KRCR News Feature
Wed, March 27th 2024 | by Maxwell Tedford
Whiskeytown Environmental School advances recovery through donations and trail repairs
Image Courtesy of Redding Trail Alliance
SHASTA COUNTY, Calif. — Across the board, the Whiskeytown Environmental School (WES) has made major steps toward getting things back to normal. With focus now shifting from just repairing facilities to clearing out the trails the camp once used, and with even more money coming in to help build it back better.
“We have a lot of good news to report," says Melinda Kashuba. "We ended last year pretty strong. We had raised over $4 million in gifts and pledges. Since that time, we’ve had another $1 million anonymous donation come in.”
Kashuba is the president of WES Community, the nonprofit that runs the environmental school and camp. She says the most recent donation put them at about $5.5 million of their $15 million goal for their "Grow Back Better" campaign, which will fund the rebuild of the camps housing. She says that's not the only project in the works.
“Rehabilitating the amphitheater which has been one of our big pushes since last fall," she says. "We’re about $19,000 short of our $75,000 goal to start that work.”
They plan to start renovating the current amphitheater by this summer at the latest, and this spring they’ve started to turn their attention to the trails.
The Carr Fire damaged the trails, hazard trees, soil erosion and the trails near WES haven’t been given a lot of love," Kashuba says.
Which is why over a dozen volunteers, including a team with the Redding Trail Alliance (RTA), got involved, clearing out almost the entirety of the Hydraulic Mine trail and several portions of others in just one day.
"[When] a call goes out and they say, 'this is for the kids,' of course you show up," said Redding Trail Alliance Founder Nathan Knudsen. He says, as someone who went to WES himself, helping out was the obvious choice.
“Lots of memories from that—some good; some bad. But, as a sixth grader, that’s life," Knudsen said. "I really think its an important part of this community that the children get to experience that.”
Every season, Kashuba says more of their slots for day camps are taken up, with some schools coming from as far as Butte County. All the help and support they've been receiving shows Kashuba how important WES is.
“I’s a legacy," she said. "Its over 50 years [that] this school has existed, and people want it back. It’s a 'rite of passage.'”
Kashuba says they are in talks with the forest service to get moving on planning out the new housing on campus. However, because of all the red tape involved, she says they don’t expect to get started on rebuilding a lot of that until 2025 to 2027.
