LAST DAY OF WORK- Team Swamp Dog!

As sad as it is, today was our last day of work before the rec trip! We began our day with stretch circle and then went to Point Mountain to go hiking. It was pretty awesome to see some work that was done by alumni SCA members, and even some members on our crew from previous years! I personally know I was very impressed by the rock staircases with HUGE rocks! As Lauren always says.. Go big or go home! It was very foggy on the hike though and humid from the rain yesterday night. After reaching the top, we all sat up on the big rock and had tunnel vision when looking out. Everything looked like it was spiraling in after hiking for about an hour and a half with minimal breaks. It was pretty cool though! Then after the hike we had a quick snack by the river and then went in to do a stream study! Working in small groups we used nets to catch things off the bottom of the river that indicate the health of the river. After lots of catching we determined the river seemed pretty healthy based on the organisms in the river such as dragonfly larva, snails etc. We all seemed pretty sad though that no one caught a cray-fish :( Then to end our day we stopped by the Clinton Library to pick up some music Cd's for the car ride up to Watkins Glen tomorrow(such as the Pirates of the Caribbean Soundtrack and Disney Princess Soundtrack..) and the book The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. A very awesome last day overall!
Cant wait for tomorrow morning when we begin our rec trip!!!! See all of you a tad later than normal tomorrow at 8, which is nice:)
-Jelly Jane

KELLIE'S BLOG!!!!!!!!!!‏

Today was our last day of work on our trail, and we thought it would be just like any other day of work until Doug whipped out his guitar in the parking lot/stretch circle area and started serenading the crew before stretch circle. Surprise #1. After Doug's interesting rendition of a Bright Eyes song, which only Casey may have fully enjoyed, complete with guitar AND vocals, we did our stretch circle. A game on ninja followed that, along with Rex suddenly blasting the Pina Colada song from Rose's van and some interesting old man dancing from Bryan and Doug. Being sufficiently woken up by all the surprise music and dancing, we headed to our trail. Once there, Doug shared Surprise #2 with us during snack time. It was his old decrepit book of 101 elephant jokes. I'd say about 99% of them didn't even make sense, but they provided some nice entertainment for the crew. (Such as: How do you carve an elephant? You get a rock and you chisel away all the pieces that don't look like an elephant.) We got right to work after snack debarking, putting in checksteps, and working on drainage dips. Amazingly, Casey finished debarking her "baby" (a log she'd been working on debarking for almost a day) and Bryan and I had the honor of setting it after Casey had a nice photoshoot with it. Pretty soon, all the checksteps were set; 17 in total, which is 17 more than were originally there. The checksteps look awesome and make walking on the trail so much easier. The drainage dips we did also look great. Before the day ended, we hiked through our first trail and got to survey our old work. Near the end we tag team polaskied a fallen tree/step that was an obstacle in the trail and got through it in record time. It was awesome. When we got to the bottom of our hike, Rose had to shuttle half of us to the parking lot and then come back because we didn't have both vans, so when she left with half the kids, the other half of us hid in the grasses and had Doug convince her that we were all missing when she came back. It would have been great, except then Doug also convinced her that she should just drive off without us, so we had to come out of hiding once we saw the van pulling away. All in all, it was an exceptional last day of work, and now we can look forward to our ice cream treat tomorrow!!!

NJ Greenteam in 36 hours

I'll start by saying that I'm not much of a morning person and it's a rare thing for me to get up before 6 unless i'm getting on a flight for an exotic vacation. On Tuesday morning I woke up at 4:30 to drive the 4 hours to NJ so I could work with the crews before the end of the program and it was well worth it.

By 7am I had gotten a panicky text asking me to come to Musconetcong to see the damage that the storm the night before had done to the trail. I arrived just before 10 and found the crew working on putting in checksteps to try to slow down the massive surge of water that runs off of the parking lot. When I say massive, I mean the pictures looked like what may be confused for a cascading waterfall or a small kayakable creek. The good news is that Patrick arrived at the same time to take photos for the county to try to get them to fix the road. Despite the crazy amount of water the structures put in by the crew were doing their job and the trail was looking great. We added some drainage aprons and an additional check step and I think it'll hold up nicely. After working all morning and stopping at the river for lunch we hiked the entire loop and I was blown away but the amount of quality work the crew had accomplished in 5 weeks. Of course the stepping stones were well set, and the crew did a great job at cutting benched tread, a first for a NJ crew, and building 2 switchbacks. I was also shocked to hear that instead of pulling out the crosscut saw the crew had cut timber for 20 check steps using a pulaski, all that crushing rock in past years has created some solid tool swinging skills with this crew.

