Fighter’s Heaven in Schuylkill County got a helping hand from Palmerton Area High School students last month as it prepares for the upcoming summer tourist season.

Around 35 Palmerton students in the high school’s environmental club spent a day cleaning up the clutter Mother Nature left behind over the fall and winter.

“They raked leaves, cleaned up fallen tree limbs, repointed stone pathways, etc.,” said Paul McArdle, environmental club co-adviser.

McArdle and fellow co-adviser Mike Gombert said they were looking for a field trip that combined something academic with something that was service-oriented, and the training camp where Muhammad Ali prepped for some of his biggest fights fit the bill.

“Mr. Gombert and I are both good friends with Mick Stefanek, who is the curator of the camp, and he reached out to us,” McArdle said. “We all felt this was the perfect place to combine the aspects of the trip we were looking for.”

Palmerton students had last been to the camp in 2019 to help spruce up the property prior to its official opening.

Isabella Mujevic, a Palmerton senior and president of the environmental club, said the students were happy to be able to make a difference by volunteering, while getting a history lesson in the process.

“There is a lot of history at that camp being that perhaps the most famous person in the world at the time, Muhammad Ali, trained and lived there often,” Mujevic said. “It was nice to be able to have our group help out with a great cause. And the best part about it is that we had a lot of fun doing it.”

Fighter’s Heaven thanked the students in a social media post, noting that they “spent the morning doing various jobs to help with maintaining the almost 6 acres of land that the camp covers. Then, they were given a tour and enjoyed a lunch of grilled hot dogs and hamburgers with all the fixings.”