Welcome to 2018 fellow diggers! We have a big year behind us and a bigger year ahead of us. 2017 marked the beginning of a new era of partnership with the City of Mount Vernon, the Mount Vernon Parks Department, the Parks Foundation, and our newly minted trail building group: the Little Mountain Trail Builders. We picked up the baton from the former Mount Vernon Trail Builders group to resume trail building en masse at our April work party with a record turnout, and carried our momentum through the late fall – completing a new connector trail between Bonnie and Clyde and Surfer’s Way and making great headway on our newest trail: the directional (e.g. down only!) flow trail.
In between these capital projects we helped iron out all the little details that make Little Mountain such a great park and trail system, including leaf blowing, repairing washouts and bridges, and removing invasive plant species. We owe our thanks and progress to an inspiring and generous group of sponsors and partners: City of Mount Vernon Parks, Max Dale’s Steak & Chop House, Skagit Cycle, Farmstrong Brewing, Arrow Insulation, and of course Haggen and Starbucks for the one-two punch of donuts and coffee. We hope those of you who joined us to volunteer in 2017 had fun, learned something, and ate well, and we sure do appreciate your help.
2018 has even more donuts and coffee – er, exciting new projects- in store. Not least will be the completion of our flow trail started in 2017. Our biggest project for 2018 (and beyond) though will be breaking ground on the Heart of the Parks project, including parking and a mountain bike skills park. Our focus as trail builders will be on the skills park, creating a place for riders of all abilities and ages to tune up their skills before and after a ride. We can’t wait to get started on this and hope you will join us as our work parties kick back in to gear this spring. We will also be working with the Parks Foundation to install new signage around the park that improves wayfinding and safety, more on this to come. In the meantime, join us on Saturday January 27th as we host our first trail building work party of 2018 - see littlemountainpark.org for details. A big thanks to Arrow Insulation for sponsoring this session!
The city of Mount Vernon continues to grow, and we plan to do our part to keep Little Mountain Park at its best: a welcoming, wooded relief from business about town with some incredible views of the valley. Here’s to a great year to come, and see you on the trails!