(Photo by Robert Barossi)

by Robert Barossi

Summer is prime time for environmental organizations and agencies to work on maintaining wilderness trails. Warmer and drier weather gives them a chance to improve existing trails for walking, hiking and biking, and to build new ones. It’s often volunteers who do most, if not all, of this work. Today, a few stories of volunteer trail work:

Truckee Trails Foundation is hosting work days where volunteers are getting out and working on a number of local trails in the Lake Tahoe area.

In Boise, the Idaho Trails Association is leading crews of volunteers into the forest to clear trails of fallen trees and other debris.

And in western Pennsylvania, a number of different organization are involved in the maintenance of hundreds of miles of trails, with the help of many dedicated volunteers who put in thousands of hours of work.  “If it wasn’t for volunteers, there wouldn’t be a trail system,” says Chris Ziegler, president of the Butler-Freeport Community Trail Council, who is quoted in the article. “Every time a tree is down, it’s a volunteer that goes out and takes care of it.”

That is no doubt true of all of these trail systems and thousands more like them all over the world.

If you’ve enjoyed the stories on this blog, download my eBook – Being Where You Are: How Environmental Volunteers Impact Their Community and the Planet Every Day. Available at the following links:

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