Pathfiners For Greenways Trail Work Database 

         
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Project Location Jurisdiction Hours Workers Date Description Type
Mill Mountain Trail #15  Mill Mountain  City Of Roanoke/ Blue Ridge Parkway  22.0  11   9/8/2021  Finished up the Yellowjacket Trail (#15). Added a little fill at top of ramp, built middle section, rolling grade in one spot, blazing, and built a Y connection at the road. Users already on it.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.5  4   9/6/2021  Finished up most work on the first drainage area we armored and started the main one where the spring is. Also have most of the lemon squeezer ride around armoring done. We had to go harvest some more rocks.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  23.9  3   8/29/2021  We are continuing our work on rock armoring sections of finished trail. We are still in the area between Lemon Squeezer and the armored creek crossing. Our main mission in this area was supposed to be the spring crossing trail. But we wanted to do a few other places before spring due to logistics. We might have near all the large rocks needed after the rock collection effort today. Ron was our designated rock smasher today and he did a great job even in extreme heat and horse flies.  Official 
Mill Mountain Trail #15  Mill Mountain  City Of Roanoke  45.0  10   8/25/2021  Dog days of summer for sure. With John R and Barry super focused, others helping, the climb up to Wood Thrush was finished. Waiting for a good rain to settle it all and see if it needs tweaking. Roger removed the cable obstacle, one strand at a time. Others worked on digging the remaining trail section. We hope to finish in one more week.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.3  3   8/22/2021  We worked on some rock armoring of a drainage and a go around of the lemon squeezer scenic feature that some people must not enjoy as much as some of us. The horse flies made it hard to focus on the work. We smashed a few fingers, I will blame the horse flies for making us loose our focus.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  24.3  4   8/20/2021  We are working about mid point in the trail where the 'lemon squeezer' rock passage is and down to the creek crossing. We are armoring a go around people are using that must not like the squeeze. We have reduced the drainages to two and working to rock armor them. One has a spring, but we have to do that one last so we can haul rocks in to the other ones easier. We had to stop with things part way done today as the weather was turning worse and we had stayed longer than the team wanted.   Official 
Maury River Access  Wind River  Rockbridge County  80.0  10   8/11/2021  Return to step building and removal of large trees. Used a rope for a handhold. Roger and Jim B finished the top flight, Shannon and Bud most of the curved section. lots of hauling, sawing, rebar, etc.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.4  2   8/11/2021  It was very hot today. We moved some rock over to where we wanted to armor and then I studied the area some more and decided to reshape the whole section of trail to reduce the number of drainages we need to armor. We moved dirt and smashed rock and removed organic material from the good clay. We have a little more to do before the rocks go in. We stopped early due to heat. On way out Renee caught us just in time and we helped her crew put a thrown track back on their Ditch Witch. They needed some more tools that they did not have with them because they have never thrown a track yet. It is very hard to put tracks back on in the field.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  18.1  2   8/8/2021  I filled all the no-ethanol cans & DW. Plus diesel and truck. Then we stopped on way to Rock-N-Roll to once again close all the social trails between Little Bell and Road that keep getting opened back up. This time we used DW to drag very heavy logs to this area. We spent an hour on this. Then we moved equipment and opened up an old access to mid Rock-N-Roll trail to work on improving a few areas on the trail. We spent time collecting some nice armoring rocks. We will likely start with armoring the trail in two low spots near the tight rock passage and then add official rock path for the go around people are using around the tight rock passage. We decided closing would probably not work and not sure why people are doing this, but assume people are scared to go between the rocks or don't know how to keep their flow through the rocks by putting front wheel on the outside rock. I guess I incorrectly thought all people would love to experience the amazingly cool rock slot and instead a significant few want to just blast through the area.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.8  5   8/6/2021  We finished naturalizing the trail and closed the access routes. We also did a bunch more road work in the area and shut down the barrow pit off the road. Before we shut that down is was producing some very nice soft shale which was used on the road. We gathered up a lot of fallen wood and buried it before capping with dirt and naturalizing.  Official 
Maury River Access  Wind River  Rockbridge County  180.0  15   8/4/2021  Quite a day. Large crew eager to help Bill with his envisioned trail. Until they saw it. Then confusion arose as Bill made his way down and had moved the flags; further delays when Janet fell and broke her fibula, necessitating a trip to ER. Lots of slip sliding down on the very dry, very steep hill. Still amazing progress made, using down cedar for crib walls. Lots of solid rock to make things difficult. Great swim at the end of the day and divine dinner and refreshments.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  38.5  7   8/1/2021  Today was another day of naturalizing above and below the trail. We also have been working on closing down the old access road and naturalizing that. Then at the end of day we put some time into road repairs in the area.  Official 
Mill Mountain Trail #15  Mill Mountain  City Of Roanoke/ Blue Ridge Parkway  33.0  11   7/28/2021  Short day due to afternoon events. John R brought his gorilla cart, which helped with rock collection. With four on rocks, the approach to Wood Thrush made substantial progress and is ready for a layer of railroad size rock and then backfill. Others worked hard on digging trail; found lots of railroad size rock. Glad to have Dave back.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  15.9  3   7/25/2021  We mostly focused on naturalizing around the trail today. We also worked on shutting down the old parallel access road. That process is allowing us to harvest some extra naturalizing material. But I had some issues today as the material is a little thin in the area we are in now. After everyone left, I worked for a bit on the Happy Valley Fire Road. The area I focused on today we between the old access trail where it hit the road and working towards where Rock-N-Roll hits the road.  Official 
Maintenance  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  4.0  2   7/22/2021  Bob and Jim reported no trees down on section west of 311. Trimmed trees and hacked weeds  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  15.3  3   7/22/2021  We spent the whole day working on naturalizing mostly the uphill side of the trail starting at the end and working back. As I use the Vermeer to naturalize and shut down the access road we were using, I was also harvesting some organic mats from spread out areas which I could easily naturalize to grow future new ones. I piled up the mats for the rest of the crew to load up in the Cannycom and haul down and place where needed. We have more left to do yet and some work on downhill side naturalizing also.  Official 
Mill Mountain Trail #15  Mill Mountain  City Of Roanoke/ Blue Ridge Parkway  44.0  11   7/21/2021  Continued on rehab of trail. Jim Brown and crew finished drainage crossing. Roger and crew worked on crossing of rock feature. John Robbins started on the climb up to Wood Thrush. This is mostly road fill, steep downfall. We started with forming a rock base at the bottom, using multiple folks from crew to rock net the bigger rocks. Still need another layer of tiered rock wall. Due to bad air alerts (smoke from out west) and heat, we had agreed to quit mid-day.  Official 
Tree Clearing  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  2   7/19/2021  Tom and Doris removed large trees reported down on First Deck. Encountered wasps at gate at Timberview  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.9  2   7/16/2021  Loaded up gravel from pile near BS gate. Reshaped the pile. Hauled gravel all the way to Rock-N-Roll/School House intersection and thinly spread on the dirt we added to road to improve years of grading issues with road. The road should NOT be crowned here, but instead sloop to downhill side. That is because the road is on a side hill with no outside turn where a ditch would be needed. No creek crosses the road here either. But this is a very long section of road and we can only do a little at a time.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  16.3  3   7/14/2021  We did a little finishing work on the back slope near the bottom of the trail. Mostly though we worked on the road near where Rock-N-Roll comes out by School House and all the way to almost the sharp left turn where School House used to come out. The road would really hold water. We are trying to fix that. It is a lot of work. We are at the point we need some more gravel and we will have to haul it all the way from Bennett Springs gate area. We have the road starting to slope the right way to drain better.  Official 
Mill Mountain Trail #15  Mill Mountain  City Of Roanoke/ Blue Ridge Parkway  50.0  11   7/14/2021  Began rehab/maintenance on Trail #15 in Mill Mtn Trail Plan, also Authorized Trail in BRP Trail Plan. First section was easy work. Then we hit yellow jackets; Alex and Liz were stung. Several nests after that. Got almost to the feature rock, but couldn't do the drainage crossing  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  39.5  7   7/11/2021  We stopped on the way in to move some fallen trees over to block the shortcuts from Little Bell to fire road. With more people we could haul heavier stuff. Due to wet weather we could not do trail finishing work. We chose instead to harvest rock from the old fire road/access trail. We need some of these for the armoring we will be going back and doing in selected places on Rock-N-Roll. Some naturalizing was done on Rock-N-Roll using piles of organic from way up where we were gathering rock as no more piles left along trail anymore. Rex clipped the vines that were again over-running the access trail that we will be using for some time.  Official 
Bridge the Gap Plaza  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  18.0  3   7/9/2021  Installed plaque on the rock. Not easy. Required lots of cutting and sanding with angle grinder.  Official 
Maintenance  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  4.5  1   7/7/2021  Roger opted to leave the crew and finish the weedeating on Catawba. Went all the way through  Official 
Maintenance, Laurel Canyon  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  36.0  9   7/7/2021  Continued on with clearing, rehab, re-benching along the old road bed  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  6.8  2   7/7/2021  Turtle adjusted the 6th from the top jump rock a little so that it had a little less lift. I worked on naturalizing old access routes roughly with Vermeer machine to make hand work easier later. We did a short day and really needed to grab some tools for a greenway work day. I am trying to recover from bad poison ivy rash I got twice working on the end of this trail.  Official 
Sign Installation and Trail Maintenance  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  61.0  13   6/30/2021  We installed the five trail signs that the county had bought, often digging in asphalt. Blanche and Jimbo blazed the upper portion of the trail. Shannon, Roger and Tom ran weedeaters, and found it was lots and lots to cut. We moved that one post down to the trail to hold blazes. Trimmed trees along the road part. We are ready for the ribbon cutting, whenever they get around to it.  Official 
Bridge the Gap Plaza  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  8.5  5   6/29/2021  Finishing touches. Shannon brought topsoil we bought and then mulch. Laura Reilly brought the plants. With her speed and digger, she laid them out and we planted them (~250) in about 45 minutes. Meanwhile the artwork arrived and we got to see that installed, with only a minor stud movement to make the base fit right on our bolts. It was perfectly level. Great job crew!!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  13.3  3   6/28/2021  Add some finishing dirt to shape the last part of the trail and make sure the trail is above the area below the trail for good drainage. Also worked on the road all around where School House Rock joins with School House. Also worked on the entry of School House where there was erosion from water runoff from the road. Trying to reroute a lot of that water best as can, but not easy to do in a non noticeable way. Making very slow changes to road in order to not cause mud issues where we are adding dirt.  Official 
Bridge the Gap Plaza  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  7.0  4   6/25/2021  Pulled the forms with no issues. Smoothed the circle dirt. Swept. Met an Australian going through on his bike; said he was from Victoria; knew Bill was from Melbourne.  Official 
Bridge the Gap Plaza  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  31.8  8   6/24/2021  The big pour day. Concrete is rush rush rush as you get it down and smooth it, then wait wait wait as you watch it cure. Boxley donated the concrete and they were right on time. The QA guy came with them, and he was a help with raking. Jim Brown meticulously measured for the jig for the artwork and got that installed on the pad. Others raked, troweled, pulled, screed - whatever Shannon told us. Lots of edging and brooming. Hot hot hot. A few stayed til 7 to be sure we got no names in the concrete.  Official 
Tree Clearing  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  1.5  1   6/24/2021  Cut tree off Rock-N-Roll 8/10 of mile in from start.  Official 
Bridge the Gap Plaza  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  91.5  16   6/23/2021  The start of an urban project, building a "nook" to recognize donors, with artwork, a bench and a rock. Our job was to form up the sidewalk space for Thursday concrete. The ground was hard as rock, in spite of the rain Tuesday, and we would never have gotten it done without the DW from the City and Shannon's tractor. Put the rock and dirt on Shannon's truck, and then got permission to fill a low spot on Barrows and take some to a rutted area near their building. It was a day for picks and digging bars. Fortunately the forms were easier than the digging. We gave up on putting down gravel as we felt like we were already in rock. Had a deadline for folks to get to GC and on to Bill's  Official 
Bridge the Gap Plaza  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  3.0  1   6/22/2021  Jim cut the forms and made the artwork jig for us.  Official 
Happy Valley Culvert Cleaning  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  1.3  1   6/21/2021  More work on clogged culvert. Water the transplanted ferns on Rock-N-Roll trail.  Official 
Happy Valley Culvert Cleaning  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  1.5  1   6/19/2021  Dug out some of the dirt on the entry side of the worst clogged culvert. Had better flow for a little while at least.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  5.5  1   6/17/2021  Got two truck loads of rocks from Tunnel Road spoils and two loads of pug mill from rock pile near gate and spread on sections of Happy Valley that needed it.  Official 
Maintenance  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  6.0  2   6/17/2021  Removed two small blowdowns and whacked weeds and overhanging branches.  Official 
Maintenance, Laurel Canyon  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  78.0  12   6/16/2021  We focused on another site that needed widening, although flags had disappeared. Tom and Shannon cut to the current end, with Tom enjoying his new battery powered saw. Jim B finished his drainage crossing. Beautiful day, high 60s, nice breeze.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  23.4  4   6/13/2021  It was misty in the morning but cleared up later. We had to cut a 14" diameter fallen pine tree off the road on way in. I used Pathfinders new 12" electric chain saw and it worked well. Around 8 full diameter cuts and a bunch of limbs. The upper dirt mine was too wet to use, so we had to find another one if possible off the road. We eventually did find a good spot to get some dirt and provide drainage. We did more finishing work on the trail and did a lot of naturalizing of the hillside where the trail intersects the road. Also a bunch of naturalizing was done further up the trail. All our organic piles are used up and we had to mine some of that material also. Turtle transplanted a bunch of ferns from places on the road we plan to work on...so we basically saved them and utilized them. Also pulled about 25 logs out of the ditches and road up by the left turn past School House junction where the trail used to hit the road a long time ago.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  23.4  5   6/10/2021  We timed the weather perfect today. We got out and home just before the storms cut loose. We did a bunch of naturalizing today. We also got 4 cannycom loads of dirt placed on the trail tread in places needed for best shape. We cut a fallen tree off the old road access trail.  Official 
Maintenance, Laurel Canyon  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  71.5  12   6/9/2021  We all focused today on one of the flagged sections, widening the bench to a normal width. It sure is faster to widen a bench than to build one. We had expected rain by noon, but, to our regret, didn't get it. Soil was like powder, super dry and dusty. We welcomed Homer Witcher's grandson Alex (not yet in system).  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  10.4  2   6/6/2021  We closed down the lower dirt mine that is also a drainage above the trail and naturalized the area. We added good dirt to the ferns that Turtle planted in that area. We watered the ferns with all the water we had. We got dirt from upper dirt mine and did a bunch of finishing work on the trail tread.  Official 
Maintenance, Laurel Canyon  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  60.0  10   6/2/2021  Another flowering day on Laurel Canyon. This week the galax were stunning. Renee and Liz flagged areas that need to be widened, Bud kept on with the brush blade, others raked and dug trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.7  5   5/31/2021  We broke out to the road right across from Schoolhouse trail today! There was about 6 foot cliff there with all sorts of stickers and brush. We roughed in and reshaped to make a side hill trail down a much more extended length. We also worked to improve trail/road crossing viability. We are using all the good excess dirt to also improve the grade of the road at the same time to sheet the water off the road. We are getting into poison ivy that we are not seeing. I think it is from roots off giant vines we do see a way off the trail corridor. We have a lot more work to do to improve the trail and side slope of this area and also the road repairs. We still have finishing work up a way on the trail to do also.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.8  4   5/28/2021  Today we roughed in trail all the way down to the ledge before the road across from School House Trail. We had to clear a large area there as we plan to reshape that area for the trail down to the road. This was a huge mess of sticker vines. We will have to get the rest from down from the road before we start to push the dirt down. Gerry focused on a lot of rock smashing to start the day out. That banked turn is probably the last feature on this trail. Then John and Turtle covered the last two rock bases of the features with dirt and shaped and compacted the dirt.  Official 
Maintenance  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  52.3  11   5/26/2021  Shortish day with many leaving for GC meeting. Cleaned ditches (by hand)- and culverts on lower end. Then around powerline and below first landing. Then up the road to the second landing.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  30.8  5   5/23/2021  First I ran and got 15 gallons of no-ethanol gas for the equipment. We worked on several projects. A bunch of naturalizing was done all the way down to the last access trail. This area took a lot of work. Dirt was mined and added to the grade reversal and banked turn before the last jump feature. A whole bunch of rocks were added to a new banked turn. To get the rocks we found some down off the road. We were careful to actually improve the road drainage and bank shape where we worked. More rocks were smashed around the armored drainage crossing.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  24.8  4   5/21/2021  We worked on the drainage above armored crossing and actually have been able to mine some dirt from there to use in other places on the trail. We raised the trail up in some spots for better drainage and user flow. Rocks were moved to shape the latest S curve through a group of trees. Then dirt was added to cover the rocks and can be adjusted for best shape. We have another small banked turn to do above this S curve. We are really close to finishing.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.8  1   5/20/2021  Worked on defining the landscape above our armored drainage crossing to make sure all the drainage goes across the trail where it is armored. Also finishing work and naturalizing around the trail in this area. Moving any found rock to where needed for the inflow and outflow of the armored crossing and around trees to keep dirt off the trunk.  Official 
Maintenance, Laurel Canyon  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  66.0  11   5/19/2021  Enjoyed a great day clearing an existing roadbed, Trail #30, now Laurel Canyon. This will tie into Buck when we build it. Stunning mountain laurel and Turkey's Beard. Roger and Tom on the chainsaws, Bud on brush blade, others trimming and raking.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  30.9  5   5/16/2021  It sprinkled all day. But we kept working. Most of the crew was hauling rock to our next feature that needed a grade reversal and banked turn between some trees. Turtle did the rock placements on this feature as two Canycoms were running non stop to keep him supplied. I focused on the armored drainage crossing I have been working on off and on. Today I got it almost finished. All rocks are in except for filling the gaps with smashed rock and adding rip rap above and below.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.5  4   5/13/2021  Roughed in some more trail and sorted through the organic to collect rock and organic matting. The rest was distributed in the woods. Worked on armored drainage crossing and grade reversal/jump features.   Official 
Maintenance  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  44.5  9   5/12/2021  Worked on removing tree debris, cleaning culverts, and cleaning ditches with the Witch. Tom and Jim B went on out the road to get a big tree.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.2  3   5/11/2021  We worked on the last two features plus the rock armored drainage. Also sorted through and distributed the rough in material piles. We hauled some dirt down for the last two features and shaped and compacted the dirt. We also cleared some fallen trees off the trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  1.8  1   5/10/2021  Place the next large jump rock on our current last feature. We have one more feature coming up next which could possibly be our last on this project.  Official 
Maintenance  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  4.5  2   5/6/2021  We removed small branches and did a little touch-up work on the tread here and there in two and a quarter hours   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.5  2   5/6/2021  Today we continued rework of last two jump features. One was completed with both a widening and banking of landing and adjustment of jump rock. The bottom one had its jump rock moved and more crushed rock added around it. We still need more dirt before reopening that one. We had to clear a large pine tree with tons of branches off the fire road. Also had to clear a tree from the trail right where we were working.  Official 
Construction  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  80.0  14   5/5/2021  Finished up with a great effort in lots of places. Bud, Barry, Shannon, and Jim Brown finished the bottom round of steps and Shannon did the rock work. Jim B installed the sign at the fire road. Tom, Steve, Greg, Chuck and Liz cleaned the jungle where Adam wants to replace the culvert on bottom section. Greg and Liz moved one blaze post. Roger and John R cut weeds in the field and all along the trail. Dave and Blanche cleared storm debris, and Tom cut trees. Big effort to push through, clean it all up and finish. Yeah!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  7.8  2   5/2/2021  Turtle and I wanted to keep this a small crew as we needed to focus on fixing a few features to improve landing areas. We did not get finished and had to block both areas with cones and branches.  Official 
Construction  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  42.0  9   4/28/2021  Leaving the steps to sit for a week, we headed to the bottom for clean-up, weeding, etc. The truck was picking up the last of the 311 equipment, so we were glad to have our field back. Tom, Barry, Blanche & Liz went in from the bottom and cleared fallen limbs off the road from the bridge to the shelter. Joined the crew there that was doing a beautiful job on clean, weed digging, weed whacking. Roger on the weedeater hit the field plus the trail on either side. Looked much better and allowed some spot improvements.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  38.3  6   4/28/2021  We redid a section of finishing work that did not have proper shape. It was missing the proper edge of trail to allow us to naturalize later without blocking water on trail tread. We also worked on smashing rock into the trail tread in a drainage area to harden it. We covered two of the grade reversal features with dirt. A few more stones were added to what will be a rock exposed armored section. A small bit of trail was roughed in.  Official 
Signs  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  9.5  1   4/27/2021  Made signs to go on fire road (various days added together)  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  37.8  6   4/25/2021  Today the trail was too wet to do finishing work. So we collected a whole lot of rock. We hauled some down to our features, but most we piled up on the side of the road for future use. I was after some large rocks for a drainage crossing and to find those you have to go through a lot of rock sometimes like today. Turtle and Dan did some rock smashing on the latest feature.  Official 
Construction  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  57.5  15   4/21/2021  Oh my gosh. Who made it so cold?!!! Freezing wind. Those up high got the worst of it. Roger joined bottom step crew. Dave worked on root crossing. Blanche orchestrated reverse grade under the powerline. Lots of cutting and hauling for cribbing. Tough day  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  16.0  4   4/20/2021  Today we did some finishing tread work and rock work on two of the features.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  40.8  6   4/18/2021  Today we did several projects. Two large piles from roughing in trail were sorted and remaining material dispersed. A large section of trail had finishing work done on it in the same area. I worked on rock armoring a drainage. Ron Smashed some rocks in a grade change feature just before the drainage I was working in. Turtle started setting rocks for the next feature/jump which will be a big one. We brought in a rock for it today. We also did some temporary patching of the place in fire road where culvert seems to be collapsing. Then at the end of day we harvested lots of rock from up the old fire road which is a long way from where we are working. Cathy came out and worked after running the marathon yesterday!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  10.7  2   4/16/2021  We harvested rock and hauled it to the areas we need it. We also did two loads of dirt for covering on two french drains. We are looking for some large rocks for our next extra special feature. We found some, but need more. Lots of work to find them and haul them to where we need them.  Official 
Construction  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  65.0  13   4/14/2021  In spite of forecast, it did not rain. Had lots of worker bees gathering rocks, a crew building middle steps and a crew on bottom steps. Several building the crossing of the ditch. Great production.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  37.2  6   4/11/2021  Turns out that Carvins Cove Bennett Springs side must have had a huge amount of rain last night. The creeks were flowing heavier than I have seen in some time. The work we have been doing on the road has really paid off as there was water on the road in places, but very little mud until you get to the areas we have not worked as much. Anyway, the trail was too wet to work on. So we just focused on harvesting rock and adding another water diverter to the old road which we can do easily as part of the rock harvest. It is great to accomplish multiple objectives at the same time. We did end up being able to haul many loads of rock down to the new trail in places we needed it. On the way out Turtle and I cut quite a mess of tangled trees off the first switchback on Rock-N-Roll. It appears someone was trying to do a good thing cutting the leaning tree and it ended up falling into another tree breaking it up high and making a dangerous bind to clean up. Took a lot of time to release the pressure and the tree still jumped back violently. Stuart from BROC brought us pizza out around 1pm that Little Caesars donated...Thanks to both!   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  14.9  4   4/9/2021  We took a chance with the weather forecast today and got lucky. We did pack up when it started to sprinkle a little after 4. Turtle gathered and placed rock for our next feature which is also providing a grade change and root protection between some trees. The rest of us worked on roughing in some new trail. We are in an area with a huge amount of fallen trees which makes it hard to work. We had to move a bunch of dead trees and spread them around instead of a big pile. There are also a bunch of drainage swells in this area that might need to be hardened.   Official 
Construction  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  67.5  12   4/7/2021  Sunny, hot, spring day. Lots of traffic in the parking lot, on 311, on the fire road. Shannon brought the remaining lumber we need, and Blanche and Liz cut it at the road. Bud, Shannon, and Barry worked on bottom steps. Roger, Frank, and Jimbo did middle steps. Others did lots of hauling materials. Dave worked on finishing upper trail. John worked on rock steps. Tom and Blanche installed the sign post. Lots of jobs and lots of hard working people.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  48.6  8   4/6/2021  Weather was Great! Got up to 80 I think. Turtle used the DW to mine dirt and apply to the latest jump/feature. The rest of us worked on both finishing work and roughing in work below that feature. We made great progress. Later in the day I worked on some finishing work above the feature and Turtle did some repair work with adding dirt to a few spots that needed touch up as the trail is settling in a bit from all the fill we used and a bit of erosion with our fill on the features.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  8.7  2   3/30/2021  We collected rock from the old fire road and added it to our latest feature. Turtle also smashed some rock at the feature and I improved the drainage on the fire road where we were collecting rock. It was a bit slow going up at the road because I kept hitting unmovable bed rock like structures. The machine can usually jiggle rocks over 10,000 lbs, so these are beyond that and seem connected. Had to work careful in this area to not damage the tracks on Vermeer. We also found a very nice jump rock for this feature. This should be a fun jump into a banked turn.  Official 
Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  38.0  9   3/24/2021  Due to several days of rain and mud at Catawba, we did a rainy day project by clearing ditches, shrubs, and culverts on Horsepen Trail at Carvins Cove. Many had not been there since we built the bridge. It was a cloudy damp day, but never rained on us and temperatures were great. Chainsaws, weedeaters, loppers, etc. Special thanks to the got-a-mechanic-coming team.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  33.0  5   3/21/2021  Jared smashed rocks almost all day! Thankfully he said he likes it. Turtle smashed rock and positioned rock. They were working in the latest banked turn/water diverter/jump. Steve, Rex and I focused on mining for rock while at the same time improving the old fire road where we are getting the rock from by adding water diverters with drainage areas. The spot on the road we are at now seems to hold many more small and medium rock and not the >200 lb like we have been used to.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.5  1   3/20/2021  Haul two Canycom loads of rock from rock mine to latest feature. Smash some rocks into a soft section of trail at previous feature.   Official 
Construction  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  58.8  12   3/17/2021  Great group. Blanche and Chuck went back to the field and raked and repaired the trail from there to the rock drainage. Shannon, Bud and Barry started on the bottom steps. Roger, Frank and Jimbo made great progress on the middle steps. Liz and Dave hauled lots of materials and tools. John and Tom cut trees from over the trail and on out the fire road. Several left early for vaccine #2!  Official 
Maintenance  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  2.0  1   3/17/2021  Digging to repair trail tread.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.5  1   3/17/2021  Hauled rock from sides of old road to latest feature. This is a long distance now and only had time for two loads.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  36.1  6   3/14/2021  Steve and Ron did a huge amount of naturalizing working their way from the top of the trail down about two jumps from the bottom. Turtle collected a bunch of rocks and started laying the foundation of the latest banked turn with possible jump to be added. It is a tricky one with tight turn and two trees close together. The rest of us roughed in a large amount of new trail. I walked where it connects with School House and could see the crew when looking back!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  10.2  2   3/11/2021  Finished adding and compacting clay on the last rock pile/jump/water diverter feature. Xfer the jumping jack compactor back to BROC to share on another project after using it one this last feature. Roughed in a little more trail.  Official 
Construction  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  64.0  11   3/10/2021  Finally, back to our trail construction. Saw Jim Webb, who was doing AT work. Roger and crew started on the middle steps; tough assignment given the way the bank falls off. Blanche and Shannon built a beautiful rock wall on the edge of the top steps. John and Bud did finish work on some trail behind us. Others digging between the turns. Generator is getting heavier.  Official 
Maintenance  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  6.0  2   3/10/2021  Worked on erosion under the powerline. Cleared one blowdown, one needs a chainsaw. This was on the older part of the trail, to the left of 311.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  13.4  3   3/10/2021  Added some dirt to a few low spots in the trail. Worked on back slope in a few areas. Found rock for next jump and place it. Add rock base to a few places that needed to be widened. Add dirt on top of some of the rocks. Cut up some dead-fall blocking the rough in work.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  1   3/9/2021  Did some finishing work in a section we only had roughed in pretty far back from where we are roughing in now. This is the last section we passed up. It needed a lot of dirt moved. I had to sort out the largest rocks and a lot of roots. I did a lot of shaping of the back slope, but a little more needs to be done in this area and a bit of dirt brought in.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  29.3  5   3/7/2021  Finally back to the trail! The ground was still a bit wet, but not bad. We had to cut one tree from the road on the way in. We started out roughing in trail. Turtle worked on positioning a jump rock feature. Then we moved to finishing 3 large section of trail between last 3 features. We still have at least one more section to do that we skipped a while back.  Official 
Tree Clearing  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  16.0  4   3/5/2021  Two teams working, one from each end on Brushy Mtn Fire Road. Tom and Hugh came in from Bennett Springs. Cut 8 trees, when they met Roger and Bud at HiDeeHo. Roger and Bud came up Hinchee, cleared 14.5 trees. Great effort to get all that open before the first warm week end.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  17.3  3   3/4/2021  First we all worked on clearing logs that were starting to block the 4 big culverts as you enter the park. We used chains and the Ditch Witch to pull out the big ones. Turtle got down in the water with his tall boots. Then we loaded up Turtle and Gerry with gravel to spread from Tunnel road to Enchanted. Then they went to get larger rock to fill in the deeper erosion on the hill that I have been re-establishing the ditches on. We are also using some old shale material piled up next to road in the woods from a long time ago when the tunnels were made. We made the lowest place in the road the highest place now with a nice crown. But we have only don't that on part of the hill. We still have a whole lot of work to do in order to really finish it. Turtle stayed late and spread some more gravel where we were crowning the road with some dirt mixed in.  Official 
Trash Pick-Up  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  42.0  9   3/3/2021  Due to another day of too wet to dig trail, we pitched in to pick up trash on Roanoke River Greenway from Bennington trailhead to 9th St. Sunny day, so lots of users on the trail later in the morning. Load weighed in at ~1000 lb, which is amazing, given that most of it was plastic. Hard to get those bags out of trees. The trash grabbers helped.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  20.8  3   2/25/2021  First I went to fill up the No-Ethanol gas cans. Then I got to the work site early to unload Ditch Witch and start shaping the rock piles and working on nearby ditches. Then Loaded up Turtle and Gerry with stone to spread on the road. For their first two trips I waited at rock piles to load them up. and worked on ditch there. They focused on the road between rock pile and Tunnel Road. We are trying to make the road better on the way out so we can drive on good road even on these wet days without damaging the road. Then later in the day Turtle hand loaded his truck and I worked on the major issue with the road between Enchanted and Buck where water always runs down the road. The ditches were in the middle of road. This has been a lot of work, but should be worth it.  Official 
Trash Pick-Up  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  32.8  10   2/24/2021  Too muddy on the trails, so we spent the morning helping with trash pick-up from Bridge St to Memorial Ave. There were some old homeless camps near the beginning, which yielded lots of trash and furniture. Big group worked to the bridge, Dave went around to other end, others worked the homeless camps. Used all the plastic bags, which was almost a case! The City picked it up Thursday and carried 1300 pounds to landfill.  Official 
Tree Clearing  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  6.0  2   2/10/2021  Crew canceled for rain in morning, but Roger and Anne cut trees in afternoon. Hiked in  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  8.3  2   2/9/2021  It was very wet on trails, so did some road work instead. But it was so wet we were not even sure that would be possible. So only two of us went out and we just focused on one area between Enchanted forest and Arrowhead. It is a hill that water runs down middle of road almost all the time. The ditches are totally filled in from past grading so road is lowest point all the way down. Worked on digging out a ditch on one side of road. We are not sure what we are going to do on other side because we did not want to funnel water onto Enchanted Forest Trail. However the only other solution is to slope all water to one side of road. Raising the other side of road will take a lot of work if we want to sort out the organic in the process. We did have a bit of a slow down due to problems with Pathfinder truck battery.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Truck  Pathfinders  1.6  1   2/9/2021  Replaced battery in truck. Took truck to Advanced and had them change out the battery while I waited. Much better now. The old batter was 7 years old.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  39.9  7   1/24/2021  It was colder over night than expected and the ground was VERY frozen. So had to change my plans from tread finishing work to roughing in trail and working on rock for next jump/feature. Turtle installed a jump rock on the next ready grade reversal feature. We also made a new access trail since we were so close to cars we could see them. This will be one we close down as soon as trail is done, so we didn't put much time into it. Turtle and I picked out our next jump rock.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  18.3  3   1/21/2021  Cleared a few small trees of the road by hand, did not need saw. The dirt had perfect moisture in the dirt mine. So harvested dirt all day to cover latest two features which have a large smashed rock base. All organic material was sifted out of the dirt and the dirt was raked and shaped. Then the dirt was compacted with the jumping jack compactor. Did a little finishing work on a section of trail that was roughed in. More work needed on that section. Lots of organic material to pick out and more dirt needed.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Canycom #2  Pathfinders  3.0  1   1/16/2021  Changed the engine oil 10w30. Changed the transmission oil 80-90 weight gear oil. Takes 2L, even though manual says 1.5. Put new tracks on and stored the old ones in trailer. Disposed of one really bad one that was in trailer. Drilled the 4 drain holes in bed a little bigger.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  DW  Pathfinders  11.0  1   1/15/2021  There was a slow hydraulic fluid leak which had nothing to do if the machine was running or not. It would leak out the body of machine at the right slot where drive motor is. Maybe a gallon per month. The pump compartment was a HUGE mess from dust mixing with the oil for so long. The Roanoke County staff power washed the areas they could in the compartment which helped a lot. But still could not find the leak. I used 4 rolls of shop towels spray cleaner to slowly wipe off huge amounts of gunk from hard to reach areas around all fittings. After cleaned up some and sitting over night, I was able to easily see the leak. I was able to tighten a hose clamp to stop it. I did a bunch more cleaning and tightened many other hoses. I think I will clean this out more often. I ran out of towels, so I will need to do more cleaning some other time when I check again.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.0  1   1/14/2021  Biked out there and harvested rocks from around old fire road and used the dirt I moved to make grade reversal and water runoff area. Spent some time compacting and making it look nice. Found a lot of great rocks and set them aside for future use. It was good to combine some road improvements with the rock collection.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.2  4   1/11/2021  Because the snow two days ago and freeze thaw conditions, we switched to road work for today. It was very muddy out there and it did not phase the overflow parking lot and huge number of people using lower trails. hikers, horses, and bikes were all out there. I think some people stayed on road and it is great to make the road better for those people. If they do the right thing, we don't want them to get muddy. The Roanoke Parks and Rec had delivered a bunch of 21b stone last week and we loaded that into Turtles truck and Gerry's trailer. Then Turtle, Gerry, and John went out and lightly spread the stone on areas of the road where dirt was showing signs of having been muddy. The road was frozen when we started. It got soft as the day went on. Between filling the truck and trailer using Ditch Witch, I would load it on the trailer and run out to Tunnel road to turn around and unload to work on ditches in that area until the crew came back through for more stone. Then I would put machine back on trailer and follow them back to load them up. While this is not very efficient for the ditch work, it was better then not working on ditches which is the roads biggest issue due to past grading of the road into the ditches thus making road lower. We all hope that a grader is not used again thus destroying all our work!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  9.1  2   1/7/2021  Harvest and move rock. Add water diverter to old fire road as part of rock harvest work. Smash rock and shape trail feature.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  63.5  11   1/6/2021  Coming in from McAfee parking lot. Asplundh has certainly worn out the mudholes on the fire road. Roger and Jim Brown finished the top flight of steps, with Jimbo and Liz digging out ahead of them and transporting the dirt. Bud and a few helpers did an amazing job of fixing the section with the tall steep bank. It looks so good that you realize we need to do finish work on about 1000' behind there. Others worked on the legs between the turns. It is coming together. The step turns will probably take longer than the remaining trail work.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.7  3   1/6/2021  We roughed in more trail and gathered rock for yet another feature and to protect tree roots in a tight spot. This will make the 6th jump feature I think. Looks like we might be able to do one more after that.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  14.3  3   1/4/2021  Today Steve and I roughed in more trail and Turtle collected and smashed more rock for the latest grade reversal and optional jump feature. It was a nice day and we got a lot done considering how wet it was out there.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.3  1   12/24/2020  Worked on grade reversal and optional jump feature. Rock collecting and smashing. Shaping of freature.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.8  1   12/23/2020  Worked on wall of next grade reversal and optional jump feature and move a bunch of fill rock in.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.8  1   12/21/2020  Move 4 canycom loads of rock for grade reversal and optional jump feature.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  10.1  2   12/20/2020  We gathered large rocks for the next feature. We also found a lot of smaller rocks in the process and made piles for later retrieval. Turtle re-shaped a back slope spot that was a bit awkward.   Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Canycom #1  Pathfinders  15.0  3   12/19/2020  his happened over several weeks. The left front drive shaft was leaking bad. The bearing was shot. We had an extra one including the seal and gasket left from the time we did the right side. It is a major job to remove the transmission in order to do this. Changed fluid too which was very dirty It took over 2 bottles (probably because we held unit upside down to drain ALL fluid out instead of using drain plug. Also noted the gears were loose on splines both sides. Dave made custom washers to tighten up the gears which worked well. Also found that the front transmission input pulley set screw had fallen out and it was loose on shaft hitting guard plates which kept it from falling off. But plates worn bad. Dave found a set screw and I used red lock tight one drop. Found right track tensioner shaft sleeve all pushed back in housing and pulled it out using trail flag and vise grips. Drilled bigger holes in bed for water drainage. Changed engine oil. After one use, someone get a rock stuck between drive sprocket and first track roller on right side. This broke the rear flange of that roller clean off the hub and it was flopping around. Dave got Darrel to weld it back on which saved Pathfinders much money. Put that welded one in the middle as it might not be as strong. Both Canycoms have new spark plugs now too since I had to put the old one form Canycom #2 in hear to get that one working last work day. Can't run these things with choke left on!!!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  38.7  7   12/13/2020  Nice day for December! We started off with most of the crew collecting rock that was used to adjust the position/shape of a banked turn in order to use less dirt and offer better sustainability. Then the rock were smashed into the turn. Also dirt was added to two turns. We also roughed in a few hundred feet of trail and sorted the scraped off material. A large fallen tree was leaning across the route and had to be cut up along with a lot of fallen trees on the ground. The crew distributed those down the hill away from the trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  29.6  5   12/10/2020  Really nice day for December. We think we might have the big S turn mostly finished. We will let some people ride it more and see the lines they are using. We started putting some dirt on the next banked turn and we started roughing in some more trail. After the work day I went and got more gear oil for Canycom and picked up the socket set we had our eye on from Northern now that we had a bag for it since its holder was junk.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  72.0  12   12/9/2020  Well, the weather was a little better than last week, in that it did warm up some. Still cold at start and plenty windy. Roger and Jim Brown worked on the top turning staircase - got about half way done. Shannon, Bud and Barry worked on the rock "patio" at the bottom of the steps. Tom and Blanche cleared out saplings along the ditches and road. Others worked on trail, which was tough at first as the ground was frozen and then sticky later as the ground thawed. It is hard to do finish work when the ground is frozen.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  33.0  5   12/3/2020  It started out below freezing this morning. But ended up getting up to around 50. Our focus today was getting dirt on the upper of the last two banked turns we have been working on. The first one is a jump if you take one route and an S turn if you bypass the jump. However it has been hard to get the S very usable. We might have to add yet another banked turn to the set to make it work. The lower banked turn, still needed more rock in the lower side to raise the banked turn to get the shape we think will work best. So more rock collecting and smashing was done. The jump rock was installed and it tested well.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  53.8  11   12/2/2020  Oh, my gosh, it was Soooo cold. Wind was howling all day long. Now working from the top, rather than coming in from the farm. First we coordinated with the Asplundh crew which was also in the parking lot and going in on the fire road. We drove in the 64 pieces of lumber for the steps - which had been precut by Roger and Shannon. The carry in could have taken awhile, but everyone was hustling due to the cold. After doing that, Roger and crew worked on figuring out the layout of top turn and others worked on making a goat path along the flag line between turns to enable carrying lumber (and walking). Finished the day by carrying some lumber to turn two.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  1   11/29/2020  Filled a few pot holes on road with buckets of stone. Collected, smashed, and shape the latest two banked turn features.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  1   11/28/2020  Filled a few pot holes on road with buckets of stone. Collected, smashed, and shape the latest two banked turn features.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  1   11/27/2020  Filled a few pot holes on road with buckets of stone. Collected, smashed, and shape the latest two banked turn features.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  23.3  4   11/22/2020  We welcomed Connor back by letting him smash some a whole lot of rock! That big banked S turn is really taking shape. We have a lot more to do, but we can start to see what we are looking for. Turtle kept Connor supplied with rock and when Connor left, Turtle picked up the sledge and took over. Steve started out by gathering logs to help fill in the dirt mine we are shutting down. Then he did some awesome naturalizing of the inside of our banked turns to keep people using the part of the trail out of the drainage. I finished the closing of the dirt mine and made it look like a simple old swell. It will still serve a purpose to drain water off the future trail route that will go past there. I also spent some time opening up a new dirt mine and trying harder to make it drain well and be less deep but more spread out. There were a lot of downed trees in the area that had to be cut and moved.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  9.3  2   11/20/2020  Today Turtle unclogged leaves from the last creek crossing so water would flow under instead of over the crossing. Either way is actually OK. But under is drier for the users. Then Turtle worked on the big upper banked turn of the two we are working on now. He smashed a bunch of rock! I focused on shutting down the last dirt mine. I worked on opening a new one and cutting up and moving all surrounding dead fall into the hole in a nice stacked manner to try to fill as much of the gaps as possible. I got about half of it filled in. More work to do, but it is looking better already. The new mine should drain better and be less deep.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  66.0  12   11/18/2020  Working on up the hill. Skipped the turns. Installed some steps. Most of clearing done.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.3  5   11/16/2020  Today was rock mining and adding rocks to two large banked turns. Lots of rock smashing was also done in those turns. They are taking shape and they are big. Also while mining for rock, doing a little work to drain water from a section of fall line layout where the road is the low point. The good thing about doing this besides improving the road, is we find a huge amount of rocks when we dig. We are now storing up the largest ones for future features.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  23.3  3   11/9/2020  Today we had Ron and Kenny who are City of Roanoke Parks and Rec employees come out to help us. The also brought along their Ditch Witch mini tracked loader to help with our rock gathering for the banked turns we are working on now and some might be used later for some crossings. We have to clear some rocks from the path of the machine to protect the rubber tracks and in the process some of these rocks are the tip of a much larger rock which we can use. They hit a really large one of these that was hard to remove but they got it and in the process many other rocks. Also got many rocks placed in the turn and some smashing done. Turtle and I worked on some trail finishing work shaping existing dirt and adding some new clay. Gerry was our rock hauler for most of the day using the Canycom powered wheelbarrow.   Official 
Tree Clearing  Greenhill Park  Roanoke County  2.0  2   11/7/2020  Cleared newly fallen tree off Pawpaw  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  9.7  2   11/6/2020  We positioned some previously harvested large rocks for the large banked turn we are working on now and also harvested some more and placed for that turn and back at the middle jump where the landing area was a little close to the edge of the rock wall. We extended the wall out and added some more dirt. We still have not finished this as we ran out of time.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  48.0  11   11/4/2020  Back to Catawba on a beautiful day, sunshine, warming temps. We focused this week on clean-up of previous sections, weedeating, re-establishing the field route, widening the trail going up to the paved road, and getting weeds out of the trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.3  6   11/3/2020  First we moved several branches and small trees from the road. Did not have to use saw. But took 3 of us to move one tree. Today was a big rock gathering day. That is all we did today. We placed the very large rocks 100-1000lb as back supports for the two latest big banked turns we are working on. We also collected tons of medium size rocks and piled them above the turns for future smashing into the shape of the turn we want for the inside fill. We have a wonderful supply of rocks up the old road.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  13.1  2   10/30/2020  Today was wet from the 2.5" rain yesterday. Some trees were down on the road. Most were small and movable by hand. One was bigger and had a bunch of poison ivy in it. We wrapped a chain around the base and pulled it to be just off the road on one side. Later a machine with bucket can be used to push it well off the road and not in the ditch. We shoveled up most of the remaining rock and did several trips of road repair and also picked up a bunch of medium sized rocks from another pile and used those as a base to improve a ditch crossing on the access trail. We sprinkled some more 21b rock on the access trail in places and worked on cutting out a blockage where the "devils' vine" yeah that is what I call it, pulled another tree down. Yes, this vine actually pulls trees down. Also this vine is like steel. It is terrible to cut. Well the vine was so numerous on this tree and all around I had trouble getting the chainsaw to the places needing cut. That vine pulled the chain off the saw twice! When that happened both chains were destroyed. Glad they were pretty worn already even though I had recently spent an hour sharpening both of them at home. So we ended up finishing this by hand with a dull hand saw. Terrible!   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.8  5   10/29/2020  The ground was much wetter than I had planned. So had to rethink what we would work on. We could not mine and pack any dirt. We roughed in some more trail and collected very large rocks for our next big banked S curve and started placing them. We even put some back in storage spot for future use as they are better for drainage crossing or bridge or trail features. Smashed some rocks in places that needed some harder soil and better flow near features and in the new banked turn. Also the importance of extra good compacting came to light again as the places we did not compact well due to running out of time last work day were a soggy mess on the top layer that did not get packed.  Official 
Brushy Mountain Road Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  37.5  8   10/28/2020  Pretty foggy and still wettish, but great temperature. We leaped frog up the mountain with three saws running. Removed deadfall, cut saplings out of ditches, found culverts and marked them. City crews coming next week to clean ditches. hope they bring a bush hog for upper road sections.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.6  6   10/22/2020  First we walked up the beginning of the trail to where a large tree had fallen across the trail. It was hard to cut as it was large and hit the ground so hard it was buried into it. We cleaned it all up and got all the pieces out of the drainage. Then we drove on out to end of trail and worked on several projects. A group of three worked on sorting through the remaining piles of material from the rough in process. We also aborted the table top jump plan and went with a rock ramp on outside of trail using a large rock we went out and found. Also many places in the trail tread were improved by adding dirt and packing it in. The largest rock drop got a moss treatment and looks really good. Also its landing was greatly improved, but more work still planned on that.  Official 
Jacob's Drop  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  67.5  12   10/21/2020  This was our wrap up day on this trail. Roger brought the trailer and Ditch Witch, but we soon realized we didn't have alot of gas - just 1/2 a tank in Witch. Shannon ran the machine and did an amazing job at the bottom of JD, reworking the ditch and using the material to fill in ruts. Others stopped on the way in and loaded rocks into the trucks to use for the approaches to the drainage crossing. So we had one crew there, backed up by the Witch for material, one crew finishing the new trail, another crew building the trail connection from the structure to old trail, and another crew digging out the huge hole to get down to the culvert pipe on Kerncliff. After lunch we went up hill to clean out the ditch in the woods above the rolling grade dip. Shannon was still working the ditch in the turn when we had some issues, resolved by a truck with tow rope. Finally had to use chainsaw gas to walk the machine out. Another nice day, and very warm, but a little adventure here and there.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.7  4   10/18/2020  Roughed in some more trail. Dan and I removed a mid sized stump that was all tap root and very strong wood. Used chainsaw to plunge cut pry slots which helped but now have lots of saw sharpening to do (must have hit a dirt pocket). Now in a section of large amounts of dead fall which we are trying to move away from trail corridor so we have room to work and spread the surface material we are removing. Turtle finished adding rocks to what might be turning into a table top possible small jump opportunity but the verdict is unsure on this. We can say that it will certainly divert any water and protect the roots that are down there. Turtle smashed some rocks around the large rocks on our second rock drop feature and added some dirt around it. I did some trail finishing work between the two features and moved the drainage area down away from the possible landing if people do want to try to use the previously mentioned feature as a jump. Sight lines are great all the way down this section of trail. We had two grade school age riders visit for awhile, talk to us and watch our work. They were very excited about this section of trail and interested in how we made it. They rode what we had about 20 times.  Official 
Jacob's Drop  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  85.8  13   10/14/2020  This week was "productive' in that we got construction on lots of things started. We started with a little confusion in the BS parking lot, as Salem Paving had parked trucks and trailers there. Renee quickly ran them off. Then Ideal Lumber, bringing our supplies, drove by the parking lot twice and we were chasing them down. We loaded all the lumber on Tom's truck, and then headed up the mountain and down the trail. After unloading lumber, tools, etc., we had crews start on four different tasks: building the drainage crossing, building a new section of trail parallel to the last downhill road section, cleaning trees etc from ditch on Kerncliff, and cleaning huge culverts on Kerncliff. As some tasks or crew members wound down, focus shifted to the construction crew to be sure that all got done and equipment used while we had it there. All in all, a beautiful fall day and lots of hard work.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  22.8  4   10/13/2020  First we cut and cleared two smallish trees off the road on the way in. We roughed in quite a bit more trail and we sorted the spoils into rock piles, organic piles and broadcast the rest into the forest. Turtle focused on the big grade reversal/hump we are making over a rooty section of trail. We did come across and old large stump right in our trail path. The crew worked on it hard, but it is a very tough one with huge tap trunk.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  20.0  3   10/9/2020  We started a new large built up grade reversal by adding a bunch of rock to the root area of several trees between two new drainage areas this will create. Also between two other features as this might end up being a slight jump at some point is it were to grow. At least it will have some fun flow. In the process we found the top of what turned out to be a > 2000 lb rock we were barely about to harvest and move up steep hill to trail. We worked it into a second drop jump location and spent the rest of day adding other large ramp rocks to the feature. This one is a bit larger than the last, but we expect it will still be easy and will have a great an obvious main banked route around so everyone can have fun with this spot.   Official 
