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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Landers: Volunteers serve as unheralded heroes of our trails

With little fanfare this season, volunteers packing saws, brush cutters and Pulaskis made our piece of heaven a better place.

The trails they built or maintained in county conservation areas, state parks and national forests are the ticket thousands of people will take to adventure, fitness, camping, berry picking, fishing, mushrooming, hunting and wildlife watching.

The work keeps some trails as they’ve been – taken for granted for decades – while one local project has brought Spokane Valley just a few links away from completing a Dream Trail that’s been years in the making.

Trail work is a job rich with opportunity if you don’t mind donating your time.

“We have roughly 100 miles of trails on (Spokane) County land,” said Paul Knowles, Parks and Recreation Department planner. “We don’t have the resources to maintain them regularly, so volunteers are absolutely crucial.”

Popular routes in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest also would have had no maintenance this summer without volunteers, said Sue Colyer, recreation program manager in Coeur d’Alene.

“Over the last four years, our budget dropped 27 percent in trails and about 25 percent in recreation maintenance and projects,” she said – and the recreation program wasn’t flush with funding before that.

“We’re having to get pretty creative.”

The agency taps matching grants from Idaho State Parks licensing programs on boats and ORVs to pay seasonal workers to help take care of campgrounds and trails.

Still, the St. Joe and Coeur d’Alene districts had no paid trail crews this season – down from crews of eight to 10 seasonal specialists a decade ago, Colyer said.

Federal funding that trickles down through the counties provided $284,000 for recreation and trails in the IPNF last year, with $50,000 immediately headed down the drain to pump campground toilets.

But individuals and about 30 organizations – church groups, clubs, Youth Conservation Corps and others – chipped in more than 25,000 volunteer hours.

“The value of the volunteer work for recreation management totaled $570,000,” Colyer said. “It’s become part of the agency’s national strategy to work with partners.”

The partners include groups like the Washington Trails Association, which recruited 106 volunteers this season to work on 33 projects in Spokane and Pend Oreille counties from spring through fall, said Holly Weiler, Eastern Washington regional coordinator.

Some of the projects were one-day blitzes while at least three required backpacking food and tools in the Salmo-Priest Wilderness for four days. Under the direction of parks managers, WTA groups returned multiple times to Iller Creek Conservation Area in Spokane Valley and Mount Spokane State Park to maintain and re-route trails and install a bridge.

“We’re already starting to plan for what needs to be done next year,” Weiler said, noting that a new trail on Bureau of Land Management land near Fishtrap Lake may be on the agenda. “We’ll get started on the ground in March.”

The Spokane Mountaineers and Backcountry Horsemen were the only groups to step up and maintain nonmotorized trails on the St. Joe District this year, said Tracy Gravelle, Forest Service trails coordinator based in St. Maries.

“We have 700 miles of trails on the St. Joe District and about half are for nonmotorized recreation,” she said. “Motorized groups do a lot of work taking care of their trails. Of course, it’s easier to pack saws and tools on a vehicle.

“Any smart horse packer brings a saw.

“Hikers are sort of on their own.”

Led by club trail enthusiast Lynn Smith, six Mountaineers backpacked in to clear out logs, brush and water bars on the district’s popular 5-mile trail to Snow Peak.

Smith also led Mountaineer groups to clear the Coeur d’Alene District trails into Stevens Lakes and Lone Lake south of Interstate 90 near Mullan, plus work on Chilco Mountain, Marie Creek and Crystal Lake on BLM land near St. Joe Peak.

“Mountaineers also joined up with other groups, like the WTA and Dishman Hills Conservancy,” Smith said, noting that sometimes the smallest projects on a map have the largest promise for the future.

In October, 65 volunteers from the Mountaineers and the Conservancy built three-quarters of a mile of trail through ponderosa pines and granite outcroppings in Spokane Valley.

The segment is part of a route in the Glenrose Conservation Area purchased through the Spokane County Conservation Futures Program.

The trail is a dead end, but the plan is not.

The Dream Trail Project seeks to acquire land or easements to create a corridor for humans and wildlife in a natural area that’s ripe for subdivision and development.

The corridor stretches nearly 6 miles as the crow flies or roughly 12 miles on the ground.

It would run from Appleway Boulevard at the Dishman Hills Natural Area southward to the Iller Creek-Rocks of Sharon area – two widely separated wild-area gems secured by the Dishman Hills Conservancy.

While it would go through substantial areas of Spokane County Conservation Futures land, the corridor would require easements through long stretches of private property involving numerous landowners.

“The private property factor is why we called it the Dream Trail when we started looking into this several years ago,” Jeff Lambert said in 2011. “It’s a dream.”

Last week, he said it’s coming closer to a dream come true.

“The new Cliff Trail segment we built leaves us about a quarter mile and a couple of private agreements from connecting Glenrose to the Dishman Hills Natural Area,” said Lambert, the Conservancy’s president.

He’ll be leading a hike on Dec. 14 to show the public how close the project is to linking the Spokane Valley’s choice wild areas in perpetuity.

“Convincing property owners to give us the necessary easements is a matter of teaching the public that they can’t stray from the corridor through private property,” he said.

“The best way to accomplish that, once we get all the agreements, is with a good trail.”

Contact Rich Landers at (509) 459-5508 or email richl@spokesman.com.