Description
Start Date-End Date: 09/16/2023-09/17/2023
Land Manager Office:
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Summary: placeholder
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Latitude/Longitude:
Additional Information:
Camping Available: Yes
Physical Difficulty: Moderate
High Altitude Project: No
Desired Number of Volunteers: 8
Total Adult Volunteers Attended:
Total Youth Volunteers Attended:
Total Volunteer Days:
Total Unique Volunteers:
Total Volunteer Hours: 0
Staff Hours: 40
Stipend Hours: 0
Project Summary: VOC staff, tool manager, and REI (crew chef) team all arrived on Friday to set up the campsite home base. Water jugs needed to be filled at the Cal Wood Lodge since there was no access at the campsite. All food, trash, and smell-ables needed to be stored in a lightning shelter at the campsite to prevent attracting bears. Ideally, all smell-ables were also stored in a hard-sided container so that no rodents could chew through/ get to it. VOC brought extra hard-sided bins for volunteers to use. Since there was no volunteer parking allowed at the actual campsite, VOC staff provided shuttle services to the campsite for volunteers and all their gear being loaded in VOC trucks. To do this, shuttles were scheduled to be at the main parking lot of Cal Wood at 5pm, 6pm, and 7pm before it got dark.
REI Experiences Team's cooking service was donated by John Frankel for the weekend. They made Saturday Breakfast and Dinner and Sunday Breakfast. Vanessa and Angie led splitting up the crews for trail work while Emily and another Cal Wood staff member led the 6 to 11 year olds for youth programming during the day. There were very few that attended youth programming and due to the logistical issues, each day a youth came late to join us. Angie led a campfire talk after Saturday Dinner talking about Cal Wood's history and the fire that happened a few years ago.
On Sunday, teams split up a little more easily and new folks who joined on Sunday were integrated into those groups where some who only attended Saturday were no longer there. Volunteers that had already packed up their camping gear after breakfast could put it in a VOC vehicle to shuttle back to their vehicles in the main parking lot to make it easier to leave after the trailwork. Kids who attended youth programming were a little more tired and difficult to engage in activities that the Cal Wood instructor had planned. After the trailwork concluded, VOC staff shuttled volunteers who still needed to pack up their camping gear back to the campsite and shuttle them back to their vehicles before leaving the project.
Successes and Challenges: Successes:
-Volunteers completed the first trail of a 5 year trail construction project at Cal Wood that will be used immediately for guiding students on environmental education opportunities.
-REI Experiences team were great to work with and provided full and gourmet meals for everyone on project this weekend!
-Angie was amazing at coordinating our campsites for the weekend, driving the Cal Wood 15 passenger van for shuttling people, helping with trail design, and providing a CalWood Fire history/ educational talk on Saturday evening. A great partner to work with again.
Challenges:
-The campsites had very limited parking which would only allow essential vehicles to be there (VOC vehicles and REI) so volunteers didn't have immediate access to their vehicles which made transportation to and from work site and campsite a challenge. Also most folks might have wanted to sleep in their vehicle but this prevented that being possible.
-Having a family camping event had many challenges in terms of attendance. If one family would drop, that would be almost 5 spots that would be reserved but then needed to be filled to make sure there were enough people to do the trail work. Some folks would sign up their youth as an attendee which would take up a spot. Some folks would not sign up their teen that should take up a spot. Since it's a 2 day project, some people would only attend one day and not the other as well. Also possibly because of kids/youth being on the project, it made it hard to recruit for crew leaders. A lot of them had to be asked to join last-minute.
-Bathrooms were few and far between on Cal Wood's property and some 6 to 11 year olds did not want to use the restroom outside. It was great to utilize a lot of Cal Wood's property but to do so it did require a lot of hiking which was not ideal for all of the participants as well. It was hard to manage expectations with the kids for both of these things.
Lessons Learned: -Ask crew leaders why they wouldn't want to join on family camping. Is it the youth being present that affected your attendance?
-Pay close attention to the location of campsites when scouting for the project. Had we have known the difficulty of accessing the campsite we may have suggested other locations or not accepted the project?
-Try to coordinate the site visit a month or more in advance. It was difficult to do this due to the land manager's availability but trying to plan it in as much advance as possible would help in getting a better sense of logistics and moving parts before sending the informational emails for volunteers so they know what they are getting into, and allow more spots to be filled in time.
Special Notes: -I think there needs to be a clear label or understanding for attendees that are under 18. Youth = 12 to 17 year olds and Kids = 6 to 11 year olds? When organizing the roster, setting registration, and communicating between project managers it just became confusing as to what referred to which. There needed to be distinction between them since the 6 to 11 year olds would be in youth programming during the day and the 12 to 17 year olds would be on the trail with the adults. Also the needs for certain waivers and waiver signatures for both are an extra step to coordinate.
Stewardship Education:
Key Concerns or Comments from Staff or Volunteers: The logistics for family camping can be very hard to manage and recruitment (for leaders and other attendees) is difficult for these projects. It is something great to offer possibly once a year but providing more single-day projects that youth can just join public volunteers with might hit the same target audience we want to engage and be just as impactful for families rather than committing for a full weekend of camping.
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