Jacob's Drop  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  56.6  11   10/7/2020  A beautiful fall day. We headed up Brushy Mountain with six vehicles, saw work on our minds, and were greatly surprised to find the Asplundh truck and trailer occupying a large amount of parking at the top of Jacob's Drop. We ignored them and parked behind and beyond. They were with a mowing crew working near the bottom of Kerncliff, with the crew leaders running up and down in a side by side. We had four sawyers, spread out to leapfrog, with swampers trying to get the debris totally off the road. That was hardest at the top, but easier on steeper sections. Dave and Greg worked hard at digging through the rocks for water diverters at the pink flags - got a lot of them. Roger added a little sawing by clearing pines from the two wide turns, to make them in fact wider, with potential sitting or viewing areas in winter. By lunch we were almost to the powerline. Liz walked back up to get a truck to carry out gear and folks. Shannon ran shuttle, while design teams looked at the potential trail and crossing locations. One more week to do those pieces.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.4  5   10/5/2020  We roughed in a large section of trail and sorted the rocks and organic matting out of the spoils that the Vermeer scraped off the surface of the route in order to just get to the mineral soil. Then what was left was flung into the forest to lightly spread it out and not smother the forest floor. Later we did some more finishing touches on the trail banked turns and added a large grade reversal that can also be used as a small drop jump. We used the collected rock as a sturdy rock base and to protect a nearby tree.  Official 
Buck Trail Relocation and Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  55.0  13   9/30/2020  A beautiful day to finish up this project! Roger and Shannon focused on the culvert installation, headwalls and backfilling, with Tom running rock and tamping, Liz and Dave running about 40 5-gallon buckets of crush, Bob and Barry shoveling. Jimbo and Chuck moved the sign. Blanche, John and Jim did the demo on the old trail. Renee and a photographer helped in multiple places and then we all focused on picking up trash from several dumps. Renee's truck was totally full and we used all our trash bags. Celebrated with a ribbon cutting before lunch. After lunch, most stayed for the one mile hike around Bennett Springs loop, and those who had worked on it over ten years ago marveled at the wear and the sandy soil. Jim B. went back and dewatered a low spot. All in all, a beautiful day and nice finish to this relo, which measured about 880' on the wheel.  Official 
Buck Trail Relocation and Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  59.5  11   9/23/2020  We started this beautiful fall morning with yummy green tomato cake from Blanche. Then headed to the finish line on this one. Bud and Liz finished water diverters. Blanche worked on naturalizing the old trail, adding duff and leaves. Tom cut out the few remaining trees and greatly improved sight lines by cutting juvenile pines. Roger measured and prepped for the culvert; then moved the sign post. Trail construction crew went all the way to the end. Next week the culvert and moving one more sign.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.3  2   9/22/2020  We roughed in some more trail and did a little shaping on the banked turns. We built two rock based grade reversals at places where larger tree roots were likely. Then we covered those with mined clay. Sorted lots of rock and organic material out of the spoils from roughing in trail and widely distributed remaining spoils to blend in.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  37.8  7   9/20/2020  John, Gerry, and Rex worked on naturalizing the sides of the trail we had finished. They used the piles of organic material we saved when roughing in the trail. Turtle, Dan, Betsy and I did finishing work on 2 of the banked turns and some sections of trail. We also used the jumping jack compactor to help compress the fill we added.  Official 
Buck Trail Relocation and Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  52.5  9   9/16/2020  Moving along, trying to finish a job at a time. Today the brushing crew of Bud, Blanche, and Liz finished the brushing. Yeah. That was much more work than anticipated. Jim Brown did an amazing job on water diverters, widening all the outfalls and checking to be sure the water would go into them. The trail digging crew moved into easier terrain, pulled up the sign and moved on toward the road. They also started the naturalizing of the old trail between sections of the new trail loop. Lots and lots of limbs and branches, but hard to cover all that old tough trench surface. We need some leaves to fall!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  29.3  5   9/13/2020  We are close to finishing all three banked turns which includes a new one started today. Plus we improved entry side of a small rock drop option to the right of the trail after a test rider tried it for us and we think it will work well for most. The goal is to make it so anyone can do it without any special handling skills. Can always modify it some more if needed. Today was all about rocks collecting and placement and dirt spreading and packing. The dirt mine is producing prime material. We walked to end of trail route and there are ~1200 feet left to build.  Official 
Buck Trail Relocation and Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  49.8  8   9/9/2020  We had a serious effort on the brushing but still did not finish it. Bud ran a sawblade on weedeater most of the day, everyone pitched in some, others worked on it all day. Still more to do. Thanks to those who improved water diverters as they walked out. The trail builders hit a tough section with lots of mountain laurel.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.0  3   9/8/2020  I picked up the stump grinder attachment from City of Roanoke Parks and Rec and went out to Cove to meet up with Turtle. Had to bring the Vermeer down to get attachment as way to heavy for us to hand load it into the Canycom. Used it to grind out a stump from a 10 inch diameter tree and one much bigger than the 24 inch diameter tree it came from. Worked on banked turns and positioned a huge rock for an optional small drop/jump. John biked out to help us later in the day.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  57.3  9   9/6/2020  Great turn out today. Also Stuart from BROC brought us pizza out for lunch! Rex and Steve focused on the access trail removing the nasty vines and reducing the out slope in a few places. Turtle lead the work on a new banked turn and that project was almost completed in one day which is a record. Several of us worked on trail finishing work and also some organic removal around some trees where I didn't want to damage roots with the machine and we planned to add dirt or rocks and dirt. Opened up our new dirt mine and moved some dirt to places we need it for the trail tread.   Official 
Buck Trail Relocation and Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  55.5  9   9/2/2020  Lots of hard work today, as the morning started foggy and high humidity and the temperatures did in fact climb to 90. We had five folks hike to the top of Buck and start working down, clearing water diverters and cutting brush. Plenty of both to do, and we got about half the water diverters done but only about 1/4 of the brushing. The other half of the crew worked on building the relo and got about half way from last week to the old trail. Several more weeks here to get the relo finished, culvert installed and all that brushing done.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  2.5  1   9/2/2020  Overseer maintenance on Phase 1. Cleared a dead ash and tread work  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.2  4   8/30/2020  Rex worked on cutting the nasty vines on the access trail some more. Turtle worked on the very large banked turn that will be one path of the rotary trail intersection between trail to School House and Boat dock and Arrow Head. From the boat dock this is almost a U turn, so it has a banked turn to help that besides helping for Rock-N-Roll to School House also. It is in the rock collection and shaping stage. I worked mostly on roughing in more trail and dealing with a large dead tree right where I want the trail to be. Trying to take it out stump and all. There is a good tree next to it and trying to protect that one even though it is much smaller. Stuart came out as president of BROC to provide some T-Shirts to the volunteers as appreciation for the work on this trail that has flow that is fun for bikes. He stayed and helped with rock collection and sorting and spreading out the spoils. The sorting is how we get our rock for banked turns and organic material for future naturalizing. The clay is broadcast to try to prevent suffocation of vegetation under it.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.8  3   8/27/2020  We had the Canycom all loaded up and started to head out with it and the left drive lever broke. That was the first time this has happened. So we put it back on truck and hand carried less stuff. We roughed in a pretty good length of trail for such a short day. We took the time to sort out all the spoils into organic matting, rocks, and dirt to broadcast. It is so much better to do this as you go before it gets rained on and hardens up.  Official 
Buck Trail Relocation and Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  58.0  11   8/26/2020  Great work day. Got the first loop of the relo finished and the brushing on the old lower trail done. Dave was in charge of working out parking on the road. This project may not take the six weeks originally projected, but great location either way.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.0  4   8/23/2020  We cleared a tree from the very beginning of Rock-N-Roll and one on the road just past that. We worked on two spots on the access trail. One was way too out sloped to the point our cannycom was almost tipping over. The other spot had a huge rock that was sticking out of the trail and hard on the tracked equipment to cross. A sledge hammer said that rock was not going anywhere, so we covered it with dirt to make the crossing easier. We added rocks to the latest banked turn and finished work on filling in the stump removal site with rocks and dirt. Then after a report of tree down on Rock-N-Roll, we went to cut it. That turned out to be a hard 2.5 hours project for two of us. It was one large tree that knocked down several others and all along the trail in a ravine crossing area that was also an important drainage which all the mess was blocking. This made us have to move all the material out of the drainage the best we could. Huge job and we ended up running out of gas and physical energy.  Official 
Buck Trail Relocation and Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  51.0  11   8/19/2020  Started a new project today. Buck has had issues with erosion, particularly near the paved road. Renee had flagged sections to rebench and a relocate. We got the rebench done, brushing back, and started the relo. Also Tom and Hugh got the trees cleared in the relo corridor.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  6.0  2   8/19/2020  Finished brushing back and weed whacking on Phase 1  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  34.0  8   8/12/2020  Starting the long, long climb to the fire road. This was our last day here, waiting on NPS to finish compliance. Made significant progress on the bottom leg, before getting rained out.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  6.0  2   8/12/2020  Maintenance of Phase 1 - clipped brush and whacked weeds  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  66.0  11   8/5/2020  We had some amazingly tall back slopes this week, as we strove for a full bench on very steep terrain. Shannon, Bud and Tom worked on the drainage crossing. We got beyond that and started up the hill; should get to the first climbing turn of steps by the end of next week. Tom has his eye out for locust.  Official 
Wolf Creek Greenway Maintenance  Route 24 Tunnel  Roanoke County,Town Of Vinton  61.5  10   7/29/2020  Whew. Another day of culvert cleaning, but this one was just super hot. Given COVID and the heat, we carried the sand both directions - to the County side and to the Vinton side, with plans for each to pick up their pile. The two Canycoms and teams focused first on the center box, where the sand was not quite as deep. The Ditch Witch and wheelbarrow focused on the deeper sand in the end box. Blanche worked on hacking back the vegetation, which had grown in substantially. Anita saved the day with lots of popsicles, ice and cold water. After lunch everyone was focused in the one culvert and then on clean up. We all got plenty of exercise and lost plenty of water weight!  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Muck Truck  Pathfinders  7.0  2   7/28/2020  In preparation for the culvert cleaning on Wed, Shannon came by to help start and load equipment. He got the Muck Truck started, but it would not run continuously, given that needle in carburetor was sticking. The linkage to shift gears was disconnected; turned out a nut had come off. Shannon ended up taking the MT home in order to work on the carburetor more and get it tuned up. Loaded the Canycoms and Ditch Witch, which Brian had worked on to be in good repair.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.7  6   7/26/2020  Today Kathy and Ron finished naturalizing mostly on the hill past the bridge. This needed a lot of work. David gathered rock for a new banked turn and placed them. Rex cut back more of the nasty vine on the access path. We all worked some on setting up rigging and pulling on a stump. We may have helped, but we didn't actually pull it out. It had a huge tap root and needed to be chopped more. We got it out and pushed ahead a little on the roughing in. I went and filled the two gas cans with No Ethanol gas since they were low and the Wednesday crew will be using both Cannycoms and DW next week.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  DW  Pathfinders  2.5  1   7/25/2020  Installed new choke and throttle cables on DW. The old ones were rusted in place. Then I added hydraulic oil. After 1.5 gallons we had, I still don't see it in the sight glass. I ran machine and looked all over for the leak and could not find even though the whole inside of machine is oily.   Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  45.5  9   7/22/2020  Great work accomplished today in spite of the heat and humidity. The trail had obviously received that heavy thunderstorm last night, but at least it wasn't dusty this week. Great trail digging and shaping by the men. Blanche cleared lots more, battling tons of laurel and growth. Liz and Renee worked on pin flagging the final climb up the last ridge.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  21.5  4   7/19/2020  It was hot and humid today. I am glad we started early as it only got worse. Ron and Turtle worked on naturalizing. And Rex cut some of the crazy vines all over the access trail. Turtle finished the berm he was working on up by the old fire road crossing. Turtle also worked on the back slope that needed some touch up. That is where he got the dirt for the berm. I had to work on the Vermeer again. This time I replaced one of the triple rollers that I noticed the bearing was bad when I did the other work replacing the rear idler wheel. Now no more squeak. Then I worked on roughing in trail.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.0  1   7/18/2020  Roughing in new trail. Spent most of time chopping on a large stump to get it totally out of where I wanted the trail tread to go. Then had to fill in the hole with rocks and dirt.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  60.0  12   7/15/2020  Moving along on this one! Bud and Roger helped on maintenance of the earlier parts by weedeating the trail and edges. Liz wheeled the trail from the shelter, finding it to be .6 mi. Trail diggers got almost to the last drainage crossing. Super steep out here and the soil just never stops moving. Full bench is super critical. Thanks to Blanche for the cookies.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  19.0  3   7/15/2020  Today I had to replace the left rear idler wheel on the Vermeer. The new one is a redesign for strength and needed the steel frame to be cut for the new part to fit. Did all that in the field in 2.5 hours as it could not be moved. While I was doing that, Gerry moved the tool boxes and most of the tools over to a new spot where we are working now. Turtle came and finished that. Once the machine was fixed I went back to roughing in trail. We are at a place where two trees need to come out and we need to get the root balls and all. So worked on that and used 6 pulleys with rope wench to rip one out after I cut all around it. Had to prevent damaging the much larger keeper trees all around. It is a tricky area to work. Lots of trees we must keep but hard to work through the area with good flow.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  6.5  2   7/12/2020  I wanted to get ahead on the roughing in of trail without the full crew and before I had to take machine out to replace a squeaking bearing. I made some good progress, but the bearing failed catastrophically which now means I have to replace it in the field. Now I know which one was going bad! It is the rear idler and there has been a redesign which means you have to replace the entire wheel and axle. Also for it to fit you have to cut the frame a little (already did this for other side). A bit of a job for the field, but will manage. This will be a delay for the project. Turtle did some finishing work and started on a banked turn for better flow at the old fire road crossing.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  21.6  4   7/10/2020  Today most of the crew worked on naturalizing previously finished trail. Also closed down the past two access trails since we have a new one. Did a little more roughing in of new trail, but the rocks and big roots were thick in this area causing some care to keep from throwing a track. Looks like we are going to have to build up the tread over some trouble spots. On the way out we cut a leaner over the road the would interfere with dump truck rock delivery. The issue we had is that the tree got hung in vines for a bit.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  46.8  10   7/8/2020  Another true summer day. Hot, wishing for a thunderstorm. We were impressed how much the soil had dried out. Got lots done.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  21.9  4   7/6/2020  We had planned to head right out to work on Rock-N-Roll first thing. however our hopes were dashed when we saw the GIANT tree across the road. This tree was not rotten, the whole root ball pulled up. The tree was 22" diameter and the saw has 18" bar. It took us two hours to deal with it. I had to cut it up into 1 foot lengths and those were hard to move! We did not put them in the ditches, but we could not haul them very far from the road. Then we got to Rock-N-Roll and finished the trail between last crossing and old fire road. I started roughing in trail on the other side of fire road and made pretty good progress. But the area is full of rocks which slowed me down some. Finally we spread out some of the spoils from the roughing in work which is easier when loose and before it gets rained on.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  24.0  3   7/2/2020  We started today by loading up some of the creek stone washed into the road into Turtle's truck. Then we loaded up Gerry's trailer with the pug mill from the now dwindling pile. We drove out to our new access for Rock-N-Roll. This one has a very nice parking area. We put the largest creek rock down in the ditch part way into the access trail. Then followed that with smaller creek rock. Then we loaded up the pug mill into the Canycom and spread it thin on mushy spots along the access trail. Then we got the 6 way blade onto the Vermeer and did some trail tread finishing work between creek crossing and old fire road. This is steep side hill, but we kept hitting old buried big organic patches. Glad we are using a machine as it was a huge amount of digging. Turtle took on the project of improving the flow leading to the banked turn before the creek crossing. It needed to be moved in-slope a few feet for better flow. We had to do this by hand because can't take Vermeer over the crossing. That was fine though as I kept busy on the other side with the machine. We spent a lot of time doing hand finishing after the machine as it is a very rocky area and the machine does not finish well when there are tons of rocks in the tread. We also have to hand finish the very steep and tall back slope. We have to distribute all the spoils evenly also and not impede the drainage. Great day even though hot.   Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  38.0  8   7/1/2020  Continued on. Built a set of steps (hikers only on this trail). Nice to have Blanche back.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  16.8  3   6/28/2020  Today we had high hopes of working on the Rock-N-Roll trail, but we only did a little on the access trail ditch which bikers had some endos on. It had gotten worse really fast. At the start of the day, used the Vermeer to load Turtle up with stone from the pile that is not so big anymore. He went down the road adding stone to places he saw that needed a little. Mostly though he added some to the new parking area and road around that. Turtle ended up doing 3.5 loads. Gerry and I cleaned a huge mess out of the big 4 tube culvert near the rock pile. I started with two new chainsaw chains on different saws and both were dull when done. We had to cut the huge trees many times in order to left the heavy wood out of the very deep creek channel. We pulled 4 stumps out using chains and the Vermeer. We hauled all the wood into the forest so it would not end back up in the creek. Plus you just have to get it out of the way for the next clean out. We noticed a lot of the wood had been cut somewhere upstream which kind of sucks that someone let cut wood get in the stream to help clog up the culverts. I have noticed when people cut fallen trees off the road or trail they very often roll the cut wood to the lowest drainage area which makes the trail muddy or the wood ends up in a creek. When we cut, we always put the cuttings in a place where they will not cause a drainage issue at least to the best of our ability.   Official 
Roanoke River Greenway Landscaping  Roanoke River Greenway  City Of Roanoke  3.0  2   6/26/2020  Bo needed some volunteer time for Scouts. We met and weeded along the greenway beyond Aerial Way, adjacent to the rail yard. Pleasant day as long as you stayed in the shade.  Unofficial 
Brushy Mountain Trail  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  2   6/24/2020  Cleared trees between Hinchee and Four Gordge Extension  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  39.5  8   6/24/2020  A gorgeous day after many that were not. Clear and low humidity. Liz mowed the field again, as Adam is going to move the Billy Goat. Others proceeded on into the steep sloped woods, saving locust logs for steps next week. At least two fallen trees were removed "the hard way" by sawing by hand, which seemed easier than fetching a chainsaw.  Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  4.3  2   6/24/2020  Roger and Bud cut three complex trees. (Tried last week and couldn't work it in with the rain.) Then drove through and cut off others on Brushy Mtn Road (hours under CC)  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  17.1  2   6/21/2020  With a whole week of rain, we figured it would be too wet to do finishing work on the Rock-N-Roll trail. So we worked on the road some more. We also wanted to improve the access trail intersection with the road which is in a drainage. Turtle brought a pipe he had to help with the drainage and we used some course rock that the water should seep through also. We filled Turtle's truck at the pile of course mixed stone we found in the woods and have been using. On the way out to the access trail we came across a large tangle of trees that had fallen across the road. Two were around 16 inch diameter and the other two were ~4 & 6. They were hung in other trees and twisted, so it took some time to sort it all out and move the wood to places that would not block drainage. When we got to the new access trail area we dug out the ditch at intersection with road and Turtle installed the pipe and stone. I continued work on the road drainage in the area. We want this to drain well and plan to park in the area for some time. The road was a mess here and took a lot of work. Later Turtle went and got more stone from the beginning of the road and spread it on the area we have been working. We noticed how well the road improvements we did held up to the rain. Unfortunately the big 4 tube culvert has several large trees pinned against it again. We were going to work on it at the end of the day, but the rain started.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  17.2  2   6/14/2020  Started out by loading Turtle's truck with pug mill stone. Then drove out to where the new access trail comes out. I used the Vermeer to improve our new parking area a little and make sure the road drains in the area which it wasn't at all. Also improved the entry area just enough to make it usable for a short time. Turtle spread the rock in areas they needed it on the way out. Then he did work by hand in the area I was working. Then we went up the access trail and cleared a very bad vine issue that was actually pulling trees down. I don't know what these vines are, but I never saw anything like this. It was the hardest chainsaw and clearing job I have ever done. I have cut up 36 inch diameter trees that was simpler. When we got to the Rock-N-Roll we roughed in a pretty long section of trail on a very steep side hill. We also knocked down the dirt piles on the hill side and spread them before they get rained on making it much harder later.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  20.8  2   6/11/2020  We used the Vermeer to load Turtle's Truck and Pathfinders trailer with the pug mill stone and took it out to places on the road that needed some more stone. We repeated several times. The stone pile is much smaller now. Near the end of the day we decided to try to improve a terrible mud bog past Rock-N-Roll entrance. We had avoided doing much work past Rock-N-Roll start to limit the overwhelming scope. But this spot had gotten much worse since the last grading that left a whole bunch of organic material in the road holding water. The Vermeer was used to cut drainage and carry the organic material into the woods. The ditch on the other side of the road was cleaned out and expanded a bit. It is not perfect, but much better. We could not make the piles of material we put in the wood look as good as I would have likes because it was too wet and the Vermeer just sunk in it. Maybe another time someone can do more work on the ditches and improve this road some more. Grading is not the answer to most of the issues on the road. Putting organic material on the road does not help.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  61.0  13   6/10/2020  Muggy, muggy, muggy. Soil a little damp. Got the rock steps done, trail edge weeds cut, field mowed. Headed into the woods. Long way to go yet.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.7  3   6/7/2020  Started out the day loading up the pug mill rock into Gerry's trailer and pulling trees out of the nearby culvert with chains and moving the material into the woods instead of piling it by the culvert. We cleaned up more of the past piled material also. Then loaded up Turtles truck with courser rock from an old pile off the road. Gerry and Turtle worked separately on two areas of road that was ready for rock after last weeks work. I moved the Vermeer to one of the worst water standing areas past the crossing of School House and Little Bell but before the Arrow Head bridge. This long stretch had two really bad sections where the road was lower than surrounding area at the roads lowest spots. Pushed a huge number of old downed tree further back in the woods and made drainage areas along the road to lower areas in the woods. Then connected those with tapered road side ditches Moved material from drainage to high places and tried to spread it out. It was too wet to shape the piles very well at this time. But what I was doing seemed better than some of the piles from the past. It should self naturalize in a short time. Then Turtle and I went and got several loads of rock using his truck and the Pathfinder trailer. We did have a little set back when I notice an important pin at one of the Vermeer arm joints had fallen out. We spent at least an hour looking for it and after about giving up, we found it along the road. It had fallen out as we were trailering the machine. We had found the less likely bolt back where I had been digging (it fell out long before the pin) and was able to repair and continue! While a huge amount of work was done, there is room for much more work to be done to keep the road in better shape.   Official 
Tree Clearing  Mill Mountain  City Of Roanoke  2.0  2   6/5/2020  Cleared trees off Wood Thrush between VA Pine and Sidewinder  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  42.0  7   6/3/2020  Moving on, back into the barberry patch. Even though we cut these in February, they are a foot high. This was the first real day of summer weather - hot and humid. Plus the first day of enjoying the 17 year emergence of cicadas!  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.3  4   6/3/2020  Another day repairing places on the road that hold water. Cleaning out ditches in many places. Spent a lot of time over by Enchanted and Little Bell again and then moved to just past the Little Bell - School House crossing which has been a long time issue. Used the Vermeer to dig out huge amounts of material from the drainage area and spread it out on higher ground out of the drainage or much further down in the drainage. Then went up that next hill and worked on the low spot up there. The drainage there was a little harder to establish as it is a big flat area. Those areas we worked on now have a nice wide tapered transition from the road to the drainage. This makes it easier to maintain. We all pretty much worked on our own. Lots of the gravel pile was used again. In the morning since I was a bit early and so was Gerry, we cleaned up the huge pile of logs and sheet metal that was cleaned out of the culvert and piled there. We hauled it way off in the woods. Except for the sheet metal and trash which we hauled to trash.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  33.0  5   5/31/2020  Since we still had the Vermeer on trailer, we decided to work on the road some more as the road is muddy, but we have plenty of gravel in that pile near the gate which needs to be used. I started out by using the Vermeer to load up Turtle's truck, then Gerry's trailer, and then Ron and Cathy's truck. Everyone drove separate and worked separate except for Ron and Cathy as they are a couple and no need to distance. Each person worked on trouble spots along the road. I took the Vermeer to the area near where Enchanted Forest crosses road to Little Bell. This area had bad drainage issues where water just sat on the road for a long stretch. I dug out a gentle ditch so the road tapered into the drainage. This kind of ditch is much easier to maintain. I moved the material into the woods and spread it in places where it will blend in over a short time. Cleaned a lot of logs out of the ditches too. Cleaned up some of the piles of organic material left by the last grading work. That stuff holds water on the road and keeps the crush rock material we are putting down from hardening.   Official 
Mill Mountain Park  Mill Mountain  City Of Roanoke  6.0  2   5/28/2020  Tree clearing from storms to get trails open. Fern Park and Mill Mtn. six different trees  Official 
