Final Barton Creek Trail Corps Report: 10,936 hours

On Friday, we turned in our final report on the Barton Creek Trail Corps Report to our primary funder, Impact Austin.  We’re grateful to them, as well as our funders Hill Country Conservancy, Bicycle Sport Shop, REI, as well as our own Austin City Limits Music Festival Grant Fund.

Between September 2010 and December, we put in a total of 10,936 hours of work on 61 separate projects.  Our Barton Creek Trail Corps crew (from American Youthworks Environmental Corps), working from Jan through December of 2011, put in 6,393 hours, with our 1,841 volunteers putting in 4,543 hours on twenty seven separate workdays.

Here’s a short (no, really) list of what we accomplished on Barton Creek Greenbelt from September 2010 through December 2011:

Our Barton Creek Trail Corps crew hours total 6,393 and can be divided this way:

• trail bushing and corridor clearing – 751 hours
• invasives cutting, removal, chipping and treating – 1,250.75 hours
• building / replacing rock steps – 686.25 hours
• building armored drains / crossings – 850.75 hours
• building retaining walls / creek banks – 1,385.75 hours
• Trail tread work including drainage, de-berming, resurfacing – 584.25 hours
• signage work and installation – 213.75 hours
• Managing volunteers during workdays – 149.75 hours
• The remaining time included rock gathering, post hole digging and fencing installation, removing old silt fencing, barbed wire and other hazards, helping re-surfacing the trail and decomposed granite parking lot at Loop 360 access, as well as GPSing, documenting and other tasks –541.25 hours.

Our  27 volunteer workdays with 1,841 volunteers working a total of 4,543 hours.  3,110 hours were spent cutting, yanking, stacking and dragging invasive species.  The remaining 1,433 hours were spent on trail tread and drainage projects including de-berming, rock popping, rock collections, gravel hauling, filling, packing holes and erosion and flood damage along the trail, cutting drainage channels, brushing along the trail and trash pick-up.

We’ll be posting our final report and recommendations at the end of this week, after we present on Friday at a session of the Texas Trails & Active Transportation Conference in San Antonio.

Thanks to our many partners, including Greenbelt Guardians, Central Texas Mountaineers, Central Texas Trail Tamers and the Austin Ridge Riders.

There’s more work to do, we have another American Youthworks E-Corps working this month on more invasive species removal and treatment and we will be sure to have a number of projects on It’s My Park Day on March 3, 2012.  We need more help to keep the greenbelt in shape. Please join us!

Thank you for a great 2011!

Rock Work by Barton Creek Trail Corps

As the APF staff winds down to the final hour of work in the office in 2011, we want to thank all of those who made 2011 a great year for us:

• our hard working board of directors,
• our amazing network of volunteers
• our outstanding partners at the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department, the Downtown Austin Alliance, American Youthworks E-Corps, Impact Austin, c3 Presents, SXSW…
• our many other sponsors
• and all of our members and donors.

Allen from the Barton Creek Trail Corps at work on a retaining wall at Twin Falls

Thanks to you, we’ve been able fund over $500,000 in park improvements through grants and projects this past year, along with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donated volunteer labor and in-kind donations to Austin’s parks.

AMD volunteers ready for a workday on Barton Creek Greenbelt

2011 was a tough year in many ways for Austin’s parks and the environment in Texas in general with record cold, record heat and record drought.  We’ve been so happy to see the rains return this fall and while we know that we’re still a long way from busting this drought, having flashes of green re-emerge from the ground makes up for those long, seemingly countless 100 degree days.

Super Volunteer Jerry pausing at Mayfield while building this amazing observation deck

And there’s still ways to help us and Austin’s parks.  We funded entirely by donations from individual members, corporate donations and sponsorships and foundation grants.  We don’t receive government funds.  You can become a member starting at $35 a year on our web site: http://www.austinparks.org/member.html or by sending in a check to the address below.

Invasive removal volunteers at Spyglass Access, Barton Creek Greenbelt

Our office will be closed from Friday Dec 23 through Mon, Jan 2nd.  When we return, we’ll be moving as well, so please note our new mailing address:

Austin Parks Foundation

P. O. Box 300369

Austin TX 78703-0007

We Need Volunteers for Nov 19 Hill of Life Workday

We’re nearing the end of a year long effort to rebuild and restore portions of the Barton Creek Greenbelt main trail.  One area where we’ve started work but have plenty left to do is on the Hill of Life at the Camp Craft Road trailhead. Our Barton Creek Trails Corps Crew is out reworking drainage so the trail can drain better and not erode as much.

