Mark Grist (BC Parks Ranger and a Knee Knacker runner) had offered me the choice of either Sat­ur­day or Sunday for the Black Mt. Trail Day. I picked Sunday. If you recall, it was dis­tinctly summer-like on Sat­ur­day with the sun shin­ing and the humid­ity hark­ing back to an August heat wave. Sunday was the polar oppo­site. The word hind­sight comes dis­tinctly to mind. Con­tinue read­ing →

If build­ing board­walks in rainy, muddy con­di­tions isn’t your thing, how about weed­ing? This Sunday, Sep­tem­ber 25, you can help cel­e­brate Rivers Day at Mackay Creek in Hey­wood Park (North Van­cou­ver, Marine Drive and Hamil­ton Avenue) from 10am-2pm. Join the City of North Van­cou­ver, Ever­green and other com­mu­nity groups to remove inva­sive plants and plant local species in the park. Tools, plants and light refresh­ments will be pro­vided. No need to RSVP, just show up!

We have a com­plete crew for this Sunday’s trail work party! Thanks to every­one who vol­un­teered. All we need now is a spot of sunshine…

Four trail elves signed up, need five more. The work will be done rain or shine, so lots of crossed fin­gers for decent weather next Sunday. And if some­one wants to pho­to­graph the event, that’d be great too. RSVP to “Trail Day Coor­di­na­tor” on the Con­tact Page.

In case you’re won­der­ing, we won’t be car­ry­ing any mate­ri­als to the work­site. BC Parks has already air­lifted all the mate­ri­als to the work­site. We only have to hike (or if you prefer, run!) to Black Mt. The start time will be 9am and we should be done by 1pm-2pm. No spe­cial skills are needed for this work; we’re just sup­ply­ing lots of Knee Knacker muscle power! Having said that, you don’t have to be a weight lift­ing god/goddess–many hands makes it easy to lift large cedar planks, which is what the board­walk decks will be made of.

We need eight or nine vol­un­teers from the Knee Knacker com­mu­nity to help install board­walks through the mud pit sec­tion on Black Moun­tain in Cypress Provin­cial Park. We’ll be work­ing under the guid­ance of BC Parks on this project, which should take four to five hours to finish.

The board­walks are being installed to pro­tect the frag­ile bog envi­ron­ment on Black Mt. As side ben­e­fits, your run time will improve, you’ll ful­fill your 2012 race entry vol­un­teer require­ment, and you won’t have to worry about dis­ap­pear­ing into an inno­cent look­ing stretch of mud!

Please note there will be some heavy lift­ing required in this project.

To sign up, please con­tact Andrew (Trail Day Coor­di­na­tor) through the Con­tact Form by Sep­tem­ber 23.

Mark your cal­en­dars — the Black Mt. Trail Day is sched­uled for Sunday, Sep­tem­ber 25. We’ll need a small group of vol­un­teers to help BC Parks install board­walks over­top some of the marshy/muddy bits of the Baden Powell trail. More details will be announced in the next day or two.

Now that the 2012 race reg­is­tra­tion has opened up, here’s your chance to ful­fill your vol­un­teer hours months in advance. The snow on Black Mt. is (mostly) gone now, so the Black Mt. Trail Day is planned for the end of August. The exact date is still TBA but we’ll post it as soon as we know. If you’re inter­ested in the Black Mt. Trail Day, con­tact Andrew (Trail Day Coor­di­na­tor) through the Con­tact Form.  Also, BC Parks has vol­un­teer trail main­te­nance days planned for the Stawa­mus Chief trail in Squamish at the end of Sep­tem­ber. If you’re inter­ested in the BC Parks Stawa­mus Chief trail days, email Katy.Chambers@gov.bc.ca to add your name to their vol­un­teer list.

The snow in higher sec­tions of the course has lin­gered longer than usual. Several creek cross­ings along the Holly­burn sec­tion of the course has had many of us concerned.

On Sat­ur­day morn­ing, a Glenn, Michel, & Andrew headed out to tackle the trail with shov­els & ice axes. They man­aged to tackle the 8′ walls of snow, uncover many of the post-hole traps, & made the creek cross­ing far more man­age­able. (Photos posted here.)

In the last week, much of the snow has receded & we expect that much more will dis­ap­pear before race day.