Friday, August 07, 2009
Trails get markers courtesy of Scouts
Have you heard?
JoAnne Poindexter
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Two Roanoke-area teens have worked on greenway projects as community service projects to earn the Eagle Scout Award, the highest Boy Scout honor.
Tyler Prillaman, a member of Boy Scout Troop 3 at Thrasher Memorial United Methodist Church, earned the Eagle Scout Award during a Scout Court of Honor on April 5 at the Charles R. Hill Senior Center in Vinton. Scoutmaster Greg Pino presented the award.
Prillaman built and placed mile-marker posts and benches on the Wolf Creek Greenway in Vinton.
During the six-month project, Prillaman, now 18, solicited donations and discounts of tools and materials and led a group of volunteers that included troop members, leaders and family in the construction and placement of the posts and benches on the two-mile trail.
Prillaman's mother, Sharon, said Vinton officials and Roanoke County planning commissioners suggested the project to help greenway patrons judge the distance they walk, ride or jog and to have a place to rest.
Prillaman, the son of Sharon and Jim Prillaman, graduated in June from William Byrd High School and will attend Virginia Western Community College.
On Aug. 1, another Scout, Quinn Pedelty, saw his liaison efforts come together as he, fellow Scouts, friends, Roanoke city workers and members of the Kiwanis Club of Roanoke installed mileposts along the paved Lick Run Greenway trail in Northwest Roanoke.
Pedelty, 17, is trying to earn his Eagle Scout Award before his family relocates to Ohio at the end of the year.
He got the idea to work on a greenway from his parents, Kris and Mike Pedelty.
His father, "a really hardcore runner," and his friends regularly use the trail and wished there were identification markers along the route, Pedelty said.
His mother was in a meeting where city and Kiwanis members discussed plans for the greenway. She thought it would be a good idea for Pedelty's community service project, the Patrick Henry senior said.
The project is the first phase of a three-year Kiwanis Club financial commitment to environmental education improvements along three area greenways. The project eventually will include interpretive signs describing the history of the areas and the plants and animals found along each trail plus the production of teachers' guides to the natural history of the trails.
The club has given $10,000 to the city for mileposts and signs that will point out environmentally interesting facts about the trail, said Kiwanian Gary Duerk, chairman of the Lick Run Greenway Education Committee.
Maggi Pace, an intern with the Roanoke Department of Parks and Recreation, is writing the script for the interpretive signs and a teachers' guide for the greenway.
Greenway signs and lesson plans will be coordinated with the Virginia Standards of Learning in biology to assist children in local schools.
