Mount Vernon Trail Builders

The first load of rock on Bonnie & Clyde’s. A special thanks to the Parks Department, the power carrier now works perfectly. This was also the first trip on new rubber tracks.

The corner/rock wall most of our material went last session, on June 8th.

Material (the dirt) was being moved to the corner from two directions. The rock (hauled from below), the mineral soil (brown in color) being brought down from above using our disc brake equipped wheelbarrows.

Lynn Postler standing adjacent to the wall helps provide a perspective as to its size.

Saying “Our Girls Rock” would be an understatement; from left to right you see: Maggie Sullivan, Lynn Postler, Wendy LaRocque and Diane Kaplan. They collectively played a key role in building one of our best rock walls to date. Hopefully they’ll be in attendance this coming session. We had an amazingly productive session!

Here Art Tuftee sees how the corner flows. It’s well after the session ended, kind of a wind-down ritual. It was Art that stated, “This is one of our best walls yet.”

Final statement: On Saturday June 22nd Windermere Real Estate will be our featured group, we hope to have a great turnout.

The May 25th session, Memorial Day weekend, was incredible. Three new volunteers, sixteen total – getting everything done we’d hoped to accomplish. And as always, we found many photo worthy natural forms.

Here Art Tuftee is upfront flagging. We’re working on the Bonnie & Clyde’s trail routing. In the background foliage is being cut with a weed eater, and just behind that volunteers are clearing it and duff off – creating the new trail routing.

Here JT is following Art’s flagging, weed eating a path about four feet wide. A little wider on steeper side slopes, that’s because a wider base is required in these situations. We cut out as little as we can. What we rack to the side is reused later, it becomes a natural weed barrier along the edge of the new trail.

Here Jerry Granahan is cutting out a stump root that simply must go, it is blocking the new trail routing. Hal Lee standing in the background, waiting to resume work.

Here Hal Lee is cutting through an old log with a tool called an Easy Dig. It is very heavy, a great tool. But there is nothing easy about using it.

Here Lynn Postler, our finisher, takes a moment to stand up. She usually brings up the rear, doing some of our most detailed work. She creates that finished trail look, carefully sprinkling duff and cut-up foliage along the trail’s edge. This was mentioned earlier, it actually creates a natural weed barrier, making it look like the trail has always been there.

Thanks, Lynn! And not shown was the amazing lunch. It was prepared and donated by Jenny Sandbo of Skagit Valley Food Coop.

Work will continue on this trail through the rest of the year. Next session we start moving in rock to build support walls. We have a great deal of work to do, and we really need your help. This stunning new trail will be over a mile long.

Did we mention we could really use your help?

On Saturday we continue our work on Bonnie & Clyde’s. We’ll flag the balance of the switchbacks, on the new routing we’ll remove the deadfall and duff. By day’s end we hope to have defined the new trail’s routing, and rerouted a section of Ridge Trail – creating more separation between the trails.

Our trail building session on Little Mountain starts at 10:00 am, and will end at 4:30 pm. We’ll have donated Starbucks Coffee, Haggen pastries and Coop snacks and soft drinks. Jenny Sandbo is bring chicken salad and bread for lunch.

Volunteer sign-up will be located at the crosswalk, on the main park access road.

We hope to see many of you Saturday.

We were very pleased to have 38 kids from the Kulshan Creek Youth Program work with us. They worked hard and were a great bunch of kids. This is the only group we’ve ever had arrive in a school bus.

After a brief orientation they got right to work.

Every job was important. Here is 8 year old Emily Samora gathering rocks from the side of the trail and loading them into a bucket to be used elsewhere.

Koreena Hayes had this to say about the experience:

“Thank you so much for hosting a wonderful trail day with the Kulshan Creek Youth Program. The kids were so excited to work with hand tools and watch their hard work create part of the Bonnie and Clyde Trail! It was so great to work with the Trail Builders and the kids will have a sense of accomplishment and ownership of Little Mountain for a long time. I am excited to grow our partnership with you and hope to schedule future work projects with you and the MVTB as it is so nice for the kids to have a place so close to home that they are personally connected with. Many thanks for your guidance, patience, instruction, smiles, and tasty soup! We had so much fun!”

We’re thankful for their support and hope to see them again on the trails.

The good people of Keller Williams joined us for a trail building day on May 9th. Here are just a few photos from that day. For the entire company, the second Thursday in May is RED Day (Renew, Energize, Donate) when tens of thousands of associates from across the United States and Canada participate in a wide range of projects, devoting their time to renewing and energizing aspects of the neighborhoods in which they serve.

Thank you to all of our supporters and everyone who stopped by our booth at the Tulip Street Fair in downtown Mount Vernon. Here are two of our many fantastic volunteers, Mary Alice Vivian and Ginny Darvill, working our booth.

This Saturday, April 27th, the Skagit Valley Food Co-op will be our featured group. As always our Little Mountain trail building session starts at 10:00 am. We’ll have donated Starbucks Coffee, Haggen pastries and Co-op snacks and soft drinks. And Leslie Estep will again provide her amazing homemade soup for lunch. Thanks Leslie.

Our volunteer sign-up tent will be located at the crosswalk on the main park access road. We’ll be doing some maintenance and making some improvements to La-Z-Boy.

We hope to see everyone on Saturday.