It may have been a Friday the 13^th – but it proved lucky for Martin Aksentowitz, a college grad from Phoenix, who found a job after recently being laid off from the auto industry test-driving Bentley’s. Today, he works for the Coconino Rural Environment Corps (CREC) in a job that pays between $7.50 and $13.00 an hour. The Arizona based youth corps was hired by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), thanks to a Recovery Act grant of $70,200. The Corps task is to repair 33 miles of recreational trails within the national landscapes of wildernesses, monuments, and public lands reserved for hikers, equestrians, tourists, and frequented by those who study cultural and historic features.

Located about an hour’s drive north of Phoenix, the youth crew left pavement and had to hike the rest of the way to the job site – in a national Wilderness where motorized vehicles and equipment are prohibited. Federal, state, and county officials shuffled behind for a ground-breaking ceremony. 

Asking the eight young Americans to stand for recognition, the BLM Arizona State Director Jim Kenna said, “The Recovery Act not only puts Arizonans back to work, but is now cultivating a new generation of public land stewards. Let’s give a round of applause for these workers.”  The crew members live in tents along the wilderness trails while working full-time.

Kenna also recognized the contribution of the nonprofit Wilderness Land Trust, which recently acquired 640 acres of private land within the Wilderness; and in April this year, the BLM obtained the land making the Wilderness whole.

Representatives of the Wilderness Land Trust, the CREC, Arizona’s Yavapai County and, the City of Peoria joined Kenna and the BLM Hassayampa Field Office Manager Steve Cohn in a ceremony to officially kick off the Recovery Act project by stacking rocks to make a cairn marking the trailhead.  The dignitaries then shoveled dirt around the cairn in the symbolic ground-breaking, and the CREC crew immediately went to work – a scene positively featured November 13, 2009, on television news in America’s 5^th largest metro city – of youth lifting large hammers to pound stone boulders and shovel unyielding desert dirt to forge the trails. At 18, Cairo Kepley of Flagstaff is among the youngest on the CREC. She says she joined the crews to gain work experience in a positive atmosphere; and when she completes service, she plans to enter culinary school with her AmeriCorps scholarship. 

As the Corps continued its work on the BLM Recovery Act project, those in the audience trekked eight miles deep into the Wilderness led by BLM staffers Rich Hanson of the Phoenix District Office and Mike Werner of the Arizona State Office. At intermittent stops, Hanson provided insights on natural history, wildlife, and trail improvements that the CREC team will make as a result of the ARRA funding. Wildlife sightings were limited to a bull that watched the stream of hikers with interest but no apparent antagonism, and a tarantula.