[lookout bob]

WTA has posted previews of the Back Country Response Trips (BCRTs) and volunteer vacations. There are some great trips this year! Check them out and how to register and find out what they're all about at wta.org/volunteer

[timberghost]

Is the list complete, some of the trails that are in dire need are not up for schedule it appears.

[Kim Brown]

are you looking at this list? Looks like a few in dire condition are indeed on schedule: Salmo Priest, Bald Eagle, Nannie Ridge, Mt .David, Sunday Lake, Entiat Rv, War Creek all are in pretty rough shape. And that's just what I gleaned from only the first few pages of many more trips I didn't leaf through. WTA crews do good work. They often add more BCRTs throughout the summer.

[bgs8379]

White River , Forest Service torched it last summer. Nothing but black.

[treeswarper]

My problem and it is probably only mine, is that the day crews I went on get started so late in the day that it is hot. I'm a "get to work while it is still cool" person. What with the gathering, then safety lecture, then a get to know everybody, then maybe a snack, and this all beginning at 9AM, it's just too hot when actual work begins. I assume the back country work might be better as all the intro stuff wouldn't happen every day? And it's hard for most of the world to get to a place and start work at the butt crack of dawn.

[Kim Brown]

Yes, but they go through all that the 1st day. Thereafter, you can be on the trail as early as the group decides. I haven't done a BCRT in over a decade, but we were often on the trail by 7 AM. In summer, its daylight at 4:30, so that was easy to do. The initial trips that morphed into BCRT's in the late 1990s weren't continued - we were begging people to join them. The idea came from a core group of groupies who went off to do trail work on their own without any planning by WTA (that is NOT cool nowadays and we were asked to stop doing that, as at least once we had done work that a USFS contractor was hired to do. They still had to pay to contractor. Oops). But outside of the groupies, for some reason, no one was very interested. The weeklongs were only $75 then; even the crew leader on those trips was a volunteer, no paid kitchen assistant, and no paid food and gear organization - all volunteers; now with all the paid folks they're a bit pricey - but I hear people do enjoy the weeklongs very much. perhaps cost is why when WTA took up the idea again years later, the program took off.