A little official business to take care of today. The Forest Service reports volunteer hours in conjunction with their fiscal calendar, which runs from October 1 – September 30. For those of you who regularly volunteer, you’ve most likely already been contacted by the FS requesting you to report your hours. It might seem like a pain to track and report your volunteer hours but it’s really important for the FS to have an accurate count on the volunteer hours being spent within their districts and across the forest. In general, the Project Leader is supposed to take care of tracking and then reporting the hours for her/his project. If you haven’t reported your hours or have any questions about the process, please contact either your Trail Leader, the organization sponsoring your project or the FS District you worked within. And if all else fails, feel free to contact Jasonn Beckstrand: JasonnB@LPForest.org
Along those lines, late last year John Ziegler from www.HikeLosPadres.com was nice enough to create an online volunteer hour project tracker. Again this should be managed by the Project Leader but after a project is complete you can report the hours of all the volunteers and the project specifics within the HLP tracker. It only takes a few minutes and at the end of the year it’s very easy to pull spreadsheet reports which break down volunteer hours by individual, by district, by organization, by trail, etc….. This is the first year the online project tracker has been used and it’s been a huge help for reporting and tracking hours. BUT it’s only as good as the information that is input into the system. If you are not using HLP to report your hours, you should probably check it out. For more information check in with Jasonn, see email address above.
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And if you’re interested in peak bagging, there’s a great discussion right now about Los Padres peaks.
Check it out on the Facebook page, click here.