Thank you to Killington Mountain School for a solid morning of removing organic material on Maximum Capacity. The students, coaches and administrators broke open about 900 feet of trail in 2 hours. This is 900 feet less than the VT Youth Conservation Corp will have to do in late June. Thank you KMS!
Rutland High School YES Plan is back in early June. We will continue to work on Maximum Capacity.
It is fantastic to have these work groups back in the park.
Pine Hill Park needs your help!
Pine Hill Park is conducting an Economic Development & Marketing Research Survey to better understand the actions and habits of our visitors and park members. We hope to learn more about the activities and opportunities that attract individuals to visit Pine Hill Park, financial patterns associated with visits, as well as how to better reach our visitors and park members.
This survey will take between 5-10 minutes to complete. Please take your time and answer each question as accurately as possible.
Please limit one response per household.
Thank You!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