Tree Clearing  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  3.0  2   5/28/2020  Maintenance. Removal of large down tree at mm 1.7  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  17.3  5   5/27/2020  Questionable weather, given the monsoons the week before and the day after. Drizzles in the morning, but we still had 4 show up. We were glad to find minimal damage from the hard rains. We do need to weedeat sections where weeds are growing in the trail. We worked from the creek up to the powerline, most of the trail is now done. Two worked on utilizing those large rocks to make steps; this needs to be finished next time.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  15.2  2   5/25/2020  Canceled the trail work on Rock-N-Roll this morning as it was just too wet for what we needed to do. However we decided to go out on work on the road in the afternoon. We had the Vermeer available as I had just done a bunch of maintenance on it. We shoveled some of the clean rock out of the parking lot, but mostly used rock from the piles inside the gate. We loaded onto our flatbed tilt trailer. It was easy to tell what spots were muddy :) Later we were able to use the Vermeer to cut some drainage's and clean out some ditches.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  10.3  2   5/15/2020  Today we hand built some trail on the opposite side of the crossing heading up to the old road. Also added some rock and smashed it on the upstream side of the crossing to merge the rock fill with the hillside. Until we get the Vermeer back out there, we are stuck doing everything by hand. Maybe this weekend I will focus on working on the Vermeer. I miss it already. It is at the point where the manuals say we are supposed to do a lot of maintenance items. It is also pretty dirty and I am trying to clean it up a bit.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  57.8  11   5/13/2020  Great progress day. Built the trail on either side of the stile, including a retaining wall. fine tuned section through the rocks. Built across the first of our many steep hills and got to the creek/drainage, where we were able to build stepping stone crossing. Soil conditions were perfect moisture level.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  8.3  2   5/12/2020  This afternoon we opened up a new access trail. We had to cut through unbelievable amount of vines that had taken over in large areas. We just have it very rough right now. The chainsaws were not super sharp when I started, but they are super dull now. It was impossible to see hidden rocks and there was a bunch of vines and rotten wood half buried in the ground. When we bring the Vermeer back out, we will make a few areas better. But since I don't think the access trail will be used very long, we will keep it rough.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  20.5  2   5/9/2020  Today I took the trailer out there hoping to bring the Vermeer out for maintenance if we finished with it before creek crossing as we can't take machine across the crossing. On the way in we decided to load the trailer up with different size rocks from the parking lot to fix more holes and mud spots along the road. We had no idea the road had been graded the day before. But there were still many places to fill. We quickly used up our load. Some users yelled at us and gave us dirty looks due to them not liking the grading results of mud piles (thinking we had something to do with it). I think what we did is a big help with the old mud holes. The ditches really need to be worked on more than grading. In a few places it looks like the grading will really help. In other places the organic piles really need to be picked up and cleaned out of ditches and side of road. On to trail work...We improved 3 banked turns by extending them and shaping them better. We also fixed several holes left by horses right after soaking rains. We used a shallow dirt mine on the side of the access trail which will clean up nicely when we are ready to close it. We worked late and were able to finish and get the Vermeer back to my house for maintenance and cleaning and any repairs needed.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.0  2   5/7/2020  Today we re-positioned leftover large rocks into benches, seats and tables near the creek crossing. This will be a really nice area for people to hang out and enjoy the creek. We also worked on the trail on the far side of the creek. There are some large embedded rocks in the slope that had to be smashed to slowly knock them out piece by piece. Then we moved the Vermeer back to fix a few banked turns to be better before we take the machine out for maintenance. We opened up a dirt mine that we will use to get needed dirt for banked turns and to fix a few holes in the trail from horses using the trail right after big rains.   Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  53.5  12   5/6/2020  Carried in pre-cut lumber for the stile. Roger and Jim Brown focused on that, digging the holes, moving the holes after squaring up, adjusting steps and posts. Others attacked the rocky, shaly section, which proved easier than expected. Blanche showed up with cookies, which spurred us all on.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  21.4  3   5/3/2020  Steve smashed rocks on the back side of the banked turn before the crossing and on the upstream side of the far side of the crossing. I used the Vermeer to move some big rocks around that I knew Turtle would be using when he arrived. Then I used the Vermeer and hand tools to finish the trail to the banked turn and used the extra good clay from that work to cover the smashed rocks in the banked turn. Spent a lot of time cleaning all organic material from the dirt. Also sorted out some of the excess rocks and used them on the top side of the turn where water may collect. Turtle started out working on the fire road on the way in so we would not have more than two people working together per City rules. When Turtle got to site he installed big rocks on the downstream side of the main crossing rocks in a way so they will not block flow over the rocks. He also designed them so that they made many places to sit. When we were finished today we ended up with a great looking crossing that we feel should last a very long time and be fun to cross or hang out at.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  9.0  2   5/2/2020  Materials and pre-construction of the stile in Roger's barn  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  9.7  2   5/2/2020  Turtle worked on setting large anchor rocks on downstream side of the rock crossing. This adds support and a blending with the existing grade. I worked on placing the last rock on the crossing main rocks. I had a lot of trouble getting it the right height and angle. Also had to spend some time shaping it with the jackhammer drill.  Official 
Maintenance  Murray Run Greenway  City Of Roanoke  4.0  2   5/1/2020  Spring brushing back  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.2  1   5/1/2020  Positioned two large rocks on the crossing. One one left to go.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  43.3  10   4/29/2020  Nothing like "soil" (vs rocks) to keep you moving along at a noticeable speed. Digging crews got beyond the high tensile fence to the rock garden. Stile will be constructed next week. Bud and Liz used Billy Goat to mow the field. Had to evict a family of mice.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  4.0  2   4/28/2020  Met to design the stile  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  20.7  3   4/26/2020  Turtle worked on the fire road in the morning filling the deeper holes with stone. Later when he got to site he collected and smashed a bunch more rock. Joe focused on roughing in more trail past the crossing and made good progress. I focused on positioning more large rocks for the crossing and smashing rocks under the big rocks. Later Turtle used a pressurized water sprayer to shoot water stream on drill bit from a distance while I drilled around 20 holes to make two cuts in a huge rock. I plan to use it as the last main rock in the crossing soon! We will add some side rocks just for support which will be easier. We are almost ready for dirt over the crushed rock banked turn before the crossing. Water is already draining through that rock well.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  7.2  2   4/24/2020  Collected more rock. Moved several of the large rocks in the crossing to make progress on the far side. However, had to shape the rocks with jackhammer chisel and also split a rock. Even with all that, ended up giving up on one of the rocks and bringing two others over to try.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  48.0  10   4/22/2020  Moving right along. The forecast brought out our 10 max people. Ron, Liz and Jimbo worked on moving a large rock to span the drainage crossing. Others worked on digging trail. Nice to have Chuck back in the area.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  7.0  2   4/22/2020  Collected and smashed rock. Positioned large rocks for crossing. The rocks are getting hard to work with as we are down to the rocks that are not the best but I hate to waste them and look for new ones.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  17.8  3   4/19/2020  We gathered rock, we smashed rock, we shaped large crossing rocks with jackhammer chisel. We sharpened chisels with angle grinder on site. We positioned large rocks with hydraulic jacks. The crossing is really starting to take shape and it is a significant one for sure. Most of the huge rocks are in place already.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  6.0  2   4/17/2020  Rode out to work site. All the creek crossings held up great with the huge flooding we had Sunday night. I can tell the water flowed over the top of our unfinished crossing, but all the rocks held and it did very well. It will be even stronger when we are done. It is designed for the water to flow over in a flood. We smashed rock and worked on positioning the next big bridge rock. Moved the rest of the possible bridge rock pieces around for easy access and inspection/measuring. We are getting down to the least favorable rocks left. These rocks are requiring shaping and more positioning time. Some of them we get nearly in place and then give up on them and rip them out to try a different one.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  33.8  8   4/15/2020  Lots of great trail digging today. Amazing to be in an area with soft soil. Loved the sunshine.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  18.5  4   4/12/2020  We hauled rock, smashed rock, and positioned large rocks for crossing. Also some hand roughing in was done for trail on other side of creek where we can't use the Vermeer yet. One rather large rock was hard to move into place, but turned out I just could not make it fit. So had to pull it back out. I think it was around 700 lbs. Don't like making those mistakes too often. Also a lot of naturalizing work was done back in an area we harvested many rocks from. It looks so much better now.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.6  2   4/10/2020  We smashed a whole lot more rock. This is how we get the huge rocks to the right height and position and how we get the trail to the correct elevation and allow for great drainage. Also put a few more large bridge rocks in to place and two close that still need a little shaping with jack hammer drill to fit better.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  19.0  6   4/8/2020  Dodging weather today. Sat out a ten minute rain shower at 9. Then started work, bailing at 11:30 when high winds/tornado alert. Ate lunch in our vehicles, but gave up as rain continued. Ground was pretty sticky.   Official 
Tree Clearing  Glade Creek Greenway  Town Of Vinton  7.3  3   4/6/2020  Did a little more around the scoreboard stand and along that row. It helped a lot in terms of getting down significant vines. Liz then did the walk through with Anita and the contractor; he had no issues with what we had not cut.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  14.5  3   4/5/2020  More rock smashing today. We will be doing that for awhile. We also raised two large crossing rocks and added another very large one to the bridge. Then had to do some cutting and shaping work on it. Found a few more large crossing rocks in the neighborhood and moved them over the the bridge rock party. Have my eye on another huge one, but only moved it a little today.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  5.0  1   4/2/2020  Wednesdays have been sort of rainy, so hard to pass up a pretty day.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  6.0  1   4/1/2020  Dave was the sole show, as coronavirus intensified and one crew went to Vinton to finish trees. but solo he did eight or nine steps  Official 
Tree Clearing  Glade Creek Greenway  Town Of Vinton  30.0  6   4/1/2020  Continued with the tree clearing for Glade Creek Greenway, along the back of the field. Hard to get those trees to fall when they are tied up there with vines!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  19.8  4   3/29/2020  Today started off with some sprinkles, but in the end it was great, if not a little windy. A big dead tree fell over right near us...that was a bit of a surprise. We smashed a lot of rocks to stuff under our big rocks in the crossing, we do this to bring the big rocks up to the right height and angles. Later we will stuff more rocks all around the big ones. We also had to use a bunch of rocks to fortify a temporary creek crossing we are using to bring the large rocks to the other side of the creek for that half of the bridge. Placed a few more big rocks on the crossing/bridge.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.8  1   3/27/2020  Smashed a lot of rock.  Official 
Tree Clearing  Glade Creek Greenway  Town Of Vinton  14.0  4   3/26/2020  Assisted Vinton with clearing of trees in preparation for the contracted greenway construction. All tree cutting has to be done before April 15, the start of bat season.   Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  5.0  1   3/25/2020  Went out after the rain to do finish work on the trail, widen a few spots, harden the drainage some more.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.1  1   3/24/2020  Adjusted the 3rd rock on crossing and then added two more. Now we have 5 in place and that is around 1/3 of the needed rock length done. Might take more rocks if they are smaller.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  16.8  3   3/22/2020  Today we added two more huge rocks to the creek crossing. Lots of time using hydraulic jacks to position them. They are looking pretty good. Might have some tweaks to do on them, but they are pretty close. Removed some more organic material in the trail route before the creek. There was still some dark soil there. We also have been working on smashing some rocks up into gravel in order to make a temporary creek crossing in order to move some big rocks to the other side of the creek. This is just to harden up the crossing for the equipment and protect the rubber tracks from the larger rocks.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.5  1   3/17/2020  Work on armoring of creek crossing.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  13.2  2   3/14/2020  Today we started laying out the trail that will extend the Rock-n-Row trail to the boat dock. It took us a very long time to find a good way through 3 extreme drainages. We also moved the junction with the trial to Schoolhouse so that we shared trail with trail to boat dock a little longer. Then due to new virus rules I ended up with nobody for the afternoon. I found another huge rock for the stream crossing and moved it over to the creek. I could not position it in the creek by myself as it is hard to move it across the rocks we already have there. I either need to get out a lot of rock moving tools and or wait for others to help. I think this rock weighs in at around 3K lbs.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  71.5  13   3/11/2020  Another productive day. We started out in dripping fog and wetness, had cold breezes at lunch, and then were hot and sweaty by quitting time. Great progress on trail building down the hill, around the top of the culvert above the wetland, through the drainage and up the steep hill. We cut lots of invasives, stacked lots of brush, picked up lots of trash. We cut some fence posts to be steps, but did not get those installed this week. Steve did more Billy Goating and may well have worn himself out. Great cookies and brownies. Fun day.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  34.2  7   3/8/2020  Today most of the crew focused on hand building the trail on the other side of the creek where I can not get the machine right now. It is very steep over there and there are a bunch of rocks that have to be moved. The organic material has to be dragged a ways down to a low spot. I used the Vermeer to remove much of the organic material that was on the first side of the creek where. This was much better than doing it by hand! I lost count of how many scoops of material I moved over to the low spot well off the trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.2  1   3/5/2020  Remove deep organic material from the trail corridor which gets very deep as we approach the creek. Moving the material to a low spot in the forest where we are covering a bunch of cut trees and stumps. We are making this blend in with surrounding area.   Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  64.0  12   3/4/2020  What a great day! Adam carried the Billy Goat up the hill for us and Steve spent all day making a serious dent in invasives. One chainsaw there helping open the path. One crew channeled water off the road into the wetland. One crew disposed of hazardous trees thrown off the road right-of-way. Everyone hacked at invasives. We got a goat path established on the first part we will build, and cleared a path to our end point from last week. Wonderful lunch spot at the shelter on the hill, and special treat of homemade candy from our guest helper from RTCA. Good to have Jim O. with us.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.8  2   3/1/2020  Started off today cutting up a very large dead but heavy tree that we pulled down last week. Moved all the pieces to a low area where we are covering them with organic dirt we are removing from trail corridor. Measured rest of large rocks for creek crossing and moved one more large rock to the staging area. Did some finishing work and roughing in work once we did not have a place to move the good mineral soil to and hate to waste it.  Official 
Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  63.0  13   2/26/2020  We began today the long awaited "Phase 2" of the trail to the Catawba Valley, now known as Catawba Greenway. Due to the mild winter, we are concerned about leaves coming out and focused just on trail clearing in an area heavily infested with barberries. We accomplished that task, clearing about 1/4 mile each direction from the small powerline. Chainsaw, two weedeaters with brush blades, and lots of loppers, wire cutters, pitchforks, etc. Beautiful very warm day.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.2  1   2/25/2020  Did some finishing work on the trail. It was a wonderful warm day. Wish I had got out there sooner. But still have to work in my paying job.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  27.3  5   2/23/2020  It started out cold in the morning and warmed right up pretty quick to a very nice day. We did a lot more work on removing deep organic material on the far side of the creek by hand. we also dug around a very large stump in the middle of our trail route. Later we pulled out the stump and a dangerous dead tree. We were lucky the stump from the large tree ripped out when we pulled the dead tree down. We used the rope winch with several pulleys to up the force. This is time consuming, but the safest way to deal with dangerous trees. We also rolled several huge rocks many hundreds of feet to near the stream crossing in prep to build the crossing. I started to take measurements of all the rocks to plan the crossing, but ran out of time when we got into the rigging.  Official 
Signs  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  5.0  1   2/23/2020  Design, manufacture, custom attachment, and installation of new sign at 311 on the gate to help users understand this is the trail up to the AT  Official 
Comet Trail - Improvements  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  88.5  15   2/19/2020  Go TEAM! Great turnout, good weather, and we met the challenge - we finished. Renee made a few suggestions walking in and those with tools dropped back to address those issues. At the relo site, we hit the lower trail hard, digging from the bottom turn out to rejoin the trail. Jim Brown did a beautiful section at the top entrance, Blanche and Liz did some top turn tweaking, and several dove in to help with all the naturalizing. We felt almost done at lunch time. Then Renee pulled out her joker card and asked for help to repair a "few" water diverters on the steep hill beyond us. Just 3-4 people, wouldn't take long. Whew. Good thing. We took most of the team and pushed our limits to put in 25 water diverters! Fortunately, those who were finishing up on the relo had the good sense to pack up the tools and head out. We all got out about 3 and were tired. Special thanks to Blanche for the coookies of the day which gave us the sugar to keep going.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  17.1  3   2/16/2020  Today we continued to remove the very deep organic material on the far side of the creek. This deep organic layer seems to even be going up the hill. Also several large rocks were encountered and had to be taken out. We also cut up some of the wood from fallen trees that was too thick for the area and buried some of it in a really low area. Tried to get some more big rocks from another low area, but it was just way to wet. Did some roughing in of trail heading towards the creek. I thought the ground was a little too wet to do any finishing work.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  1.0  1   2/14/2020  Rode bike out late today, so could only work for hour before it started to get dark and very cold. I wanted to work on a route to move large rocks out of a rocky low area, but it was WAY too wet today. I collected small gravel sized rocks in a bucket and dumped in the low area to help harden it for future moving of rock. I also did a little roughing in of trail and moved the organic dirt down to the area that is low. It is a good place to put it, and it will help when we want to move the rocks when it dries up a bit.  Official 
Comet Trail - Improvements  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  58.5  11   2/12/2020  Significant threat of rain with drizzles as we gathered in the parking lot, but it fizzled and we had a nice day. Tom and John cut out some down trees on TuckaWay. We did all the naturalizing on lower Comet - well all where there were actually two trails. We did water diverters on the eroded part between Tuckaway and the relo. At the relo, Dave worked on the bottom turn. On the upper turn, we worked on fixing the grade reversal at the bottom of the turn. Most of the sidehill between the two turns is built and most of the top section. Dave, the last one out, saw a bear with two tiny cubs.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  17.0  3   2/9/2020  We had to cut some trees off the road on the way in. One had fallen and split itself on another tree. This had the tree in a twist bind that made it hard to cut. Then cleaned some leaves out of the creek crossing where we are working as they had piled up and diverted the stream a bit. Then we worked on the far side of creek spending our time removing thick layers of duff. We all worked on rolling a huge ~2000lb rock on logs about 300 yards to get it ready for the creek crossing. We are getting a good collection of huge rocks, but I think we need more. Did a little more trail roughing in on near side of creek.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.8  1   2/3/2020  Collect large rocks for the creek crossing.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  29.3  6   2/2/2020  Naturalize a section of trail ended up not using. Hand rough in trail on other side of creek where we can't use the Vermeer right now. We need to get rid of the organic before we can put rocks down. We also started collecting the huge rocks needed for creek crossing from around the area and rolling them over near the crossing using the Vermeer. So far we are finding some really nice ones.  Official 
Comet Trail - Improvements  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  68.5  12   1/29/2020  The log turn crew kept at it, with the sidehill crew supplying dirt for banking the turn. Liz and Ron did some naturalizing near the beginning in 4-5 spots - lots more of that to do. The upper sidehill and log banked turn are almost done, with the next section of sidehill almost half done.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  22.2  4   1/26/2020  Ground was pretty wet from all the rain Friday. We took some clinometer readings of an alternate route we were planning to use to get to a better creek crossing. I was getting worried that it was too far up the stream. It did not look near as bad as the actual readings we got. So we went back to the original crossing that is a bit wider, but the other route has much more of a climb and obstacles that makes the trail harder to build. So we started hand clearing all the organic material away from the stream crossing area. The organic is deep and this is a ton of work. We started putting some rock base down. Later we will cap this with larger rocks for a trail tread without any dirt on top.  Official 
Comet Trail - Improvements  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  67.3  12   1/22/2020  Brave souls enduring frigid starting-out temperatures. Only to be confronted by an unlockable gate, thanks to a WVWA person who didn't know how to daisy chain. Renee got permission from the landowner to park at the barn, and we all walked just a little bit farther. It was, after all, a great day with an enthusiastic crowd. The Lincoln log crew built a wall, with Roger on the saw for lots of cutting and notching. Renee got a crew started on the lower turn, and it was looking beautiful. Trail diggers started where there were leaves, but everything was thawed by noon.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.2  1   1/22/2020  Roughed in trail and move and smash rock.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.9  5   1/19/2020  We started out by raking and blowing the leaves off the areas we wanted to work. Then we moved a bunch of rock into the area we had cleared the organic between the first set of big trees. Also worked on cleaning the organic material out between the next set of big trees where the trail will be through. Did some roughing in of trail and collected rocks as we moved material. Later in the day we did some more finishing work on the trail since it had gotten dry enough to work it later in the day. We put the excess mineral soil in the previous rocked root crossing and did some final shaping on it. I think it might be done.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.3  1   1/17/2020  Did finishing work on roughed in trail and used excess mineral soil on rocked root crossing.  Official 
Comet Trail - Improvements  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  46.0  9   1/15/2020  What a beautiful day for January, in spite of the forecast! The one mile walk in to the relo seemed longer than that, but we were all "out of shape" after a month off. Lower trail was very wet from all the rains, with lots of places gummed up with leaves. Tom got to cut lots of big trees - the one across the trail required cutting into about 6 blocks it was so big. We had a few other tree adventures as we started working out how to do the banked turn. Enjoyable day, followed up by birthday cake at Bill's house.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.5  1   1/15/2020  Did finishing work on a previously roughed in section. Moved rocks and mineral soil to the root crossing behind us.  Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  4.0  2   1/13/2020  Installed the Nancy Pace bench. Had a hand from Scooter to carry it up the hill.  Unofficial 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.3  5   1/12/2020  Today we started on carefully clearing the organic material off of an area between tree roots for large trees in 3 areas ahead of where we are roughing in trail. We are clearing these areas by hand to protect the tree roots. We will then put rocks in all three of these areas as we find rocks building trail. It is nice to do this ahead of where we are working for a change. In the late afternoon we did a little trail finishing work as the ground had dried up enough. We used the excess mineral soil for the previous rocked tree root crossing. We are putting dirt over the rocks. We sort all organic material out of our mineral soil as organic material holds water in the trail tread which is very bad.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.7  1   1/10/2020  Started putting clay on top of the rocks we have been putting over a section of trail to protect some big oak tree roots. I got the dirt from finishing work I did on the trail near that area.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  1.8  1   1/8/2020  Road bike out to do trail work. With how terrible the road was, I thought I was going to have to turn around when I got to Rock-N-Roll. However the trail was great, not a soft spot at all. I was very happy about that and was able to collect rocks for the tree root crossing and spread our excess organic material and top soil out down the hill neatly and evenly while pulling out rocks as I found them. Smashed some of the larger rocks when needed where we are spreading them out for a pretty long length of trail just below a huge tree. This should protect its roots permanently. I think on Friday we can start putting clay on top of those rocks as we do finishing work on a section of trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  23.8  5   1/5/2020  High wind past 24 hours, but no trees down on road! Road was a bit muddy in spots. We continued pushing forward with removing organic material. And mostly finishing the back slope. We gathered a huge amount of rocks as we went and used them to protect the roots of a very large oak tree.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.5  1   12/20/2019  Roughed in trail by pulling organic off and shaping backslope. Use rocks for tree root crossing a little way back on the trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.3  1   12/19/2019  Roughed in trail by pulling organic off and shaping backslope. Use rocks for tree root crossing a little way back on the trail.  Official 
Happy Hollow Steps  Happy Hollow Gardens  Roanoke County  62.8  12   12/18/2019  A cold crisp day, but not raining and not icy. Shannon picked up the timbers from the county for the construction of a predicted 7 or 8 steps; turned out to be 9, but we had enough materials. Roger headed up the step crew. Tom and Shannon cruised all the trails to remove fallen trees. Ben, Dave, and Jimbo cruised all the trails for clean up. Bud, Blanche and Liz de-vined azaleas and brushed out the Spice Bush Trail. After lunch all hands were on helping finish the steps, which go from an overlook up to the trail and bench. Carried out all the old wood, broken bench, and lots of trashed water bottles.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.2  1   12/18/2019  Roughed in more trail. Move rocks to tree root crossing. Spread organic soil far down the slope. Finish back slope. Review route ahead.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.8  5   12/15/2019  All morning we spent cutting 3 trees off the road. All three were leaners over the road. The first one was broken kind of high up on the trunk to cut. So we pulled that one down with the truck and cut it up. Then the next one looked like it could fall anytime, so we thought we better get it before our shift change gets blocked by this tree. Well, this one proved to be much tougher than it appeared. We tried to pull it down, but could not. We cut much of the split base and thought we had it several times but it still leaned over the road and would not come down. It got to the point that it was too dangerous to cut on anymore so we decided to go get some proper straps and chains from the work boxes and came back and was able to pull a chain through the cut from a nice distance. It came right down hard and then we were able to cut it up and carry all the parts off the road and out of the ditches. Next we came to a pine that was there last week, but this week it had made the road almost impassible. It was a little tricky, but nothing like what we just did. It did take a while to clear all the pine branches and cut up the tree and carry all the parts far off the road. Once we got to the site around 2:30pm, we finally got to do some trail work! We actually made great progress roughing in trail. It was too wet to do finishing work. We moved a bunch of the rocks we uncovered while roughing in to build up where we were crossing over big tree roots. Later when we are finishing trail, we will use any extra clay to cover the rocks.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.5  1   12/12/2019  Roughed in some more trail by removing all organic material and shaping back slope. Placed rocks in next tree root crossing area. Took some before pictures of next creek crossing. Spending a lot of time casting the spoils thinly across the down slope far from the trail. Doing it as we go so we don't have to come back and deal with it when it gets hardened. Also by not putting it near the trail, it allows for better trail drainage.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  42.8  8   12/8/2019  We sent one crew member to blow the leaves off the full length of the trail. The goal is to not hold water on the trail tread and make sure a leaf berm does not form on outer edge of the trail, which would trap water on the trail. The rest of us did finishing work on the section of trail before the rocked and raised tree root crossing area. We used excess clay from that work on the crossing. Then later in the day we push forward with roughed in trail. We got to another tree with big roots that we do not want to damage too much, so this will be another rocked and raised area.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.3  1   12/5/2019  Rode my bike out to do some trail building. I worked on doing finishing work and adding the excess clay to the build up we made to clear a large tree root system as our trail needed to be on the downhill side of this large tree.  Official 