The next day I met both crews at Hoffman Park (which I'll add to my list of places that make NJ a beautiful state and would surprise those people that hear NJ and think NJ Turnpike) and after some hasty picnic planning with the leaders headed out to Cushetunk. Wow do these crews do a lot of hiking. It was nice hiking over the project that the crew did in 2009 to the current site. Again, I was impressed by how these crew members that usually move large rocks have embraced timber and have set some perfect check steps. I hiked the chainsaw out which proved to be more of an ego builder then a help with the project. I was nicknamed "lumberjack" but only made 2 small cuts so not sure I can take credit for that. My plan to fell a tree was foiled by a finicky saw and a lack of time. Instead I got to dig one drainage dip and lay out the placement for about 5 more (more fun then sawing believe it or not). The only bummer was having to leave early and not getting to see the ridge trail and all of the great work I've heard about there. Hey, the way I see it is it's an excuse to come back and hike without a saw.

It was great working with everyone and I sure wish I could do it more often (but don't think that getting up at 4 on a daily basis would be good for me). I'm excited to hear about your rec trips and look forward to seeing you all again next week for the picnic. You should all be proud of your trail skills, you accomplished a lot and the county trails are proof that will last for years! Nicely done. (pics of musconetcong crew here: https://picasaweb.google.com/117334271898732252242/MusconetcongGorgeNJGreenteam2011?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCM2N6ZGPodrJcQ&feat=directlink cushetunk are coming...)

Rachel

I think I'm supposed to post tonight...

Well this will be a short post 'cause I'm uber tired and I don't even know if it's my turn but TODAY ON TEAM SWAMP DOG...

•  Awesome alumni AJR aka Little Bear came to work with us today! except he's not so little anymore and he's taller than me and now I feel old and short
• Played Bear, Fish, Mosquito and both crews ended the game with magic...as in with absolutely no planning one team said UNICORN! and the other said WIZARD! Game ended in a draw because I can't be sure Wizards are oh so much more powerful than unicorns
• Dug more drainage dips and finished a section of tread that yellow jacket attacks prevented earlier
• Discovered that Taylmeleon/Tay looks like a tricerotops aka a TAY-cerotops!
• Did some major bench cutting on the ridge trail because it was so narrow and dangerous originally. Some hikers came through and expressed their gratitude for the work we did on the switchbacks, the parking lot trail, and the swamp so that was really nice to hear!
• I got to see Little Bear's/puppy I wish was mine at the end of the day! and Ali is FREAKING HUGE NOW! I used to be able to hold her in my arms =(

Signing off...
Voldemort, Voldemort, oooh Voldy Voldy Voldy... VOLDEMORT!

26th (yesterday) - Team Swamp Dog

I have one word for the three of you who read this: Dunkin Donuts. Thats two words but I'm a triceratops derp so... Anyway, this is actually relevant because yesterday morning Ben Wheat and I went dumpster diving and brought the crew a very large amount of free doughnuts (for those of you who don't know, dumpster diving is a national activity in which you wait for a dunkin donuts to close and throw out their fresh donuts that didn't sell. You then take and eat said doughnuts. It is completely sanitary, the donuts have their own fresh bag and they are actually wrapped in the pink paper they sit on in the shop). Moving on Rachel came and visited us today! She helped so much because our trail had major water damage we had to solve. Overall good day, we did a ton of drainage work.

July 28

we got a good number of check steps set and they're looking pretty good. the debarking is a pain so i'm glad we have so many barkless logs. i did other general trail maintenance with with doug, like lopping and moving blowdowns, but on our way back, he was stung by some kind of wasp. he stung again on our hike down but kelly is still master of the bee stings with a total of three.

-Marcus

Rain, rain, rain...

