Some preliminary statistics for the Mount Rainier Recovery Corps

October will be a month of gathering statistics for the past year of volunteer activity, and as the numbers come in, I will share them with you. Here are some great preliminary numbers for the Student Conservation Association's Mount Rainier Recovery Corps. They do not include the many, many volunteers who participated at the park in other ways--just the ones who volunteered with our SCA crew leaders.

2008 included:

• 105 person-days of snow removal
• 521 person-days of meadow roving
• 8 "sherpa projects" (carrying supplies to work locations in the backcountry), involving transport of 6,400 pounds of gear
• 33 Soundscape Monitoring sites monitored
• 130 person-days of weed eradication
• 5 trail bridges built
• 15 organizations worked with
• 118 youth volunteers worked with, many of them for periods of weeks or months
• 1,486 amphibians surveyed
• 111 total projects

The Corps worked with close to 670 individual volunteers, which is only about 30 short of last year's number--very gratifying given the lower level of urgency this year and the fact that our Recovery Corps itself was much smaller than last year!