Northwest Youth Corps - Sumpter Valley Dredge State Heritage Area

Kayleigh Knudsen is slinging mud and getting paid to do it. She plunges her hands into a wheelbarrow and scoops out two fistfuls of gray goop that looks like the remnants of a Slurpee gone wrong.

Knudsen, a 19-year-old from Hermiston, kneels beside a calf-high rock wall and twists her wrists. The mortar spills from her palms in thick globs, like clots of half-congealed gravy that ooze onto the ground with a soft wet thump. Knudsen grabs a grimy spoon and thrusts it between a chunk of limestone and a hunk of granite, each about the size of a cantaloupe.

Mortar squeezes into the gap and a thin stream squirts out the other side, like a dab of toothpaste pushed between neighboring molars.

“Sorry, I don't want to splash you,” Knudsen says to a co-worker who stands nearby. Locking these rocks into place is a messy job, Knudsen concedes. But it's better, she said, than dishing out burgers and fries, which is how she used to earn a paycheck.

On Wednesday Knudsen and the eight other members of her Northwest Youth Corps crew were building the base for a sign at the entrance to the Sumpter Valley Dredge State Heritage Area. Their raw material is both conveniently located and historically appropriate. The dredge spat out the stones as it churned through Sumpter Valley between 1913 and 1954, searching for gold.

The group — six boys and three girls, ages 16 to 19 — hefted 35 loads of rocks into a trailer Monday and Tuesday, said Rob Angster, crew leader for Northwest Youth Corps, a Eugene-based non-profit that assigns its teen-age crews to jobs across the Northwest.

Angster said his crew's goal is to construct the 16-foot-long stone sign base to a height of about 3 feet by the weekend. Another Northwest Youth Corps team will arrive next week to finish the base, one section of which will rise to 8 feet. Angster's crew, meanwhile, will spend the next two weeks building barbed wire fence in the Seven Devils Mountains, on the Idaho side of Hells Canyon.

The teen-agers paid a $200 tuition for the five-week session, but they also earn a $1,000 stipend, plus $6 a day for food, Angster said. Crew members also can earn bonuses totaling as much as $250 if they work every assigned hour with no accidents.

Knudsen, however, said she considers the money a fringe benefit.

“This is about learning, growing up, it's not about money,” she said late Wednesday morning while the crew relaxed in a pool of refreshing shade beneath a grove of ponderosa pines.

The teens, whose hometowns range from Western Oregon to Virginia, gathered June 18 at a campground in the mountains above Boise. Wednesday was the mid-point of their five-week tour, and Knudsen said the group, none of whom had met before June 18, already seem as familiar as a gang of old friends.

“We're together 24 hours a day,” she said. “You become really close, really fast.”

The crew, besides working as a team, also eats together, rests together and camps together, bunking down in a trio of tents, Angster said.

“Two for the guys, one for the girls,” he said.

Knudsen said she needed a few nights to adjust, as she hadn't slept under the stars since she was a first-grader. Not so for Joe Piccolotti, 16, of Eugene. He said he camps often.

“Sleeping in a tent is no big deal,” he said.

The first week on the job the crew built a wooden bridge on a trail near Colville, Wash. Last week they piled slash in Idaho's Payette National Forest.

Knudsen prefers the Sumpter sign job.

“Slash piling is so tedious, repetitive,” she said. “(Assembling the rocks into a sign base) actually requires some thinking.”

The crew concludes its half-hour lunch break by slicing open a cold watermelon.

Jay Hobbs, 18, of Idaho City, Idaho, deftly wields a folding pocket knife, carving wedges of watermelon with the blade, then spearing them with the tip and transferring the dripping pieces into his mouth. He somehow accomplishes all this without bloodshed.

“Pretty bacony,” Hobbs says as he slurps red juice and spits a slippery black seed onto the carpet of brown pine needles.

The watermelon didn't appear particularly porcine, but Hobbs has a thing for bacon. In fact he introduces himself not as Jay or as Hobbs, but as Bacon.

His said his co-workers bestowed the nickname on him last year, when he also worked for Northwest Youth Corps, including a stint building a fence at the Sumpter dredge park.

“I talk a lot about bacon,” he said.

He didn't have any to eat, though, until his crew leader last year, whom Hobbs describes as both “vegan and kosher,” bought him a rasher.

When all that1s left of the watermelon is well-gnawed rinds, the crew members don their orange hardhats, button their blue chambray shirts and walk 50 feet back to the sign base.

Damian Withen, 17, creates a miniature rainbow as he sprays water into a motorized mortar mixer.

None of the crew is farther from home than Withen, who lives in Wise, Virginia. Most of the year, anyway. During summer he stays in McCall, Idaho, where his dad is a smokejumper.

Hobbs and Jeremiah Murray, 16, of Genesee, Idaho, shovel mortar from a wheelbarrow. Angster helps the teen-agers sort through several piles of rocks and pick ones of the proper size and shape. The sunshine straddles that fine line between warm and hot, but Angster acknowledges that conditions could be worse.

And probably will be the next two weeks in Hells Canyon. For now, though, Angster, who has a perfect Santa Claus beard except it's black rather than white, concentrates not on heat but on the cool dip that awaits back at camp.

The crew pitched its tents at Millers Lane Campground, on the south shore of Phillips Reservoir about eight miles from Sumpter.

“The lake's close,” Angster said. “It feels really good at the end of the day.”

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