Little Bell Trail Re-route  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  77.0  15   12/4/2019  Sure enough, we finished this re-route. Plus did a fierce job of covering the old section of trail. Horses and bikes were already on the new trail. The major issue was deciding - keep the coats and hats on, or take them off?  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  33.6  7   11/29/2019  A very large oak tree was hanging over the road on the way in and hung in some trees, but about ready to fall. We decided to deal with it now for safety reasons. It took a long time to cut it carefully and not pinch the saw. Also the trunk pieces were so heavy, I had to cut them smaller so we could move them into the woods and not just leave them sitting next to the road to cause issues later. The ground was pretty wet so we roughed in trail and smashed rocks on our tree roots crossing area. Later in the day we were able to do some finishing work and started putting excess clay we had on the rocks. We need to get enough dirt on the rocks so we can get the Vermeer over to the other side for finishing work without damaging the tracks on the sharp rocks.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.0  1   11/26/2019  Moved and smashed rock to cover tree roots below a large tree where the trail will be. We will put clay over the rocks later. Then when I ran out of rock, started to rough in some more trail which will also provide more rock.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.8  5   11/24/2019  The ground was pretty wet today, so we could not do finishing work. We roughed in trail and also worked on the downhill side of a large tree, trying to not damage the roots and instead pull out all the organic material from around the roots and then start replacing that with rocks. Later we will put dirt on top. This is a lot of extra work, but that tree has been out there for a long time.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.2  1   11/21/2019  Roughed in some trail. Had A tricky section that had a huge rock formation that didn't want to move. I had to get around to other side and work it from that side. Had to reduce the angle of the side hill some to operate the machine on it. So had to broadcast a lot of dirt down the side of the hill. Made sure to spread it out very thin which was a lot of work to fling it down the hill. Was able to then pick at the large rock formation and brake several chunks off of it.  Official 
Little Bell Trail Re-route  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  54.5  11   11/20/2019  Blazing along on Little Bell. With practically flat terrain, we breezed along cutting new trail. Could finish this in one more day. So nice to have Jim O. out with us. Tom and John went out on a mission of cutting a huge tree on Brushy Mtn beyond Buck; longer drive than cut.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  27.8  6   11/17/2019  Hand finishing was done on the naturalization of the previous drainage/dirt mine to make it look even better. Then we did finishing work on the trail tread and used the excess clay for the closest banked turn behind us. That clay was shaped and packed in. Then we did some roughing in of trail and made a lot of progress. We did hit a section of large embedded rocks which slowed us down a little. We saved many of these in a large pile near the banked turn where there is a flatter area to store them. We might need these later for another banked turn. The 45 max temp was pretty nice for trail work.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.0  1   11/14/2019  Did some finishing work and moved some good clay from where I was finishing to the only banked turn we have in progress now.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  53.5  13   11/13/2019  Ribbon Cutting Day on Midway Cruise Trail. We sent one crew to the start to install the sign post, another group to install the sign post on the end at HiDeeHoe, others carrying out tools for our next job, picked up flags, enjoyed the day. When all together, we cut the orange ribbon. Then we moved tools and us to Little Bell, walked the flagged re-alignment and got input from Renee. Some of us did walk through and throw off branches, but in general we left the start of this til next week.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.2  1   11/11/2019  Worked on naturalizing the last drainage/dirt mine area.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.3  6   11/10/2019  We pushed forward roughing in trail. Taking off the organic layer. We worked the back slope so that we will not get organic on the trail tread later. We distributed the organic dirt way down the downslope so that is will not interfere with water runoff and to make sure there is no chance for organic to get covered with clay. We did a little smashing of rocks in our latest banked turn. We brought an angle grinder and some clamps out and Gerry spent several hours sharpening ALL our tools. It was so nice using sharp tools the rest of the day! Later did some finishing work and since it was a steep side hill, we were able to harvest the extra clay for the banked turn. Just got a start on that.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  37.3  11   11/6/2019  More moving dirt to widen the trail into the ravine. Full bench can be tough in steep terrain! We are about done with this trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.7  4   11/3/2019  The dirt was a bit damp, but workable. Rocks were smashed on our latest banked turn. We pushed forward on the trail focusing on getting the organic out of the way by doing the back slope and downslope as highest priority while pulling any organic out of tread area but leaving much of the clay undisturbed until later when we do our finishing work. This prevents organic material from being buried under trail tread which is very easy to happen. We also added clay to two banked turns and shaped those.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  39.0  11   10/30/2019  A walk through determined that we needed more work to fully bench the trail into the ravine. We took the Canycom to help haul Tom-provided rocks, but had a track come off that caused delay. Still got the rock there eventually. Lots of digging and transporting sticky soil to the other side of the crossing. Dave and Stew improved the crossing. It was "misting" all day, and mist became audible-on-the leaves precip by 11:15. A hardy bunch who didn't melt in damp conditions.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  30.2  6   10/27/2019  Today the trail was too wet to work with to start with. So we collected a lot of rock for the latest banked turn and smashed it while shaping the turn. Then in the afternoon we finished some trail between the rock with banked turn and the next banked turn. We also added a lot more dirt to a banked that already had red dirt on in. Before the turn was a little too far from the trail and I was afraid it did not have good flow. So we spread and packed much more dirt in that turn. We also started gathering rock for the next banked turn.  Official 
Gordge Trail  Bill's House  Pathfinders  71.0  13   10/23/2019  Nice day at Bill's working on trails on his hillside. Shannon had picked up a load of rock on his manufactured trailer, so we wheelbarrowed that to the sites. Sandy made lunch and all sat on the deck in the warm sunshine. Several stayed extra to construct and install a new mailbox. Nice to have the time with the Gordges!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  37.4  7   10/12/2019  We finished the rock work on one banked turn and packed dirt on it. Hard to pack as it was too dry. Will need to wait for rain before finishing. We started on a new banked turn also. We did a little more trail roughing in and a lot of finishing work.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  54.5  10   10/9/2019  Working toward HiDeeHoe. Almost there.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  39.8  7   10/6/2019  We moved the tool boxes down the trails quite a way to have the tools handy to where we are working. This gave us a chance to clean them out too and organize the tools. We also built a new access trail and it is much further down the road. We also worked on the banked turn. Connor smashed rocks most of the day which made Turtle happy. A little more arranging of the rocks and that turn should be ready for dirt. We also did a lot of finishing work on the trail and roughed in some more also.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  50.5  10   10/2/2019  Working in the last big ravine. Steep sidehill. Added shale around the roots and in drainage crossing. Cleared to HiDeeHoe. Needs more work and finishing touches. Installed sign posts and dug the initial piece at Hotel.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  33.9  5   9/29/2019  We worked on hand finishing a section of trail. We were able to take good extra clay from the trail bed and use it in our latest banked turn that had its finishing rock work done this morning. We had enough dirt to finish this banked turn. We will need a few rains to see how the dirt packs in as it was way too dry today. We worked on the back slope further down the trail and had to wait on tread finishing work until the next banked turn is ready for dirt. That next turn got most of its rock collected, positioned and smashed today. It will need a little more before it is ready for dirt. We have our drainage area picked out below the banked turn and ready to collect some dirt from as needed. It needed to be dug out a little just for good drainage. We also pushed ahead a bit with roughed in trail. Some fallen trees had to be cleared.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  72.5  13   9/25/2019  Did a walk through with Renee and the whole crew, talking about design and layout, things yet to fix, things that have worn in. Then started attaching the final ravine. Short but super steep backslope  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  38.3  7   9/22/2019  Today we did finishing work on trail that had been roughed in. We also started on another banked turn which is on a turn around a show piece rock that we took the trail around. This turn was almost finished today! We also roughed in around 100' more trail. Things are going really well in this section and the finished trail looks really good.  Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  71.0  12   9/18/2019  Final touches before the ribbon cutting. Installed 4 directional signs at bottom, 5 posts & 3 signs above. Put up VOF signs. Painted signs and bollards on Hanging Rock to 1206 Kessler Mill. Great improvement. Weeded, trash on Dutch Oven bridge and road. We're ready!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  44.8  8   9/15/2019  Today we used our big pile of naturalizing material to touch up some places before moving on. Also we finished a small banked turn right at the exit of the alternate route over the Turtle Back Bridge. We also continued the trail and curved around a very huge rock in a way that we might be able to include an alternate route over it in the future if the right big rock slabs are found. We did a lot of hand work to finish back slope, trail tread shaping and down slope clean up.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  50.0  10   9/11/2019  Super hot day. Very very dry. Ground was super slick. Plus dust. Getting to the point where we can see bike trails from the other end, not staying on the flag line.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  48.8  9   9/8/2019  Today we finished naturalizing the dirt mine and the trail before it. We added legs to the Turtle Back Bridge feature. We moved leftover rocks around to make seats with drink holder tables in a semi-circle with stadium seating viewing the rock feature. We think this will be a fine area to rest and hang out awhile. We finished most of the naturalizing all around this area. A small banked turn was started right by the exit from the alternate route for best flow. Some shaping of the trail just before the drainage turn was finished. The trail was roughed in and mostly finished for over 100 more feet. Lots of downed trees were cut and moved away from the trail corridor. Large crew and great progress today. We are now moving out of this area and fast!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.3  2   9/7/2019  Tonight we finished what we are now calling the Turtle Back Bridge. We finished the stone path on the beginning side of the bridge and blended the last stone into the main trail. Then I tested the bridge a few times with my bike. Also we spent time naturalizing the dirt mine using the Vermeer to do the major dirt moving and shaping of the land around this area to blend it all in.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  7.5  3   9/6/2019  We worked on the rock trail leading to the arched bridge. Also started the work to naturalize the dirt mine using the Vermeer to do the major dirt moving and shaping.   Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  84.5  12   9/4/2019  Back on Hinchee to install signs, No Trespassing signs, and gate bypasses. Tom and Stew went to Bennett Springs afterwards and did another hour of tree cutting. Dave fought with the problem culvert the whole time. Shannon ran the Ditch Witch to dig nine post holes and then to fix ditches that still had rocks and leaf piles. Two rock retaining walls were built to give users a way around the extra wide gates. Blanche and others had a run-in with Mr. Brown for cleaning ditches along VA Deer.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  30.5  6   9/1/2019  Today we finished the downhill end of the rock trail from the arched bridge alternate route so that a rock trail goes all the way down and ties into main trail. We smashed small rocks all around the big rocks to secure them well and then will added dirt and shaped the surrounding area. Started the work on naturalizing around it. Added more rocks to the drainage dam to storm proof it as best as possible while we have access to the rocks and are in the area. At least 30 five gallon buckets of small rocks were gathered. And around 8 cannycoms full of medium rocks. Also around 5 cannycoms full of dirt.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  60.0  12   8/28/2019  This trail has been officially named Midway Cruise. After several weeks off for Wolf Creek and Hinchee, everyone was glad to get back to this favorite. Shannon, Blanche and Liz worked on improving the creek crossing and digging out the shale edge. Others continued with the sidehill  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  34.8  5   8/25/2019  Today we worked on naturalizing several different areas. We also continued work on the alternate rock path that goes over the arch. We are now almost done on both sides of the rock connector path. Also some more shaping was done on the area between the banked turns which required 4 more loads of dirt. The big drainage area was improved by making the water controls a little higher to protect from a possible future big storm. We needed to do something useful with all the rock we were finding while looking for the larger rocks needed for the alternate route.   Official 
Brushy Mountain Trail  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  49.5  9   8/21/2019  Opened all the remaining culverts. Went as far as Trough.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  27.0  4   8/18/2019  Rich and Steve focused on shaping the back slope for a 100 foot section of trail. Then they worked on naturalizing the back slope and down slope below the trail for a longer section of maybe 200 feet. John and I drilled and split a rock to shape it to fit in the rock path on the approach to the arch feature. Then we placed about 20 foot of rock. In the afternoon we put dirt on a banked turn and compacted it. Then we added much dirt and shaped the back slope above the turn to force users onto the turn and narrow the trail back down. We used the jumping jack compactor and the ground was almost too dry, but it worked out in the end and looks pretty good.  Official 
Brushy Mountain Trail  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.0  6   8/14/2019  Worked Hinchee and Brushy Mtn. Roger and Tom cut the last big blow down oak, near Buck, making the road totally open. Others cleaned small stuff and trees out of ditches, plus culverts. half the crew did culverts on Hinchee.  Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  35.5  7   8/14/2019  Five worked near the parking lot, cutting trees and limbs to clear the site line VDOT wants. Others worked on culverts beyond the second gate. (Others went onto Brushy Mtn Trail.)  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  41.8  7   8/11/2019  The morning was cool at around 60 degrees! The parking lot was packed. We worked on several tasks today. Rex tucked all the upper side landscape material under the rocks. He said the knee pads we had out there were great. Jesse took all the rocks we harvested and smashed and shaped them into a banked turn we have been working on. The rest of us had the main goal of digging for large flat rocks to use for our alternate rock route over the arched rock. We are making the whole route out of flat stone. As we dug for those, we harvested smaller rock for the banked turn. We also drilled at split a very large rock into 2 long pieces we will use for the narrow side of alternate trail. In the afternoon we spent a lot of time placing some very large rocks on the other side of the arch banking towards re-intersecting with the trail. These rocks took most of us to move with pry bars.  Official 
Brushy Mountain Trail  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  87.5  15   8/7/2019  Liz cleaned up dead trees on yellow parcel at the bottom. Then she and Ron worked culverts out to Blanche and Dave, on the big leaf culvert. Others are WAY in there. Got to within 0.3 of Buck. Excitement of the day for some was digging up copperhead eggs.  Official 
Brushy Mountain Trail  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  43.5  8   7/31/2019  You can't have cool every week, but not bad temps. Getting way on out the mountain. Focusing on clearing; didn't get all the ditches. Welcome to Steve.  Official 
Brushy Mountain Trail  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  56.0  11   7/24/2019  Continuing on out Brushy Mountain. Did about 0.7 mile. Beautifully cool temperatures.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  19.4  4   7/21/2019  It was a very hot day. We worked on packing the banked turn dirt that is on top of the french drain. We have been working hard to keep the dirt out of the rocks. It has been hard to pack at the steep angle of the turn. The jumping jack compactor is not designed to work well at that kind of angle. We also used the Vermeer since the turn is so long, that actually worked pretty well. So we used a combination of both. We also added some more rocks just below the dirt in order to blend the two area and help block any dirt movement as the dirt had ended up a bit higher than the rocks. A strong storm came and we had to call the day short. We had hoped to tuck the top side of the fabric under the rocks, but we had to leave and we got very wet. Glad we stopped as it rained for quite a while with lots of lightning.   Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  45.5  10   7/17/2019  The County was on the trail today, using machines to clean ditches and regrade road. Most of us were beyond the second gate, with some getting all the way to the Brushy Mtn pull off near Hugh's property. Bud had weedeater with saw blade for small pines. Hot day  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  22.8  4   7/14/2019  Today we finally started putting the dirt down on top of our big french drain. We put landscaping material down first to keep the dirt out of our drainage flow. We got many loads of dirt from our dirt mine. We put a banked 8 foot wide crossing over out much larger rock field. We used the new jumping jack compactor, to the dirt was too dry. We did not get as much compacting done as wee had hoped. Hope we don't have a big rain before we get back out there.  Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  62.0  13   7/10/2019  Trying to catch up on the parts not done before, as the County will start road work soon. We had five on the very bottom near the gate, two on culverts higher up, and the others cutting above the second gate. Top crew got to the rock cairn just before City line.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.5  6   7/7/2019  We had to first cut three trees off the road on the way in. Two where significant. When we got to site, I had planned for us to add dirt to drainage turn. However with all the recent heavy rain we had gotten out there, I noticed that we could use more rocks in a few areas due to how significant the flow was and we also had to widen on left side due to softness of ground. So another day of collecting moving and smashing rocks. Also we worked on collecting special flat rocks for alternate trail over rock arch and clearing the route for that where it connects back into main trail on the downhill side. We did get a thunderstorm and had to wait it out under a tarp for around 30 minutes.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  30.8  5   6/30/2019  Hot today. I thought we might be able to start putting the dirt down for the trail over the french drainage. However in the light of a new day, I felt like we still needed to do more shaping of the rock bed and improve the length and height of the banked turn part of this crossing. It is best to get this right with the rock base under the turn instead of doing it with dirt. Also we worked about half the day on the special rock feature we are adding off to the side of the trail where we have been harvesting rock. We took some of the biggest rocks and made a picnic table slash bike bridge feature. It looks really neat and fun to sit at. We had lunch there and thought about how fun it could be to bike over too. It is a great area to spend some time relaxing. We are going to spend more time here naturalizing around this area and maybe extending the bike feature a bit with a totally stone trail through the area.   Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  46.0  10   6/26/2019  Back to Hinchee after helping get Wolf Creek ready for the 20th celebration. Continuing to clear the road and culverts. Several leaving early for GC meeting and Wolf Creek.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  47.8  9   6/23/2019  Good size crew today and we really got a lot done. Had a team of two on naturalizing previously built trail surroundings on back sloop and down sloop of trail. They used the hand pushed wheelbarrow as another team was using the Cannycom to harvest load after load of rock and take it to our huge french drain. Another crew smashed rock for most of the day and shaped the layout of the rocks in the french drain / banked turn / drainage crossing. By the end of the day it was pretty close to being ready for the landscaping cloth and dirt. We also added rock to a banked turn we are making before the drainage turn. In addition we built around 150 feet of new trail. We are in a pretty easy area right now.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.5  1   6/21/2019  I rode my bike out and collected rock for the french drain crossing we have been working on. I also added several large rocks to our newest banked turn that is up near where we are harvesting rock. I was digging all around a yellow jacket nest to see how many rocks I was able to sneak out of the area without upsetting them too much. I want to actually shape this whole area as this nice knoll is where I want to use the huge rock we found to make a picnic table. We also have some rocks to make some seats. We are going to try to make this to use as a bike feature also.  Official 
Wolf Creek Greenway Maintenance  Wolf Creek Greenway  Town of Vinton  4.0  2   6/21/2019  Finished staining the bridge deck  Official 
Wolf Creek Greenway Maintenance  Wolf Creek Greenway  Town of Vinton  5.0  2   6/20/2019  Having cancelled Wed because of the dire forecast and morning sprinkles, there was little rain and a small group met Thursday. The bench in honor of the Bryants was installed (except the top board) and one side of the bridge deck was stained, leaving the other side for travel.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.5  6   6/16/2019  We collected rocks for the big french drain and bigger rocks for the banked turn support. We are getting close to enough rocks for the drainage, but a lot of smashing is still needed. About ready for the smaller rocks on the banked turn. Ron and Cathy focused on naturalizing the section of trail before the dirt mine and back just before the previous banked turn.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  19.2  4   6/14/2019  We first had to cut 3 trees off the road to make it to our parking area. One of the trees was around 18 inch diameter. Once we got to site we continued our work of collecting and hauling rock to the big french drain/banked turn. We also worked on adding big rocks to support our other banked turn up the hill. We uncovered a really huge slab of rock and thought a bit about what to make out of it. Suggestions so far = a tall monument, a picnic table, a bike jump. I am not for sure which it will be yet. It is around 4000 lbs and 10 foot by 3 foot and about a foot thick. It will not be fun to move very far. We did get into a yellow jacket nest, but nobody got stung. They seemed mellow in the cool weather.  Official 
Wolf Creek Greenway Maintenance  Route 24 Tunnel  Roanoke County,Town Of Vinton  74.5  13   6/12/2019  Time again for culvert cleaning and bridge staining. We had two Canycoms, Ditch Witch, and wheelbarrows in the culvert. Hauled the sand (3-4 dump truck loads) to the Goode Park side and the county picked it up. We also removed some old sand piles near the culvert entrance, swept the paved section. Roger led a bridge repair crew, replacing some boards and posts. We all worked on staining the railings after culvet was done. Wolf Creek Greenway 20th anniversary planned for June 26.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  7.3  2   6/11/2019  We rode our bikes out to continue construction. Today we smashed rocks and moved rocks. We are working on a very large French drain. It needs lots of rocks. We are also working on getting some very large rocks over to our next banked turn, but have to get the smaller rocks out of the way first.  Official 
Hinchee Trail Build  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  64.8  13   6/5/2019  Today we began work on the Hinchee Trail, clearing old deadfall, cutting back trees and shrubs from the ditch line, and cleaning culverts. Roger and Tom's crews worked up the road and on beyond the second gate. Bud and Liz's crews focused on culverts and first landing. There had been forecast of significant storms by 11, so when it started raining at 1:15, we all headed out, only to have it quit.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.3  1   6/3/2019  Rode bike out to work on trail. Worked on harvesting rocks. Moved some medium large rocks (~300 lbs) to the side in order to get at a 1000lb rock which I rolled over to our latest banked turn foundation and wiggled it into place with Vermeer and rock bar. Now we will have access to a few more 1000lb rocks for the banked turn foundation. It is a slow process as we have to clear all the other smaller rocks out of the way to protect the rubber tracks of the Vermeer. It is not a waste of time as we are collecting all those rocks and using them for the drainage that will be under the trail as it passes above a large drainage area.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.0  6   6/2/2019  Today we could only do afternoon shift since the trail marathon was using most of the trails and fire road in the morning. We spent the afternoon moving and placing and smashing rocks in the drainage for the French drain. Also worked on making a rock free path for the Vermeer to allow the moving of very large rocks for banked turn without hurting the rubber tracks. This had the other advantage of providing many more rocks needed for drainage and banked turn. And are there ever a huge amount of rocks in this area.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.0  1   6/1/2019  Finished digging out and shaping the part of the drainage area that we will be filling with rock for the French drain. Also did some work to shape the left side bank and sort the organic out of the dirt I added there.  Official 
Garden City Trail  Garden City Greenway  City Of Roanoke  57.5  12   5/29/2019  Today we built the Garden City Trail, connecting Garden City Recreation and Greenway and the Blue Ridge Parkway Horse Trail. Roger, John, Frank, and Jimbo did seven steps from the grass to the trail. Dave repaired the rootball trail section. Tom cut trees. The rest cleaned out the drainage, leaf dams, invasives, waterbars and dug post holes. George walked to Gum Spring and Chestnut Ridge and reported no other trees down. Renee provided the materials and the popsicles.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  15.5  4   5/27/2019  I had out of town company today, so we did a short day and my friend from out of town joined the fun. We worked in the drainage area where we will be installing a large French drain under the trail and a nice banked turn on top of it. We have had to reshape the area and widen the drainage to support the expected flow. We have had much organic material to remove in order to get ground compatibility and sustainability. The dirt we are left with is looking much better. We started adding some rocks to the outflow area. Much more needed.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  14.3  3   5/24/2019  Today we continued working on the drainage where we are reshaping the area to widen the drainage and slow down the water. We are installing a large French drain under the trail. So we are digging out where the rocks will go and we are sorting organic out of dirt which we are moving to the sides and back.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  77.3  14   5/22/2019  Worked hard on the steep hill and on the creek crossing. As we dug out near the crrek, Blanche and Chuck carried the buckets of dirt away, making a small mountain. We swiveled the log to use for retaining. Had to dig the trail ever wider on both ends to make it passable with the tall backslope and to keep dirt out of the creek.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  13.5  2   5/19/2019  Small crew today. The weather was clear but a little hot at 90. We worked on the drainage crossing. We cut up all the downed trees and moved them to all little way up the ravine and made a dam of deadfall that will slow the water down well before it gets to our French drain and runs under the trail. We also sorted out a whole bunch of roots and other organic material throughout the area of the banked turn crossing. We are prepping the area before we add all the rocks for the French drain. We want to make sure we get it right before putting the rock down.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  68.0  11   5/15/2019  Headed into the deep ravine. While we needed rocks for retaining around some roots, it was impossible to carry them there, given the steep sideslope, so the trail had to be etched in first. Stew, Blanche and Liz worked near the creek, figuring out creek crossing options. Some folks are starting to walk in from HiDeeHoe; getting close.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  1.5  1   5/15/2019  Biked out to do a little machine work in the drainage. Sorted out a whole lot of roots and organic material. The roots were amazingly thick. I also took out a few trees in order to get the drainage crossing shaped correctly.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  31.8  6   5/9/2019  We had our workday on Thursday this week because it looks like the whole weekend will be a rain fest. We started by finding and moving very large boulders to our newest banked turn for back support. Since it is such a steep side slope we needed to put really big boulders in place. Lot of pry bar work with all 4 of us prying the rocks slowly in place. We used the Vermeer to harvest rocks, but had to remove rocks all around the area we were running across with the machine in order to not damage the rubber tracks. The good news is that we have a huge pile of rocks we have collected. We have more work to do for the support of the banked turn, but decided to take a break with that for the afternoon. In the afternoon we pushed forward on the trail and got into the drainage area of the ravine. We tried to leave the area in good shape for the rain this weekend. There is an huge amount of organic material in this area that was a lot of work to move off to piles out of the area we are working.  Official 
Maintenance  Murray Run Greenway  City Of Roanoke  139.5  18   5/8/2019  Crew 1 installed forms; poured concrete near parking lot and bridge. Crew 2 installed and compacted stone on the hill. What a very long day.Special thanks to: Shannon for the concrete expertise. We are lucky to have him, given that no one else in the group even had floating concrete skills. He was a trooper from start to finish, even transporting gravel the day before. Bill G was the ever expert eye and special touches in the layout and design. We were so glad to have him all day. Jim Brown was for the "didn't think of it" tools, like clamps & saw horses, the expertise in using them, and patience with the rest of us. Roger brought cords and equipment delivery, plus back up on stone and concrete, along with Jimbo. Chuck and Ron did lots of shoveling and digging and raking. Don Strum and Jim Lewis were back with us on a day we could use lots of hands. Sandy and Wendy Gordge took pictures and ran delivery of the survival ice and gatorade - truly a life saver. The stone trail crew ate dust all day and finished!!!! The crew across the way took stone to Montgomery and worked along, at times without equipment. Blanche brought cookies and Liz birthday cupcakes for Shannon, so we had more to eat than dust, plus Blanche stuck it out to help with clean up. Renee was everywhere, keeping both crews supplied and going, lunch, hoses, and all those materials. Big day  Official 
