Trail maintenance

Hey everyone! I’m still catching up on the events that have happened to me over the summer, so this blog post (and the next one!) are a little bit behind. But since coming back, as you probably saw in the previous blog, I’ve started to hike local trails. There is a long, continuous trail in the area around my hometown, called the East Coast Trail (ECT for short!)

So far, my friend and I hiked the purple parts of the trail below!

I plan to continue through the rest of the trail, even alone! So when the organization that maintains the trail was looking for volunteers, I thought it would be an exciting chance to give back to nature, and help other hikers like me! It was a bit far away, at a place called Tors Cove, and it was about a 45 minute drive away! (The organizer picked me up, thankfully!)

We started out from the parking lot, and hiked about 1 hour into the path. It was quite beautiful, but had some tricky points that made my feet hurt a bit!

We got to work with big clippers (called “loppers”), and smaller hand-clippers, as well as saws. We had to trim branches and trees that were growing into the path making it difficult for other hikers.

I don’t have many pictures of myself, because it was difficult to wear those gloves, and cut trees, and take a picture at the same time! But we all worked for about 5 hours, stopping once for lunch. We had to carry heavy piles of branches deep into the woods to dump them out of sight.

By the time we were done, I was exhausted, as you can see here, haha! I was very sore the next day, but it was all worth it! I hope I’ll have a chance to go again next month!