On August the IMBA Trail Care Crew arrived in CT. Kelly and Collins Bishop arrived in Milford just in time for some lunch on Thurs August 13th. After a quick lunch we sat down and discussed the trail challenge that they were there to help us solve.
As you may know we have been working a project in Milford with Joe Woyciejes to restore the trails in Eisenhower Park. It started as an extremely ambitious project to restore the entire system in Eisenhower Park for shared use. There is about 9 miles of trail. As we reviewed the project we helped Joe to narrow down the scope to a pilot project to demonstrate NEMBA's capabilities to the stakeholders in the park. We put together a nice one page summary explaining what our intentions are and how we approach restoring a shared use trail to a sustainable format.
Thursday night we met at the Milford Elks for our monthly meeting. In lieu of the normal meeting we had the Kelly and Collins give us the IMBA Club Care workshop. It was a great motivator for how to grow a club and most importantly motivate people and have a good time.
On Friday morning Joe, Art Roti, Kelly and Collins attended a meeting with the Mayor of Milford and several town committees involved in the decisions to allow us to go ahead. We explained in detail over the next 1.5 hours how we build and maintain trails and the resources that we have available. It was a success! The mayor gave his blessing to the pilot project. Now we have to put together the proposal to have all of the committees sign off on it.
Friday evening we headed out to West Rock State Park in New Haven for a group ride. We had a great ride and rode most of the trails in the southern end of the park and even had a great view of the city from the lookout at the top. Afterword we went to Damato's for pizza. I had never been there before and the food was great. We had originally wanted to go to Modern but they were closed for vacation.
On Saturday we host the IMBA Trail School at the Milford YMCA. About 15 people attended. It was a great mix of people from Joe's relatives, horse enthusiasts, mountain bikers and even my 21 month old son. Everyone left with some new tools for trail maintenance and some even left with schwag for getting quiz questions correct. That's right there was a quiz.
On Sunday we capped off the visit with a ride at West Hartford Rez. We rode for about 2 hours and covered the best trails there.
All in all it was a successful weekend!
Thanks to the IMBA TCC and Joe Woyciejes for all of their hard work.
--Art
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