Maintenance  Murray Run Greenway  City Of Roanoke  4.0  1   5/6/2019  Two trips hauling gravel from the Cove to Murray Run to put under the concrete  Unofficial 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  62.0  11   5/1/2019  Back to the other side of the ravine. Dug as far as the teepee, with Blanche getting the steep hill cleared. When back at the parking lot, the final four helped move a tree at the start of Bennett Springs Loop.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.5  1   4/30/2019  Spent a little time adding some dirt to the top of the banked turn and the far end. Plus put a little in a few low spots. But I did not want to take the compactor back over it as I was afraid I might mess up how good it is right now since it is now so hard and maybe brittle. There were some drying cracks. Then I blew leaves off the areas we are getting ready to work in for the drainage crossing and above the area we are now working in so that the leaves would not be blowing into where we are working requiring us to pick them out of the dirt. Then I pushed forward a little on the trail and worked on some of the backslope we had already started.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  23.5  8   4/28/2019  Interesting day. We stopped to cut a tree off the road near the wood bridge. Well it had a hairy vine all up through the tree. At first I didn't think it was poison, but then I got a better look at the dying leaves and thought pretty sure it was. Well we had the oils all over us by then and we finished cutting the tree and vines. Then I decided to call the work morning so that we all could go home and wash off the poison oil. I also had to clean it off the saw(quite a job), chaps and helmet and truck steering wheel, door and tailgate handles. Now we cross our fingers. So I was all cleaned up and went back out to meet Rich and Cindy for afternoon shift. Rex came back then also. We pushed forward on the trail and made good progress.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  100.5  20   4/24/2019  This was North Cross service day, so we jumped beyond the steep ravine. Came in from HiDeeHoe, walked out of sight, and worked a new section on that side.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.8  2   4/24/2019  Rode my bike out to work on the trial. I added a bunch more dirt to the banked turn and packed it using the jumping jack compactor. I managed to get it all the way up on the banked turn which took a bit of force, but I got the hang of how to do it. It is looking pretty nice. Then I met up with Aaron to ride the road and talk about how we are going to fix the ditches and low spots in the road.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.0  1   4/23/2019  Today I added more dirt to the banked turn and used the loaner jumping jack compactor to pack and shape it.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  1   4/22/2019  Rode my bike out to do some trail building. I worked on the big banked turn near where we are extending the trail. I smashed a bunch of the rocks and moved them around to shape the turn.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  18.2  3   4/21/2019  First we cut some trees off the road. One was tricky as it was a leaner. All were pines so lots of branch cutting to manage it. Then we got out to the Rock-N-Roll. We worked on extending the trail and we also worked on the big banked turn and even ran the loaner compactor a little even though it was a bit too wet, it still did pretty well. We got some of the rock foundation in for the next banked turn.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Canycom #1  Pathfinders  3.5  1   4/20/2019  Changed Oil in Canycom #1. Cleaned air filter and housing. When I got to truck, the battery was dead. Took 20 minutes for it to jump charge enough to start. Charged the truck for several hours at my house. Fixed the tailgate latch issue using wire wrapped around the parts. Fixed the left brake light socket which made for intermittent light. Aired up the tires to 70psi. I found the spare at 8psi. I guess we all forget to check that one. Repaired the 6 way blade control switch for Vermeer. It had broken off. The old one was plastic, I found a nice metal one in my parts bin at home. I soldered the wires to it for better connection.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.5  1   4/18/2019  Rode my bike out to do some more work before we get all the rain. I pushed forward some on the trail. But my main focus was to run the jumping jack compactor some more. This time I did a section of trail that had a lot of rock in it but the shape was a little off. Again the compaction amount was more then I expected. The rocks seemed to be pulverized. In the end, the trail was shaped much better. There was some loose material on top, but I was able to use my feet to do the final smoothing. We have a large section of tread finished now and ready for naturalizing around it.  Official 
Maintenance  Murray Run Greenway  City Of Roanoke  130.3  18   4/17/2019  Big workday of hauling and compacting stone that was washed out in Hurricane Michael. Two ditch witches, two Canycoms, two compactors, front end loader to help move stone. Bill supervised excavation at the parking lot and bridge for pouring of concrete at a latter day. Had seven additional people not on this list. Got from the lower end to the base of the hill.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.5  1   4/17/2019  I biked out to the trail and added some dirt to a few low places on a section of trail that was near done. Then I ran the loaner jumping jack compactor over the whole area. It really compacted a section of trail we had already hand packed some. This did much more. It did something that I was hoping it would do and that is knock down high spots and push the dirt into low spots. It was a little hard to control in some places. But I got better at using it over time.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.0  2   4/13/2019  I did not give much notice for the work day today due to weather forecast. So there were only two of us working today. We had a loaner Jumping Jack compactor to try out today (Thanks to Aaron Copeland with Copeland Excavation and Construction Co). It was a little wet to do the compacting, but it did pretty well. It will be much better when not quite as wet. We spent must of our time pushing forward on the trail and made some good progress through a tough section with lots of big rocks and organic material. The dirt was a little wet and heavy to work with also. After the work day, I went to special gas station to refill our gas cans with NO-Ethanol gas for our equipment. Then I got a new bulb for brake light that was out and replaced it. The new one did not work well, so had to mess with socket a bit. Was not great to do in rain, so might have to work on it more later if it goes out again. It looked like old bulb was bad and they threw it away at auto store.  Official 
Horse Trail  Blue Ridge Parkway  National Park Service  53.5  10   4/10/2019  Parked in the same place at MP 117.3 in that field area, with others leapfrogging as they moved forward. Bud took 3 with him to finish up that part back by Pitzer. Roger and others worked to finish up under the power line. Great improvement there. Then as each group finished, it moved to the next section, Jae Valley to 118. . As you walk up the hill, they debermed and filled the trench. At the creek, did some cleaning out and stepping stones at the Ford. Beyond that, Tom worked on trees to Bandy.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  34.8  7   4/7/2019  Today we pushed forward on the trail. The crew could stay pretty close together with some working on adding rocks to a large banked turn and some smashing rocks into the trail tread and others sorting through the material the Vermeer turned over as we cut into the hillside. We are shaping and finishing trial as we go including the upper and lower side hill. If we need a little more clay, then we haul it over from our nearby barrow pit.  Official 
Horse Trail  Blue Ridge Parkway  National Park Service  62.5  12   4/3/2019  This week we parked in the field between Pitzer and Jae Valley, working both directions. Greatly improved the section of trail coming out of the woods into the field and the section under powerline. Some Where the trail comes out of the woods into the field, if you were coming from Pitzer (Mp 117.3), we re-dug the bench, took out encroaching multi-flora rose, opened it up so a horse can fit through. This was impassable to start. We also re-dug that section of trail - almost finished; will wrap up the piece near Pitzer next week. Going toward Jae Valley from the field, we had some great improvements at the creek crossing and up under the powerline. The culvert at the creek crossing was washing out because of debris in the stream; we removed that and repaired some holes in the tread. Under the powerline, we are rebenching to fill the trench and include some runoff spots. We did not open up the trail down to Jae Valley road itself, as there is a section on private property which is for sale. The horses are obviously (tracks) walking at the edge of the Parkway to cross Jae Valley.   Official 
Horse Trail  Blue Ridge Parkway  National Park Service  49.5  9   3/27/2019  The trail crew worked today from Sha-al/Rutrough. In the morning we finished the trail section from Rutrough to Hogan. It is clear, raked, pin flagged, ready for users. After lunch we walked down the driveway from Rutrough to the next trail section, which we had cleared of deadfall last week. It was immediately obvious that someone had been through there on an ATV. Tracks all the way to the field by Simsmore Interestingly, this person did some "trail work", chainsawing additional sections of logs to widen the clearance, pushing logs away from the trail, cutting overhanging limbs to make more horizontal and vertical clearance. Reported all this to Ranger. Crew dug the section around the big blow down  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  31.3  6   3/23/2019  Today we started with about 3 hours of naturalizing about 400 foot of trail backslope and downslope. This narrows back down the trail and will define where we want the users to go. It will look real nice when the plants start to grow in those areas. We made sure that drainage was not blocked. Then we moved back to extending the trail. We are working on a steep side slope with lots of organic material and rocks. We are doing finishing work as we go. We do have a big banked turn that we are adding rocks to each work day. We got around 75 foot of new trail built.  Official 
Fallen Tree Clearing  Tinker Creek Greenway  Roanoke County  6.0  2   3/22/2019  Cutting pines that came down in snow/ice/wind storms  Official 
Horse Trail  Blue Ridge Parkway  National Park Service  56.0  10   3/20/2019  The first day of spring and it felt like it. With four sawyers we were able to make significant progress on tree fall between Hogan Road and Rutrough, Rutrough Road to Simsmore, and Pitzer to the field before Jae Valley. Also raked and cleared trail to make the location more obvious. Blazing would be helpful. Worked on Hogan to Rutrough. It is all open and most of it has been raked and re-dug in the last few months, but we have one more spot to do next week. This still has pin flags the length of it. From Rutrough to Pitzer, we got all trees cut, corridor cleared and most of it raked. We'll tweak that next week. From Pitzer to the field in the middle, half way to Jae Valley, we got the trees cut, but have not yet raked or cleared small stuff. Met several neighbors - Roger Ray and Billy Spradlin. They both were glad to see work being done on the trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  27.0  5   3/17/2019  Another nice day. Wow, the weather pattern has changed. The road only has a few mud bogs. The dirt is not sticking to our tampers. Today we did more finishing work. We use a lot of clay fill to get the elevation and shape we want. We shaped the trial tread, made sure the trail was well above the downhill slope, so that when we go to naturalize, water will not be held on the trail. We shaped an inside banked turn in a drainage area. Since it was a drainage area we smashed many rocks into the tread and back slope in that area. We did a bunch of back slope shaping. We may only have one day left on finishing work before continuing with the trail. Most of that work will be naturalizing around the tread.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.8  2   3/14/2019  Today I took a vacation day from work since it was my Bday. It was such a nice day that wanted to be outside most of the day. So trail work in the morning and biking in the evening. Rich came out to work with me even though it was a last minute request. He has been traveling and was anxious to get back to the Rock-N-Roll trail building. We did some finishing work as we needed to get some of that done before pushing ahead again. We narrowed the trail down some where it had gotten too wide from some huge rocks that we had to take out of the bank as we tried to get by and avoid the tree that was on the other side of the rocks. Also the ground did not slope off very well for drainage up next to the trail, we wanted it to slope off more on downhill side of trail so that when we added naturalizing material, it would not block drainage off the trail tread. We also filled the holes the rocks came out of on the back slope and shaped the slope and did some modification to even the tread out. Where we added fill, we also added rocks for hardening.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  62.0  12   3/13/2019  Spring is in the air and great to have a large crew out. Lots of folks to attack the shrubbery. Finally got beyond it and headed down the hill to the teepee. We could have a round about here and a loop trail on the ridge.  Official 
Appalachian Trail/Catawba Greenway  CSC  Roanoke County  4.0  2   3/11/2019  Roger and Liz hiked out AT from McAfee parking lot, carrying chainsaw gear, signs, and sign installation stuff. Installed signs, made by Jim Brown last week, on the existing post at the intersection of Catawba Greenway. Hiked down the trail to the bridge, cutting all debris, which wasn't bad. Trail needs some work on the shaly section, where the backslope is collapsing. The VT wetland has made it impossible to get to the gate unless you walk through water.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  42.8  7   3/10/2019  It was a warm and sunny day. However the ground was wet. Rock-N-Roll was in pretty good shape, but the dirt was a bit sticky. We did some more shaping and finishing work on the trail. We smashed some rock into the tread to harden areas and add material to get the shape we wanted. We opened up a place to get some dirt. We also put some dirt on top of our rock banked turn. We worked on the back slope in several areas. We started piling up rock for the next banked turn. Even though it is not easy, we noted how well it has been working when we smash rock into the trail. We will focus more on doing it as we go in the future.  Official 
Signs  Catawba Greenway  Roanoke County  4.0  1   3/7/2019  Jim Brown made two signs for AT at Catawba Greenway intersection  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  30.0  6   3/6/2019  Still winter. Forecast of high winds. Core crew continued to work. Entering a section with lots of small bushes.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.8  2   3/2/2019  Today it was only two of us. Our plan was to first stop and cut a big tree off of the beginning of Rock-N-Roll and it crossed the trail twice and knocked several other trees down. But that was not the big problem, it was the huge root ball that came up right in the middle of the trail. It was taller than us and huge amount of dirt. Well we wanted to remove the stump from the trail as it would mess up the flow where it was. It turned out to be a huge effort. The stump had huge roots still in the ground. It was a very healthy tree with no rot. It ended up taking all day and we barely got it done and all the dirt moved around to reshape the area.  Official 
Carvins Cove Trails - multiple  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  42.0  10   2/27/2019  Big effort to help cut trees and get trails open again after the snow, ice and wind storms. Sawyer Shannon and Greg got the four trees on Bennett Springs loop, went out Hotel to the new trail, cut out all the deadfall on the new trail, and returned to finish up the big pine at the intersection of Hotel and HiDee Ho. (Someone had cut it enough to get through, but the trunk stood up.) Bud, Jimbo, and Bob drove out to Songbird, cut 7 trees in the first half mile, went out Rattlin Run and got two more before meeting Roger. Roger, Frank, and Ben hiked out Rattlin Run, also got two trees, then turned left on Songbird and went all the way, losing count there were so many trees. Liz and Blanche worked on Hotel, cleaning out under the Boy Scout bridge, cleaning the ford, and cutting a big pine and two small trees near the ford. Later helped Shannon and Greg at the intersection, then went up to get the three trees near the start of Four Gordge. Still need some clean up at that spot, as the rootballs are hanging into the trail. Great day - no rain today!  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  8.5  2   2/27/2019  Two of the crew dug trail, while the rest cut trees from the windstorm.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  36.2  7   2/15/2019  We moved the workday to Friday due to weather. Glad we did as the weather was great and we had a good turn out. We had to cut 3 trees off the fire road on the way in. We split into two groups. one group was working on previously roughed in trail and smashing rocks into the tread in order to harden the trail. That group also worked on the back slope in many places along that section. The other group pushed ahead and we got around a very rocky turn. We have been finishing the trail as we go. Only that banked turns will be left for later. We also smashed a fair amount of rocks into the tread as we went. We hit a few extra large boulders, but we were able to move them with the Vermeer.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  50.5  12   2/13/2019  Rained out of our big project at Fishburn, too wet for equipment. But it was ok for building trail. Liz and Renee reviewed older sections and flagged some spots that need finish work. Others built and built and built.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  18.3  4   2/10/2019  Colder than we expected today and it really did not warm up much. Even had to cut the day short when the temperature dropped and the sleet started. In the morning the trail was too frozen to do any shaping work on the parts roughed in. So we decided to stay warm by smashing rock to shape the banked turn we have been working on past few work days. We ended up bringing around 4 more loads of rock for the turn. After we got the shape pretty good we worked on the back sloop around there. We want to bring the trail out to put users in the banked turn, so started shaping the back slope to do that. We will need some better dirt for the actual surface of the turn later. Then for second shift we pushed a little further ahead on the trail. It is very slow going due to massive amount of rock and organic all around it. As we go we are actually smashing some of the rock into the trail tread. Once we got out to the lot the sleet had stopped, but better safe than sorry.  Official 
Carvins Cove Trails - multiple  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.0  2   2/6/2019  Tom and Hugh met the crew and then went out to cut trees on Songbird, Arrowhead and others.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  60.5  13   2/6/2019  Great turnout, with many travelers home again. Tom and Hugh went out to the lowers to cut trees for Renee. The rest of us utilized the newer, shorter access route. It was warm and we all had a great time, looking at the teepee, building new trail, being in the woods.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  43.8  8   2/3/2019  We had a good turn out today. The weather was great, but the trails and road were very wet. There were a bunch of people using the trails and tearing up the trails. The signs were set to red, but that did not seem to stop these users. Anyway, we were able to get to the work site without damaging anything but the access trail which will be shut down at some point in the next several months once a new one is opened. We split up a little and had two people adding a bunch of rocks to the only banked turn we are working on right now. I think they got all the rocks we will need for that, but some of the rocks still need to be smashed and the turn shaped before the dirt is added. Most of the crew was smashing rocks into the wetter parts of the new sections of trail. We could see how this has already helped from last weeks work. It is a lot of work, but it sure pays off in a very dry trail for the future. We also shaped about 150 foot for back slope. Then in the late afternoon we decided to continue the trail a little further finishing it as we went. I think we got another maybe 60 feet done. Lots of rocks in this area, we went ahead and just smashed a bunch of them into the ground as we went. We are really close to the next ravine now.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  21.0  6   1/30/2019  Tuesday was snow/ice/ and forecast of "dangerous" windchill for Wed, but the hardy persevered. We decided at the parking lot that quitting at noon would be reasonable, as wind would be increasing and we often get cold eating. The wind did steadily increase through the day, but we were generally dressed for it. Guys dug 80' of new trail, Blanche and Liz worked on prepping, cutting out laurel and huckleberries. We all walked out to the next point to see the view of McAfee that is coming up and the teepee/shelter on the ridge. Ron carried out trash and the Swedish knife. There are numerous pretty well defined trails in this area - more than deer.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.9  2   1/27/2019  Today we did not have a public workday as I had no idea the state of the fire road or the trail. The road was pretty bad except for the part we worked on a month ago. We need to continue that work. The access trail to Rock-N-Roll was pretty muddy, but Rock-N-Roll was good except for a section of very new trail that was pretty muddy. We walked all the way back to the big rock bridge and there was only a small section right by the bridge that was severally effected by freeze thaw. The part had different clay. Much more red clay. We will need to mix some stone into that clay when we get a chance. We decided to not do it today as we were worried about the trail thawing out more later in the day after we were out there. We decided to continue forward on the trail and to finish anything we start. We did smash some rocks into soft areas of the trial near where we were working. We will do more of that next work day when we have more people. The two of us got tired of rock smashing after several hours. We finished about 100 foot of trail. We even did the back slope. The weather was very nice. On the way out, that fresh section of trail near us had thawed out more and it was really muddy. We really need to smash some rock into it next work day. We were horrified at how many people were out in the afternoon tearing up the trails.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.8  7   1/23/2019  The weather turned out much better than forecast and we even had a few moments of sunshine and warmishness. The new access is a big time saver. The guys did some beautiful edge work and digging; Liz dug out six small pines, Blanche worked on shrubbery. We are trying not to remove duff unless we can get the trail built, as the leaves and duff help so much in keeping the ground not frozen.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  70.5  13   1/9/2019  Great to be over with the holidays and get back out with the crew. Due to the federal govt shutdown, we were not on the Parkway but back at the Cove, working on our current favorite trail. In spite of the forecast of high winds, we found the weather tolerable, at times pleasant, for mid-Jan. Blanche and Liz walked the whole trail, cutting out two trees with handsaws. The rest of the crew started just beyond a big blown down pine near the creek crossing. (We'll get it next time we have a chainsaw.) Great progress up over the saddle and along the side of the ridge. We used a new access point coming out and moved the tool cache. The soil was perfect for trail work.  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  36.3  4   12/19/2018  Today was a big road repair day. Got off to a cold start at 24 degrees. Our material and equipment had some freezing issues. But we soon got things going and ended up needing another load of material which Renee ordered and came out to make sure we got it (Thanks Renee). End the end we spread and compacted 38 tons of pug mill stone into the wet areas of the road between the gate and just past the Tunnel road. We all wished we could have gotten further, but I assure you it was not from us not pushing ourselves to the limit. On top of that we even cleaned out some drainages to try to get water to drain off the road better. Thanks a ton (38 actually) to our most dedicated volunteers who all put in a very hard full day of work!!  Official 
Happy Valley Road Repairs  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  9.0  3   12/18/2018  Met gravel truck in morning and directed it trough gate and to the place I had cleaned up earlier for dumping 18.5 tons of 21b pug mill. Then later in day came back out to meet the equipment delivery. Pathfinders is renting a dump trailer and trench compactor. We had issue with battery on the dump trailer and while waiting for repair we worked on the road between Comet and Song Bird. The turn before the culvert was holding water because the drainage ditch was higher than the road. We used the Ditch Witch to clean that out and reshape it. We also spread some of the pug mill and packed it down with the trench roller. It worked pretty good. Once the trailer was fixed we hauled a load of material down the road and spread it in the first muddy area we come to. We used the entire load at just that one 150 foot area. These road repairs will require a lot of material. We will be back first thing in the morning and Renee will try to get some more material on the way.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  34.2  6   12/7/2018  Finally a day we can actually do tread finishing work! So we took advantage of that most of the day. We decided to get some more dirt out of our dirt mine one last day before closing it. It has pretty much turned into a rock mine anyway. We used the dirt to do finishing touches on about 400 foot of trail. Then we closed down the dirt mine and naturalized it and the access trail to it. Then we moved our staging area about 1500 foot down the trail. We did some naturalizing work in the old staging area to make it look like we have not been camping out there all summer. We have actually found some really nice dirt in the areas where we are roughing in new trail and will be able to access the dirt we need as we go for awhile at least until we get into the next steep ravine. This should save us a lot of time.  Official 
Horse Trail  Blue Ridge Parkway  National Park Service  63.3  13   12/5/2018  Ahhh. The blessing of ten degrees warmer. The early birds began with picking up trash and tires near the roads. After safety and review of QC, crew walked in and got to work. Stew and Ron redid the rocks at the creek crossing. Lots of grubbing to get greenbrier out of the trail.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.5  1   12/3/2018  Rode my bike out to work on Rock-N-Roll. Pushed ahead with building new trail. Moved some dirt from below the trail to make sure the trail tread is much higher than the ground below the trail so we have great drainage. We will get a bit more dirt and naturalize the area next workday. Getting close to next ravine.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  31.1  6   12/2/2018  Today was really wet. We could not do tread finishing work. We were able to do backslope work and finished some pretty tall backslope for about 200 feet. There were a huge amount of rocks in there and we hauled all those to a new banked turn we just started. We spent some time clearing out deep organic where we are putting the turn and before dumping in the rocks. We have a lot more rocks to add. Later in the day we built some more trial I hate to say roughed in, as we did everything but finishing the backslope. This is a very rocky section and we sorted out a huge number of medium sized rocks. We harvested dirt right from a few drainage areas just below the trail and we naturalized those areas right away when we were done with them. Much easier to do this way. Because the ground was very soft, we will have to do a little more shaping of the tread, but we have plenty of clean sorted clay already in place and very close to the right shape. Just some track marks to deal with later.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  2.8  1   11/29/2018  I rode my bike out to do a little work on Rock-N-Roll. I roughed in some more trail. Maybe only 15 feet, but it was very rocky and lots of organic to sort out. Also blew the leaves off for some distance ahead to inspect the route up to the next ravine which is pretty close now. It is extremely rocky in this whole area.  Official 
Horse Trail  Blue Ridge Parkway  National Park Service  54.0  11   11/28/2018  Frigid, frigid, frigid. A hardy crew to show up on a windy day when the temperature is close to 20. Started at Sha-al/Rutrough and worked back toward Hogan. Tom and Roger cut out down trees (left leaning ones as instructed). Dave et al started in the jungle near the powerline and dug the connection to Sha-al. Then we moved steadily on, raking, lopping briers, digging duff, more in some places than others. Ron worked on the crossing through the rocks. Good progress on an unpleasant day. Hand warmers sure help.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  21.8  4   11/25/2018  Today, the dirt was pretty wet, so we could not do finishing work on the trail tread. Instead we roughed in more trail. This is good because the way we are roughing in the trail, it will be very quick to do the finishing work. I am counting 1-3 smaller banked turns to build on the long section between the access trail and where we are now. With all the rock we have found while roughing in the trail and piled up, we should be good with materials. We roughed in 120 ft of trail today. We also greased the Vermeer. After trail work I installed a new trail light on our tilt trailer that I broke about a month ago.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.3  5   11/23/2018  It was below freezing when we started today. But it warmed up to around 40. The ground had not frozen much luckily. We did a bunch of work on the back slope above the trial. We shaped it and naturalized it. We also naturalized around three banked turns. Some of this naturalization was positioned in order to get users to use the part of the trail we want them to use for sustainability. We spent some time added several loads of clay to the banked turn just past the toolboxes. Lots of the organic piles around the trail all the way up to the access trail were used up and flattened out to match existing landscape.  Official 
Maintenance  Murray Run Greenway  City Of Roanoke  33.5  11   11/20/2018  Continuation of efforts to rebuild Murray Run Greenway through Fishburn Park. Installing base, stone, and compacting.  Official 
