Service learning project
Carkeek S.T.A.R.S an event put together by Dale Johnson in order to help maintain the trails and walkways of Carkeek park, This event was held on November 18th 2017 from 9am to noon but was finished up at a about 11:30.
Most of what we had to there was fairly straight forward. Take a rake and rake the leaves that had fallen onto the path off to the side. Seems simple enough. And something that doesn't require a lot of physical work or talking to people. While we were doing this to make sure the trails were maintained and didn't erode over the winter and spring. This was due to the leaves eroding and turning into this weird mush that can actually mess up the trails a lot as well as mess up the entire natural filtration systems in the wetlands. While raking up leaves is in fact a simple job, the fact that it does a lot more than just clearing out the trails. It may seem small but it does a quite a bit in helping maintain the bio-region and just about everything that relies on it.
One of the things that surprised me the most on this little adventure was the fact that all of the people who were out on jogs or walking dogs or something along those lines would come up to us and tell us "thank you" for cleaning up the trail. And to be honest, I still hate people but it felt nice to have them acknowledge what we were doing and that was actually fairly nice in it's own. Even if they don't really know that this is more than just helping them walk around it's something nice that I don't really experience that often due to never going out that much. It was a nice experience that I probably would do again in order to help out the bio-region, get exercise, and find out why people actually like other people.
My questions for this would be:
1. How long would it take for the trails to degrade completely,
2. What would first be affected by the eroding trails
3. Does moving the leaves off to the side carry any effect on the ecosystem
4. What organisms would be least affected by degrading trail.
Dale's contact: carkeekstars@gmail.com
Most of what we had to there was fairly straight forward. Take a rake and rake the leaves that had fallen onto the path off to the side. Seems simple enough. And something that doesn't require a lot of physical work or talking to people. While we were doing this to make sure the trails were maintained and didn't erode over the winter and spring. This was due to the leaves eroding and turning into this weird mush that can actually mess up the trails a lot as well as mess up the entire natural filtration systems in the wetlands. While raking up leaves is in fact a simple job, the fact that it does a lot more than just clearing out the trails. It may seem small but it does a quite a bit in helping maintain the bio-region and just about everything that relies on it.
One of the things that surprised me the most on this little adventure was the fact that all of the people who were out on jogs or walking dogs or something along those lines would come up to us and tell us "thank you" for cleaning up the trail. And to be honest, I still hate people but it felt nice to have them acknowledge what we were doing and that was actually fairly nice in it's own. Even if they don't really know that this is more than just helping them walk around it's something nice that I don't really experience that often due to never going out that much. It was a nice experience that I probably would do again in order to help out the bio-region, get exercise, and find out why people actually like other people.
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| I hate selfies so here is a photo Grace took of me. My hair is in my face |
My questions for this would be:
1. How long would it take for the trails to degrade completely,
2. What would first be affected by the eroding trails
3. Does moving the leaves off to the side carry any effect on the ecosystem
4. What organisms would be least affected by degrading trail.
Dale's contact: carkeekstars@gmail.com
Hi Maya,
ReplyDeleteeven though this seemed like a simple task, I thought it was really interesting that the purpose of it was to prevent further erosion of the trail during the winter and spring seasons. I didn't know about the leaves changing and causing issues with the trail.