June is Great Outdoors Month, and that also means it’s time for the Great American Campout, typically held on the fourth Saturday in June. In honor of celebrating camping safely and responsibly, the Student Conservation Association (SCA) offers many programs geared toward maintaining campsites and educating visitors. Here are three locations where you can find our SCA crew members making a difference this summer!
Home to 2.4 million acres of rugged backcountry, historic areas and beautiful alpine lakes, the SCA’s Backcountry Wilderness Ranger spends 12 weeks at the extraordinary Washakie, Fitzpatrick and Popo Agie Wilderness areas. The ranger helps with campsite inventory, cleanup, naturalization and restoration. They also help carry out trash and collect visitor use data throughout 1.4 million acres of wilderness. The data will help inform upcoming visitor use management decisions for some of the Forest’s most highly used areas. Named after the Shoshoni people who have called this area of northwestern Wyoming home for thousands of years, the Shoshone National Forest is part of the 10-million-acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
The SCA’s Wilderness Ranger Crew joins a diverse wilderness program with the U.S. Forest Service. They help conduct wilderness patrols and provide visitor education on Leave-No-Trace camping principles to encourage visitors to preserve and protect the campsites they visit. Trail maintenance and reconstruction projects are also a critical part of this project. The Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest is a large and diverse landscape, encompassing 3.8 million acres along the east slopes of the Cascade Range in Washington state.
The SCA’s Wilderness Trail Crew performs trail maintenance along 360 miles of trails, including re-establishing trail treads, clearing logs crossing the trails, cleaning out water bars, installing trail signs, and providing campsite cleanup and rehab. The Payette National Forest boasts more than 2.3 million acres to enjoy, where visitors will find the deep recesses of Hells Canyon and peaks reaching elevations of almost 9,500 feet. From Hells Canyon to the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, here you can experience the solitude of seldom traveled trails.
Help our crews continue to preserve and protect national, state and local parks with your gift for our Million Dollar Challenge. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar through June 30 for TWICE the impact!
