A Week With Lake Metroparks

Last week Sarah and I worked with various departments of the Lake County Metroparks, helping to build trails and improve natural spaces and also learning about how they manage human access in their parks. Lake Metroparks has some very unique concerns in terms of the development and maintenance of its parks. As a publicly funded system, their job is to allow access to as many people as desire it,  and as a system with limited funding they have to carefully consider the cost of their projects. Guy Wagner, who was in charge of the Maintenance department we were working with, said that one of the ways that they have tackled these issues when they're developing parks is to put in an 8 foot wide road all the way through a property and build gravel and dirt spur trails off of it. This saves a lot of money and time during construction and maintenance of these spur trails, as they can drive almost any vehicle on these 8 foot trails. At  first we thought that is was strange that the system puts in 6 foot wide gravel trails almost everywhere instead of just using a well-made dirt trail, but then we learned that this was an effort to allow greater access for people with disabilities, and also that due to the high volume of foot traffic that many of the parks get, even the gravel paths are destroyed by people walking, and a dirt trail would be impossible to keep free of mud patches, and impossible to keep people on. The parks do have dirt and horse trails, which Guy says are by far the biggest drain on their maintenance efforts, as well as lots of boardwalks, which are constructed both to allow wheelchair access, keep people dry and to lower the impact that a trail has on an environment.


The trail that we were working on building was one of the 6-foot wide gravel trails, a very short stretch that runs to a small new campsite that people can rent. The park system has put in five other rustic campsites, which are rented out to a single group at $10 a night and stocked with free firewood, in an effort to bring more people into the parks and give them a new experience. The main reason for building a gravel trail to this spot even though the foot traffic to it will be relatively minor is so that they can deliver firewood in a vehicle.

 On our first day working with a trail building crew we learned just how much work it is to maintain parks in an area as big as Lake county; we met at the main maintenance building on Spear Rd in Painsville, and after the men we were working with loaded all the machinery that was stored there we drove to our site, which is connected by a stretch of 8-foot trail to Penitentiary Glen, and then had to wait around for about 20 more minutes while they drove into Pen Glen and came back by that trail with a Skid Skid. A big part of all of their jobs is driving, shuffling equipment and machines, and looking out and reporting what needs to be done at various parks and sites.

The new Lake Erie Bluffs park makes great use of boardwalks because they provide wheelchair access right up to the beach, allow the trails to go through wetlands instead of skirting around, and also ensures that people wont go off into areas that they have identified as fragile. The land was once slated for development, but after the recession the developer sold it, and the Metroparks have been slowly building trails to allow people to access this prime birding spot. We spent one day flagging the wetland areas of what will soon be a new trail, most of which will be boardwalk, which will indicate to the trail building crew where they should definitely be building boardwalk and also be careful to disturb the area as little as possible.