By Tony K (all pictures by Darby Darrow)
I am a strong proponent of putting your back, legs and other muscles where your mouth is. No point in me advocating doing volunteer work if I don’t participate myself. So off to the woods I went. My son Caleb joined me as well as Darby from our club. Darby had found out that there are work parties at our local ORV park on the second Saturday of each month and since nothing seemed to be happening this month it was the perfect time to jump in with both feet, back, hands etc.
One of the great things about Walker Valley is that we have a really good trail manager who is all for using our rigs in the woods. Elyse Fleenor holds that title and my hat is off to her and the difficult job she does. Having to balance all the different factors of her job is not something I would like to do. If you ever have to put together a bunch of volunteers there is a lot to learn from her. She seemed to have a lot of faith that we would do what was needed and placed a lot of trust in our knowledge as to what causes trail damage and how things should be placed to fix and prevent damage in the future.
Many thanks to our Excavator operators as well. Ron Frost was doing the main work on the trail and it was obvious he has spent a lot of time with this machine. And not to forget Sam who was doing the bulk of the loading of rigs down at the base of the trail.
Most of the moving of the rock was done in the back of fellow wheelers rigs. Bill had a nice box set up for his mini pick up and Andy used his rock buggy to pull his custom trailer with a pnuematic dump mechanism. I pulled one load up with my wagon and trailer but the confines of the trail made things a bit impractical for my manual steering and the length of my wagon so I relegated myself to manual labor for the day and labor I did… Kevin was loading his Samurai with a considerable amount of rock, just picture the back of a Sami filled with limestone. And even Darby’s 40 got put to use, he taught us you can 
move a large culvert pipe with a 40…. And a huge amount of rock was moved in the back of a full size Dodge pick up brought by one of the guys from Whidbey Wheelers, my hats off to him for fitting that rig on the trail.
Even though there were two excavators and several of the rigs being used to move the rocks up the trail to where we were working, there was still a ton of manual labor needed.
I have to admit that this was the first workparty I have been involved with and as tired as I was, it was worth every sore muscle and bone. We moved tons of rocks to reinforce a trail that sees quite a bit of use and abuse. There is a lot of satisfaction from helping extend the life of a trail. And extend it we did as there was talk by someone at the Dept of Natural Resources about shutting this trail down due to erosion issues. The only real damper on the day was when the excavator blew a hydraulic line just before we were going to call it a day.
I had a great time and met a bunch of new friends that share the same ideas about trail maintenance, if we don’t do it who will. If the guys like the ones we were working with aren’t there to donate time as well as the money to rent the excavators, we will eventually 
lose access and trails, something I do not want to happen. So get out there with your gloves and sense of humor and lend a hand, you will not be sorry.
Many thanks to the Rainier Ridge Rams, Whidbey Wheelers, Raincountry Cruisers, Elyse at DNR and everyone who showed up and whose names I can’t remember….
