Foot trail design and management certification course at Sandy Creek Nature Center

[Tha Wookie]

This was sent to me recently, I hope some of you find it of interest. It should be a great course if anyone is interested. Walt Cook is an amazing man with about as much trail experience as anyone alive.
-Tha Wookie

Trail Certification Course... Please forward to any interested parties.

Sign up deadline: Thursday, Feb 1, 2007
(minimum 6, maximum 12 participants)



Certified Trail Design and Maintenance Course
When: February 6, 8, 13, 15, 20, and 22, March 13, 15, 20, and 22.
9am - noon (*no more than one absence allowed for certification)
Where: Sandy Creek Nature Center and Memorial Park, Athens, GA
Cost: $125 per participant (ACC Employees need to contact Michelle Harper: 3615 x225, to arrange for payment in advance)
Limited Space Available - sign-ups taken on a first come, first serve basis.
Please sign-up through Carly Robinson (via phone or email) with Name, Dept, phone # and email address.
No Refunds. Open to ACC employees til Tuesday, Jan 23, then open to the public, until Thursday, Feb 1.

COMPREHENSIVE FOOT TRAIL COURSE
WINTER – 2007 – Walt Cook
Notes to Participants
The scope of the course includes all non-paved foot trails. It will include hiking trails, nature trails, and utility trails. This is a new course, so the time to cover a topic is only an estimate. I don’t want to rush through, and I want to have plenty of time for questions and discussion. We will not go overtime, but we may quit early, if the topic break is near. We will also go outside and observe the trails here on the nature center property, to try to apply what the notes said.
The following Outline of PART I will be a guide, not a dictator, of the major indoor work. PART II will be mostly outdoors, with a little indoors. PART III will be all outdoors. By the end of the course, we hope to have built a new trail in Memorial Park, probably one to replace an existing trail that has been badly eroded.

Introduction
Values
Principles
Applying the Principles
Purpose = kind of user = kind of trail
Aesthetics
Physical stability
Environmental Factors
Topography
Soil
Water and gravity
Using Maps in Trail Design
Introduction to maps
Understanding scale
Understanding contours
Planning a trail on a topographic map.
Trail Design
Flagging the route
Tread design
Steps
Drainage
The last four days are all outside, mostly at Memorial Park. In order, the four outside days will be:
A hike to critique an existing trail
Practice maintenance -- brushing, drainage, tread renewal
Practice flagging a trail
Practice cutting and digging a new trail

Please call or email with any questions or to sign-up.

Carly Robinson
Coordinator of Volunteer Services
Athens-Clarke County Leisure Services
Division of Natural Resources
(706)613-3615 x227
[email protected]

For Upcoming Volunteer Opportunities click below:
http://www.sandycreeknaturecenter.com/uploads/wint%200607.pdf

--
Nate D. Olive, M.A.
PhD Candidate
Natural Resource Recreation & Tourism
Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources
University of Georgia

[generoll]

Hello Wookie:

This is not meant to be argumentative in the slightest, but I do have some questions. When you refer to this as a certification course, I wonder if you could tell us just who is certifying this and what their qualifications are. I won't belabor the issue and will stop right here. If you'd prefer we can continue this via email.


Gene

[Tha Wookie]

Hello Wookie:

This is not meant to be argumentative in the slightest, but I do have some questions. When you refer to this as a certification course, I wonder if you could tell us just who is certifying this and what their qualifications are. I won't belabor the issue and will stop right here. If you'd prefer we can continue this via email.


Gene

Gene,

To be honest I don't know who the certification is through. My colleage sent me the email and I thought some people would be interested. I bet if you call the contact number on the post above Carly would be glad to tell you so you can come back and post to everybody what you found out. That's a good question.

You can check out the park at www.sandycreekpark.com. I've been involved in some primitive skills courses held there. Seargent Rock came and brought his boys. I helped build some of the Oxbow lake trail out there. They have over twenty miles of trail in beautiful riparian areas, including a mile of roller-coaster bog bridges -fun.

Walt Cook, PhD, was the designed of the trail. Many people know him on this site from his involvement with the creation and completion of the BMT. He is the namesake of the "Cook's Trail", a four-mile whiteblaze footpath that is part of the 20-mile trail system that extends through protected lands right from downtown Athens.

Incedentally, Dr. Cook was a professor where I am now in grad school, at the Warnell School of Forest and Natural Resources. I found a great sotry on him that could tell you about this great man better than I have time to do justice: http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/092902/ath_20020929109.shtml

I'll post the whole story here on the next post in case the link doesn't work.

If anyone's into learning the knowledge of a wise hero, you should check out the class.

just ask Footslogger or the BMTA.

[Tha Wookie]

Trailblazer can see forest for the trees
By Lee Shearer
[email protected]


Walt Cook pauses on a hike through Sandy Creek Park to count growth rings to figure out the age of a fallen tree. Cook says some foresters appreciate forests too much for their dollar value and not enough for their aesthetics.
Lee Shearer/Staff
You wouldn't suspect Walt Cook to be one of the state's most revered environmental heroes, judging from one in-your-face bumper sticker on his truck.
It says, ''If you object to logging, try using plastic toilet paper.''
A retired forestry professor, Cook sometimes finds himself patiently explaining to well-meaning preservationists some basic facts of life about trees and forests.
''Trees are a renewable resource,'' he says, a resource we depend on for the paper this article is printed on, the houses we live in and yes, toilet paper.
But in his decades in forestry, Cook also sometimes found himself at odds with colleagues in the forestry profession and at the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forest Resources when he thought they appreciated forests too much for their dollar value and not enough for their aesthetic values.

