The more I’ve been able to get out and visit various areas of the state this year, the more I’ve become aware of the tremendous contribution college-age men and women have made to our trail systems and parks.

I’ve seen them at work on South Turner Mountain in Baxter State Park this summer and as recently as last week as they toiled away grooming new hiking trails in Jamies Pond Wildlife Management Area in Hallowell. Their work is impressive.

Unfortunately, their work often goes unnoticed or unappreciated. How often do we contemplate the origins or mechanics that go into establishing a trail where none existed? If you were to visit Jamies Pond and hike the trails, you might assume they’d been there forever. They are brand new, portions only recently completed, yet walking them is as easy as pie thanks to the hard work by young men and women involved in the Maine Conservation Corps.

You would need a scorecard to keep up with the projects they have undertaken in Maine. This year alone there have been more than 52 projects ranging from assisting the Can Am Crown Sled Dog Race Committee set up its course in Fort Kent, to beach cleanup and trail improvements at Popham Beach State Park, to interior building restoration at the Franciscan Boarding Home at Eagle Lake. While there are a few building projects, the bulk of their work is centered around trail development and maintenance.

For example, recent work includes on-going development of 40 miles of hiking trails at Nahmakanta Land Management Unit southwest of Baxter State Park; improvement of 8 miles of trails at Bradbury Mountain State Park which will be accessible to mountain bikers and horseback riders; construction of outdoor learning centers at Wayne, Standish, and Monroe elementary schools; timber stand improvements on Bangor’s 200-acre city forest; construction of a log cabin on Chamberlain Lake in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway; construction of a 24-foot multi-use bridge on property managed by Coastal Mountains Land Trust; and rehabilitation of trails and cross country ski trails at Merryspring Horticultural Nature Park in Camden.

As for the work these young men and women accomplish?

“I don’t know how we’d have done it any other way,” said Robin Smith, regional manager for the Maine Department of Conservation in Old Town. “[They] allow us to develop recreational trails, remote access camp sites, such as the three at the Cutler Land Management Unit, and water access campsites such as those at Nahmakanta Lake and Donnell Pond.” They have been doing work for the Bureau of Parks and Lands for more than seven years. “There’s no other entity to contract with” to get this type of work done, Smith said.

Their work in clearing ice storm damage on trails on Black, Caribou, and Schoodic mountains in the Donnell Pond Management Unit this past spring was invaluable, Smith said. They built the trails at Cutler, and during the past three seasons have done extensive work establishing a trail network in the Turtle Ridge section of the Nahmakanta Lake unit, the state’s largest at 43,000 acres. Smith said he expects to be contracting for their services for another three seasons developing another 10-15 miles of trail in the Debsconeag Backcountry area of Nahmakanta. In areas such as this, the crews must camp in tents and carry all their provisions and equipment to the remote worksites.

While the living arrangements are often crude, the bureaucratic umbrella they work under is complex. The Maine Conservation Corps is the coordinating arm, working in conjunction with Workforce Development Centers. Established in 1983, MCC’s mission is to accomplish natural resource-re lated projects with long-term public benefit for public and non-profit agencies; provide jobs, training, and conservation education to economically disadvantaged Maine people; and promote/manage volunteer opportunities with public natural resource agencies.

There are four programs under MCC’s wing: the Maine Conservation Corps Summer Youth Program; Americorps*College Conservation Corps of Maine (A*CCCM); the State Environmental Resource Volunter Effort for Maine (SERVE/Maine); and the SERVE/Maine Volunteer Leaders Program.

The MCC Summer Youth Program establishes teams to work on specific projects, most of which are in the corps members’ local communities while some are residential backcountry projects. Members are provided jobs, job training, and conservation education.

The A*CCCM program is a year-round residential one that completes outdoor recreation and conservation projects around the state. Members commit to a year of service and receive a living allowance, health insurance, and a $4,725 educational award as well as a semester of college at either Unity College or the University of Maine at Presque Isle.

Ken Spalding, MCC’s director, said there are 34 student corps members working on various projects such as trail work at Jamies Pond. In the Summer Youth Program there can be from 60 to 150 signed up. The SERVE/Maine volunteer program attracts 100-plus participants in any given year, and the Volunteer Leaders Program, which runs throughout the year recruiting, training, and leading community members and volunteers on local projects, has about 15 participants.

“We are the largest builder of non-motorized trails in Maine,” Spalding proudly stated as we talked recently at his headquaters on the Augusta Mental Health Institute campus. “We did the Cutler [Management Unit] 9.8-mile trail loop” over the course of three years, from design to finish, he said. As a matter of fact, nearly three-fourths of the Land for Maine’s Future properties has benefited from public access work by the MCC.

If it were not for the work in clearing downed trees after the ice storm of last winter by A*CCCM students, many of the state’s parks would have been late opening this year.

In a letter to Spalding in April, Ronald Lovaglio, commissioner of the Department of Conservation, said, “Feedback received from Parks and Lands Regional Managers and field staff indicates that without the assistance of the AmeriCorps teams, reopening of winter-use trails would have been severely delayed, particularly at Sebago Lake, Mt. Blue, and Bradbury Mountain State Park and on the snowmobile trail from Frye Mountain Wildlife Management Unit to Lake St. George State Park. The MCC assistance also made it possible for the Bureau to open some of the parks [Range Ponds, Swan Lake, Lake St. George, and Sebago Lake] on schedule this spring and ensured that the trails at our most heavily used park, Camden Hills, would be open and safe.”

Crews, generally of eight members, work with team leaders such as Tom Bradbury of West Paris, who has been with MCC for 10 years. In the summer, teams often spend eight 10-hour days working on remote projects and living (usually in tents) on site, then take six days off.

As for the students, they like the work. I had a chance to talk with Tom Boatman of Vassalboro, who’s working on an associate of urban forestry degree at Unity College, and Adrianna Siniawski of Lynn, Mass., who is working on a wildlife biology degree at Unity. They proudly described their work at Moody Mountain on the Appalachian Trail where they helped make stone steps, retaining walls, and side-hill trail stabilization involving pinning logs to ledges, log ladders, and installing steel “staples” into ledges to assist hikers in steep areas. They and others in their crew had put in a week of trail cutting and grooming at Jamies Pond, eight days working for the Friends of Acadia building trails, causeways, and three wooden bridges.

The tough work and communal living/camping was not a deterrent for Holly Kingsley, an assistant team leader into her first month on the job. The University of Montana resource management major was already thinking about signing up for a second “tour of duty” with A*CCCM. Maggie Watson of Caribou has graduated from UMPI and had classroom teaching experience, but the lure of the outdoor work was stronger. She’s in her second A*CCCM year and plans on pursuing a graduate degree in the field of ecology.

I’d bet that as long as we have the MCC and a good supply of folks like this, we can look forward to having well-groomed hiking trails in Maine, wouldn’t you?

Jeff Strout’s column is published Tuesday and Thursday. He can be reached at 990-8202.