Sep 8, 2017 | The Youth Conservation Corps is a program coordinated through the Arizona Conservation Corps that affords young people, typically 17- and 18-year-olds, the opportunity to perform community service and resource conservation through hands-on project work with a variety of land management and community partners, including the Kaibab National Forest. 

September 1, 2017 | A training for volunteer coordinators from Brazil’s Chico Mendes Institute for the Conservation of Biodiversity were hosted by U.S. Forest Service International Programs and the Pike & San Isabel National Forests & Cimarron & Comanche National Grasslands, which includes the Salida Ranger District.

August 29, 2017 | As the young adults displayed photos of their project sites to family members and community partners, they spoke of the challenges of long, hot days filled with heavy lifting and technical rock and fence work. They also recalled the camaraderie developed on four- and eight-day “spikes,” camping, cooking and hanging out with their crewmates. Several were close to tears as they told of gaining confidence and making lifelong friends.

August 19, 2017 | On this day, an overcast, relatively cool Friday morning earlier this month, the Farm Corps crew is working a 1.5-acre field just off Pueblo Road in Acomita, a village at Acoma Pueblo, about 60 miles west of Albuquerque. The field is planted with Acoma white corn, Hopi yellow watermelons and Acoma pumpkins.

August 7, 2017 | A bit less than 2 miles from the Columbine Canyon Trailhead a group of young people are 18 total days into a project to rebuild the bridge at the third river crossing (the fourth, if you count the small crossing over Deer Creek) on the Columbine Canyon Trail accessed via the canyon between Red River and Questa.

August 4, 2017 | As I watched the activity within this group, witnessing expanding connections between the inspired participants, I was reminded—yet again—of the reverence Indigenous people have for this Earth, and how it is typically instilled as soon as a small child begins to comprehend.

July, 2017 | We can’t change the past, but we can change how long people remember it.” These were the words of 12-year-old Elly Weber as she opened her speech at the conclusion of 2017’s Preserve America Youth Summit in Colorado. Weber was one of 46 students from across Colorado who attended the tenth Preserve America Youth Summit in the Southern Rockies this year. 

April 15, 2017 | I graduated from Winona State University in Winona, MN in May of 2016 with a BS in Geoscience: Environmental Science. During school I took as many opportunities as I could and my internship here at Salinas Pueblo Missions was not my first Geoscientist-in-the-Parks (GIP) internship in the search for paleontology experience. In the summer of 2015 I worked at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado. After that experience in a park founded largely because of its paleontological resources, what interested me most about the position at Salinas Pueblo Missions was the opportunity to work in a park that had not yet been explored for paleontological resources. The geology underlying the park has been studied for decades and the paleontology in the area has been pretty well documented but no one had yet examined the units within the park boundaries.

March 12, 2017 | In honor of AmeriCorps Week 2017, I would like to share my story of service, with the hope that other will commit their skills, knowledge, and time to tackle pressing problems and strengthen our nation. As part of the Geoscientists-in- the-Parks (GIP) program, a partnership between the Geological Society of America (GSA), Environmental Stewards, and the AmeriCorps program, I had the privilege of guiding approximately 900 third-graders from Richland and Lexington Counties, SC, on a journey to discover their natural environment.