Trail News
Subaru IMBA Trail Care Crew February Visit Report
One of the two IMBA-Subaru Trail Care Crews, Ryan Schutz and Kristin Butcher, recently visited Houston to help with trail expansion at Double Lake Recreational Area
Last Friday, Ryan and Kristin accompanied GHORBA volunteers Kevin Highfield, Jim Mackey and Robert Patrick in meetings at the U.S. Forest Service headquarters in New Waverly with the new Sam Houston National Forest District Ranger Warren Oja and his staff. After morning presentations, the team drove to Double Lake and walked through newly marked trails with Mr. Oja.
On Saturday, Ryan and Kristin gave a one-day version of the Trail Building Clinic. The clinic was attended by 26 people, which included Mr. Oja, Jay Daniels (Memorial Park Supervisor), five other Houston Parks and Recreation Department staff, a team from REI, Mark Stines (the new Texas Trail Doc) and a collection of area cyclists. The weather was perfect: rain in the morning while we were in the classroom, then the rain magically stopped in time to head out and do some armoring and drainage work on trails near the lodge. The trails were perfectly dampened for this type of work.
On Sunday, a regular work party was led by Ryan and Kristin and we had a total of 25 people attending – about half from the previous day and the rest just turning up to help and earn Paydirt points. At one point, we actually had over 40 people working, since a girl scout troop turned up and also helped. During the work party on Sunday, a section of trail running down the fall line along a powerline right-of-way was modified to give riders a more fun flow and mitigate drainage issues.
We marked two new sections of trail in early February, but the approval process on Federal land requires more time for approval than local city or county land, and so we could not start work on these sections. But this is an opportune moment to describe more about this process:
New projects on federal land require that the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) be followed. This is time consuming and expensive requiring environmental and archeological studies be conducted for review. However, there are provisions for “categorical exclusions” from many of these requirements and it appears likely that the new trails will qualify for this. In order to head off likely opposition when the new trails are submitted for public comment (another NEPA requirement) we have already had the Houston Sierra Club SHNF representative, Brandt Mannchen, walk the trails with Jim Mackey. Brandt has submitted his comments and we have made some minor, reasonable adjustments to the new trail. Ryan Spates and Susan Stormer (the former Texas Trail Docs, now dba Talon Trails) marked the new trails and we made the adjustments under supervision of the IMBA Trail Care Crew, so we don’t think any trail proposal has ever had this degree of professional design input and review!
Although we weren’t able to cut new trails, the weekend was still a great success, most importantly because we were able to establish great new working relationships from which we hope great things will blossom. And, we had a great time! We hope that we’ll see Kristen and Ryan back in the Houston area again before too long.
View all Trail News
By: Mike
Mar 2