Christmas Is Almost Here!!!

Well since it's Christmas Break, everyone was busy so no one had a chance to get out and do some work on the trail. So no actually work has been done other than the hardening of the dirt that we need to move at the crossing! I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year!!

Saturday Work Days

Well this Saturday we went out and worked for 5 hours straight. We managed to clean a lot of the trail up and fix minor imperfections. My senior project is still on hold due to the dirt not being compact enough. I will go out next time and check to see when I believe we can resume working. Till then I will continue to volunteer.

Градот го уништи

For those of you can not read Macedonian, my title means "The City Ruined It!". I forgot my blog last week and a lot has happened since. The city provided us with the pipe we needed, but without telling my mentor or I dropped it into the middle of our crossing ruining all the work we have done so far. Now we have to wait for the dirt to get hard enough to bring the heavy machinery down there to fix the whole site. 

Since we can not work on my portion of the project right now, they began working on the actual trails. I have volunteered to help and I still go out Tuesdays and Fridays. I even picked up a sweet souvenir, a bad case of poison ivy!!

Rain rain go away.

The rain cancelled our tuesday work day, so this week I have yet to work. Tomorrow (friday) we are working again, sadly I don't have any helping hands because they are all busy playing football against the men on the school staff. We will be working on clearing out the area for the 6 foot wide by 10 feet long tube to guide water safely under the passing. Tomorrow should be a successful day, but only time will tell. Till then!

Machete, Chainsaw, and 4 boys. :)

Well since last friday, we've definitely made some progress. Here are pictures from last friday.

The walk down to the ravine.

The Ravine From both sides. 

Now you have seen what we will be crossing, there is also a creek in the middle of this whole mess. This Tuesday, with the help of Thomas Wildeman and Brad Thorne, my mentor and I made some progress in clearing some of the shrubbery away to see where the path will go. After our work shots.

These pictures are still fairly hard to see what exactly is happening, we have much more work to do! This Friday is our next work day, so we'll see what we can get done!

Change of plans.

Change of plans, no more bridge. Or at least for now.. Mr. Turner and I went out to the site for a view of the site. It is very over grown and the whole concept of a bridge got very complicated with the given circumstances. We examined every aspect of getting down the ravine, crossing the ravine and getting back up the other side. Water drainage was a big problem but we are avoiding those problems of having the trail washed away. We may build a bridge depending on how we can make this work best. My end goal is not changed, because I am still working to get across this ravine. The next work day is tuesday! I am excited and can't wait to get back out there.

It's over.

The most hectic and stressful week of school so far is over! I had to drop work (that means getting paid!!), extra curricular activities, and sleep all over a research paper. I did miss last weeks blog, we were not in school so I didn't think we would need to turn one in. Due to some phone complications this past month, I no longer have the phone number of my mentor either and since he is on the other side of town I have had no time to go and talk to him. I will be doing this saturday though to talk about some details so I can get started!! I will also calling Mr. Thorne afterwards to set up a meeting at Duncan Park, as he asked to see the site, to look at my plans with the site. I hope to be able to meet Mr. Thorne this weekend to see the site, or early next week. Then I plan to get back to Eric and finalize some things and hopefully start purchasing some wood within the next weeks. I am beginning to plan now, so I don't have problems of finding free time to do this, thanks to the suggestions that were comments on my previous blog.