A couple of dozen volunteers shoveled gravel, built a bridge and cleared bicycle trails on a chilly Saturday morning at Boyle Park in Little Rock.
The volunteers were making sure everything would be in shape before the Big Rock Mountain Bike Festival on Oct. 4, but the cleanup also was a part of the 20-year-old city volunteer initiative Adopt-A-Park, which allows volunteers to tend to the parks faster than the city can afford to tend to them.
After the city dumped six truckloads of material at Boyle Park, Keith Canfield and about 10 other volunteers associated with the city and Boy Scout Troop 24 shoveled it onto playgrounds next to a pavilion. Before the material was put in place, only the dirt-and-grass earth lay below the equipment.
"The city provided the gravel, but we provided the labor," Canfield, 53, said.
By about 11 a.m., toward the end of the day's work for most of the volunteers, children were already out on the playground equipment, having run over from an event at the pavilion. The men, mostly dressed in T-shirts and jeans on the cloudy, mid-50s morning, worked their wheelbarrows and shovels around them.
Canfield has been a volunteer park ranger for the past few years and is also on the city's parks commission -- a group of volunteers advising Little Rock's Parks and Recreation Department -- where he serves with fellow Saturday volunteer Tim Heiple.
Canfield volunteers at parks most weekends and said he thinks volunteer involvement is growing.
Mark Webre, deputy director of operations for the parks department, said volunteer groups participate in the Adopt-A-Park program at about 25 of the 60 parks across the city, theoretically saving the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor costs.
"It's a good way to build the parks, but it's also a good way to build the community," Webre said.
"[But] it's had its downtime," he added, where it has lacked volunteers.
The nonprofit Central Arkansas Trail Alliance had been to Boyle Park twice this year, board member Basil Hicks said. The group was back Saturday prepping the western portion of the park for the Big Rock Mountain Bike Festival, which has not previously been held at the park.
The group builds and maintains trails in the area and is working with the festival. On Saturday, they put a short wooden bridge up over a small ravine, where bicyclists and walkers previously had to bypass a steep, sloping wooded path.
"You've got to know what you're doing to ride this," said Hicks, 70, motioning to the old path.
The group cleared more trail across the road in another hilly, wooded patch so people using the trail in the future could spend more time off the street. They brushed aside leaves and branches and took a chain saw to trees blocking the new trail.
"We try not cut down any more trees than we have to," Hicks said.
Hicks and his colleagues have worked at Boyle Park along with other parks in Little Rock, North Little Rock and Mountain View this year.
"The trails all have the same problem: The trails are there, but not enough people to maintain and work on them," he said.
Metro on 09/14/2014