Northwest Youth Corps - NYC youth build trails at Aumsville Ponds

The nearly 1-mile, part gravel trail came at no cost to Marion County. The Northwest Youth Corps brought two groups to the Marion County park to make improvements.

The Northwest Youth Corps is a Eugene-based group that gives kids a chance to work in the outdoors and learn about the environment away from typical summer jobs such as fast food restaurants.

The park is maintained by Marion County but has a limited budget to make such drastic improvements.

“There is absolutely no charge to Marion County,” said Orville Rice, Marion County parks manager “It’s amazing how much work they have gotten done here in two weeks.”

The group is funded through grants and other programs. <

“The benefit for the citizens of Marion County is that a lot of the projects would never get done because of our limited budget,” Rice said.

The group of teenage boys, ages 16-19, established the trail by hand.

“The area was thick with blackberry bushes,” Rice said. “We asked them to make the trail 5 foot wide, and it is just great. This is the hardest working crew I have ever seen.”

The ambitious teenagers spend the evenings learning about the environment they work in and love. The group is a branch of the AmeriCorps and focuses on community service, education and the environment.

Each night the crew would have SEED time, the acronym for Something Educational Every Day. The group talks about real life skills like how to resolve a conflict, map reading and the hot topic, drug and alcohol abuse.

The hard working crew earns about $1,200 a week and works for five weeks.

“It is fun to meet people and make friends,” said Micah Rasmussen from Springfield. “People in the community are so appreciative and have never seen anything like this before.”

The group takes pride in the work they do, too.

“We slept here and worked here,” said Kris Givens from Longview, Wash. “We have been working long days. We would come back to camp and be ready to hit the sack.”

Sometimes the group would wake up to loud music. One morning the crew reported that they went back to look at the trail they had just finished packing and hauling gravel for and there were already cigarette butts on the trail.

“Its gets kind of discouraging and hard to keep working when the very next morning the trail has already been vandalized,” Givens said.

This is the second year that Marion County has used the Youth Corps for the park.

“Last year the Youth Corps made a trail for us at Niagara Park,” Rice said.

This year the focus was the pond trail and building some viewpoints to meet the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements.

”Next year I hope to get some bridges on the trail,” Rice said.

The park is gaining in popularity as people find out about it and realize that the park has been improved.

“With every project, the park is improving and people are enjoying it,” Rice said.

Photo by Jodi Kerr. The Northwest Youth Corps, an Eugene-based group, brought two groups of teenagers to Aumsville Ponds last week to help forge a 5-foot-wide trail around the park.

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