We will be holding a community work day Saturday, April 30th from 9-12pm. Meet at the front entrance of Pine Hill Park.
We have lots of small projects we would like to tackle, which include helping the Master Gardener’s in the front entrance, to hiking the trails with tools to clean out drainage’s.
Category Archives: Trail Work
Community Work day
CANCELLED
CANCELLED due to snow on the ground. We will reschedule when weather permits us to moving lumber.
Sunday, November 28th at 9AM meet at Evergreen Gate. We will be moving lumber in from the Pond Rd to Vista overlook for a new bench. Lumber is all pre-cut and ready to go just need some extra hands to move it in. Thank you. Hope to see you there.
Community work night
Wednesday, August 4th, 5:30pm. Meet in the parking lot at Giorgetti. We will be weed whacking the Carriage Trail on the Rutland side. We could use your help. Bring a weed-whacker, if you don’t have one we will have a few for folks to borrow. Bring bug dope, wear gloves and bring a head lamp.
RTP GRant Awarded
We are proud recipients of a Recreation Trail Program grant (RTP) through the VT Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation who administers the grant. Out of 23 applicants we were one of nine chosen to receive an $18,000 grant. This will pay for a 3 week VT Youth Conservation Corp crew in 2022. This crew will work on Maximum Capacity and Bone Spur which are both located near or off Milk Run.
We would like to thank Kim Peters and Nikki Adams at Rutland Rec for helping the write the grant. Joel Blumenthal and Nicole Kesselring were instrumental in helping with the maps and Act 250 questions that we had to answer. Without everyone’s help our grant would not have been a success.
With some luck, YES plan from Rutland High School will return in the spring of 2022 to help with our fantastic trail system.
Community Work Day
Thank you every one who came Saturday to the community work day. It was a huge success in moving some rocks, cleaning drainage’s and moving bark mulch for the Master Gardner’s.
Saturday, April 24th, 9AM to noon. We will do a little bit of work in the front entrance to help Master Gardner’s out. Our primary goal will be to stage rocks on Milk Run for a French Drain and banked corner for a future volunteer group. Rock collecting will be all size rocks using buckets for softball size and smaller. Rock slings with pry bars for larger rocks. We will also being working on cleaning drainage’s out. Meet at Giorgetti parking lot. We have tools, bring water, bug dope, sunscreen and gloves. Thanks and hope to see you there.
Update on trails
UPDATE April 8th: Trails are riding great. With the wind we have been having trees are falling down so reports are appreciated. pinehillpartnership@gmail.com. Trails that are still closed Exit Strategy, steep hill on Droopy, Lichen Rock. Voldemort should be open later today April 8th.
UPDATE April 5th: Opening up trails this afternoon except for our normal winter closures. Hopefully our 15 degree nights are done. Thank you for being patient.
UPDATE April 3rd: Trails are still going through freeze/thaw cycles with the cold weather that is back. We have frost poking up on the trail tread. Please NO BIKES.
UPDATE March 29th: Trails are slowly drying out. With all the rain on Sunday(28th) things got pretty soggy again but it did drive the frost out of the ground. Snow is in the forecast for later in the week so we have to wait until after that event to melt. We will be monitoring trails regularly to see when we can open for bikes. We need a bunch of windy days to dry the park out. PLEASE BE PATIENT!
We are in the middle of freeze/thaw cycles when the trails are super fragile. We would appreciate folks staying off the trails at this time. Hikers if you would stay on the Pond Rd that would be greatly appreciated too. Thank you.
PHP AWARDED Loyal to our soil grant
We are proud recipients of the Loyal to Our Soil Grant sponsored by Ranch Camp, MTBVT, and Specialized Bikes. Last summer Ranch Camp held two raffles for Loyal to Our Soil Grant. Specialized donated two bikes for the raffle, tickets were $100 each. Also, Ranch Camp donated, a portion of the proceeds from the sale of every bike sold in 2020 toward the grant.
We are one of 5 groups to receive this grant. This will help us pay for a VT Youth Conservation Corp group to build Maximum Capacity, our next trail construction project.
A big thank you to Ranch Camp, Specialized Bikes, and MTBVT! #ranchcampvt #specializedbikes #mtbvt
Milk run is open!
As of late Monday September 7th, our newest trail, Milk Run, is fully open!!
We started building this trail with YES plan from Rutland High School and Youth Works volunteers in 2018. That first year we completed about 1300′ of trail with 400 volunteers and 1600 volunteer hours. In 2019 we completed about 1000 feet of trail with 1225 volunteer hours, 286 volunteers. 2020 the year of corona and no major volunteer groups like YES plan or Youth Works we accomplished quite a bit.
The trail is just under 3900 feet (.74 mile) long. FYI, the longest trail in the park is Stegosaurus at 4100 feet.
The Vermont Youth Conservation Corp (VYCC) came in with 4 crew members for 2 weeks and we completed just under 1500′ of trail. With VYCC removing organic material and our three Pine Hill Partnership volunteers doing finish work behind them it was a perfect combination utilizing the work force. We completed just under 1500′ trail in a little over 500 hours. We did have an extra hand two days that really helped with getting a couple of small banked corners built along with finish work. Having a trained work crew was instrumental on getting this trail done.
VYCC is a paid trail crew. We are still soliciting donations and contributions to help defray the cost.
The trail still will need a touch of refinement next year (hopefully our big volunteer groups are back). We expect to build two banked corners on the new section.
Dropping the rope on Milk Run 
WE’RE DIGGING IN !
Update October 28, 2020: We received a check from IMBA/Shimano for $2300. to help pay for the VYCC crew we had in the park the end of July. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this fund.
We have been selected as one of 10 recipients of the IMBA Dig In Grant program. With the support of Shimano, IMBA is doing a grant to pay for trail building at Pine Hill Park. Read the announcement from IMBA here.
This program will help us raise money needed for the VT Youth Conservation Corps (VYCC) to come in at the end of July and help finish off a couple of trails in the park that volunteers have been working on. (map below)
Thanks to COVID-19, large volunteer groups are not happening in 2020. VYCC will be a big help, but we will have to pay for their services.
Our newest trail, Milk Run, was started in 2018 with the help of volunteers. At the end of July we are having VYCC come in and hope to use their time to get all the organic material off so that we can open the trail up to the top of Upper Halfpipe. This is about 1500′ of organic top layer to be removed.
Why remove organic in Pine Hill Park? We have found for long term sustainability, our trails hold up better by removing it early. Early on in our learning process of building trails we would do a ‘rake and ride’. Those trails now have been rebuilt at least once if not twice.
If you’d like to help us with this effort, please consider making a donation here. As always, thank you for your support!
Trail build out
We are reaching our limits of trails in Pine Hill Park. We currently have 17 miles. With Milk Run, Bone Spur and Maximum Capacity all adding about another mile and a half we will have reached our limit for density of trails inside Pine Hill Park.
This is a rough map of where Milk Run is completed in 2018, 2019. 2020 we hope to break open the rest of Milk Run with a VT Youth Conservation Corp crew in July. They are a paid crew so we are trying to raise money to cover this expense.
Bone Spur will be a pretty bony section off Milk Run.
Maximum Capacity will branch off Milk Run and head towards Intersection 20. This will be a fun trail utilizing trail contours.
If you are able to donate money to help defray the cost of a VYCC crew it would be greatly appreciated. We are applying for multiple grants-we have been turned by a couple and are patiently waiting to hear on other applications. https://pinehillpartnership.org/donate-2/