Maintenance  Murray Run Greenway  City Of Roanoke  43.0  9   11/19/2018  This work day was organized to repair damage from Hurricane Michael. The trail in Fishburn Park was totally blown out. Renee had ballast stone and 21A, but it was in the parking lot and the worst areas were down near the bridge. Laborious amount of shoveling rock, carrying it in buckets, Canycom, City Ditchwith. Compactor belt broke at one point, but luckily Ed had tools and was able to replace the belts that Chuck got from the hardware. Need more machines on this project.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  35.6  7   11/18/2018  First thing we did today was to shutdown and naturalize the old access trail to the big rock bridge. It seems that very few people are using it now, so it was a good time to go ahead and close it down giving a chance for more leaves to fall on it without being smashed down. Then we went on out to continue building the trail. We worked on the back slope from the toolboxes back in any spot that needed work. We did a bunch of naturalizing of the areas around the trail. We are very near finished with everything up to the toolboxes. Just a little more touch up in a few spots needed. We also naturalized an old rock mining area we had put off closing down. But now we are way past that area and will not need it anymore. We spent a lot of time packing the clay down and shaping two banked turns. We narrowed the trail down in several areas to entice the users to what we think is the best and most sustainable part of the trail.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  66.5  11   11/14/2018  We worked from the creek to the big pine near the ridge, cleared to the saddle. High water had come through, so there was some reshuffling at the creek crossing. Stew and Liz reworked the banked turn to give it a wider radius. John worked on filling sections just before the creek. Others dug new trail up the steep side hill. Blanche and Liz walked out the older part, two trees that couldn't be removed. A City crew had worked on naturalizing the steep hill on Hotel.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.8  1   11/14/2018  Rode my bike out to work on the trail. Did work on the back slope of trail we roughed in many months ago, but the back slope was too steep. Also taking this opportunity to narrow down and fine tune the shape of the trail. Did a little bit of naturalizing, but much more needed.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  21.5  4   11/11/2018  It was below freezing in the morning. But it quickly warmed up a bit. Since the ground was pretty hard, we started with using the Vermeer to break up the ground to rough some trail in. We did our normal sorting of organic and large rocks out from the clay. We just want clay and small rocks left for the trail tread. In the afternoon the ground was thawed enough for us to mine some dirt and cover the rock banked turn and add some dirt to improve the back slope of the trail and narrow down the trail a little. Proper back slope helps the water sheet across the trail better. We can also use it to position people on the part of the trail we want them to use. In this case to push them onto the banked turn so they are not turning in the drainage area. We plan to naturalize these back slopes later after we are sure the final shape is good.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.0  1   11/8/2018  Rode my bike out to do a little trail building. Just worked on roughing in new trail. Using the Vermeer to turn over the dirt and then the fire rake to sort through it and remove the organic material and large rocks. Raking the dirt into the shape we want for the trail tread.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.2  1   11/7/2018  Rode my bike out and roughed in a little more trail. Lots of rocks and roots to sort through in order to end up with nice compactable clay. A few people came out on their bikes to where I was working and talked for awhile. They said how much they liked the trail.  Official 
Signs  Explore Park  Roanoke County  49.0  12   11/7/2018  Continued the sign installation and finished all the County had for us. Started by doing all the post trimming in the storage area and then loading to vehicles from there. Blanche and Shannon did the running around with the Witch. The hardest was carrying the post half mile out the yellow trail; the Witch was a huge help with hole digging on the others. Beautiful day. Alex North, Co. staff, was a great help as before.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  30.7  6   11/4/2018  Today we searched for and collected around 10 cannycoms full of large rocks in the 100-500lb range to use as back support for the latest banked turn. This is a big one that is needed to adjust the location of a turn on the trail in order to prevent an outside turn in a drainage area. We then added more small rocks to shape the turn. Had to smash some of them. Then we worked on extending the roughed in length of the trail while sorting the rocks and organic material as we went.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  DW  Pathfinders  3.0  1   11/2/2018  Renee and Mary Lou borrowed our Ditch Witch to work on Kerncliff. After filling it with gas, they couldn't get it to start. Shannon hiked in from the red barn, fixed it, and helped them get it out in the pouring rain.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  35.0  10   11/1/2018  Today was a GE Software Team building event. We all rode bikes out to the trail work. Actually we started at 9am. But we rode several trails before getting to the work site so I didn't count that time as trail work time. We ate lunch on the rock bridge on Rock-N-Roll then started our trail work portion of the event. We split up into small teams. One team was gathering rocks from the piles on the side of the trail we sorted out during roughing in trail the last several weeks. They hauled these to the big banked turn we are working on near the toolboxes. They smashed some of the bigger ones to pack them into the shape of the banked turn. Had another team smashing small rocks into the trail bed in a wet drainage area to firm up the trail. Had a large team shaping the back slope into a more sustainable and good looking shape over at least 400 feet. Everyone seemed to have a pretty good time. Good mix of riding and trail work.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  3.2  1   10/31/2018  Rode my bike out to do a little trail work mid day. roughed in more trail and moved some of the bigger rocks I uncovered to the banked turn we are building as supporting base rocks. Had some issues with giant rocks that would not budge. Had to build around those. Moved the trail down the hill just a bit to avoid them as their shape and position was not going to be good for the trail surface. Lots of organic material to sort out of the trail corridor along with huge amount of rocks made for slow going process.  Official 
Signs  Explore Park  Roanoke County  56.0  12   10/31/2018  Trail Sign Installation. A glorious fall day, lots of help, vehicles to carry things, great fun. Shannon and Roger pre-dug the holes with the Ditch Witch, which certainly made the cleaning out easy. They got in the most hiking. The others split into 3 crews with three vehicles, going to assigned spots to install posts and signs. Scott Ramsburg (staff)had a great system with signs well organized, and he ran around in the 4 wheeler providing direction and support services. Alex North (staff)helped one crew, and Wayne Wilcox (staff) painted blazes. We installed all the posts that were available (15); more next week with a little more hiking. So nice to have Eddie out with us!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  4.0  1   10/30/2018  Rode out to build a little more trial. Started by compacting a few new banked turns with the hand tamper. They had a few tracks after all the rain. Wanted to harden them up a little with compacting. When my arms got tired of that, I switched to positioning two ~800 lb rocks we found Sunday. They will be support rocks for a big banked turn. I gave up trying to move them by hand and got the Vermeer's help. I wanted to flip them and could not do that by myself without the machine. After I got the rocks positioned, I continued to rough in more trail. Sorting out lots of rocks and organic mats for later use.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  26.8  5   10/28/2018  Today we filled in the backslope on a very steep section of trial where we had to cut into it to get through. Also now that we have a retaining wall and banked turn we can narrow back down the trail and have great drainage. We will naturalize this soon and blend it into the original slope. We did a lot of packing of the material. Then we continued roughing in new trail and collecting rocks. We moved several big rocks to the location of our next banked turn. This is what will be one of two banked turns by our tool boxes. These turns are being installed so that users will turn in the banked turn and go straight through the drainage area instead of doing an outside turn in the drainage area.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  8.5  2   10/25/2018  Today Rich and I rode our bikes out to work on building the trail. On the way we cut a 20 inch diameter fallen tree off the trail with a hand saw. This took about 20 minutes. Then we went out to the construction area and finished a banked turn that had the rock foundation already laid. We added about 8 cannycom full of clay and rocks to finish it off. We had to sort the material, shape and pack it all down with hand tampers. Very rocky mix of clay was hard to work with.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  55.0  11   10/24/2018  A big final spurt to reach the creek before we take a break and head to Explore Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The creek is the 1/2 way point, one mile of trail built. Tom went out ahead, cutting for next time. May need to add some dirt to the banked turn and rock wall going down to the creek.   Official 
Tree Clearing  Read Mountain  Roanoke County  6.0  2   10/23/2018  Roger and Blanche volunteered to hike in to remove a huge fallen pine near the intersection of Buzzards Rock Trail and the top of Crossover Trail. Users had already made a trail around it. They got the tree, but reported significant wear and erosion on the rock steps, leaving very high risers.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  33.5  6   10/21/2018  Good sized crew for the morning. Had Gerry making one good wheelbarrow out of two. Took the wheel from a flimsy one and put on the stronger one. Hauled out and disposed of the other one. Steve and Rex worked on making a soil base for our next banked turn on a very steep side hill. Ron and I worked on roughing in more trail and sorting out the rocks for a banked turn further back on the trail. Gerry came and helped once the wheelbarrow was done. We then hauled huge base rocks over to put on the base Steve and Rex made. I think one of the rocks was 1500 lbs and the other 1000. Then we had a few baby 300 lb ones. We had to slowly pry bar the big ones into place and even use the come-a-long a few times because of very steep side how did not allow us to get a good footing or pry area. Then we continued the roughing in of trail and sorting out of rocks and organic material saving each in piles for later. Then after everyone else left I finished the banked turn further back on the trail. That brings us to the tool boxes are far at trail tread goes. We have a bit of back slope and naturalizing back there, but not much. The roughing in was going pretty fast and the result will not take too much more work to finish.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  48.0  8   10/17/2018  Working steadily from the bee tree, around the head of the holler, out the nose toward the creek crossing.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  5.0  5   10/10/2018  Well, we tried, but the rain that was supposed to arrive at noon came in early. Dave got in all the way, but the rest retreated in the thickening drizzle and just cleared out leaves etc on Hotel while walking back.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  18.3  3   10/6/2018  The goal today was to finish the creek crossing turn where we had smashed tons of rock and the creek was flowing through all the rock. We wanted a dirt trail there instead of a bunch of fist sized rocks. But we didn't want the dirt to filter through the rocks and clog the flow of the stream. So we put down silt fence material to keep the soil out of the rocks. We did smash another 4 loads of rock over the area before putting down the material. Then we covered the material with a lot of clay. This clay had a lot of rocks in it, so we sorted through the dirt and used the rocks at the interfaces between fabric and clay.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  66.0  12   10/3/2018  October already and still hot. Liz finally showed up with some popsicles, first time all summer. Stew, Frank and Ben built a rock crossing at the next creek. Blanche raked that far. Trail digging almost done to the bee tree.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  45.5  8   9/26/2018  Smallish crew today. Headed downhill from the saddle. Blanche and Liz cleared the way as far as the big pine tree. Encountered some yellow jackets and emptied the spray can on them multiple times. Almost too wet, even for hand digging.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  12.8  3   9/23/2018  It rained a lot the night before this workday. So the ground was too wet to do trail finishing work. We had to just do trail rough in work. we roughed in around 30 foot of trail. It was very rocky and we collected the rock and moved to the location of our next banked turn we are building. We had a stump with big tap root to deal with. We used rope winch and pulleys to help rip it out.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  10.3  2   9/22/2018  Today was an impromptu work day because I had someone that wanted to help out and all I needed was a small crew since we had to spend time bringing the Vermeer from part way up the 1000ft climb fire road, back to Rock-N-Roll. Then we mined some good clay and did a bunch of tread finishing work in places that needed a little more dirt. The clay had just the right moisture content and a nice mix of small rocks. We made it out of there before it rained.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  60.0  11   9/19/2018  Quick sweep of the bridge and Hotel, as we had seen the remnants of Hurricane Florence. Not much impact. Then back to digging trail. Got beyond the saddle.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  DW  Pathfinders  16.0  2   9/15/2018  Worked on Ditch Witch over several days. First day we took the machine over to Matt's garage and took the worn tracks off and checked all the track area bearings. We found 3 idle wheels on left side needed new bearings. Also the left side tension wheel bearings and axle were totally shot and the wheel was not round anymore. Probably all due to too much tension. We decided to go ahead and replace both drive sprockets even though they did not look near as bad as last time we changed them. We cleaned everything up. Then I ordered the parts and Matt removed the sprockets from the drive motors and bearings from the idle wheels. After the parts came in, we put it all back together and put the new tracks on and tensioned to specifications. We also changed the oil. Matt fixed the arm control handle that was crooked. Then we worked on the attachment levers that were all rusted and hard to operate. While doing that we noticed the lower bushing on the tilt cylinder was totally gone. We took the pin out and found it badly damaged from operation without bushing. I ordered new parts and now waiting for them to arrive. Oh, and we also had to replace the 7 year old battery that would not hold a charge.  Official 
Brushy Mountain Road Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  62.5  10   9/12/2018  Road maintenance week. Worked ditches, cleaned culverts, cut saplings along the road near Buck. Renee used DW for grading and cleaning.  Official 
Brushy Mountain Road Maintenance  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  24.0  3   9/11/2018  Shannon brought his tractor to help Renee with maintenance of the road from Four Gorge down. He used the bucket to clean ditches and dragged the road with the blade. Renee went on with the City's Ditch Witch and Marylou Legg worked ditches.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.3  5   9/9/2018  It was wet out there today. I guess it had rained a bit at night and then it was misty much of the day. Had to bring the trailer in today in order to move the Vermeer to another location after the workday in order for others to do some road work on the mountain next week. So logistics were tricky today with parking and unloading and such. I wanted to do some finishing work with mined clay. However it was too wet to work with. So we moved to the banked turn near tool boxes where we piled all the stone and brick in the past. We knew we could use wetter dirt there. As we added some loads of dirt, I actually was able to dig to some drier dirt as we went. Later in the day I used the 6 way blade to finish some previously roughed in trail. The afternoon crew did some back slope shaping and naturalizing.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  66.5  13   9/5/2018  We are moving along. Quote of the day: "having a big crew is more efficient than having a machine." Reached the saddle. Just standing there, looking down into the next big flat, which must have been a field at some point, you just feel like you have gotten somewhere! Renee and Shannon went off exploring options for next week. Ben came back. Still hot and muggy.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.5  5   9/2/2018  Today we started by cutting a big tree out of the trail near the big stone bridge. It was very large and we tried to move the cut pieces away from near the edge of the trail. Then we went to the place where we had added a whole bunch of sandy soil to get a trail in on a very steep side slope. This was holding pretty well, but had some erosion lines. We filled in the erosion area with some good clay from a new dirt mine and packed it in. Then we naturalized on top of that and hope that that will hold. Then we moved on to adding clay to a banked turn that was started a few months ago. By the time we were done today, that turn was almost done. But after it has set for a week we will see what is needed to fully finish it. Oh, yeah, about an hour today was wasted on a serious yellow jacket infestation of a naturalizing pile. We had to get by the pile today, so some effort was made to move them without a whole lot of success. But nobody got stung today while passing the pile :)  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  74.0  14   8/29/2018  So nice to have a big crew, with lots back from vacations. Welcome Ben Rogers, who is trying us out. Love having Jim Lewis back. The crew dug way on toward the saddle, Tom and Shannon cut trees into the beyond, Renee and Liz tied down the flagging the rest of the way to Hi Dee Ho.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  27.2  5   8/26/2018  Today we finished the banked turn extension near the beginning of Rock-N-Roll trail. This was the last of the improvement projects we went back to do in that area. We moved the equipment back down to where we are extending the trail for next weeks work. Today was mostly spent naturalizing the area all around that turn and the area where we harvested clay. At the end of workday I went and got non-ethanol gas for the equipment at a station on Apperson. I put the ethanol gas from the cans into the truck.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  10.0  2   8/24/2018  I took a vacation day from work due to great weather. Rich agreed to come out with me in the morning. I did send out an email that night and posted on FB that night, but got no other takers. The weather was wonderful, felt like Fall. We started by taking some dirt a little way down the trial to the two rock garden areas and just did a little patching for entry and exit bumps and a few cracks parallel to the trail. Only took one trip with canycom of clay, but we did spend a lot of time packing the dirt well. Then we went back to finishing the big banked turn we have been working on the last few work days. We were able to complete all the dirt work. Now we just need to do the naturalizing of the turn and then shut down the clay mine and naturalize the area. Then we will be back to working on the end of the trail next week.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Truck  Pathfinders  2.0  1   8/24/2018  Took Pathfinder truck in for inspection and an oil change. Had to wait awhile. Then tried to get ethanol free gas, but failed and ended up getting two cans full of 10% ethanol after the clerk told my it did not have ethanol. I notice the pump said it did and then when paying another clerk said they did not have it anymore. Our equipment is getting gunked up from that ethanol junk.  Official 
Horse Trail  Explore Park  National Park Service  10.0  4   8/23/2018  In cooperation with the County, we had a short work morning to clear the future Roanoke River Greenway location between the future parking lot on Highland and the landfill service road. This section is in the woods. The County is bush hogging open areas in the future parking lot and a route around the fields visible from Roanoke River Parkway. The goal is to have several miles of trail that Reba Farms can use for equestrian rides. Beautiful clear cool morning.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  42.0  9   8/22/2018  Wow. Cool air. And Blanche missed it. Got on around the turn and headed in the ridge (vs out the ridge) toward the saddle.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  31.3  5   8/19/2018  Today we continued the improvements near the beginning of the trail. We only worked on the big banked turn that we are extending to encompass must of the turn in order to move the drainage around 25 foot to a more straight section of trail. In order to get the right slope for drainage we had to raise the whole banked turn quite a lot. This took lots of material. We had to get creative in the dirt mine in order to mix the wet clay with drier clay. The dry clay was hard to come by. In the process we hit much more rock than we did clay. Normally we might be pretty happy to find so much rock, but the crew is getting a little tired of smashing rock I think. However that is what we did with the excess rock. We kept smashing the rocks into the clay all around the turn. This will make for a much harder trail which will hold up better. It is just a lot of work. On a positive note it is also good exercise. We are mostly done, but will need to add a little more dirt next work day. We will have to naturalize the clay mine before moving on.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  47.0  9   8/15/2018  Crew got around the corner at the nose. Now right at the shortcut to get out.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  18.9  4   8/12/2018  The forecast was not great for today. We put up the tarp and during 2nd shift we needed it. First shift got out dry. We started by adding around 4 Canycom loads of clay over a large root that had been exposed below a drainage. We really built it up to last longer. We cleaned the sand out of around 7 drainages in that area. Then we focused the rest of the day on the last project in that area which is extending a banked turn and moving the drainage to a more straight section of trail. People had been sliding out on this turn and sliding into the drainage. We added a bunch of rocks to support the turn and raise up the area. We added about 6 loads of clay and packed it in. We did not get very far on the afternoon shift before the rain cut loose. We were hoping for a short storm as we waited under the tarp. Turned out of rain quite a lot and it was too muddy to play in the dirt anymore. We moved some large rocks using a rock net and then decided to leave before more rain hit. We have around another days worth of work to finish this up.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  57.0  12   8/8/2018  Crew worked steadily along with the sidehill, trying hard to avoid yellow jackets. Renee and Liz pin flagged to the teepee and the far steep drainage.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  16.0  4   8/2/2018  Extra day to finish 7 more steps to make a run of 13 to get down the hill from the #7 tee. Thanks to Shawn Sorrells for hauling stone to fill the steps and running after one more board.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  85.0  21   8/1/2018  Roanoke County offered a Pathfinders appreciation lunch at Explore Park, so we planned a half day of work at Mayflower. Shawn had installed a few new baskets and use patterns were showing some problem areas. Thus we broke into four small teams. Stew and Eddie finished the toe kick on the #5 bridge, and then helped Roger's crew by hauling rocks for the steps. Bob and Jim O. did the lower leg of the new trail to the new blue basket at #4; Blanche, Ron and Liz did the upper leg. Dave and Jimbo tied them together with a fan of 5 log steps. Roger, Frank, Bud and John put in 6 steps before our lunch - exactly what Roger had predicted. Many, many thanks to those four and Shawn for coming back on Thursday, ignoring the forecast and radar, and finishing up seven more steps for a total of 13. At noon we all headed to Explore Park Visitor Center where we were treated to lunch and gift bags from the County, plus sunshine instead of the forecasted deluge. After lunch, Scott and Alex provided a choice of a driving or walking tour of the new camping facilities. Many thanks to the County!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.8  6   7/29/2018  Today the weather was great. A little cooler than July. There was a threat of rain 50%, so we put up the tarp early. Not even a hint of the predicted rain in the afternoon. We finished the naturalizing on the sections we worked on last week. We noted that they held up very well after all the rain we had. We must have done a good enough job packing the dirt. Then we worked on the armored turn that so many people have been bypassing. We rerouted the trail on one side to give much better flow. We cleaned out all the gaps in the rocks and filled with clay to smooth them out some and since little water flows over this, we hope it will be OK. We raised the level of the trail on both sides to make smoother entry and exit from the rocks. Then we did a creative natural looking blocking of the short cut people were doing. Now that we made the main route flow well and smoother, we expect nobody will miss the short cut. Did a whole lot of packing of the new raised tread.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  45.0  11   7/25/2018  Muggyyyyy. This was a wet day beginning to end. The morning was so muggy that everyone had steamy glasses and had to wonder around blind. Bud brought his weedeater and cut out huckleberries to the next saddle. Liz and Renee fine-tuned flags. Others dug trail. Shannon and Ron both got stung. The thunder started just before 12:30 (as predicted), but gave no waiting around time. Everyone was drenched by the time they got to the cars.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  25.5  4   7/22/2018  Today the weather was threatening to rain, so we set up a tarp just in case. It didn't rain at all. The dirt was a little wet from last night's rain. So it was sticking to our packing tools. We finished all the filling in around the rocks. We were doing around 800 lb loads of dirt in cannycom and we did around 12 loads. We spent a lot of time sorting out the organic material and packing in layers. We started on the naturalizing of the area and got most of that done. Have a little more to do on that next time. We still have a banked turn to extend and a armored crossing to realign the flow on so people ride over the rocks instead of around them.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  59.0  11   7/18/2018  Shannon and Stew finished the wall, as Bud and Liz widened the trail and brought down the material to use for fill. Others continued digging on out the ridge. Blanche ran into some yellow jackets and got stung once.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  31.7  6   7/15/2018  Back to the hot days. We have moved back to the beginning of the trail to do a few improvements while we had the machine out. There are two banked turns that we are making flow better which means extending and adding lots of dirt. We are also adding dirt in where the dirt had pulled away from some rocks making for bigger step ups than designed. So it is moving rocks and dirt. Spreading the dirt and sorting out organic material. Then a bunch of packing in layers and repeat. We seem to have a pretty good supply of dirt and rocks in the area.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  76.8  14   7/11/2018  We split into two groups. One group was up ahead continuing to dig trail. The other group was back at the first creek crossing to fix a route around the big hickory roots. The decision was to build a retaining wall and build the trail up over the lower roots. Shannon and Frank were the rock layers. Bud, Liz, Renee and Tom were the rock fetchers. Many rocks had already been used on the other wall, so the fetchers were going far afield, or rather far upstream. Tom got stung about a dozen times and headed out after taking some Benadryl. Both crews were thankful when the thunder started up around 2:00, as the black clouds made good reason to call it a day.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  68.3  13   7/8/2018  The weather was perfect and we had a large turn out! Another week without the Vermeer (at least for most of day) So all hand work. We split into teams. We got a whole bunch of naturalizing done. We also reshaped a lot of back slope to not be as steep to hold up better. We worked on a banked turn that just had some unsorted dirt piled up. All the dirt needed to have the organics sorted out and shaped into the turn. Eventually that team actually went to clay mine and dug around 5000 lbs of dirt out by hand to add to the turn. More will be needed, but that was a good start. Some trail tread had finishing hand shaping done. Later in the day we drove out to pick up the trailer and then the Vermeer from my garage where it got lots of new parts and tracks. Then we took it in through an old access point up Arrowhead where we need to mine some clay to better shape some areas for better flow. We opened up the mine and will be ready to move some dirt next workday. I think we will have several workdays to finish the work in that area before moving back to the end of the trail. The Vermeer is back in great working shape.   Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Vermeer  Pathfinders  20.0  1   7/7/2018  Worked on Vermeer over many days. Replaced drive sprockets, but had issues with them not fitting correctly. They were sticking out 1/4 inch past the centerline of track path. I ended up grinding the area between where the sprocket connects to hub (both new parts). Got it to 1/8 inch and decided that was good enough. Installed new left side tension wheel and fork. Installed new right rear idle wheel (had to cut frame to make new wheel design fit). Changed oil and filter. Cleaned and greased machine. Included cleaning of cooling fins and air cleaner. Installed and tensioned the new tracks.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  14.0  2   6/30/2018  Today was hot, so I know that is why some didn't want to work. So only had Steve in the morning and then in afternoon I did naturalizing by myself. We were able to finish the banked armored turn that we have worked on for around 4 work days. Today was some trail tread work on the entry and exit areas. We also added some large rocks to discourage short cutting and to look good. We smashed up remaining rocks all around the perimeter. Then a bunch of duff was hauled to area from down by toolbox area where there is a huge pile. There is a little bit more naturalizing to do, but it is looking pretty good right now.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  45.0  11   6/27/2018  Forecast of rain, but we planned for a half day. Turned out to be nice and not quite as hot. Got beyond the second crossing and on out the ridge  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Attachments  Pathfinders  2.0  1   6/27/2018  Matt returned the bucket after he re-welded the corners of the mounting plate that was pulling through the back of the bucket. He also welded on some extra duty support pieces to try to prevent further damage in the future. He then painted all the spots he had worked on.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  38.5  7   6/24/2018  Today we worked on the armored banked turn just past the rock ledge step up. We added 6 large rocks. 3 to both ends. We then adjusted all rocks for best fit and then started smashing rocks into the ground all around the big rocks in order to make things solid and offer good drainage. We worked on the tread on both ends to make it merge better with the rock turn. We still have some more to do on that and filling the gaps around the rocks. we will then naturalize and try to prevent any short cutting of the turn as happened on another turn earlier on the trail. It will be much rougher to short cut on this turn. Also added some more rocks to the down stream side of creek past bridge to prevent undercutting of the bridge and to try to get water to eventually flow through both sides of bridge again by slowing it down and spreading it out. More naturalizing was done between bridge and the turn we were working on. Have a little more to do. It was muggy hot today which slowed us down a bit.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  56.5  10   6/20/2018  Getting to the second drainage crossing, with Blanche stuck in the leaves of the second branch of the second crossing. Liz and Blanche dug them all out and made a huge pile for future naturalizing. Bud ahead on the weedeater to cut through the huckleberries. hot  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  24.5  5   6/17/2018  Only worked first shift today because nobody wanted to work in the afternoon due to heat. We mostly broke into two teams. One team first worked on adding some rocks to a place under the big bridges that had gotten a little undercut from the huge flow we had in the last few weeks and also trying to get the flow to go through both side of the larger bridge. Then that team moved on to naturalizing just past the bridge. The other team worked on the next armored crossing just past the bridge. We had to drill and cut the last big rock and then position the 4 pieces. We had to remove quite a bit of dirt to get the rocks to fit correctly. We have been moving the excess dirt over to the next banked turn we will work on. Next work day we will add a few more pieces of rock to this crossing.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  73.0  13   6/13/2018  I've been workin' on the railroad, all the live long day. Working on around the hill to the big pine.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Attachments  Pathfinders  3.3  2   6/13/2018  Matt came over to pick up the bucket to take to his garage for welding plates onto the week corners where the attachment plate welds were pulling through the bucket metal. We then tried to put a new sprocket on the other side of the machine. But it also stood out 1/4 inch past track center line. I have been trying to resolve the issue with the part supplier. They seem to have changed their supplier recently. Also discovered that we should change the right side rear guide wheel as it is out of round and it is sitting at an angle that could effect track wear and ability for track to stay on. Finally got the bearing out of the tension wheel. But could not get the bearings off the axle. So will order an axle also.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Vermeer  Pathfinders  5.8  2   6/12/2018  I barrowed a gear puller from Advanced Auto. With a lot of force and some banging with a hammer, we finally got one of the sprockets off. Then put one of the new ones on. Unfortunately it did not fit correctly. It stuck out 1/4 inch past the centerline of all the other track guides. We tried all sorts of things to seat it further including the removal of the shaft key. Nothing helped. Also worked on trying to get the bearings out of the tension wheel, but they were really stuck in there. It took a long time just to remove the dust caps and snap rings.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  15.3  3   6/10/2018  Today started out with nice weather. We worked on armoring a banked turn with huge rocks. The first step was to cut one of the rocks into two 500 lb pieces. So we drilled and split the rock. We dug out a place for it and then slowly levered the rock to where needed. We realized we wanted to swap the place of the two parts to match up better and once we got one on top of the other in the switch...the sky opened up and for the next 45 minutes while we were packing up and walking out we got totally drenched. I think we got about an inch of rain during that time and water was flowing everywhere. I was shocked to see people arriving at the lot with bikes. However, later I found out that it had not even rained in parts of Roanoke. Wow! So people had no idea how bad the trails were. Hopefully they turned around when they found out... This week was the final drawing to win a part of the $70 the mountain bikers gave us. This week it was $10 and I won it.   Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Vermeer  Pathfinders  3.5  1   6/10/2018  After trail work today I started working on the Vermeer in my garage. First step was to jack the whole machine up as I wanted to work on both sides. The machine is too heavy for my car jack (only does 1/4 of car). I had to supplement with hydraulic jack which I first had to fix. I got both tracks off without too much work. Then I started trying to remove a sprocket. First the cotter pin was very hard to remove. Then the giant 1.5 inch nut (biggest socket I had). I tried to pull the sprocket and broke my pulley puller as the arms were not strong enough. I will need to see about buying a better one or renting one. Lastly I checked all track roller bearings and found the left tensioner one was going bad. Spent some time trying to remove the dust cover before giving up for the night. I drilled it out the next morning only to discover my Craftsman snap ring remover was too wimpy for the next task to get to bearings. It seems I need some bigger tools.  Official 
