Our Stories

MN charter school group helps build new trail in NW Wisconsin with Roving Trail Crew

This past winter, Bill Menke was contacted by a student from Avalon Charter School in St. Paul, MN.  The Avalon School requires their students to incorporate a Service Week into their curriculum.  A senior student, Jessie Rideaux-Crenshaw, had earlier chosen the North Country Trail as the place where she would like to do her 300-hour senior project working with the Arrowhead Chapter on a route development effort near Grand Rapids, MN.  She also wanted the NCT to benefit from the school’s annual service week project.  She inquired to see whether the NCTA could work with her to develop a trail project during the specific dates that the school designates for service week.  Volunteers in Wisconsin benefit from Minnesota’s somewhat longer winters and the fact that trail projects within the BSC Chapter area are actually closer to the Twin Cities area than the nearest Minnesota trail segment.  Jessie recruited other students and provided the logistics on their end.

Bill agreed to incorporate Avalon’s service week into a BSC Roving Trail Crew outing.  On April 26, 15 students and an instructor/chaperone showed up at our Bird Sanctuary Campsite.  A significant percentage of these students had not been camping or if they had, they were not used to things like our “wilderness latrine” and our propane fired camp shower.  But, they were good sports and most of them got along just fine.

As a group, we put in three full days of difficult trail tread construction.  This project area is without a doubt the most difficult trail construction we have encountered after building over 50 miles of trail as a crew.  This area is composed of scattered trees and the ground is covered by a thin layer of moss.  Beneath the moss, it is almost solid rock that is difficult to explain.  The rock is a hard, old sandstone that is in layers ranging from ½ to 1 ½ inches in thickness.  A puzzling factor is that these layers are vertical rather than horizontal as a sedimentary rock should be.  In order to build a smooth tread, these rock layers have to be dug and pried out—then lain back down horizontally and sometimes left like a pieced-together “patio” (student description) or covered with soil that is hauled from as far as 1/4 –mile away.  By the end of the week, the students and regular crew members had built about ½ mile through these difficult conditions.

A huge factor helping to make this week a success is that Atley Oswald agreed to serve as camp cook—providing wonderful meals that were done in a timely fashion.  Thanks Atley and thanks also to the other adult crew members (Dick Kreoner and Jim Upthegrove) who supervised groups of the students.  Last but not least, thanks to Jessie and the rest of the Avalon students for their work.