Sorry for the delay in adding my notes but it looks like we have a great start to the volunteer list.
Like last year, there will be the Obstacle Course at the JeepFest Home Base site as well as off site trails. The Sheriff has plans to add more obstacles to the course and add 1 more trail to the Sandy Bottoms area(which is where all the trails were last year) and also 2 more trails at another location called Moto Mountain.
The Sheriff's office and their volunteers will handle the Obstacle Course...we asked that they get some experience by coming out and seeing the guys that would pre-run the courses so they could see what the needed to know for spotting. He agreed with that comment.
Each trail will have a club handling it's management. Of the clubs that showed up, they all pointed to GaTR to handle the new extreme trail, to located at the Sandy Bottom property, and we accepted it. It will be our job to develop the trail and then staff it for the times it will be open. The Sheriff has one more meeting with the landowner of the Sandy Bottoms property, once that is done he will let us know that we can come out and review the trail area. Mike with JeepHut knows the general area of this potential trail and will meet us to point us in the right direction. After that meeting we will know how much work it will take to develop the trail and then staff it during JeepFest. This will be OUR trail and we can put up banners if we like to show GaTR's support.
Staffing for our trail will be necessary on Saturday(9/7) from 9am to 6pm and Sunday(9/8) from 10am to 3pm. Based on the length and real world difficulty of the trail(they want a harder trail than last year's "hard" trail so they called it "extreme", we'll see how extreme it really is) we would need volunteers for trail leader and a tail gunner for probably 2/3 hour time slots. The good news is that with enough volunteers, everyone will only have to do one slot and then have the rest of the time to enjoy the Fest! The Sheriff offered his deputies and other employees to help stage and keep the waiting area organized and in shape and to ensure that the jeep folks are following the rules(seatbelts, everyone in a real seat, no drinking, proper equipment, etc).
For our efforts they will give us a "club" tent location on Club Row for free. We also asked them to consider a reduction in price for the volunteers. The seemed very open to the discount idea, much more so that in the past. I told the Sheriff that last year we had about 5 or 6 club members come out, two that volunteered...all paid full price. This year we could easily have 20 to 30 members come out with half of those volunteering...I told him that a 50% discount for the volunteers would still net more to the Charity than last year. He agreed and asked that we get him a rough number of volunteers as soon as possible and he would get back to us on a discount. I think 50% off would be reasonable and fair to both us and them, this would be for those actually working on the trail and volunteering on the trail.
We also need to send them a GaTR logo, the Sheriff plans to put all the volunteer clubs on the JeepFest website.
More to come as we find out when we can get on the property and scout the trail and begin trial prep!
One more thing. The Sheriff said that this time last year they had about 60 pre-registered, as of last Saturday they had 140 already pre-registered!
Topic: JeepFest Crawl for the Kids September 6th - 8th 2013 Jasper, Ga (Read 3594 times)
