National Trails Day is an annual event held on the first Saturday in June, established by the American Hiking Society in 1993 to promote outdoor recreation, trail stewardship, and community involvement. This weekend Friends of Kachemak Bay State Park and Alaska State Parks staff will lead a group of volunteers to repair and improve trails and facilities within Kachemak Bay State Parks. For this particular event, the volunteer capacity is full with about 40 people registered to help on Saturday.
The Homer event has actually been taking place since before the annual day was officially and federally recognized. According to Mako Haggerty, chairman of Friends, the Homer event was started by Roger McCampbell in 1996. This year there are several projects that the volunteers will be attending to that Haggerty identified. A trail recon is the process of scouting and assessing the status of the trail. A map of the trail locations is available through the Kachemak Bay State Park website. Several of the projects involve basic trail recons in various locations as well as:
A crew conducting recon of the Port Lock Trail: they're basically looking at a route for the Kachemak Bay Mountain Classic, a trail race which will be held on July 11th. More details and registration information on the race is available on the Friends of Kachemak Bay website.
“…and then there's a crew that's going to be doing a recon of the Blue Ice Trail, and that's the one that leads up to the glacier. Well, used to get all the way to the glacier, but that's not the case anymore. But that trail you get dropped off at Glacier Spit, then you cross the Grewingk River and up to Foane Ridge (sp?) and down onto the Blue Ice Trail and on up towards the glacier.”
Other than this volunteer trail work day, Haggerty provided these details on the financial challenges of trail maintenance:
“The state maintains them, but due to budgetary restrictions, or lack of funding, or the inability to to prioritize state parks, the trails have been, I don't want to say neglected, because we're all aware of what's going on. It's not like we're neglecting them, we just don't have the horsepower to keep them all clear. Once upon a time, we had 80 miles of trails over there, and now that's been reduced quite a bit. So some of the trails, like the Wosnesenki Trail, got washed out. That one is not even…even if you show up with a machete, you're not going to make your way through that.”
Haggerty is taking the place of former chairperson Kathy Sarns who also provided some comments on the upcoming Trail Day and some other thoughts on public contribution to trails in Kachemak Bay.
“When I found out there was no funding for maintenance through the state,I asked the state if they would teach me how to use a gas brusher, and then they said yes, and then they let me clear trails with a couple friends, and you know, we just started doing it that way. It was just a few of us, and then it snowballed, because people would hear about it, and then they wanted to join, and then, so one thing led to another. I joined the friends, we got insurance, we got equipment, but all through donations, this is all you know, and then we slowly have created a whole volunteer thing that helps, helps keep some trails cleared across the bay. We can't get them all because it's not humanly possible at this point with the manpower we have, but we're getting more done than ever before…”
Even though the “official Trails Day” is not open to more volunteers, Sarns describes volunteer opportunities this way:
“In the past people would think it's only trails day, and I'd be like, no! So now I always say, “every day is Trails Day.” And then, as you get more involved, you can pick a trail and decide to, like, adopt it and clean it, and we support you, you know…throughout the summer, Friends pays for the water taxis, but the water taxis offer a discount to Friends, so we basically pay for their gas when we take volunteers over there, and so we couldn't do it without that, and we couldn't do it without the whole community support.
We provide everything, you just bring your own food and your own clothes and your shoes, and so anyway, we have a system now that has grown in the last 10 years, from just a few of us, like three or four of us, to now we have a volunteer list of almost 200 but we only have about three leaders, so anybody listening, if you're, if you want to learn how, you know, just how to be a leader for friends, and in when you lead, you only lead two people, you know, with a brusher, because it takes one brusher and two swampers, and then if you have, anyway, in and then we show you what to do.”
For people interested in volunteering for Friends of Kachemak Bay State Park, you can find contact information on their website: friendsofkachemakbay.org.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
