Volunteering your time on something you care about always feels great. Spending that time with friends? Even better!
Last year, KEENer Bex! spent a week in the San Juan Islands building the first public trail in the Cady Mountain Preserve. She loved the experience so much, she organized a KEEN group volunteer trip to go back and make a bigger impact. Six KEEN employees used their 40 hours of paid KEEN service leave to help out the San Juan County Conservation Land Bank in April.
Lindsey Hall in our IT department was one of those awesome trail helpers. Here's a quick volunteer trip report from her (plus some amazing photos!).
Lindsey: We maintained trails with the San Juan County Conservation Land Bank. Our crew carefully pruned plants or guided them to grow away from the trail. We fought with Himalayan blackberry and scotch broom to give native plants room to grow. One group learned how to artfully disguise a closed trail with logs, moss, and other forest debris until you couldn’t tell a trail was ever there.
A particularly grueling (and satisfying!) day was spent alongside the tireless twenty-somethings of the Island Conservation Corps hauling gravel in buckets and wheelbarrows to combat soggy spots on the trail. (Bex! even got a chance to drive the tracked dumper that spared our poor muscles from some of the hauling.)
Lindsey, top right in the yellow hat, wore her Targhee III hiking boots.
After our first day of work, we got to see bioluminescence on the coast! Britta, a fellow KEENer, heard it might be visible on the islands this time of year and found out where to look. We hunted around the beach for a while as it got dark, enjoying the lack of light pollution to look at the stars, and finally noticed tiny, flickering sparkles in the water.
Shauna and Jacob with the San Juan County Conservation Land Bank were encyclopedias of plant identification. We saw so many beautiful flowers in bloom and got expert foraging tips. They pointed out miner’s lettuce, their favorite berries to eat (and the ones not to eat) on the islands, and showed us how to safely eat stinging nettle leaves.
This was an amazing trip; I’m so grateful to Bex! for organizing it. Volunteering with the Land Bank made me appreciative of how much work goes into our public lands for visitors and the plants and animals that live there. The San Juan Islands are one of the most beautiful places in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s thanks to their work that we can experience that beauty. Even if you don’t bring a group of KEENmates, the San Juan County Land Bank organizes work parties you can volunteer with. Reach out and see what they’re doing!
