Well I've grown up here my whole life.From when I was a kid,
I started mountain biking when I was 13 and from that time I
have come to appreciate and recognize the importance of community
involvement and integration with the Forest Service.
Not only are we fortunate to have the Mt. Hood National Forest but
there's a huge fortune in being able to invest your time in
maintaining it. And everybody can do that. I am a volunteer, back country snow ranger.
I also do work on multi-use trails on the Mt. Hood National
Forest.And I've been volunteering for a couple of years now.
When we go out and do the trail work, I do log out, brush out,
and drainage work. It's nice being out there too. We're in the
middle of the Mt. Hood National Forest, which is an incredible
place and an incredible resource. And I've been able to recruit
other people. There's a vast number of people out there that
I'm sure would be willing to do the same thing but they just
don't know. So why not take advantage of something like
this. I figure I owe it to the forest. I spend a lot of time
out there, and it does a lot of good. Everybody's a winner with
something like that. I've been also a part of the backcountry horsemen
and we've been clearing trails for about the past 10-11 years.
Clearing trails has provided us a great opportunity to use
our animals and to go back to how horses were originally used for
in helping to maintain trails.
A lot of those areas where it's hard to get especially to use a
lot of cumbersome type of equipment, culverts and those sorts of
things. We enjoy riding and backcountry horseman provides us the
opportunity to make it a very social club. Clearing trail gives us a great sense of accomplishment
and we've learned a lot.
We have a lot of fun. The weather isn't always perfect and its days
when we wouldn't be normally clearing trail or even riding our horses
but since we made a commitment to the Forest Service to help out,
we go out, rain or shine, and we have a darn good time working!
We cover around 145 miles of trails during the wintertime for the
skiiers and snow mobilers. And a lot of the snowshoe people use these.
We groom to two of the lookouts which are rented out during the wintertime.
The lookouts, it's amazing, the people come from all over the country to rent these.
It would be really nice if we could get more of the organizations that
border the Mt. Hood National Forest to maybe come out and give the Forest Service
a little hand here and help them maintain some of this. It's a great
opportunity for different clubs and organizations to get out here.
It's amazing how many people you see from different parts of the country
who do get here to enjoy this beautiful scenery that we have here at the
Mt. Hood National Forest. Involvement with the volunteer trail maintenance
has included work with many other volunteer organizations. Some groups from bicycling
clubs, horse clubs, actually small business, local businesses.
And I've been really impressed with the way the Barlow Ranger District has attempted
to work with all these folks into the volunteer program. And I appreciate being a
part of that. But there's never really enough volunteers. If others would be
interested it would just be really great. The more we have out there working on
these trails the better it's going to be for all of us trail users.