellow Garden Spider sighting by Jason, so wiggling mayfly larva by Emi, a leopard frog by Patrick, and the highlight of our day, the snapping turtle at lunch. This turtle was hanging out in the shade of our water cooler, and after kindly sticking around for our photo shoot, retreated to the newly refilled standing water the side of the spillway were we prep our plants and tools in the field. And all of this aside from our normal sand hill crane and heron sightings. Too bad the camera is not always turned on and at the ready to catch the true breadth of animals we experience everyday, especially after the rain we animals started to return to the wet areas.

Another work related activity we did was participate in the NPS Volunteer Appreciation Picnic on Saturday at the Bailey Homestead, and aside from delicious food and games of bingo and water balloon tossing, we got to meet the other volunteers for the park and hear about the other numerous activities going on in the park. After the picnic we rounded of the beautiful day with a dual team hike down the Cowles Bog trail to Lake Michigan so a nice quiet afternoon on the beach. So while this was a wild week of switching jobs and feeling like we were on a wildlife safari, and dodging lightning storms, we learned some new skills, finely received some rain we’ve been hoping for, and met some very nice volunteers from the park, and got some great shots of the interesting work we do every day. All and all a pretty good week.

http://www.keloland.com/videoarchive/index.cfm?VideoFile=120718forestfires

The Migratory Bird Crew was able to cover 481920 acres during the season. We recovered 1506 bird skulls from mine claim markers, hopefully preventing 1506 future birds from becoming trapped. The team was able to set two live birds free from two different mine claim markers, a season highlight for all of us. The crew pulled 2176 markers in all, more than half of them during the 6th and final hitch.

Work Totals

Area Covered (acres) 481920
Claim Markers Found Empty 1644
Claim Markers Knocked Down 2176
Mammals Extracted from Markers 97
Reptiles Extracted from Markers 118
Birds Extracted from Markers 1506
Live Animals Found 10

Special thanks to our agency partners for their support throughout this challenging field season!

The Wilderness Ranger Corps (WRC) team is made up of eight corpsmembers and one project leader who are all based at Snoqualmie Pass in Washington. Members of the corps team have come from all different areas of the United States to the state of Washington to do some very exciting and beneficial work for the SCA and the U.S. Forest Service.

Throughout the summer and into late September we will be monitoring and taking inventory of all known campsites and recreaction sites in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Specifically we will be designated to the Alpine Lakes, Glacier Peak, and William O. Douglas Wilderness Areas.

The project is part of the U.S. Forest Service's 10-year Wilderness Challenge. The goal of the 10-Year Wilderness Challenge is to bring every one of the more than 400 wildernesses under the USDA Forest Service’s care to a minimum stewardship level by 2014, the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act.

The job of Recreation Site Inventory is one of the 10 key elements of the challenge and we are more than excited and willing to spend the summer and fall in some of the most beautiful and scenic areas of the world.

Specifically we will be hiking the trails throughout the mountains and lakes of the Wilderness Areas for nine days at time. We will find known campsites and recreaction sites while using Trimble GPS units in teams of two to collect data on such things as physical campsite locations, tree damage, ground disturbance, and other human impacts. While collecting the data we will be camping along the way in teams of four and then re-uniting with the other team members back at our home base at Snoqualmie Pass to share our adventures.....and then go back out in the backcountry to explore and monitor another area!