Rainy Day Stories—May 1, 2026
What does the Trail Crew do after a big rain? They can’t dig or do much walking on the trails, so they catch up on jobs like these:
- Spring Lake: First attempt by Team Flora to remove invasive catclaw vine. The tips of its tendrils are actually hooked which makes it a winner at climbing high up into trees and taking over. Plus it spreads out into thick mats on the soil ground and smothers native vegetation.
- HunDun: Jo holding handfuls of young invasive ligustrums pulled out of HunDun. The rains have helped make it easier to pull the plants out by the roots!
- Upper Purgatory: Todd and Kyle film short How-To video for SMGA training. This one focused on drain cleaning which is removing debris build-up on trails to keep water free flowing off the trails. We will be using this one after the rains! Crew then hit Dante and Parasio with maintenance and drain cleaning.
- Widening gate: Mark and Scott using old post as roller to smooth fill material over cattle guard. Alan setting new T-Post for new gate location. No pics but City Crew and SMGA also did trail maintenance at River Recharge. Kudos to City Crew Crystal, Jake, and Payden for doing major drain cleaning at RR earlier in week. (Photos and text from Jo Ellen Korthal, Jon Cradit, and Monique Tschurr)
HUNDUN—June 12, 2026
(“HunDun is the new trail from Hunter Rd. to the Dunbar neighborhood.)
The Trail Crew met at HunDun to continue tread building. An assembly line was formed to keep the material and labor moving forward, starting with the 1st crew prepping the tread with fine grooming: removing rock and leveling the dirt to hold the TruGrid flat.
Then 2nd crew laying down the TruGrid and anchoring it solid with nice sweeping curves. And then 3rd crew filling in the TruGrid with gravel and spreading and tamping and leveling and last ( but most important!) was 4th crew filling Red’s trailer with gravel to bring down to the trail. All went smoothly and with the heat and humidity yesterday, it was kind of nice to have the SkidSteerer and Utility Vehicle for moving the large amounts of heavy gravel!
