Lord Hill Trail Maintenance Day

In conjunction with Earth Day my work set up a trail work party with the Washington Trails Association (WTA) at Lord Hill Park. I signed up for this as quickly as I could since it was self-serving to do trail maintenance at a place I run at so frequently. The first picture is how bas the trail was when we first showed up. The trail was getting more and more wide as people were doing their best to avoid the slop in the middle. If you stepped in the deepest gunk it was almost 10 inches deep of mud and water. And if you didn't tie your shoes tight enough there was a good chance that you wouldn't have it on anymore as you tried to step out of the slop. There were 42 people altogether and we worked on a 0.6 mile section of trail that had not seen any work performed in many years.

See Glen working? He gets free socks if he sends this picture in for the Cascade Crest 100.

This picture is about 75% of the way complete fixing the mud hole. We scraped all the crap out down to the hard pan and then put some drainage in so hopefully the water will not pool here and create another quagmire.

Here is the finished project. Yes, the trail is considerably wider, but it was already pretty wide at the mud hole. There were about 10 of these holes of slop that we fixed this day. We also fixed some eroded parts of trail where 2 trails were existing side by side - one for water to run down the hill, and one for people to avoid the water.

This was a lot of work but very rewarding. I would love to be able to work on trails more often. Washington has hundreds if not thousands of miles of trails and I'm sure there are many that require work. It was about time I gave back to the trail community since I spend nearly every weekend running trails somewhere in western Washington.