It’s hard to imagine starlight in Brooklyn, but here—75 miles southwest of the Brooklyn Bridge—small, celestial sparks come dancing through the trees, finding breaks in the canopy, almost as if there were a city up there. Here is the Mohican Outdoor Center, one of AMC’s southernmost destination, which sits in the middle of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, a small vestige of wilderness in western New Jersey.
The Water Gap’s eye-popping 70,000 acres are cut by the Delaware River and a ridge that defines the eastern reach of the Pocono Mountains. You can hike to Mohican—via the Appalachian Trail—or drive to it, which is not unlike Lucy Pevensie finding Narnia in the back of a closet. From highway to suburbia to back roads, the woods close in. All at once it gets darker, more comfortable, and much more quiet.
The silence is broken by the arrival at noon of Brooklyn, which comes in the form of 19 students and five counselors. Instantly the Mohican parking lot is busy with an activity known as stretching your legs, but which, in reality, consists of soccer balls in motion, footballs flying, and spontaneous games of tag among kids who are comfortable with each other’s company. Boxes appear from bus compartments to land on the dusty ground and everyone reaches for a “book bag,” which is what you call a daypack if you happen to be a kid from the city.
The group represents the Green Reach Program of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, an environmental outreach program for K-8 teachers and their students. But on a larger scale they also represent the thousands of inner-city young people who benefit from AMC’s Youth Opportunities Program (YOP) each year. Since the program’s beginning in 1968, more than 56,000 young people have experienced outdoor education, often for the first time, through YOP.
“The aim of the program is to provide youth workers with the skills and resources to lead youth groups on outdoor excursions,” says Marshall Nicoloff, coordinator for outdoor education programs at Mohican.
The process begins with a four- or five-day outdoor leadership training session for youth workers from youth-serving organizations such as afterschool programs, recreational programs, community centers, Scouts, schools, and residential facilities, Nicoloff explains.
Photo by Robert Moore Koenig