So I'm in charge of blogging for Monday, July 25. I'll keep it short considering I'm about to fall asleep. I'm pretty sure the entire crew had a bad case of "The Mondays", myself included. However, there was work to be done. So after stretching and playing a quick game of lumberjack ninja (which I won after making the best "suspicious squash"), we made our way to our trail. We were greeted by Mason and Bobby (two of the SCA interns we met on our EE Trip to Sandy Hook). They took a brief hike of our trail to see the work we had accomplished up to the swamp. After our guests departed, it was time to super tread the bottom loop of our trail, as it was too thin and needed benching. After completing the tread on the entire initial loop, we broke for lunch. We then discussed our food plans for the rec trip and began a game of Mafia, which was brought to an abrupt halt by the incoming thunderstorms. We proceeded to make a dash for the vans to beat the rain and continued to Lauren's house. There we finished our game of Mafia (in which there happened to be no Mafia!!!) and proceeded to do some EE curriculum games. The first activity was to split into groups of three and design a park with a certain theme and to use natural resources and energy efficiency as often as possible. Themes were penguins, unicorns/pegasus', and pandas. We all had a lot of time thinking of silly and creative ways to design our park. After presenting our park proposals, we discussed renewable and non-renewable resources. By the time we finished all of that, it was time to head back to Mountain Farm. Well, that's about it. So much for keeping this one short...

Trey Songz out

July 25

It finally rained today after several weeks of dry weather. It was only 
at the end of the day but it was my rose. Today we did check steps and 
which was fun beacuse we haven't done them this year. Swinging the 
Polaski also felt good because its always a great feeling to chop a 
tree in half. I hope we get to finish the check steps we started today. 
I am really excited to see how many we can get in before the rec trip.

-Rex

Ps put in this youtube video its the one called beautiful trail.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12TmI5_RIIo

RE: Thursday July 21st

Hello all,

This here post is regarding this past Thursday, a half, but rewarding, day. With projected highs of 110 degrees, it seemed like a pretty daunting task to de-bark, carry, set and fill our remaining 7 (someone correct that number if I'm wrong) check-steps - but we overcame the heat and found the light at the end of the tunnel. We had completed our third and final project! What a relief that was, seeing as working into the afternoon would have been straight up dangerous. At any rate, we finished our trail and headed down the road to Lauren's house, where we immediately cooled down by the pool - taking hose showers and dipping our heads and feet into the refreshing water, ahhhh, rejoice. We spent the rest of our day writing letters to Exxon and participating in an Environmental Ed. activity in which the Mud Puppies assumed the roles of various individuals affected positively and negatively by climate change and conversed with each other, sharing stories of greedy oil tycoons, worrisome snow-leopard conservationists and apple farmers from Oregon. This activity allowed all of us to understand just how serious climate change is and how each and every one of us is affected by it. Continuing on the subject of climate change, we then lightened the mood a little and finished off our day by watching the wonderful movie, Ice Age. All in all, a very rewarding day for Team Swamp Dog.

Stay cool, all.

Zach

Canoeing the Delaware!

On Friday both crews took an 8 mile journey down the Delaware River! The day started off meeting at Hoffman Park fifteen minutes earlier! And everyone managed to make good timing! As soon as we got everything together, we headed to the arboretum to meet with the canoe leaders and get our canoes, life jackets, and paddles. We all piled into the vans and left for Easton to start our journey! We arrived at the river and were taught different canoe strokes and signals.
Soon after, we were off! The weather was incredibly hot, so we stopped to swim as many times as possible which was very refreshing. Along the way, Bryan found '90s looking sandals that were two different sizes on the shore, I have a feeling he'll be rocking those for awhile now. As we paddled up to the end point, we were all thankful to be getting in vans with air conditioning and out of the sun. It felt good to have accomplished 8 miles of canoeing in a timely fashion, good work, guys!

One last thing, RIP Liz and Casey's sunglasses. Both pairs of sunglasses were loved by everyone and will be missed, no matter how inexpensive they were.

'Til next time,
Brittany

Canoe Trip!

Today was a wonderful environmental ed day! It started off with a trip to the arboretum and meeting up with people Mountain Farm that were nice enough to take us canoeing down the Delaware. The weather was sweltering, but the river certainly cooled us off and made it bearable. We threw bailers of water at each other all down the river. We all had fun and it was definitely the perfect activity to get through such hot weather.

