The folks at the Partnership for the National Trails System decided I should introduce myself in their newsletter, so I obliged with the piece that follows.<\/p>\n
– Laura<\/p>\n
I first fell in love with trails in high school, when I was running on them most mornings all summer and several afternoons a week during the school year. I was on the cross country team, you see, and training on trails honed our hill-climbing fitness and made us surefooted on rough terrain.<\/p>\n
My teammates and I ran in Eagle Creek Park, a natural haven of nearly 4,000 acres in my native Indianapolis. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a big park \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I got lost pretty regularly at first (that made for some long runs). Now, nine years later, I know every trail in that park \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the rooty staircase on the Reservoir Run, the jack-in-the-pulpits surrounding a bench on the Volksmarch trail in the springtime, the maples whose trunks and leaves become pillars, arches, and stained glass on my favorite side trail. Whenever I run those trails, I feel like I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m seeing an old friend.<\/p>\n
So why would I go all the way to Madison, Wisconsin, and leave Eagle Creek behind? To blaze some new trails, I suppose. I graduated last spring from a small school in northern Indiana called Goshen College, with an English major and a developing (and relatively mismatched) interest in sustainability. So I decided to commit to a year of service to try and link the language with the land.<\/p>\n
The program through which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m volunteering for the Partnership is called Mennonite Voluntary Service, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a program of the Mennonite church, the small Protestant denomination I grew up in. MVS offers its volunteers a chance to work in a professional position of their choosing, in any of 22 locations all around the United States, unpaid but with basic living expenses provided. Madison appealed to me, having earned a reputation as a green city, and I soon came upon the Partnership for the National Trails System, headquartered in Madison, in my search for environment-related placement options.<\/p>\n
I was intrigued: here was an organization that existed to improve and unite, not just one park or trail, but an entire (and extensive!) system of national trails. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d hit paydirt \u00e2\u20ac\u201c figuratively speaking, of course. Gary and Julia agreed to take me on as a part-time volunteer, and I started work at 222 South Hamilton in October. Since then, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve assisted with various mailings, a congressional directory, survey analyses, action alerts, and occasional copy editing. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve even made it out to Wisconsin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own National Scenic Trail \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as of December, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been working half-time with the Ice Age Trail Alliance, a perfect pairing that lets me see how the Partnership interacts with one of its trail partners.<\/p>\n
From one trail lover to another \u00e2\u20ac\u201c thank you for all the work you do to preserve, protect, and maintain the beautiful places that stir us and keep us surefooted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The folks at the Partnership for the National Trails System decided I should introduce myself in their newsletter, so I obliged with the piece that follows. – Laura I first fell in love with trails in high school, when I was running on them most mornings all summer and several afternoons a week during the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mvsmadison.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}