Carter Giegerich
for The Franklin Press
For many students, the promise of a month-long summer work program spent shoveling dirt and busting up rocks might not be too enticing. For this year’s Youth Conservation Corps cohort working on the Bartram Trail, though, it’s four weeks of paradise.
The work crew kicked off their summer season on June 6, meeting at Cowee School for a brief orientation before heading out to the trail to get to work. Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy Executive Director Brent Martin said the students will tackle some repairs and improvements that have been on the back burner for too long.
“They’re doing some way overdue sections of treadwork – the type of things we don’t have time to dig into usually. We’re always just clearing trails, for the most part,” Martin said.
The work is no walk in the park, according to Macon County Schools STEM Coordinator Jennifer Love. Love helped recruit students for the work crew and said it was important to be clear with the prospective crew members up front about the demands of the job.
“We did our first crew last summer, and we started with the Macon Youth Trail Corps. That was my attempt through the school system to get the kids on the trail and understanding what the work was like,” Love said. “I wanted them to understand what was expected, because it’s hard work.”
This week, the students are finishing up their work on a section of the Bartram Trail that extends from Lake Nantahala to Sawmill Gap. From there, they’ll spend their remaining two weeks working out of a camp near Scaly Mountain.
In spending these four weeks becoming intimately familiar with the landscape in the place they call home, Martin said he hoped the students on this year’s work crew would develop a lasting relationship with the outdoors.
“You’re getting kids out into this landscape and helping them develop a sense of place as they spend time here. Hopefully it connects them to the landscape in ways that are meaningful for the rest of their lives,” Martin said. “These are 16-18 year olds, and I got hooked on nature when I was an adolescent. In the 70s, the Forest Service had this same program going on and I applied for it – I think it gets in your blood.”
The students on this year’s summer crew are from throughout the Southeast, with three of the seven students residing in Macon County. Recruitment for the program locally was a challenge in the inaugural 2021 season, but Martin said this year the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy’s work program has benefited from increased funding from a number of sources to allow them to expand the program. The National Forest Foundation provided funds to support eight weeks of work for the trail, and the Forest Service agreed to match those funds effectively doubling the program’s capacity for trail work during this session and the next, which begins in August.
Students in the Macon County School System also benefit from the county’s Career Activator Grants, offered through the Macon County School System’s Career and Technical Education program.
“Students from Macon County got a supply stipend, to go to Outdoor 76, or wherever they wanted to go, to get boots, or socks or whatever else they might need,” Love said.
The CTE program has a major interest in seeing the program grow, Love said, in large part due to the growing awareness around the many careers associated with the outdoor recreation industry. She said last year’s crews were exposed to a wide variety of careers in the outdoors while they worked to repair and improve the trail.
“Last summer, we really worked to crash their campfire every Tuesday night when the crew was out at the campground,” Love said. “The first time we went and talked to them about nonprofit work, and then the second week we had Mainspring Conservation come out. The third week my husband and I went and talked to them about Highlands Biological Station and the Coweeta Lab, and then the last week we had Cory from Outdoor 76 come out and talk to them about entrepreneurship and the outdoor economy.”
Love said the diversity of opportunity in the outdoor recreation industry is broad and represents enormous potential for local students.
“Careers in conservation are not just trail building,” she said. “We try to make sure they understand what would be available to them in this area.”