A mission team of eight persons completed a week-long construction project at the base camp operated by Mountain Mentors in northern New Hampshire and returned home safely last Saturday.

 The team, which included Larry and Sherry Keeler, Pat Young, Melissa Gregg, and Mike, Laurie, and Carrie Andryc, built a deck and refinished floors in a cabin at the camp, which provides a base site for the Toledo-area group to work with at-risk teens each year. The team was accompanied by Bob Duffy, a former Mountain Mentor board member who supervised the deck construction work.

 A bear visited the camp the first night the team slept there and chewed its way into a tote holding pancake mix, coffee, and paper products. The tote and a coffee can showed clear teeth marks where the animal had mauled the containers.

 In all, the team traveled more than 2,000 miles and spent more than $1,500 to complete the work at the camp.

 The Mountain Mentors is an organization founded by Rev. Everett Mills, a United Methodist pastor, in the mid-1980s. Over the years it has helped hundreds of juvenile delinquents and at-risk teens to make better choices for their lives. The group provides a full year of one-on-one mentoring and a week-long wilderness experience as part of its program. In the past two years, it has started providing week-long bicycle trips in Ohio as well.

 "The work at the camp was truly grueling," Rev. Keeler said. "We began the first day by digging 12 four-foot holes to hold posts for the deck, and we immediately discovered that the entire site was covered by tree roots."