Trail Update: Burns Park

From Bert Turner, of the Central Arkansas Master Naturalists, comes this update and an opportunity to help with a little trail work in Burns Park. The emails below were sent to me and to Ryan Johnson at Comptetitive Cyclist. Ryan has worked with Bert on the trails:

If you have been out to Burns Park you will see we are making good progress again. One section of the new trails is still closed pending inspection by the Army Corps of Engineers. We are moving along with everything else. If any of your guys are looking for something to do, they can go behind the machines and dress up the tread, clear out drainages for 20-50 yards below the trail, remove debris 30’ below the trail and 10’ above it, or do anything else that strikes their fancy.
The technical things we are looking for on these multiuse trails is a tread of ~24”, corridor 6’ wide by 10’ high, outslope of 4-6% (about 1.5” from high side of tread to low side), good flow to make the trails fun but to slow down speedsters, long open sight lines to be able to see other users, and generally a very sustainable trail.


We are working on a blazing scheme now and we will be switching to painted blazes. Exact color mixtures are being finalized by parks and they will purchase the paint.
If you have any questions, please ask me or John Crow.
Good luck and good riding!

Bert bert_turner@att.net

....and this:

The area above the Scout camp is the part that is still closed off—even though the machines have been through there. Remember, we’re dealing with government. I want to finish that area as soon as possible to eliminate waterbar hill, but we are going to have to wait until the Corps does its thing.


Ryan, how about working on the new reroutes across Arlene Laman from the Scout trailhead. Once finished and marked that will get rid of the straight up the fall-line section and the swampy section at the bottom. After that we can move to the upper loop. The machines are going around that area now, so that is where we need to groom the tread and pack it down.
I’ll keep you informed of what we are doing. We are trying to get some state prisoners to work on some of the labor intensive stuff like moving downed trees away from the trail.


Thanks again for the help. See you out there!


Bert

I'm looking forward to riding the new trails, but won't be ready to do much rock clearing, yet. Thanks to Bert and the folks at NLR Parks for improving the trails, and I guess we need to thank the Corps of Engineers and the military for clearing the munitions.