CORP will have a representative on the Friends of Blue Mound board starting later this month.
This will bring some needed visibility for the bike trails to an influential group of people connected closely with the Park. I've spoken with two of the current board members to get their take on what the Friends are looking for in a board member.
Essentially, they want someone who will attend their monthly meetings on a regular basis. That will mostly be my responsibility. Gary Schweisthal has kindly offered to to substitute for me occasionally. The Friends also need the board members to help with their main fund raising events which are the Horribly Hilly bike ride, their trail run, and the candlelight ski events.
I agreed that these are events that I can support. It would be most helpful if additional CORP people volunteer for one or more of the events.
Keeping the bike trails at Blue Mound open requires a couple of hundred dollars per year on average, between gas and oil, and repairs to the power tools. We need to purchase a new power tool every few years. CORP has covered most of this through our cut of the IMBA membership dues and the Battle of Cam-Rock. But that money gets stretched thinner every time we open a great new trail.
Beyond just maintaining what we have, we need to look to the future. I think I've made a strong case with the quality of the work we did on Serpentine Climb, Holy Schist, and now the Beginner section reroutes that the trails at Blue Mound can be anything we want them to be: we can have advanced flow features where it makes sense, we can have dry trails that will stay open in marginal conditions, and we can have some trail that almost anyone can ride. I can tell you with every aching bone in my body that this won't happen with manual labor alone. CORP by itself can't hire the kind of help we need with the resources we currently have.
We need outside partners who share our vision of realizing the potential for great(er?) trails at Blue Mound. I need to spend a little less of my time moving rocks and dirt, and a little more of it finding people and organizations to contribute financially, and to help make the case to the DNR that we want their authorization for more and better trails.
The first step is right ahead in joining the Friends and supporting their goals. If you want to see more of the kind of trail work that happened in 2014, please consider helping out with the Friends fund raising events. I'll be posting here on the Blue Mound forum to keep everyone updated.
Walt