Tool & Equipment Maintenance  Trailer  Pathfinders  22.5  3   6/9/2018  Today Rich and I drove up to Harrisonburg to pickup our new trailer. This is a custom 4.5 foot wide tilt trailer with 7,000 lb axle. This will allow us to go down narrow fire roads with our Vermeer skid steer in tow. Once we got back in town, we picked up Cindy and went out to collect the Vermeer from the Rock-N-Roll work site. We had to limp it out as it was missing two drive lugs on the left track and the track barely stayed on. We took the machine to my house for repair and then went and picked up the new tracks and sprockets from storage.   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  52.5  9   6/6/2018  Great start with Blanche's cherry cobbler first thing. Beautiful weather with cool temperatures early. Great trail progress starting up from the creek. It sure helps to be able to stand up and to have terrain not quite so steep.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  65.5  12   5/23/2018  Great progress on the steep side hill. Got almost to the creek.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  11.3  2   5/20/2018  Today we got a late start because we were helping the GCC church on Peters Creek Rd with a trail build project they are working on. They wanted some guidance. Then we headed over to the Rock-N-Roll. We were not sure how the road or trail would be. It was not as terrible as I thought it might be. One culvert was stopped up and water was flowing across the road. But the trails certainly should have not been used and there were a bunch of people out using them. Glad we didn't see anyone come by us on Rock-N-Roll while we were out there. We were very limited on what we could work on as the ground was too wet. We ended up closing down one of the dirt mines furthest back on the trail. It took us most of the day to naturalize as the ground was heavy. We had to do it by hand as we lost another lug from the Vermeer tracks and now two in a row are gone. Now I don't know if we will be able to get the machine out or not. We could not take it down the trail today as it is too wet and we don't want to damage what we have finished. We worked a little on the area where we are going to do the next armoring project in a drainage. This was the first time we had significant flow in it and we did not like the direction of the water. There is a huge rock diverting the water on the downhill side and we don't want to move it 5000lb at least. We worked a little on correcting that to get water to flow around it and getting it ready for the armoring rocks. I think we are going to end up cutting the biggest armor rocks so we have more cracks for the water to flow through and they will be easier to move. Maybe down to 200-300lb pieces. They are over 1000lb now. Wish we would have cut them more before moving them uphill a few months ago which would have made that easier.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  40.8  7   5/13/2018  It was a very hot day ~95 and humid too. I wanted to tap out the sandy clay mine and close it down. So we harvested around 10 more loads to use on reducing the slope below a section of half bench trail. We didn't use many rocks below this section of sandy clay and I was afraid it might not hold up without some more backing. When we naturalize this on another work day, it should look pretty good and hold up well. Then we shut down the dirt harvesting site by first pulling down as much saved organic material that could be reached around all the rock obstacles and steep banks using the Vermeer. Then the rest was done by hand. The access trail was also naturalized. Rich did most of the hand work on this and it looked great when he was done. We also reduced the height of a steeper section of trail and made it flow better. We took the dirt and used it in the banked turn at the bottom which raised the bottom of the slope and provided a place to get the turning done before the drainage section so that trail users will be going straight through the drainage instead of doing an outside turn in it. We harvested more dirt from the best dirt mine over near the huge rock bridge. We are going to shut that down next work day probably and then we can armor the drainage over there. The bad news for today is that another steel lug fell out of a track on the Vermeer. I was going to bolt it back on next work day (like I did with another one), but somehow I ended up loosing it. We kept using the machine without it, but you have to really baby the track when it is missing a lug. It is a good way to learn to be gentle on the tracks. The good news is that our new tracks came in. But I want to wait for our new trailer to bring the machine out to replace the sprockets and tracks. This weekend Bill won the $20 drawing.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  67.5  12   5/9/2018  Finally May is here. Beautiful day, starting in the 50s and warming up, with clear blue sky and lots of warblers singing. We started the day with a celebration of Tom's new truck, rebuilt by Shannon. Yeah!!!! Proceeded to our trail for steep, steep sidehill digging. Stew and Shannon built the wall and approach to the creek crossing, with Hugh and Liz providing rocks. Blanche out ahead preparing for next week. So good to have Eddie and Hugh out today, and of course all the rest of us.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  32.3  5   5/6/2018  Today the forecast was 60% chance of rain like yesterday and it did not rain like yesterday. We had a tarp set up just in case we needed to take cover during a downpour. We started the day collecting rocks from the access trail to make it better for bringing machines in and out, and also because we needed rock. We added these to the high banked turn we have been working on. After 4 loads of rock we had enough. We did pull one more huge rock out of the trail right near the turn and it ended up being around 1000 lbs. We decided to smash it up to use on the turn. Randy was out biking and joined us for trail building fun. Him and Rich smashed that huge rock into baseball size pieces. I did some finishing work with Vermeer. Then we all worked on trail shaping and we even put in an insloped turn and some grade reversals. We started on another insloped turn. We also started covering the rocks in the big banked turn with sandy clay. We will finish with good clay later. Steve won the $20 from the drawing today.  Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  60.8  11   5/2/2018  Continued the new trail. Wow it was hot - 50 degree swing in temperature. Got to the steep sidehill going into the first hollow.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  47.8  9   4/29/2018  Great turn out today. Also great weather. The fire road was pretty muddy. We roughed in some more trail so that we could harvest some more rocks and prep more for the May 5th work day where we will have a large group that will be harvesting rock from the hillside above the trail and piling them right above the trail. Today we hauled most of the rock to a banked turn a ways back on the trail. We also put some more on the nearby drainage. In both places most of the rocks needed to be smashed. Some dirt dug out of the near drainage area was moved and used as back slope above the trail nearby. At the end of the day we opened up another dirt mine near where we need the dirt. Kendall won the $20 from the drawing today.  Official 
Horse Trail  Blue Ridge Parkway  National Park Service  100.3  22   4/25/2018  This was the start of rehabilitation of the Blue Ridge Parkway Horse Trail from Hogan Road, headed south. Thanks to Lindsay Webb at Roanoke County for coordinating permissions, compliance, etc. North Cross students came out for their service day - brave bunch with Ed Dickenson toiling away in the morning rain and mud. The crew raked and cleared over 1/2 mile, but too wet to dig. Great to have some of the old timers back - Bill and Lynn to start off the day, Jim Lewis, Maurice, and a new comer Jim Pickens.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  37.5  6   4/22/2018  Nice weather today. We started out cutting a tree off the fire road. Then we worked on roughing in more trail through a rocky zone in prep for a large crew on May 5th that will be harvesting rock from above the trail and sitting it above the trail so we need to have a trail to sit it above so they don't have to carry it any further than needed. Later we will haul it as needed from above the trail. We also widened the outlet a little on our rock filled drainage and filled it with rock and then raised the level of the rock on the right side maybe 10 inches. We want to make sure there is less chance of this ever getting stopped up. It was flowing heavy today and very clean water coming out from under the rocks. It is neat hearing it flow under the rocks. Then later in the day we filled both cannycoms full of rock and proceeded to travel on many of our old access routes all the way back to a very early drainage that has been a little soggy the past week. This was a drainage where we had no rock. We had spread the drainage over a large area to prevent erosion which worked, but the constant water flow finally softened the dirt. We pounded the two full loads of rock into the back side of the trail. It was very hard work and we decided we need at least one more hand sledge as we could not swing the big sledges anymore after 3 hours. It is harder trying to pound rocks into the ground than just smashing them. I am not sure we totally finished this, but it should be much better. I also know where some closer rocks are if another day we want to work on this more. But the rocks are bigger and will need a lot of smashing, but better than hauling loads so far. Oh, we also added quite a few rocks to another banked turn and placed a few large rock in the structure. Three mountain bikers came by and gave us $70 and said have a good lunch. But since we all do not leave at the same time, we decided we should do a drawing for 20,20,20,10 the next 4 work days. Use it as an incentive to get more help or at least reward some of the volunteers who show up often and have more of a chance to win. Hopefully this is good with everyone and the people that gave it to us. Thanks!   Official 
Hotel-Hi Dee Ho Connector  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  60.5  11   4/18/2018  Started the new trail connecting Hotel to HiDee Ho. Renee and Liz worked on layout farther along, crew worked on trees and construction.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  43.3  7   4/14/2018  Wonderful weather today. The ground was almost too dry, A bit hard to get the dirt to pack well. First we gathered two loads of rocks. We hauled them down the trail and added them to a banked turn. Then we got two more loads. Then we got many loads of dirt, maybe 30 or so and worked on two banked turns. We finished them and also worked on some naturalization. We have more touching up to do, but that section is almost done.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  64.0  12   4/11/2018  We finished! Great day with great crew. Built ramps on either end of #16 bridge. Built toe kicks on #15 bridge. Raked between 15 and 16. Built trail from #11 basket to #12 tee. Built trail between #10 basket and #11 tee. Got two loads of dirt on the equipment road near #12 bridge and raked it down to cover the roots. Dressed up between #5 tees. And finished the steps at #4, for a total of 13! Several groups playing the course and inmates working on dirt shoulders at the tees. Beautiful sunshine and a little Frisbee, oops disc, practice at lunch. Not too hot, not too cold; finally a spring day.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  35.0  5   4/8/2018  Today we focused on fixing the drainage where the spring popped up too far off to the side for our original rock work to catch it. So we dug out another large area for handling the drainage from the spring and filled it with rocks. It was hard work to dig out next to all the other rocks we had already installed. Today we also repaired the Vermeer track that had lost one of its metal drive plates. The track was not working well at all without it. We were able to remove the track then reinsert the plate that had ripped from the rubber and we drilled holes and bolted it back into the track. Holes on outside of track were countersunk in order to protect the bolt heads as we try to get more use out of these tracks. It took about 3 hours to fix, but it worked very well. We roughed in some more trail mainly in order to harvest rocks which we knew were VERY thick in this area. We hauled most of them down the trail to a banked turn we have been collecting rock for.  Official 
Clean Valley Day  Hinchee Trail  Roanoke County  28.3  9   4/7/2018  Good turnout of hard workers, in spite of the forecast. We cleaned the "blue" Hinchee tract and Mason Creek. 13 tires, lots of carcasses (deer and fox), VDOT signs and debris, and the normal trash or plastic, carpets, etc.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  13.0  2   4/6/2018  Today Rich and I biked out to the work site to do some finishing work. We finished a section of trail and added a banked turn. We ended by collecting some more rocks by roughing in a little more trail, but ended up having an issue with the right track on the Vermeer. One of the metal drive and tracking plates came off. We tried using the machine without it, but that did not work well. We thought that was going to be it for that track. Stay tuned for next work day because I had a few days to think of a fix.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  54.0  11   4/4/2018  Trail on Number 4 got dug and 7 steps installed at top. #15 built. Finishing touches on #7. Glad for the correct weather call from Bud, as it turned out to be a pretty nice day. Ticks are out.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  44.0  7   3/31/2018  It was a bit wet out in the morning. On the way in we had to cut a pretty large heavy tree off the fire road at the far end of Song Bird. Once we got out to the trail we were disappointed to see a flowy spring had popped up to the right of the area we had made for the water to flow in the ravine. This was coming out the side of the hill and making the trail wet before going into our rocks. We will have to make a wider rock area to catch this spring also now. Of course we worked on another banked turn. This is a small one back near the beginning of the roughed in trail where we are trying to finish up trail, so we knew we needed to get started on this on. We made good progress, however we had to haul rocks a very long way as there were none around this area. Then we worked on some almost finished banked turns packing and shaping them a little more. Ron was the master naturalizer today trying to follow in Dicks footsteps and doing a great job. Rich and I finished working on the issue at the rock ledge where lots of water was running down the top of the ledge rock making a muddy area. We cleaned all the dirt off the surface of that huge ledge rock where the trail goes over and rock armored the outer edge past the lip of the rock where the water will run off. We got that area of trail looking pretty good. There will be a small area where we are going up to our dirt mine that we can not finish until we close the dirt mine and naturalize it. Dick came out today to plant some trees he got from the forest service. I think he said he planted 40 trees. He picked some spots that were a little baron around our trail.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  63.5  14   3/28/2018  Multiple teams. One team finished digging the trail from 13 tee to 13 basket. Then moved to start digging 4. One team worked on digging 7, and one team worked on steps for 7. Also got 6 done. Nothing like a big group!  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  35.5  8   3/23/2018  Great day. After being snowed/rained out for three weeks, we opted to work half day Friday. Fortunately the breeze had helped dry things out and not as much snow there as in western part of the valley. We were all eager to enjoy the sunshine and camaraderie building trail. So pleased to have Maurice back, plus George and Jim Brown. We finished the trail from 12-13 and did about half the trail from 13 tee up to the field. Bud and Tom built 3 AT-type locust steps in the turn and Tom did a great job on digging out a huge tree root. All in all a fun day  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  36.3  6   3/18/2018  Today was wet from all the rain last night. We could not use the Vermeer because it was down where we had just made some banked turns the week before and the they were too soft to move the machine across them at this time. So we smashed more rock most the day. Steve worked in the ravine crossing where we have put huge amounts of rock. He was working on the banked shape and making a place for water to collect if we have a massive rain and then it will filter through all the rock we put there and the little dam we made to slow it down. Later weeks if the dirt ever dries out, we will shape up that area some more. We did a lot of work on the banked turn near the tool boxes. The one we put all the brick in. We had to raise up the middle area to get proper drainage. We also hand dug and shaped the drainage on the far end. We had to cut through rock to shape the tread. It was a slow process. It should hold up great as the trail is mostly carved rock. Then in the afternoon Rich and I went back to the rock ledge as we were going to do finishing work. However we decided instead to redo an area that had issues with the way water was collecting underground and flowing out over a massive rock and into our clay on the trail making it wet. It is a small area were the massive rock sloped down and we had put dirt and small rocks there. Well we dug all that out and started armoring it with larger rocks and we decided to just expose much more if the huge ledge rock even if the trail slope is not ideal we think we can blend it in. We were hunting for the best jigsaw puzzle rocks and having a time finding good ones. Maybe we smashed up too many. We did not finish, but got a good start.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.4  4   3/10/2018  Today the weather did not know what it was going to do. We took a chance and it all worked out. The soil had perfect moisture for working it. We did finishing work all day on 3 banked turns and the trail between them.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  39.9  7   3/4/2018  Today we started out clearing some fallen trees from the road between start of Rock-N-Roll and out parking area. Then we had to gather and smash rock before we could get the Vermeer back across the ravine. We smashed rock at the ravine and the closest banked turn. When we got that done we went back to the start of our still roughed in trail. We smashed rocks into the dirt in the soft spots. We packed some new dirt in low spots and reshaped the trail.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  27.0  8   2/28/2018  Finished the 16 bridge and some of approaches to the 15 and 13 bridges, with minor trail construction. Cold and misty wet off and on, so quit early.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  28.3  5   2/25/2018  We almost didn't have a work day due to rainy weekend. But things cleared up by 1pm and we had a nice afternoon to work. Trail was too wet to do finishing work, so we fixed the Canycom (clutch belt replacement). We finished bringing the last of the old brick up. We smashed all the brick and some rock in the banked turn nearby. We dug out the drainage area and started to fill it with rock. This way the little water that flows will flow under the trail. We harvested rock nearby for this. The digging was hard as the dirt was wet and heavy. We piled it up to dry. We will use it later to shape the turn. We did a little work with shaping on the bricked banked turn, but have more to do to get the shape right.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  46.0  8   2/21/2018  Beautiful spring-like day, almost hot. Small but talented crew. Roger and his team built the bridge from 12 to 13. Dave Foster, Tom and Blanche built the trail to 13, which Bill had finished laying out before his surgery. Rolling crown turn, thanks to Tom. The bridge at 15 had been decked by Shawn. The park is really shaping up.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  8.0  2   2/19/2018  Today our mission was to fix the Canycom belt. I had went all over the place in the morning trying to find a belt. I got one finally that I was led to believe was a 30 inch belt. It turned out to be too tight. We gave up on that and it was too wet to haul brick with Vermeer, so we spent the rest of the day smashing brick that we had already moved the day before.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  34.5  6   2/18/2018  Today we decided we better get the bricks moved that the Virginia Conservation Easement people said we had to get rid of (they were piled at end of old School House Trail exit). We were planning to use them as fill in wet areas. So instead we are using them as fill in a banked turn on Rock-N-Roll (but that was a long haul). We smashed them up and it will save us from using a much dirt. To move them up we needed to put some dirt over some very tall roots that we didn't want to cut on the access trail. We also had to pull up some pointy rocks that would hurt the tracks on the equipment. While we had the Vermeer down at the road we shaped up the small parking area a bit. We also cleaned out an old drainage that was stopped up due to fallen old tree and dirt that backed up. We shaped it better but when canycom belt broke we started hauling bricks with Vermeer which prevented us from doing final shaping and naturalizing. It has rained ever since so it is not workable now until it dries a bit.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  34.3  6   2/9/2018  Today the ground was frozen to start. It started thawing right away and made a wet mess. So we could not do any trail finishing work. Again we had to harvest rock and rough in trail. Today we mostly focused on rocks. We gathered some very large ones from an area above the trail. We used the large ones for a big banked turn we are making. We also smashed a bunch into the closest drainage ravine. There was some water flowing in the ravine today. Looks like we might have to armor this crossing after we are done driving equipment across it.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  16.0  2   2/3/2018  Today started out cold, but quickly warmed up. The dirt was too frozen and then too muddy to do any finishing work at all. So we roughed in a little more trail with a goal to get to some rocks to harvest. Well we really did hit a stockpile of rocks while roughing in a short section of trial. We gathered all those rocks (around 15 loads with canycom). All but one load went in above the trail in the nearest ravine crossing. We are building up the uphill side to slow the water down and spread it across what will be our banked turn through the ravine. Later we will see if we need to armor the tread. Then we walked the whole rest of the trail again to freshen the flaging and check the elevations.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  56.5  13   1/31/2018  This was a productive day - with the step team finally finishing the long flight on the #5-#6 connection (beautiful job), and the ramp just below, and the approaches to the new bridge - all completed. With a blaze of energy following a grand lunch of chili courtesy the County and brownies courtesy Blanche, the second bridge is now well along further down the drainage, and a nice long stretch of descending side-hill to #12 tee is now in place.   Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  73.0  13   1/24/2018  Numerous jobs were done today all in close proximity making it easier to share burdens. Shawn had left a trailer with the bridge lumber on the road top-side, stringers already laminated - and the whole crew carried the materials down to the bridge site making the work easy. One team worked on the ramp and another on nearby trail mutually assisting in hauling rock. Half the ramp and crib wall have been completed and most of the trail from bridge up slope to goal - fortunately Shawn showed up just at the right time to stop us starting in to the final steep ascent to the goal as the golf rules stipulate no structure within 15 ft. of a goal. Step team did well but several still to do - the day shortened as some folk had to leave early for G/W Commissiion meeting.   Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  35.0  6   1/21/2018  Today was a wet day from thaw. So we could not work on any trail finishing and could not use the clay mine. This was the first day we used the new access trail. We cut the fallen trees off of it. We flagged it better and blew the leaves off. On the main tail we pulled all the organic off the trail route through the next very steep drainage in a really wide swath as it is a steep side hill so we will be disturbing a larger area to get the back slope right. The organic was deep in the drainage. We are making an area above the trail in the drainage to slow the water down before it crosses the trail. This will be filled with rocks and allow for a banked turn. After all the organic was removed we were able to use the Vermeer to rough in the trail and take advantage of all the nice exposed clay. We put some of the clay on a previous banked turn we had started, but we forgot to go back to shape and pack it down, I noticed it was a mess the next day. Dick came out in the afternoon and transplanted some ferns to help naturalize around the bridge area. Did I mention how warm it was today? Over 60!  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  19.8  3   1/14/2018  To start with today we had to cut a tree off the fire road. However the saw did not run well. We tried fresh gas which worked last time, but didn't this time. Because of the recent rain and then fast freeze, We found the ground was too slippery for the Vermeer to cut new trail like we did last weekend (too risky for sliding off the steep side hill). And I knew we could not begin to work on finishing work. Instead we flagged the next temporary access trail. We cleared as much of the down trees as we could by hand. We will have a few that need a chainsaw once it is fixed. Then we decided to go down the main trail and freshen the flagging. Unfortunately we found a large area in the middle that had absolutely no flagging left. I have no idea how this could have happened as 6 months ago we put up a huge amount of flagging. We spent a huge amount of time trying to find any evidence of the old flagging. I am amazed that we found none. We then tried to lay it back out the best we could without a clinometer. We will have to go back later and verify the route using the clinometer. Also I intend to use a none degrading flagging because we are very good about removing all the flagging as we build the trail...no need for degradable flagging. Then at the end of the day we dug and chopped around a 10 inch tree out of the middle of the trail route.  Official 
Disc golf course features  Mayflower Hill Park  Roanoke County  80.5  13   1/10/2018  Eager to get back to work after seemingly endless days of bad weather and holidays, we were frustrated yet again to find the ground frozen iron-hard two inches below the surface.The two bridge teams however were able to proceed with picks to excavate enough soil to complete their steps - bravo! but our intended aim of building the short connection from tee 11 down to the site of a future creek crossing was limited to clearing the route of brush, debris, some duff. The trail crew left after lunch, while Shannon et al worked on until mid-afternoon built the last of the final fan complex for #17 and some nice looking rock cribbing also.Roger et al kept at their flight another several hours to complete a very handsome set of steps with landing platform down at the big tree.  Official 
Rock-N-Roll Trail Build  Carvins Cove  City Of Roanoke  15.5  2   1/7/2018  Today started out pretty cold at around 8 degrees F. However there was little wind and it was not too bad. Later it warmed up to near 30 and felt quite nice. We did have a little trouble starting the Canycom and the Vermeer. For the Vermeer we had to drive the truck back out to pick up a battery booster. That did the trick and even though the machine was a bit sluggish until the hydraulic fluid warmed up, it eventually ran very well. We decided to rough in trail since the first few inches of ground was frozen and would make it hard to do any trial finishing work. But it was fine for roughing in trail. Once we broke through the first 3 inches the dirt was very nice below that. We were able to also use the dirt we dug out to continue adding to a banked turn we had been working on. As usual we spent a bunch of time sorting all the organic out and even some of the larger rocks. We used the larger rocks on the back side of the banked turn for support. We were pretty happy with our progress on a very steep side hill. We are getting pretty close to the drainage crossing.  Official 
Location Summary for Carvins Cove:   Total Project-Days = 486      Volunteer Hours = 13,844.7     Staff Hours = 820.5     Total Hours = 14,665.2
Report Summary:   Total Project-Days = 486      Volunteer Hours = 13,844.7     Staff Hours = 820.5     Total Hours = 14,665.2

Report generated: 9/19/2021 1:30:36 PM