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.

Friday July 15th - Sandy Hook

I had been looking forward to this Friday all week and it did not disappoint. We started the day at Hoffman park and saddled up fast as we were all eager to get to Sandy Hook. Upon arrival we met with the SCA members working at the park there. Before beginning our hike, we played a round of ninja and one of Chalupa. We then met with the Essex County crew and split into smaller groups to be lead through the forest. We learned about how plants survive on the beaches as well as the scientific names for many plants found there. For example, we identified bayberry and cedar. The crew members there also told us how the military engineered poison ivy trees to deter spies. We had a quiz on what we learned and had a chance to ask questions about what working at Sandy Hook is like. Finally, we took our long awaited trip to the shore itself. We got in plenty of refreshing swim time before we reluctantly headed back to vans for our return trip. Another excellent environmental education day under our belts.

A Day in the Life... Of Botanists!

Today we joined up with the SCA crew in Essex County for the day. Basically, there was a large fenced in area (about 1/2 of a square mile I believe) in order to keep the deer out. Native species had been dying out in this park due to the large deer population eating them. So our job was to take data about sections of the park in the fence and out, so that hopefully in a few years, data can be recollected and we can know whether or not the fence was working. We worked with the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, and a few representatives from El Paso, a company that builds natural gas pipelines, that I think are funding some money for SCA next year. (If I'm getting these details completely wrong, I'm sorry)

We learned about several different kinds of plants that lived in the park and how to identify them with some helpful botanists. Today was very fun, and so very different from our regular days of trail building that we've grown accustomed to. We also had a great lunch and water bottles thanks to the NJ Conservation Foundation!! If anyone from there reads this, we all thank you very much! We really had a great day and I think everyone learned a lot.