Example of a partially completed improvement for drainage. It needs to be built up more and packed with soil

We’re hosting a workday with our friends from Bicycle Sport Shop on Saturday, November 19th from 9 am to noon with lunch and a raffle thanks to Bicycle Sport Shop immediately following the workday. We need another 50 or so volunteers to come out and help us gather and pack rock and dirt into berms, clean out drainage channels.  We have about 15 places along the 1/3 mile of hilly trail and we’ll divide into teams to get it done.  There’s a ton of soil and rock within arms reach (or a very short walk).

Please SIGN UP HERE so we can bring enough tools and lunch.

Please wear long pants and sturdy shoes, bring a water bottle and if you have a wheelbarrow or rock bar, bring that too.  We’ll provide gloves, more tools and jugs of water.

in many cases, these water bars (something no longer used in trails) were improperly installed. We just need to extend them with rock and soil packed into place to drain water off of the trail

Think of all of the good food you’ll be able to enjoy guilt free on Thanksgiving after 3 good hours of hard work.  And think of how much you’ll be helping the trail.

Thank you.

There's still a bit of water in the creek near the bottom of the Hill of Life.

Barton Creek Greenbelt Update – Oct 14, 2011

Volunteers hard at work on National Public Lands Day, Sept 24th

With the arrival of “fall” in central Texas, we continue in our efforts on Barton Creek Greenbelt.  Our Barton Creek Trail Corps Crew, made up of our five amazing e-corps members, will be finishing up their work just before Thanksgiving, but they are still hard at work every weekday and we’re getting more volunteer workdays scheduled and just today, we enjoyed the help of 130 volunteers from Pearson Education, The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas and CA Technologies who helped us cut, yank, haul and stack more invasive trees and plants in both morning and afternoon sessions on Barton Creek Greenbelt.

Since last September, we’ve now had the help of 1,740 volunteers working 4240 hours at 24 separate volunteer workdays on Barton Creek Greenbelt.  We have a number of additional workdays planned including one on Saturday, November 19th at the Hill of Life (sign up here)

In the next few weeks, we’ll be compiling all of our results, lessons learned and additional photos and stories of our work, but we do know that while we won’t be able to have a dedicated crew out on Barton Creek Greenbelt next year, we will continue to have many volunteer events and workdays to continue the efforts that we have begun in 2011.  So, stay tuned.

Thank you, Austin City Limits Music Festival

We’d like to take a few minutes and just thank all of the attendees of the Austin City Limits Music Festival since 2006, when we entered into an agreement with C3 Presents, Inc. and the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department.  Each year, we receive a percentage of ticket sales that can only be spent on City of Austin park improvements.  While we have invested (and continue to re-pay) the big improvements to the Zilker Great Lawn, we have been able fund hundreds of smaller projects in parks across Austin.

To put it simply, we could not have done what we’ve done since early 2007, when we received our first check from the festival.  And it’s not just the funds from the festival, for every dollar we can spend on a project, we get a matching dollar from another donor or in-kind donations from professionals in the landscape, design or building trade.  It’s pretty amazing.

As a result, we now have nearly 100 community volunteer groups who have adopted parks and work regularly to improve and care for their parks.  We’ve also have been working on a big effort along the Barton Creek Greenbelt this year, with a crew of five from another great non-profit, American Youthworks Environmental Corps, working out in the cold and heat (but mostly the heat this summer!)  Half of the funding for this project came from Impact Austin, a really cool giving circle, with the rest from ACL funding, funding from another non-profit, Hill Country Conservancy and contributions from Bicycle Sport Shop and REI.

And so, the staff and board of directors of the Austin Parks Foundation thank all of the attendees of the Austin City Limits Music Festival.  We’re happy you’re here and we hope that you stay hydrated, smoke-free (please don’t smoke in our parks and trails, we’re VERY nervous about our extreme fire danger situation) and that you thoroughly enjoy the festival over the next three days.

