Greetings Trail Volunteers,
Please accept my apologies, as it has been a very long time since I have sent you any updates. This fall has proved to be very busy for me, with my real job and now a change of career. I have not had the time to host any public workdays in Dupont State Forest (DSF). Please consider this period of time a vacation. We certainly value and will need your help on trails in the coming year.
We have actually been working a fair bit on major projects, but have not needed any more help achieving these. The reasons for this are twofold. First, we have had a lot of special civic groups volunteering, including groups from Brevard College and the Boy Scouts. Second, we have purchased a new piece of machinery. You may have heard me mention the Dingo machine, which is a compact hydraulic loader. It is proving to be a great trail tool.
Ed Sutton and I have spent the last several months learning this machine, and so we have been working a fair bit by ourselves in this training process. The Blue Ridge Bicycle Club owns the Dingo, and the purchase was made possible by $3500 of BRBC money with pledged labor matching (20%) a $20K RTP grant. The Dingo will perform work in many of your favorite trail systems, including Dupont. This machine is very versatile, and is good for trail maintenance as well as new trail construction.
One of the recent major projects in which we used the Dingo was the bottom section of the Cedar Rock Trail. This worked was completed just before Thanksgiving. In addition to Dingo work, we had two good crews of Brevard College students working with us. Webmaster Jeff Jennings has started a trailwork page on the Friends of DuPont Forest (FODF) website. This recent project is the first installment, with many more to come. A full report can be seen at http://www.dupontforest.com/trailproject.asp
We hosted both of the IMBA Trail Care Crews during that same period, and they provided additional labor for the Cedar Rock project as well as some other good work. One project we began during their visit was new trail construction in the Sheep Mountain area. This is a very large project, and I do not expect it to be completed for quite some time. We will of course keep working on this project in the coming year, and alternate between maintaining current trails in Dupont with new trail construction. Many of the new trail construction projects will be re-location projects of poorly designed trails.
I have developed a Trails Priority Document for the forest managers, and we will be using that as a guideline for prioritizing projects. As you would guess, this Trails Priorities Document was a major project in of itself, and I spent a fair bit of time in front of the computer working on that. Please let me know if you would like to see this document.
Other major projects performed in the last several months include a rock armor project (by BRBC members) on steep sections of the Burnt Mountain Trail, and a culvert installation on the Little River Trail (Boy Scout Eagle project). The culvert work also involved 50' of rock armoring. This turned out really nicely; I invite you to check this out. We will try to get more of these project reports up and running on the website soon.
We have installed FODF donation stations at each of the various parking lots. Ed and I dug the holes for these (using the versatile Dingo machine), and FODF board members Tom Fortener and Dick Thompson installed them. You will find a large green cylinder located beside every kiosk, and we should have these operational soon. The money collected at these donation boxes will of course be put to work in projects supporting Dupont State Forest. Please consider a donation next time you travel in Dupont and help spread the word. Much of the donation money will go directly back into our trails.
Another project we have started is user exit surveys. DSF Supervisor David Brown and I helped develop the survey, and North Carolina State University masters' degree student Jon Scott is heading up this project and collecting the data. This survey will give us vital information on how the public perceives the trail system in Dupont. If you are interested in participating, look for students carrying clipboards in the parking lots on nice weekends. Or if you would like, I can email you the survey and you can fill it out on your next trip to Dupont. Please feel free to send any ideas you may have on our trail system to me; you really do not need a special form to do so.
As you would have guessed, our volunteer hours donated to Dupont State Forest again numbered in the thousands of hours. I do not have an exact count on hand because I do not have hours reports for the trash pickup days or from the equestrian community (who also work hard in Dupont); but suffice it to say it was a ton of volunteer work. Thanks to all who contributed to Dupont this year. We are of course far from being done, and we invite you to return in 2003 for more fun. I plan to get back to a more regular volunteer schedule, and will keep you up to date on workdays. If you have any comments about what days of the week or times work best for you, please fire me an email.
My year-end review would not be complete without recognizing the efforts of one person, my friend Chuck Ramsey. Chuck has been working on trails in Dupont since the inception of the forest, and has donated countless hours of quality work down through the years. Chuck worked at the Dupont (and later Sterling/AGFA) plant for 25+ years so he has been on the trails that now form Dupont State Forest for longer than most. Now that the plant has closed down, Chuck has moved to Charleston SC to continue his career with AGFA. We will miss Chuck greatly and wish him the best of luck down in the lowlands (can you say "fish out of water"?). Chuck and his wife Tia (another regular volunteer) have kept a house up here for weekend get-always, and he only has three more years before retirement when they plan to return to the area. I am sure we will see some of Chuck (just not as often as before) in the three years to come. He will owe us a bunch of work when he returns. Thanks, Chuck!!
My new right hand man in Dupont is Ed Sutton. Many of you have met him by now as he has been heading up our “Adopt a Highway” efforts. Ed is full of energy and good trail building knowledge, and I am honored to have him on board as a regular volunteer. Ed and I have also started a trail consulting/construction business called Trail Dynamics. We are currently working on a project in Biltmore Estate and have several other jobs we are looking at. We will of course continue our volunteer efforts in Dupont, so please do not think we will be abandoning our favorite trails.
I hope to see some of you on the trails soon. As noted earlier, we hope to get back to a once a month public project in Dupont starting in January. Thanks again for all of your help in this year. The trail system in Dupont keeps getting better, and we have plans to continue to improve it.
Woody Keen - Volunteer Trail Coordinator for Dupont State Forest
© Blue Ridge Bicycle Club Inc. 2004