Wilderness Volunteers give back while on vacation
Sunday June 21, 2009
Tracy Moss
Eric Thompson, front, and Jim Dean, both of Minnesota, make their way through a mud pool as Gabriel Frank of Alabama gets ready to take the mud plunge April 29 on a day hike through Choprock Canyon in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in southern Utah.
ESCALANTE, Utah – If you want to help the environment and don't mind foregoing the luxuries of a five-star hotel for the inconveniencies of a tent below a sky full of stars, then here's a wonderful outdoor opportunity.
Each year from spring through fall, the nonprofit organization, Wilderness Volunteers, offers a lineup of trips in some of the country's most naturally beautiful, and sometimes remote, places where volunteers spend a week camping, sweating and doing some basic physical labor, working on various projects, including trail maintenance, habitat restoration and more.
Yes, a working vacation.
But the work is rewarding, the views beat any office cubicle, you won't go hungry and you may not even miss the television or other comforts of home, because you'll likely have all the entertainment you want, meeting people from all walks of life who share a common interest in nature and a commitment to give a week of their time to improving it. And you'll get some free time to explore whatever wild place you've chosen.
It's sort of "Survivor" with a real mission and food, and without the challenges or the drama or a TV camera. And nobody gets voted off. Maybe that's a bad example afterall, but you do need to be prepared to rough it a bit, if you're not a seasoned hiker or backpacker or camper. Being in shape helps as well as heeding all the ample advice provided by trip leaders before the adventure begins.
This year, Wilderness Volunteers features 47 trips in 18 states, stretching from Acadia National Park in Maine to the John Muir Wilderness in California or Denali National Park in Alaska, and even one right here in Illinois.
This week, a group of WV volunteers will spend the week car camping in Midewin National Tall Grass Prairie south of Joliet, building an overlook platform and access trail to the overlook. Midewin is a tallgrass prairie restoration area administered by the United States Forest Service and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. It has a trail system, and the new overlook will allow hikers a good view of Buttonbush Pond off the Prairie Creeks Woods Trail.
If you're looking for a more challenging adventure, WV has plenty of backpacking trips into more remote areas of wilderness where even cell phones don't work.
In late April, a group of volunteers backpacked 3 miles into a canyon in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in south central Utah and spent a week helping the National Park Service's back country ranger Bill Wolverton continue his nine-year mission to eradicate the non-native Russian Olive tree from the banks of the Escalante River, which flows into the Colorado River and Lake Powell.
Many years ago, the Russian Olive was purposely planted along the Escalante for erosion control, but the aggressive, thorny tree is choking out the more beautiful native trees in Utah and other states, like Colorado and New Mexico.
For four days, volunteers cut and cleared small to large Russian Olives from morning until late afternoon along the banks of the Escalante with the red rock walls of the canyon as the backdrop. Upon returning to camp, volunteers washed off the canyon dirt, sand and sweat with a swim in the Escalante before gathering on the river's banks for the nightly meal.
On each WV trip, two experienced leaders guide the group of volunteers to their destination and through the week's work that's broken up midweek by a free day of exploration and relaxation. Volunteers share in camp chores, maintaining a fresh supply of water, cleaning pots and pans, and on some trips, doing the cooking.
In Glen Canyon, the group spent its day off hiking several miles through a nearby canyon, where beautiful walls of red rock stretched high above the canyon floor, and in some places, narrowed to the width of a car. The trek required wading through parts of the Escalante and through a waist-deep mud pool, but everyone was rewarded with stunning views like those in Neon Canyon.
Reddish-orange, streaked rock walls tower over hikers in the lower part of Neon that ends at Golden Cathedral, a hiker hot spot, that's a beautiful natural amphitheater with a water pool at the bottom, the perfect place to cool off with a swim.
And that's only one of the many, many beautiful places a WV trip can take you.
If you go
If you're interested in a Wilderness Volunteers trip, there are still some openings in this year's lineup, and the best place to start is on the organization's Web site at www.wildernessvolunteers.org. There's a $259 fee for each trip that covers the cost of food, which is provided by the organization, and other costs associated with organizing the trips. On most trips, you need to supply your own backpacking and/or camping gear, except for cooking equipment and make your own travel arrangements to the rendezvous point where the group then backpacks to its destination. The Web site provides plenty of information about each trip, including the exertion level and whether it will be a car camping or backpacking excursion.
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