2010-2011 - Larry Telle

2010-2011 Volunteer of the Year – Larry Telle

2010-2011 Volunteer of the Year – Larry Telle

By Dave Harrison, 2010-2011 Chapter Chair

Volunteer of the Year

As last year’s chair of Genesee Valley Chapter of ADK, it’s my responsibility and pleasure to recognize as Volunteer of the Year a chapter member whose efforts on behalf of ADK-GVC during the past year were so great in terms of the time spent and the quality of service that they were in a class by themselves. As you can imagine, selecting one such individual can be a daunting task, since there are so many people who have volunteered so much of their time in making our chapter run. That said, I have no difficulty in designating Larry Telle as this year’s Volunteer of the Year.

Larry is not an officer of the chapter, and he is not a committee chair or a member of ADK-GVC’s executive committee. What he is is someone who has taken a major leadership role in one of the chapter’s primary activities—hiking. An accomplished hiker and mountain climber, Larry currently serves as one of the coordinators of our very successful Sunday hike program. This means that he invests considerable time in lining up leaders for upcoming hikes and publicizing those hikes. Moreover, he has led countless Sunday hikes himself. Although some of these have been local hikes in County Parks, he has also organized and led a series of all-day hikes on the Finger Lakes Trail. Some of these have required two to three hours of travel to the trailhead, which means that the groups have left early in the morning and returned in the evening. (Many of us have been passengers in Larry’s van on these all-day outings.) One of Larry’s goals in organizing and leading the series of FLT hikes has been to afford participants the opportunity to hike the entire Finger Lakes Trail in installments.

As a hike leader, Larry is very attentive to the needs of his fellow hikers. He takes care to see to it that the group stays together, and he adjusts the pace of the hike where a participant is having difficulty keeping up.

In addition to his contributions as Sunday hike coordinator and as a hike leader, Larry participated as one of the instructors in the chapter’s 2011 trip leader training program. And last spring, he was one of the volunteers who took part in the chapter’s National Trails Day work project on Rob’s trail and the adjacent spur leading down to Canadice Lake.

In all of these activities, Larry has been very friendly and welcoming to the other participants, whether they were chapter members or newcomers. Genesee Valley ADK wouldn’t be nearly as effective in implementing our outdoor recreation mission without his volunteer efforts. And we certainly wouldn’t have as much fun as we have had on the trail with Larry!

Congratulations to Larry Telle, an outstanding member of Genesee Valley ADK, and an outstanding Volunteer of the year.

--Dave Harrison