Youth Fitness and Team-building
Young people who build trails in Colorado’s forests and national parks learn about the importance of physical fitness and how to be part of a team.
When Brandon Warren examines some of the roughly 100 miles of hiking trails he helped build in Colorado and Wyoming, he sees not only the corridors of outdoor recreation, but also the team-building efforts that went into constructing them. The Rocky Mountain Youth Corps has been carving back country trails for the past 15 years, and as logistics manager, Warren has been part of the effort for six of them.
Through the Colorado Healthy People 2010 initiative, he was recruited as a youth mentor for the trail-building crews in Rocky Mountain National Park and the Routt, Arapahoe and San Isabel National Forests, as well as other public lands. His job is to inspire the young men and women in his charge toward increased physical fitness and to function as a single unit, sculpting hillsides with recreational walkways.
“We start with goofy things like name games,” said Warren. “And we wind up completing complex projects like water and weed mitigation, fence building, thinning underbrush and creating elaborate rock structures.”
Warren says getting the job done means getting crew members to plan together and talk things out. He discourages friends from joining the corps together, preferring to split them up and have them meet new people with whom to form a working unit.
“It’s all about the team,” said Warren. Group dynamics that focus on building character, motivating each other to be physically resilient and, of course, learning about back country engineering are encouraged.
Groups of 16- to 18-year-olds work only in the summer, while some 18- to 25-year-old crews work on trails as long as five months at a time. They trek to a project site, set up a base camp, cook their meals over camp fires and sleep in tents. At evening campfires, the crews learn about forest ecology in the corps’ SEED Program (Service and Environmental Education).
Corps members come out of the forest weekly to clean up and briefly spend time in a rural town, enjoying a prepared meal and a hot shower. Youths’ postings on the corps’ website bear testimony to the lasting, positive impact of summers spent building trails—from their experience in the corps, youths carry forward an awareness of what it means to be a team player, and of healthy mind and body.
