Blazing New Paths: SFA Students Step Up for Trail Maintenance

Our stewardship outing took place on Saturday, October 12th, from 10am-2pm at the SFA Hike and Bike (Recreational) Trails. SFA Campus Recreation’s Outdoor Pursuits program area is responsible for managing the trails above. We chose to do trail maintenance because many of the tasks that had to be done felt overwhelming for Outdoor Pursuits’ staff to do on their own. We split the 20 volunteers into 3 groups. One group of volunteers helped move 5 massive piles of wood in no time at all so we could focus on other projects on future trail maintenance days. Another group reconstructed neglected mountain bike features (a berm and a portion of the actual trail). The last group cleared overhead vegetation and dead trees near the trail. We’re excited to work on new projects now that these large-scale issues have been addressed.

Allen – I felt good about how the event went and felt as though it was a huge success, both with the amount of people that showed up and with the amount of work that got done. I realized my degree is applicable in a variety of uses! (Allen used his orienteering and map skills from forestry when Miranda got lost). 🙂 

Miranda – I felt overall great about the outing! This was a great learning opportunity for event planning and coordination. I have also never led people, much less a group of people, through trail maintenance. We were hitting our itinerary perfectly, but I got us lost 🙁 (a couple of times; Allen led us to the right locations), and one of our vehicles also ran out of gas 🙁 (I forgot to check before we left). Regardless, we persevered and even went above and beyond our expectations for the day!

Our impact was the creation of more collaborative campus relationships! One of the athletic coaches reached out to us via Instagram, came to the trail day, and wants to schedule another trail day involving the entire athletic department. Furthermore, we had many entry-level forestry students volunteer with us for a class—we hope to partner with the forestry department for more help with these trails in the future. Volunteers remained in good spirits throughout the day, and we hope that they learned a thing or two about working on trails. Our outing was a wonderful success that we hope to do again!