Tornado Alley Clean Up Canceled

UPDATE: Thanks to the efforts of the Worlds End State Park Staff and other surrounding state parks, the blow down through the state park caused by the tornado last week has been cleared. All chainsaw work on the trails the race uses within the park boundary has been completed. A few trees on Forestry land that will completed by Forestry Rangers this week. The junction just below the Worlds End Trail/Loyalsock Trail and Pioneer Road was entirely ripped up due to the tree roots being pulled out and we cut in a temporary reroute to bypass the mess. We then did some filling of major holes from missing tree root systems and did a general clean up of the debris.

The Alpine Club is the official maintainer and overseer of the Loyalsock Trail. We did not feel we should overstep our bounds in doing too much digging and reworking of the trail without approval from the club, so we did not go too deep into that task. The Alpine Club has a work day on Sunday which we think will have the manpower and proper tools that we were not equipped with today. So with that, we decided to go mobile and tackle sections of trails we knew to have multiple fallen trees outside the tornado zone. We cleared ~16 trees, did general clean up along the trails, and put eyes on several more miles of trails that haven't been seen so far this year.

The new plan for this week is to forgo the organized work days on Tuesday and Saturday and instead focus on supporting the Alpine Club on Sunday.

I still plan to be out on Saturday to finish running the sections of trails I haven't seen yet and do any tree clearing/spring cleaning that still needs to be done. A new event posting will soon appear on Facebook for the spring cleaning if you wish to attend. If you are not on Facebook, contact me on here!

-Dave