Fact: Trailbuilding is hard. Fiction: Ohio is warm.

Over the years I have traversed many a trail in national and local parks. Never have I thought to myself, "Gee, this is a lovely path, I wonder how it got here." But this week I found out. Trails are basically built by a big 'ole team of people with shovels, rakes, and fire-fighter axes busting their bums in the cold, rain and wind on steep hills with aching backs and freezing mud-soaked gloves for 8 hours a day. True fact. haha It's pretty hard work, but also neat to be able to see an immediate physical result to your actions. Over the last week, we've "benched" a ton of trail, which is basically cutting into the soil on one side of a path and pulling the dirt to the opposite side so you're leveling out the walkway and making it less steep and easier for people to walk on. We've also pulled out a bunch of honeysuckle, an invasive plant species not native to the U.S. that tends to grow over trails as well as block sunlight that native plants closer to the soil need to grow.

Here are some members of my team speaking with our site supervisor, Ted.


Shoveling wheelbarrows full of wood chips to place over a large portion of trail downhill that was collecting rainwater and becoming too muddy for us to get our golf cart up to the trails:

Benching a trail:


And removing honeysuckle:



Did I mention that the temperature here is ridonk? Basically one day it is a t-shirt-worthy 70 degrees, the next we are hiding indoors while a tornado siren blares at us, and 2 days later we have a forecast of 1.5 inches of snow. WTF, Ohio?!