Trail Extravaganza!

On Saturday I went out to lend my labor to building a trail at the Ocean Shores Interpretives center (a senior culminating project with our partner, PEI). I freakin loved it. It feels so good to actually get something accomplished as a team, work hard physically. Our society just doesn't provide enought of these types of activities! With probably a team of 15-20 people, it was pretty damn cool to see a trail carved out of the forest, along with all the kinds of tools, methods, cooperation with strangers.

I ended up working on starting one side of the trail on the side without too much forest, meaning we did hacking up of the dirt,roots, weeds, branches, shoveling out the dirt and creating an edge. 3 of us kept at this 25 ft of trail, learning as we went, that each root we pulled up, created about 3 more...figuring out what tool what best, using a combination of hoes, axe-like chopper (my favorite for agression release), shovels, rakes, loppers, an edger, wheelbarrow...after smoothing the path, we rolled a weed cover over the trail and started hauling and laying the gravel.

All the while, other groups have gone through with chainsaw, saw, loppers, rakes, clearing the a 3 foot path through the forest, hauling out wheelbarrows full of bush, weed, branch remnants. Oh, so freaking rewarding. A full forest with tags throughout was carved into and acutally looked pretty much like a trail by the time i took off. Hell yeah!