Updates & Stories

7:00 AM: The day starts with getting the truck from the “bull pen”, a fenced area where all the DNR and Corps trucks are housed. Our crew leader Steve checks his email or calls our project host to see what we are doing, and today we are heading up to Wild River State Park to work on woody invasives. Read More

Unlike many other field crews, work on a water trails crew can be very much a feast or famine type of situation. Some rivers will give us more work than we sometimes think we can handle. We’re working at least ten hours a day (many days more than that) and it seems we don’t get anywhere. Snag after snag and jam after jam seems to be blocking our path to open river, freedom and a wonderful sense of accomplishment. Read More

Ever wonder what an oak tree talking to another oak sounds like? I know… Oak-Oak-OAK.An oak savanna -- especially one that doesn’t need management – is a rare ecosystem. Read More

As a member of the NPS Roving crew, I work with the Exotic Plant Monitoring Team (EPMT); as a part of that work I have spent nearly four months backpack spraying in forests and restored prairies throughout parks in the Midwest. We’ve treated exotic invasives such as sericea lespedeza, Johnson grass and Japanese stilt grass, to name just a few, but also focused on native invasives like sumac, dogwood and plum.  Read More

Like many Plains States, Minnesota was once home to millions of acres of prairie grassland. Native grasses like big blue stem, little blue stem, switch grass, Indian grass, porcupine grass or side-oats grama, and forbs such as goldenrod, prairie smoke and blazing star covered the western and southern parts of the state. However, if you travel through the southwest region of Minnesota today, you would be hard-pressed to find an area with native remnant prairie.  Read More

On my first day with Conservation Corps, I pulled into a dark and snowy parking lot where my crew leader and the first crew member to arrive were standing to greet me. That crew member shook my hand and introduced herself: “I’m Sophia, but you can call me Grace,” she said. She was bright eyed and excited. Read More

Hours before dawn on a mid-August morning, my crew and I started the truck and began the drive east back to the Brainerd office, ending our final project trip in North Dakota. Our departure was marked only by the sound of jumping gravel and the hushing of countless field crickets, whose mating calls had made the last ten mornings so raucously serene. “What is that?” Read More

Does construction count as conservation? Why yes, yes it does. When we build a fence for instance, even if it is to protect bicyclists and hikers from steep hills in a recreational park, we’re promoting the protection of both recreational and preserved natural resources by keeping those places destination points for families containing the next generation of nature lovers. But, wait, that's not all!  Read More

There's a sense of peace waiting to be discovered in the outdoors that I've been spoiled by—that throughout my travels has become this miraculous anywhere-kind-of home. Sometimes that peace is the silence that drifts in right before a rainstorm: easy to miss when plugged into social networks of the 21st century but impossible to avoid when wading with my crew through the prairie while the horizon is gathering purple and green.  Read More

August has been exciting for the Metro Crew: rather than maintaining rain gardens, we finally had the opportunity to build them! For a week and a half we worked alongside a landscape architect from the nonprofit Metro Blooms. They worked with the neighborhood group in Prospect Park Minneapolis to give grants for rain gardens to be placed on thirteen homeowners’ properties, and we were there to help install them. Read More