Barton Creek Greenbelt Update – 9/12/11

As we’ve mentioned in previous posts on our year-long project on the Barton Creek Greenbelt Trail, the drought has enabled us to do a lot of stone and rock work.  It’s been very hot, but our Barton Creek Trail Corps have muscled through the hot weather and have completed some amazing projects.  One of the last rock work projects is an drainage crossing on the main trail just several hundred yards down from Spyglass Access.  The corps has hauled out very large stone pavers and armored a 30 feet wide by 40 foot long crossing and they are finishing it up tomorrow.  Here’s a picture of it in the shadows of the trees today.

We also did a few volunteer workdays in the past week, working on continuing cleaning up brush piles (breaking them down and compacting them as well as pulling out any re-sprouted invasives (mostly chinaberry)

One of the areas that we did a huge invasive removal effort at the Zilker Access Trailhead last September as part of the 2010 National Public Lands Day. (This year’s event is Sept 24 and we’re looking for volunteers.)  The area, between the trail and the creek bed, was completely shaded by Ligustrum and chinaberry trees and no grass or other plants were growing underneath. Here are two photos showing the same area as of Sunday.

Despite the drought, we did have a good amount of grasses coming up and with a little more rain, this area will be continuing to look better.  Still, it’s impressive to see all of this improvement in just a year and a very dry at that. Finally, look for these signs appearing at various portions of the Barton Creek Greenbelt where we’ll be doing more invasive species removal and restoration work in the near future.

Barton Creek Trail Corps Update – 7/26/11

The Barton Creek Trail Corps is finishing up our rock work at the rope swing area just east of the Mopac overpass.  It’s looking really good and once they are finished, they’ll move to trail surface work for the next few weeks…

 

Thanks to our Saturday Volunteers at Barton Creek!

We had over 40 volunteers yesterday out on Barton Creek Greenbelt helping us gather rocks – small, medium and large, as well as buckets of gravel and soil to help our Barton Creek Trail Corps as they continue work on the retaining wall at the (sometime) swimming hole just east of Mopac on the main greenbelt trail.

Here’s the before and after pictures to give you an idea of what still needs to be done.

From This Past Tuesday…

This is just fill behind the really big rows of boulders that will be placed by the Barton Creek Trail Corps, we moved a number much closer so the Corps can use their winch system to drag the bigger ones into place…

The first row of boulders at the bottom of the picture will be the actual front of the area, everything else will be backfilled.

This is a boulder being hauled into position using a rock cradle.

The amazing i-serve volunteer crew shoveling gravel into buckets.

Time for More Rock work on Barton Creek Greenbelt!

Our Barton Creek Trail Corps Crew from American Youthworks is back on the job after the week of July 4th off for vacation.  They are working to build a retaining wall to shore up another portion of creek bank on Barton Creek Greenbelt.  The area is just east of the Mopac Expressway crossing.

Part of the Trail Corps Crew...

Some of the bigger rocks already gathered.

We also have a volunteer workday planned for this Saturday, July 16th from 9 am to noon to help stockpile big rocks and cobble for use by the crew.  (Please meet at Twin Falls accessTrailhead at 9 am to join us!)  You can also RSVP here.

This is a similiar project to one completed earlier this year at Twin Falls, but not as big or as high. Here’s a picture of the retaining wall at Twin Falls as it currently looks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next Big Project on the BC Greenbelt

UPDATE: We’ll be hosting a workday on Sat, July 16th from 9 am to noon and we need volunteers to help haul gravel in buckets and larger rocks with rock cradles.  Please sign up here

Our Barton Creek Trail Corps crew is out removing a very old silt fence along the trail near the Mopac crossover this week as well as doing some Spyglass Access drainage improvements off-trail, but we took some time to look at the next big area we need to tackle.

This is a section of creek bank just east of Mopac where the water can be very deep – so it usually grows a rope swing or two.  As a result of many people loving it, the banks have eroded and this amazing Cedar Elm tree is in danger.

This is also one of the recharge areas where water just disappears through the gravel and rock, which is pretty cool.

Our goal is to rebuild this section. Our crew will use their winch systems to pull in some of the bigger rocks, but we’ll need volunteers to help us haul over smaller rocks using our rock cradles as well as lots of buckets of gravel to help backfill the banks once we start putting rocks into position.

We’re currently looking at the dates of July 16 and August 6, but would welcome groups of volunteers (10 minimum) that might be willing to come out on weekday mornings as well.  Email Charlie at cmccabe@austinparks.org if you are interested.