July 21, 2011

Today we went to Mountain Farm and did some team-work building activities and enjoyed a nice snack under a shady tree. After some more activities we headed down to the ravine and had lunch on top of a bridge. We then headed down into the deep depths of Doug's dungeon and wrote letters to our sponsors. Once we finished that, it was time to go and we had a minute car ride back to Hoffman Park. It was a nice break from crushing and carrying fill up and down the trail. Tomorrow we will be flowing down the Delaware River in canoes for a nice EE day.

--Scott Potter

Pictures!

Digging fill!
What, where does this next bucket go?!
Rex throwing some excellent pulaski swings.
Myself digging out a water bar!
Doug rocking the pick, digging a fill hole.
Marissa carrying buckets of fill. Like a BOSS.
Rock Removal Squad!
Concentrating on the water bar.
Anthony giving the trail a manicure.
Our friend we met during a game of Camouflage.
Crew leaders crew leadin'.
The apprentice apprenticing.
Andy has the morning derps.
So does Marcus.

Rex's artistic photo of Doug and the treeline.
Lauren also has morning derps. =P
Karah, Doug, and Trey on the way home from an exciting day of working with NJ Conservation Fund and El Paso.

**Disclaimer** These pictures are courtesy of Rex Cummings and Marcus Wehof, just because I am posting them does not mean I take claim of them. This is just one of my many responsibilities as a crew leader.

P.S. Can't wait for canoeing tomorrow!!

Pictures from Team Swamp Dog

Derping in the Rain

Human Pretzel in the Rain

Casey holding onto his log

 

 

Fetal position... We Can't Go On!

Taylor and Jane trying to solve the Handcuff game

This log is One Jane and a Water bottle length

So this hole needs to be one Jane and a water bottle length!

A picture is worth a thousand words... what do you think?

Tuesday, July 19

Today was very much a typical day at the trail (save for the excessive humidity and the abundance of flies). After two weeks of non stop crush-work from the crew, all the major holes in the trail are filled and set. The tread-work is complete all the way to the end of our trail, leaving us with the final duty of putting the finishing touches on it. Due to the inclined nature of a mountain trail, ours needs a significant amount of drainage and water bars. Filling in the remaining diviets and crevices with fill is the last step in making the trail as comfortable as possible for the hikers.

--Andy

Starting a new section

Today we have "completed" the new trail that we have been working on for the past weeks. It looks quite stupendous and I think it will complement Cushetunk Mountain's vast repertoire of Multi-use trails. We moved our tool cache today to the next area that we will work on.The area we will start some maintenance on is an old section of Cushetunk that a hybrid crew worked on awhile back. Its going to be nice to have a different path in the morning, except the weather tomorrow is supposed to be pretty bad so we will see what happens. The crew has made some serious strides over the past week on Cushetunk, I cant wait to see the final product.

Wicked Hot Wednesday...

Well it's definitely that time of summer again when New Jersey enters the rain forest like climate of high humidity and temperature, but Team Swamp Dog is resiliently holding up well! Today, like other days, began with a stretch circle at Hoffman Park and then a group game that consists of everyone kneeling in a circle and arranging your hands in a confusing manner and slapping the group. Trey Songz and I were the last two and we went to a Vegetable off... I think we were supposed to be "Cantankerous Cucumbers" or something and I won! Woo! Next we drove to our site and decided we needed another round of waking up so Arielle and I introduced the crew to Ninja Lumberjack ... or we should have called it Chicken Lumberjack because our crew's ninja noises sound suspiciously chickeny! Zachariah won this game over Taylor by being a more convincing "Suspicious Celery"! Next, Zachariah, Ben, Taylor, and myself started off the morning with a log lugging warm up while the others continued tread work (some benching to make the trail wider) and a few people chopped more trees for more check steps! Tread work got especially hard today in the New Jersey rain forest so after lunch, we switched from tread to check steps... we completed three after lunch alone, not including the two check steps Zach and Brittany finished before lunch! GO SWAMP DOGS!

Tomorrow we have another wicked hot day coming so we're planning on blasting through our remaining eight check steps and doing some serious environmental education, sponsor letter writing, and picnic planning!

That's all for now....

Lauren

P.S. I totally have/had pictures from my phone to upload but they are currently lost on my sister's computer somewhere so I have to search and find them soon! You won't be disappointed!


P.S.S. Let's play a game... what rhymes with FINE!?

