More than 50 people turned out to lend Mother Nature a helping hand, or maybe even a green thumb, at John Boyd Thacher State Park this past weekend.
New York state’s “I Love My Park Day” was held for the second time on Saturday, May 4. The event is meant to encourage people to volunteer at their favorite local state park to assist with cleanup and beautification projects. The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and Parks & Trails New York sponsor the event.
Volunteers were spread out across Thacher Park performing various tasks from painting, to planting flowers, to performing trail maintenance. Thacher Park Manager Chris Fallon said the event allows several tasks to be knocked off that park workers would otherwise have to tackle.
“We picked out some projects that we thought we could use some help with. … We always have projects like that,” Fallon said. “We picked out maybe 10 or so for today. What doesn’t get done, we will do with our own forces.”
Fallon said park funding is still “kind of flat,” but the state recently approved funds for capital projects at state parks to help make improvements.
Some of the trail projects performed involved rerouting the Long Path Trail, performing trail maintenance for the Indian Ladder Trail and spreading crushed stone, shale and woodchips to even surfaces and fill in washed out sections of trail.
Sisters Patti Mead of Guilderland, Mary Fox of Colonie and Shannon Hickman of Guilderland were painting the booth near the park office.
“We the love the park and we like to volunteer,” Mead said. “We have been coming here our whole life.”
Mead said it was the first year she had volunteered for the day, but she plans on participating again.
Hickman said the park offers a lot during all four seasons, so she wanted to give back to the park. Fox said she enjoys snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.
“It is an absolutely beautiful park,” Fox said.
Erin Kelly, who recently moved to Rensselaer, said she had never visited the park before volunteering that day. Kelly was planting some flowers outside of the park office with her friend Nicole Anuszewski, also from Rensselaer.
“We were going to come out to hike and we decided to come out and volunteer instead,” Kelly said. “We just moved to the area two weeks ago and had never been to the area before, and we thought it would be a great way to come out and explore.”
Altamont resident Jim Schaller, also a member of Friends of Thacher Park and trail volunteer, was part of a group that placed fencing around a sinkhole that developed off of a trail.
Schaller said when the park was established and roads were built, the natural drainage was cut off and “big heavy ditches” were made to funnel water into the natural sinkhole.
“Over the years, erosion has greatly enlarged it and when there is water coming down here during the wet seasons it is a torrent of water,” Schaller said. “It was determined that since this section of the Long Path is only 20 to 30 feet away from it that people walking or hiking might get over there and fall into the hole by mistake. … We decided to put some nice green fencing around it to keep folks at a distance.”
Schaller said further up the path the group rerouted the trail and cleared a pine tree that had fallen across the pathway.
Becky Nold of Glenville and her 13-year-old son, Andrew, were a part of Schaller’s group.
“We enjoy the parks, all of them, and we enjoy hiking so we wanted to spend the morning maintaining the trails so that we could enjoy them later,” Becky Nold said.
Andrew said he goes hiking about every two weeks once the weather is nice and he enjoys being outside. Becky Nold said her family probably comes to Thacher once each year and they often head north to the Adirondacks, as well.
At around 1 p.m. the volunteers gathered to eat lunch, which consisted of a bounty of food from hot dogs and hamburgers to vegetarian chili.
Eileen McFerran, of Albany, and Jayne Maloney, of Delmar, picked up some food after volunteering, but they also had done work before the event and would continue to do more afterwards. The two women are a part of the Thacher Garden Gang, which is an offshoot group of the Friends of Thacher Park.
The two said they were at the event last year and worked on the planters throughout the park, which then turned into a constant focus for a group of volunteers. There are 17 planters at the park that “were 10 years untouched” at the time.
This year the “gang” is working on installing plants and flowers at the two park bathrooms following their success with planters.