Sunday, September 09, 2007
Carvins Cove volunteers good on word
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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BENNETT SPRINGS -- Not quite a decade ago, when Roanoke city officials were trying to figure out how to manage recreation at Carvins Cove, many fans of the area's trails talked a grand game.
"If you let us legally ride and hike these trails, we'll make it worth your while," they collectively said. "We'll repair bad trails and build great new ones.
"We'll be your partners in this effort and we'll even work for free."
You know what they say when something seems too good to be true.
But the city took a chance.
And the trail users have kept their word.
And there's a great example of the value of this kind of partnership in an ongoing bridge-building project on the Cove's Four Gorge trail.
This bridge isn't one of those rickety 10-foot planks stretching over a ditch.
It will be a massive span, nearly 30 feet and towering over a deep ravine.
It's also a half-mile from the nearest road.
"You could probably build this bridge for $30,000 in Roanoke," said James Glass, a volunteer who works in construction. "But because of the location and the logistics, this would cost $60,000, easy."
Yet because so much of the manpower is costing nothing, and because materials are being provided at discounts, the bridge will cost only about $10,000.
This weekend volunteers are tackling the project's final major steps, hauling lumber to the site and getting the structure put together.
Saturday morning about 40 folks showed up to work.
There were mountain bikers, hikers and horseback riders, from 16-year-old Joey Klimchuk to 79-year-old retired physician Bill Gorge, who's one of the region's deans of trail work.
Brian Batteiger, a 44-year-old mountain biker who is the closest thing to the project's manager, wasn't surprised by the eclectic mix of volunteers who have jumped on this and other efforts at Carvins Cove.
It's what happens, he said, when trails are opened to multiple user groups who can all take ownership in the paths.
The big turnout was important Saturday because there was plenty to do, starting with hauling several tons of lumber, including a stack of decking boards for the floor, and dozens of 2-by-6 planks for railing and 10-foot 6-by-6 beams for building the support structure.
And then there were four monster beams, each 28 feet and weighing 650 pounds.
One thought was to wrap the beams with straps, then have about 20 people string crossbars through the straps to haul the wood.
It would have worked, but it didn't have to.
Pathfinders for Greenways, one of the groups involved in trail building and maintenance in and beyond the Roanoke Valley, hired a crew of logging horses for the job.
Normally, when Jason and Jagger Rutledge's massive Suffolk horses haul logs from the woods, they work as a team to pull a special cart atop which the log lies.
But the trail to the bridge site was too narrow to allow the horses to work in tandem, so they had to haul the beams one at time.
It wasn't the first time horses have been used to help. On a previous work day several trail riders used their horses to haul bags of concrete to the site.
Horsepower helps, but the real power on the project has come from humans.
Batteiger said he estimates that 2,000 hours have been put into the effort already. When you have 40 people working eight hours, it adds up fast.
"Actually, we're probably 75 percent done," Batteiger said. "It might not look like it, but this last part is going to go fast."
An important step had to come even before the physical labor on the site could start.
Mountain biker Molly Bullington, an engineer, prepared the plans. Another volunteer got them certified.
Then came the tough and tedious job of preparing the massive concrete footers, a step that first required extensive excavation, then the hauling and pouring of tons of concrete.
Even before the horses showed up Saturday, volunteers were able to get much of the lumber to the site in the morning, with teams of four hauling heavy stacks using the strap-and-bar method.
Meanwhile, John Teeter spent much of the morning preparing a cable-and-pulley rigging system that would be used to put the main beams in place. Mike Glowczynski used a motorized Muck Truck hauler to haul out bags of unused concrete, while others carried bags by hand when they returned to get more wood.
At midday, the volunteers took a welcome break for lunch and drinks, then quickly got back to work.
They'll be back this morning for another big day, and back many other days until the project is done.
And then they'll find another section of trail to build or fix.
Because they said they would.
