AmeriHike

Before I came here, I knew that the whole Denver campus was divided into four units, and each unit was divided into four or five teams, but I thought it was all pretty random. It turns out that at the end of this month of training, called Corps Training Institute or CTI, the team leaders from each unit get together and pick their teams. During CTI, we are switching teams and team leaders around about every three days or so. This is so the team leaders can observe people's communication and leadership styles and to see who works well with whom. So today, my team that had bonded pretty well had to split from Sarah, our awesome leader, to go to other teams. My new leader is Christina, who I also like a lot, and my new team seems pretty good.

This morning we had more Unit Time. The Sun Unit hopped in our vans and drove like 1.5 hours away to Mount Falcon Park to go on a hike. It started off pretty nicely:
Doesn't that look like a lovely trail? I could see it heading into the woods, but for some reason I (a very inexperienced hiker) assumed it would all be this gentle. Little did I know, it would soon turn into this:
This wasn't even the worst of it, this is just when it occurred to me to take a picture of the trail. We hiked about 45 minutes, downhill most of the way, then stopped with our team to eat lunch and fill out our Individual Learning Plans (our goals for after AmeriCorps, what we want to get out of this, etc.). We then turned back the way we came. That's right, now it's uphill most of the way. I'm not going to lie, it was very difficult. I live in Illinois, where hills don't exist. Two other people from my team were having an even tougher time than I was, but we all made it eventually.

After that, we had Community Mapping. This is where we were supposed to go to a community and try to determine things like its strengths and weaknesses, what it needs, how we could help, etc. My team went to a Boys and Girls Club on the other side of Denver. We managed to talk to the director, Rich, about what they've been doing. It sounded like they were doing some really great work. He told us several stories about kids who come from horrible backgrounds who go to college with scholarships. Rich seemed amazing and really passionate about his work. I think my team might do some ISP hours there soon. (NCCC requires 1,700 hours of service for successful completion of the program, and at least 80 of those have to be Independent Service Project hours, where corps members have to set up projects on their own).

And now for a few don't-do-it-justice pictures of the view from the death hike.