Welcome to Trailsville!

Greetings from Arkansas! Here are a few pictures to hopefully paint a picture of what life has been like since I moved here a few weeks ago!

Here's a picture of "Trailsville" AKA my home sweet home. We live here in the heart of the Cossatot River State Park. The polebarn in the background belongs to one of the park rangers whose house is about a half-mile up the driveway. We live in these camping trailers inside the fencing. There are three trailers for our team, and then three more trailers for the "trail crew" that we work with on the other side of the barn.

This is my lovely trailer that I live in with Lindsey (my team leader) and Erin. The little window on the top left is right where my top bunk bed is located. They are actually very nice trailers compared to what I was expecting. We have heat, a stove and fridge, a toilet and a small shower. The only probably with the shower is that we have very limited hot water, so we are only able to shower a couple times a week. We also got gym memberships, so we try to shower there when we go into town a few times a week.

This is my shuffle-round team on our first day hike.
(Top row L to R: Kacy, Andrew, Erin, Kelly, Scott, Jeremy, Steve. Bottom row L to R: Lindsey, MG, Me, Aaron-aka Danger.)

Arkansas is so beautiful -- I wasn't expecting the landscape to be so nice. There's tons of water, rock formations, crystals, and beautiful plants.

Here we are hoisting a bridge into place using a pully-system and ropes. The bridge needed to be built over a steep ravine, and it wasn't safe to build the bridge from the start over the opening, so we built the basic frame off to the side and then lifted it into place. This took a couple hours and nearly 18 sets of hands to make this move go smoothly and safely.

Here are some of my teammates and the trail crew waiting on one side of the bridge for the other side to level their end. The man in the middle of the picture is our sponsor, Jim Langford. He is AWESOME -- so positive and encouraging. He works on the trail with us every day, supervising our work and helping us learn how to build the bridges and trails. The guy in the blue shirt is Mike, one of the 4 "trail crew" members that Jim employs to work with him. All four of them are past AmeriCorps NCCC members, so they are great to work with because they understand our program and where we're coming from.

Here's the bridge finally in place over "Trista Falls."

We've been doing a lot of bridge work, which I am enjoying because I am learning more construction skills. This is the beginning of what will soon be "MultiFalls Bridge." One end of the bridge will be at the top of the silver ramp in the left side of the picture, and the other side will end in the bottom right corner of the picture on the wooden retaining wall.

And just 10 days later, here's the finished bridge at Multi Falls! I worked on this bridge a lot, so it was really exciting to finish it up last Thursday!

Another view of the bridge -- it's about 40 feet long.

When we're not building bridges, we are cutting trail. THIS IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT WORK! We swing pick-axes and pulaskis, pull roots, move giant rocks, and rake the dirt. It is very physically demanding, but I am getting more used to it. This is a section that we cut last week.

These are just a few pictures for now. We also had chainsaw training a couple weeks ago, which was cool -- I have pictures from it that I can put up soon! I am definitely having a once-in-a-lifetime experience here and learning a lot about trailbuilding and myself. I will try to keep this more updated! Take care!