Counting the Volunteer Hours...

We've been keeping better track of volunteer hours lately by recording them as part of our monthly meeting minutes. Here's a rundown of the volunteer hours so far this year:

Total hours: 547
Trail Improvements: 119 hrs (Stockmal bridge, Poet Path benching)
Trail Maintenance: 428 hrs

This was a particularly difficult year, with two major storms that cause trees and limbs to fall across the trails, topped off with a very rainy summer. The vegetation just keeps growing!

Storm Damage: The February storm was the worst. For the months of February through April, 225 hours were spent clearing blowdowns, limbs, and sticks across the trails.  Another storm in May (the same one that dropped a few tornadoes across the state) wasn't quite as bad, but still dropped more trees onto trails that had just been cleared. Another 47.5 hours were recorded clearing blowdowns in May. That's a total of 272 hours clearing storm damage.

Vegetation: It's been a wet year, which means everything grows more. During the months of June and July, the peak growing season, volunteers worked for 155 hours, mostly cutting back vegetation from the trails, although some blowdowns were also cleared. Crews fell behind in part because they were still cleaning up storm damage while the plants were growing, and because it just wouldn't stop raining. In some cases, sections of trails became a jungle and nearly impassible. It can happen so fast.

Hours per mile. The volunteer hours were tracked for 25 miles of trails.
Storm Damage: 11 hrs/mile
Vegetation: 6.2 hrs/mile
Total Maintenance: 17 hours/mile

Rec Path: During the growing season, the multi-use Rec Path is a real job to keep clear, since parts of it are in damp, sunlit areas where everything grows fast. The Path is four miles long, or 16% of the trail mileage we were tracking, but 50% of the volunteer hours in June and July were spent there.