Trail Cleaning 101
Teach your volunteers these simple techniques. Your trails will inevitably be cleaner and safer. What’s more, many Teammates (known as Cleaners or Gardeners) love to “clean up”, because it’s a less demanding task that quickly pays off:
Top 18 Cleaning task (and counting...)
- Encourage the presence of at least one Leader or Captain on each site. Experienced people should give advice and support to newcomers.
- Always prioritize water management. It’s the foundation on which all future decisions are built. Clean drains, canals and water outlets before doing anything else.
- Hide debris in areas not visible from the trail (behind a large rock, in a hole, in a crack in the rock), transporting it with a boiler. We like it clean.
- Take 20 or more steps away from the trail before dumping waste (branches / trunks / stumps / roots / contents of a plant-filled boiler). There’s nothing more unpleasant than having to move an old, tangled pile of branches.
- Group different types of debris together (trunks, branches, dead leaves, black earth or vegetation).
- Spread out piles of debris and avoid making large mounds.
- Cut down all dead trees within one metre of the trail. Keep an eye out for more than you might expect.
- Make sure there are no dead branches hanging over the trail. The safety of users depends on it.
- Carry a cut tree by holding the foot and walking 30 paces from the trail (so that you don’t see the cut trunk, but the head of the tree).
- Mask the cut of a freshly felled tree (or an exposed root) by rubbing damp earth over the white trunk. This will blacken the cut and conceal the whole thing.
- Prune trees cleanly and close to the trunk (without damaging the bark) with a sharp reciprocating saw/saw/shears, so as not to leave any dangerous spikes. A clean, slightly bevelled cut will help the tree to heal (see this simple diagram).
- De-branch high up, 360 degrees around the tree and as high up as possible. This will create a much cleaner visual corridor.
- Cut small shrub/sedge trunks as close to the ground as possible and at 90 degrees (avoid cutting at 45 degrees). These traps left near the trail are waiting to impale a user and are extremely dangerous. Use a reciprocating saw/saw all (your chainsaw is too valuable for this.
- Fill dug-out borrow pits (equipment pits) with scraps (moss, dead leaves, black earth). These are potential traps for wildlife and humans.
- Cut and move moss/lichen with a trowel, to relocate it close to the trail. This will be less demanding than getting rid of it far away (as a bonus, it will continue to live in its new location).
- Make piles of rocks around the edges of the trail, instead of throwing them away (they will inevitably be used one day). These mounds also serve as visual markers. Take care to place them in places that are not likely to present a danger to users.
- Walk to the planned work site, without stopping at various points to fix something else (this syndrome delays the execution of targeted projects).
- Leaving an area to come back to it later is a good way to let ideas emerge and avoid making bad decisions (e.g. cutting down one too many trees, which in the end would leave an obstacle to go around on 2 sides and create 2 lines at the same time).
