Thursday 6/30/11 - Team Swamp Dog

Back again, Brittney is absiento so I'll cover for her, and don't worry I'll make this one shorter than the last.

So, stretching circle today was the snow ball game. Underdog, a fairy, and zombie-generating Russians made appearances in our story. Then we finally got Big Momma in the ground by accident, re-veged hell mud pit 1, almost killed someone for walking through our newly re-veged trail (you know who you are), and had a magnificent surprise: JON REGEN!!!!!! It was so great seeing Jon again, hes awesome, a super crew leader in every sense of the word, and as I hear an avid blog reader so hi Jon. Then we played jungle themed mafia at lunch. Jane was an excellent narrator with her surprising twists, and GO ARIELLE FOR WINNIN' MAFIA :D (I was her partner, just saying lol).

Overall, it was a great day, we all felt really accomplished. We set a total of 22 rocks in three days, made a marsh look pretty, and did a ton of corridor work. Quick side note, Harry Potter themed virtual hide and seek is now my fav game, even better than Chalupa. See everyone tomorrow!

Wednesday 6/29/11 - Team Swamp Dog

FIRST POST OF THE YEAR!!!!!!!! though it should have been yesterday :P (shout out to Lauren aka Hurricaney for reminding me)

So....what happened on Wednesday....? Firstly, team swamp dog met our newest member: Jane Compton! She is AWESOME. She fit in with us right away even though we are this misfit crew of nerds, tree-huggers, GaGa fanatics, newbies, weirdos (cough cough Lauren), MIA music-men (Zach), MIA gingers (Brittney), and total bad-asses (Arielle). We could totally be the breakfast club but sooo much cooler, not only because we mountainscape instead of running around a high school, but mostly because we're not living in the 80's.

Moving on, we had our normal stretching circle in the parking lot, but today we pondered a pretty big life question: if you could be any food item which would you be? I know, mind shattering, but team swamp dog tackles huge stuff like this all the time. We're that impressive.

Back to Jane though, she has this killer/slightly freaky rock instinct. She just kept saying she had this feeling of "no faith" with different rocks and she called our bad fits every time. We tried to set 3 different stones in this one hole and every time we had to end up taking the rock out and go rock shopping again to find a bigger rock. Until, that is, Lauren found Big Momma. (insert inapropro statement about how much I hate Big Momma). We spent an entire day digging Big Momma out, trying to convince Lauren not to use her, flipping her UP the hill to the trail, trying to get Lauren to stop laughing at our pain, failing, getting Arielle to get Lauren to stop laughing, trying to get Lauren to relearn geometry, failing, figuring out which way to flip the rock in the hole on our own, tediously measuring the rock and hole, then FINALLY flipping the rock into the hole in the last ten minutes of work, and FAILING! The rock did not follow our carefully laid out plans, caused our creation of the phrase "trail-fail", and almost made Jane cry. jk on the last part.

And that why my entire day :) Oh, and the other mud puppies set seven stone. Go team!

Sorry for making this so long people who read this, aka Jon, hope you got a good impression of the day.

-Taylormeleon

The First Day of Green Team 1

The first day of SCA went great! We went to Mountain Farm and played name games, did hopes and fears, went over group contracts and went over tool safety. Lauren and I took our crew to our trail at the Musconetcong River Gorge. We hiked to the river and ate lunch by the water, it's such a beautiful spot! We contunued the hike and showed them the different projects we will be doing. They are: the top part of the switchback that the Hybrid crew built two years ago needs to be finished, the trail parallel to the ATV trail has some major drainage problems that need to be addressed, and the trail up to the parking lot has erosion issues. We have our work cut out for us but I know we will do an amazing job! As we reached the parking lot we came upon a stray dog.Lauren called the local animal control and they picked him up. Hopefully his people will find him or he will get a new loving home. I know we all wanted to take him home!!

~Arielle~

Day 2: Team Swamp Dog!

Today was the first day of work on our projects of the summer! We began working in the muddiest part of the trail, but the mud didn't deter us! Actually, some(TayTay) were quite willing to get covered in mud in order to put stepping stones in. Not only did we set a bunch of stepping stones, we also did corridor on the trail and got a few logs off the trail. Even though rock shopping was a challenge we were able to scrounge up some perfect ones! Great work today, mud puppies! Sorry this post is a bit short, but all I would really like to do right now is sleep and it's not even 7:30 yet!
Hopefully the rest of the week will be just as successful as today!
Later mud pups!
-Brittany

Day 1: New Beginnings

Today was the first day of this year's program. And it was awesome! All of the new folks that I've met on both crews are great. And all of the old folks are great too. What more could I ask for? And since I don't like rhetorical questions all that much I'm going to go ahead and answer that one. Nothing.

We (green team 2) played some killer games and began laying the foundations for a successful summer in the morning. Then after lunch we went over to Cushetunk to check out our site. I was super impressed with the quality hikers that our crew is. We made the ascent of Cushetunk mountain in style. Then we trekked across the ridge and admired last years fantastic trail work. Later we got to see some work that SCA did in 2009 too. So this is the third consecutive year that SCA's been gracing the cliffs of the Cushetunk crests. It's exciting and inspiring when you suddenly realize what an influence SCA has had on a park. Take Point Mountain for an example. This is actually the first year in well before my time with SCA that we haven't had a crew there. Which is a testimony to the stellar work we've been doing in recent years.

There's really a lot of potential for some really neat stuff to happen at Cushetunk this year. We've got a variety of drainage, tread, and rock projects. I'm pretty stoked about getting some work done tomorrow. I've been waiting all year for this and legitimately cannot wait any longer. I've been getting some of the typical symptoms of Conservation Withdrawal. (restlessness, increased frequency in hiking, playing with rocks, talking with rocks, etc.) I'm hoping that tomorrow will provide a healthy dose of hard and rewarding labor.

Well it's after my bedtime. But I'll go ahead and leave you all with a quote.

"Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find." -Quoted in Time

Keep it real.

Another year begins!

Hello All!

Tomorrow is the beginning of the TENTH year of the New Jersey Green Team!!! As always, we have two new crews, although saying "new" is probably not the best way to put it. Each crew has half or more alumni members and a handful of the new members are family members! Regardless, the crews are sure to be really awesome (as always!) and I'm so excited to get this summer of trail work started in Hunterdon County! In addition, this is the first year that ALL the crew leaders are NJ Green Team alumni... how cool is that? On a sadder note, Super Crew Leader/Wolfman Leader Jonathon Regan will not be coming back to the crews this year. Without a doubt, we are going to miss him fondly but I'm sure he's going to try to surprise us on the trail sometime!

This year our two projects are at Musconetcong Gorge (mine and Arielle's crew) and Cushetunk Mountain (Rose and Casey). They both are going to have their challenges for sure but there are plenty of opportunities for amazing trail building... and of course.... FUN!

Well... off to bed to get up bright and early to get the rental vans and met the crews at Hoffman Park!

Adios!