The Game For Life

Hey Greenteam,

I'm blogging about Tuesday the 19th for Team Swamp Dog.

We started off the morning by playing a couple different variations of tag to wake up for the day of work ahead of us. The first one was called Hunters I think. There were 6 different positions (forgive me if I get the names wrong); hunters (the taggers), crazy elk (had to run backwards), old elk (had to run hunched over), papa elk (could run normal), baby elk (had to stay with mama elk), and mama elk (had to stay with baby elk). That was a really silly game that we had a lot of fun with. Afterwards we had an "environmental education" discussion about which type of elk survived better. We learned that elk that run backwards don't fare very well! After that we played a round a toilet tag; a variation of freeze tag which requires you to be "flushed" by someone to get back in after be tagged into a toilet. After that we were all energized for work as we packed into the vans.

When we got to the work site, one thing was perfectly clear--we would be setting a lot of check steps. After we had spent the past couple days chopping and carrying up a bunch of logs, it was now time to set them in the section of our trail that is steep and has a lot of erosion. All groups were hard at work digging holes, finding rocks, and setting logs. By the end of the day we had set about 9 check steps. I was really impressed with the great work we got done. We already need more logs to set for tomorrow!

Just before lunch, Lauren's brother, Russ, came to visit us. He ended up staying for lunch and even brought some Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream which he generously shared among the crewmembers. We then had some discussion about the canoe trip and our "lax bro" theme. We discussed potential ideas for clothing choice and Lauren even had the idea to have SCA Lax Pinnies custom made if everyone was willing to pay which would be really cool! But after that Jane and Taylor spent a while trying to find the solution to Lauren's "handcuff" game. There is still no solution in sight after countless tries among the crew. After that it was back to setting check steps until it was time to head back to Hoffman Park.

So for those of you who aren't on Team Swamp Dog, you may be wondering what exactly the title means. Well this is the game that has been going for a few days now but took off today at work. If you are reading this it means you have already agreed to play the game. I'm going to tell you the rules; the game continues for the rest of your life (hence the name). The catch is that anytime you say the word m*** (I can't type it otherwise I'll have to do 20 pushups). I'll give you a hint as to what the word is though. it rhymes with fine, but starts with an "m". Anytime you say that word the consequence is doing 20 pushups, 20 "I'm A Star" leaps, or a recital of the "I'm A Little Teapot" Dance. And it continues under these rules for the rest of your life. So good luck to you all now that you're playing! All day we were thinking of clever ways to get people to slip up and say the dreaded word. The only person on the crew who didn't say it all day was Ben. We had a lot of fun with it though because it got ridiculous with how blatant the attempts at coaxing another into saying the word were. The goal for tomorrow is to have Ben do pushups at least once.

Well that pretty thoroughly summed up the day. This was my first blog of the summer. Hope ya'll enjoyed it!

Trey Songz out.....

AH this is my first time I'm blogging this year because my computer broke but its fixed so HEY EVERYONEEE! So I'm gonna be blogging for last Thursday, which was awesomeee by the way. Our crew is speeding through our projects. The trail looks amazing and we have been working super hard. Last Thursday was great because we had Coco come visit! (For those of you who dont know who Coco is, he also goes by the name Colin Kenney) :] Colin helped us chop some trees up to make some awesome check steps which are coming along very well. We did some awesome tread work through the begining of the trail which is making it so much easier to walk on. Thursday was also our Harry Potter day because many of the crew members were pumped to see the premiere to the last Harry Potter movie that night. We celebrated by playing some Harry Potter themed mafia and using our hand made wands to motivate us through the hard working day. Well thats about all I can remember from last Thursday....which was AWESOMEE :]

Apshawa Preserve

Monday, July 18. Today we went to the Apshawa Preserve, a trail part of the NJ conservation foundation. We met the SCA from Essex there as well as Rachel, some botanists, and sponsors of sca. After driving through traffic we finally arrived there and were introduced to the other crew and the adults. Then we started hiking the trail, where we mapped plants in designated areas and learned how to identify plant species to show how to deer are eating almost everything and destroying native species. The botanists taught us that there are about 10x more deer per square mile in the environment than it can sustain, so it is important to keep fences up to keep deer out. When we finished our project, we were given a delicious lunch AND sca water bottle and we ate be the reservoir. We then hiked out and got some more SCA swag before we packed up and left.