This week we’re excited to welcome eight AmeriCorps NCCC team members to Walker Valley. They will volunteer with us until December 19th as part of their 10-month-long service through AmeriCorps. They’re coming to us from Florida, where they’ve been assisting with hurricane relief efforts.
While serving at Tremont, they will set the stage for future programming at the second campus. Over the next month, they’ll help us continue to expand the backcountry trail network, digging, lopping, and sawing their way toward a trail system that can support future programming. In addition, they’ll clear an area of early successional forest composed primarily of invasive species, including mimosa, privet, and vining honeysuckle. Their labor will lay the groundwork for future native perennial plantings, like elderberry, pawpaw, walnut, mulberry, grapes, and raspberries, that can grow in complement to one another as an edible food forest. They’ll also help with other projects, including habitat restoration in the lagoons at our home campus in Walker Valley, inoculation of mushroom logs, storm damage cleanup, and various other projects.
We’re grateful for the support of AmeriCorps NCCC in launching new projects at our second campus and look forward to sharing their accomplishments over the next month!
Want to meet the team in person? Sign up to build trails with this crew during an upcoming volunteer day on our second campus.
About the Author
Elizabeth Davis is the Land Manager at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. She is a native East Tennessean who grew up exploring and backpacking in the Southern Appalachians before moving away to the snowy mountains of the northeast. She received a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Conservation Biology from Middlebury College, worked at John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, spent a few seasons at the Ashokan Center in the Catskills, and hiked from Maine to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail before finding her way back home. She has worked at Tremont full-time since 2014.