COMING MONDAY: State Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond returns to his old home place to kick off a fund-raising drive for an agriculture exhibit in the ENSAT Center at Sandy Creek Nature Center.
Cook listed just one disappointment in a talk he gave as he neared retirement in 1996, reflecting on a 37-year career in forestry that brought him to Athens in 1971 -- his inability to convince the school of the importance of forest aesthetics.
''This is my big complaint about forest management (in general),'' Cook still says. ''They haven't accepted that aesthetics is important.''
The beauty of the forests underlies the whole economy of north Georgia's mountains, Cook argues -- and if the forests' beauty is destroyed, so will be the economy.
''Once that's destroyed, people don't come back, and they won't recommend that their neighbors do, either,'' he said.
One disappointment, but lots of accomplishments, he said in that 1996 talk -- listing three things he considered his top accomplishments, beginning with his family -- his wife of more than 40 years, Carol, five children and now 11 grandchildren.
After that he listed the ''many good forest resource managers'' he and other teachers in the UGA forestry school turned out.
''In looking back over the students I've had, I can think of only one I would classify as an airhead,'' he said.
But it's probably the third accomplishment that's more recognizable to most people in Athens-Clarke County -- the role he played in founding the Sandy Creek Nature Center, now visited by tens of thousands of people annually.
''It's probably not fair to say we would not have a nature center without Walt Cook,'' said retired UGA administrator Al Ike, who was also instrumental in beginning the nature center along with UGA staffer Dan Hope, the late Alma Walker and a handful of others. ''But without his efforts it would not have matured nearly as quickly or as well.''
In the early 1970s, Cook, Ike and the others latched on to the idea of starting a nature center where Clarke County children could get environmental education. They developed plans, found a place for it, negotiated the land sales and convinced private donors, local governments and the Clarke County school system to pitch in, both in starting the Sandy Creek Nature Center and with ongoing staffing and funding.


Walt Cook on a hike through Sandy Creek Park
Lee Shearer/Staff
But Cook's role extended well beyond those things.
Cook is a nationally recognized trail builder, and he actually laid out many of the trails around the nature center, as well as Cook's Trail, a part of the North Oconee River Greenway that connects the nature center with Sandy Creek Park.
Cook also designed the first trails around Chateau Elan, and trail-building groups across the Southeast consult him, asking him to show them how to build trails through sensitive areas, placing them for maximum scenery and enjoyment and minimum erosion.
''Good trails are not natural, but they look natural. You have to know what people will do,'' he said. ''People will take the path of least resistance, and your job as trail manager is to convince them that your trail is the path of least resistance.''
At Sandy Creek Cook didn't just design trails, but helped build and maintain them.
''He was the guy would go out on Saturday to improve trails or cut trails. He wouldn't just do the planning, but get out there and do physical work,'' Ike said.
The four-mile-long Cook's Trail is named after Cook -- not just because he conceived of the path and designed the trail, but because he actually built a lot of it.
''He put in just countless, countless hours,'' said Larry Dendy, the immediate past president of the Sandy Creek Nature Center board of directors and someone who counts Cook as one of his environmental heroes.
''I don't know of anyone wiser than he is in terms of understanding and appreciation of our local environment, and more dedicated to preserving it,'' Dendy said.
At 71, Cook may have slowed down a step or two, but maybe not.
Tuesday before last, he hiked 14 miles in South Carolina's Jocassee Gorge, but not just for fun. His companion was the chair of a group building a ''mountains to the sea'' trail that will pass through the gorge. Cook, the master trail builder, volunteered ''to make sure it's built right,'' and to do that, of course, he had to hike the area.
On another recent hike, Cook walked all morning on a trail alongside Lake Chapman in Sandy Creek Park as temperatures climbed toward the 90s. Only at the end did he stop to take a small swig of water.
''I'm training myself to drink water,'' he said almost apologetically. Or un-training himself.
In Cook's early years as a young forester for the state of Pennsylvania, he trained himself to go long hours without water, he explained, and now he's trying to undo that long habit, he said.
Cook is also the volunteer maintenance director of the Benton MacKaye Trail Association, a group dedicated to the upkeep of a hiking route that's an alternate to the Appalachian Trail, and is responsible for maintaining one section of the trail.
He's also still active on the nature center's board of directors and with the Oconee Rivers Land Trust, which recently negotiated the purchase of a wetlands at the northern end of Sandy Creek Park, a valuable piece of buffer and wildlife habitat.
''He just goes quietly about working his tail off, working for the things he believes in,'' said Nancy Smith, a former director of Sandy Creek Nature Center.
''He doesn't expect awards or recognition. He just wants to protect and defend the environment,'' she said. ''He believes in environmental education, and he's just tireless. He was always an inspiration to me. I just admire him a great deal. Anyone who works by his side any length of time admires him.''
In another recent talk, Cook said he would have done one thing differently if he could go back to the time he was helping start Sandy Creek Nature Center: the project's founders seriously underestimated how popular the nature center has become, and should have set aside even more land for the nature preserve.
As Clarke and surrounding counties develop, the dwindling patches of natural area -- ''greenspace,'' where people may find a bit of quiet -- will seem more and more precious, Cook believes.
''Fifty or 100 years from now, all these little islands will be very important to the people who live here then. And if we don't get them now, they're not going to get them. That's why I save land,'' he said.

[Footslogger]

If anyone's into learning the knowledge of a wise hero, you should check out the class.

just ask Footslogger or the BMTA.
===========================================

Yes ...I can vouch for Walt's expertise and the quality of the program at Sandy Creek Park. Flew back last year and helped Walt build a section of that trail. Only wish I lived closer because I would definitely be putting this on my calendar ...not necessarily for the "certification" per se but to gain some valuable experience and have a great time to boot !!

'Slogger

[generoll]

O.K., asked and answered. Thank you for filling in the blanks.

Gene