Trails Update: May 10, 2024
High School Muscle
We hosted the students from Mr. Kung’s Outdoor Leadership program again this week and they proved to be quick learners and resilient diggers! Tremendous progress was made through challenging rocky terrain on the Rainbow Creamsicle redesign project. This is a sizable segment and sadly, the fruits of their labor are not ready to be tasted. Their work remains unconnected to the existing trails. We’ll be shifting future volunteer efforts here once Flashback is fully connected!
About Flashback: McElhanney hosted last week’s dig night and they brought the entire whistler office to help! I suspected slow progress through the next build section because the terrain became steep and more rocky (compared to what the Cheakamus landscape had offered in the last few weeks). However, I chose to prepare more metres of flagging minutes before Dwayne, Ed and Bridget showed up. This proved to be a good move… Despite the dog scuffles, the full roster of volunteers carved the dirt ribbon passed the boulder gate.
Trash Seriously.
After finishing up our work around the Trainwreck site, we moved along the “Tour de Trash” repairing the impacts of both foot and tire traffic. Assessing the situation, I could see that the Trash trail has been widened and braided significantly. The evidence shows that mountain bikers are trying to avoid slippery off-camber bedrock and roots… probably to avoid falling into the river. The numerous braids and offshoot paths indicate that hikers want to go everywhere that might be of photographic interest, as directly as possible. Our mission was to make the original bike trail the most appealing line. We widened and supported the trail where it had eroded and narrowed. It was difficult to find angular rock near the river, so we were challenged to work with smooth rounded river rock. We also scraped a lot of the organic muck that was pushing Trainwreck bound hikers into the pristine moss.
Reminder to ALL trail users: please stay on the trail!
Speaking of (lack of) respect, we discovered a shocking amount of freshly dumped garbage in the parking areas and numerous “free range toilet” sites just metres off the parking lots and trails. “How do you know it wasn’t dogs?” Dogs don’t use toilet paper…
I realize that educating polluters can be uncomfortable/confrontational, so I’ll just leave this BC government (anonymous) reporting link for public lands abuse here: https://forms.gov.bc.ca/industry/report-a-natural-resource-violation/
See you on the trails!
Dan Raymond
WORCA Lead Trail Builder
