June 21-23, the Arizona Elk Society was honored to help Ethan G. earn his Eagle Scout Badge. Our goal was to build ½ mile of log-worm fencing to protect a meadow from off-road vehicle travel. A few months ago, the local game warden had contacted us about this being an area of concern. He was doing an airplane survey when they flew over this meadow and witnessed OHV’s driving through this sensitive area. Blind Lake has channels that were constructed for critical waterfowl habitat such as nesting ducks. The Arizona Elk Society gladly accepted his offer to build this fence and starting implementing the plans to do so.

On June 20, Ethan and his dad along with a few other volunteers met up at the meadow to begin staging logs. A member of the forest service had graciously brought logs up on a flatbed with a Bobcat and placed the bundles where I had asked him to, about every 200’. We just had to transfer a few of the logs by hand. We begin cutting feet for the fence and got everything staged that we needed to.

Friday, June 21 a few more volunteers showed up and we had 5 people in total, so we decided to get a head start on building the fence, and we knew this fence would be hard to get finished in one day. (This is a fence that is held together with log screws, so you have some people pre-drilling, then others coming behind and assembling the fence with those screws.) We worked most of the day until about 4 PM and with 5 people we managed to build 580 feet of fence. Afterwards, we retired to camp and had cheeseburgers and chips before settling down for the night.

Saturday, June 22 we had our full crew of 21 people, including Ethan’s scout troop along with AES volunteers. After a hearty burrito breakfast and a safety meeting, we quickly got to work. It took us awhile to get our rhythm, but Ethan did a great job of assembling teams. We had a team staging the logs for us, some who were building what we call tabletops, some who were measuring distances, and then our final assembly crew for the fence. We also had someone watching our charging station for the batteries, and a professional photographer on site. It was really impressive to see how hard the troop worked all day, and even more impressive to see younger and older working together for a common goal. After a day’s hard work, we were finished with the fence build by 4 PM. We managed to get done just in time, and not 2 minutes after cleaning up the site, the monsoon rains unleashed on us. We got back to camp, huddled under the 2 EZ ups and kitchen canopy to stay dry, and we had a pasta dinner with alfredo/marinara and garlic toast. We were all tired, but we had great conversations around the camp

Sunday morning, we woke up and had a great breakfast before packing up camp. We would like to thank the partners who worked with us on this, including the AZGFD and the Coconino National Forest. We also would like to thank the volunteers who came to help, the Scout troop and leaders who helped, and would like to congratulate Ethan on his accomplishment.