Ben Matthews
Port Townsend High School Student
4-H Stewardship Program Member
2010 Fall Season Work Crew
Watershed Cleanup
This was our first work day. We split into two groups, one to clean up trash and the other for noxious weed removal. I was with the trash clean up crew, we found trash everywhere under logs far down the side of a hill. There was a mattress that we had to pull up the side of the hill with a rope. There were bags of diapers everywhere they were really hard to get them all into garbage bags because the bags they were in were really weak and full of holes.
Fish Fling
This was a project to re-introduce salmon from the hatchery to places farther up the river. They had brought all of the fish up to bridges near the river and dropped them off for us. We stood on the bridge and threw them down to the river. The reason that we did this was so that the fish could decompose and help out an environment that would not usually get these nutrients. Also on this day we went down to the Skokomish river and looked at log jams that had been set up and how much the river had been cleaned up by the forest service.
For another project we waterproofed a bunch of picnic table boards for the first half of the day and then we cleaned up the parking lot of the ranger station in forks. To do this we used hoes and brush trimmers, we trimmed back the bushes that were growing over the parking spaces and we used the hoes and shovels to scrape back the moss out of parking spaces and gutters. We also picked up trash from the side of the road near the station. I climbed a tree with a hand saw and sawed of branches that were hanging over he lot.
For this project we planted saplings on a decommissioned road and in a elk habitat then moved a ways away from, we also planted grass seeds down a part of the road that had been shut down for a while. Then we came back to the ranger station and planted starts in containers, we ran out of dirt about halfway through and so we had to unload some from the truck onto a tarp on the ground.
Trail Maintenance
This was our last day of work and the one where I actually felt like i was earning my money, we cleared out water drainage ditches that came off the side of the trail. We pushed back weeds that were growing into the side of the trail and cut back brush that was hanging over the side. We did not make it to the top of the trail but we got a good portion of the trail done. We used a lot of different toolsBy the end we had a really good system by having the tools in a certain order and it was really efficient.
This day was kind of an accident because the guy who was supposed to help us put the picnic tables together did not show up for work so we had to come up with something else to do. We went on a few hikes and saw some pretty cool stuff then we did some campground maintenance like picking up trash on two different campgrounds. It was a pretty good day even though we did not do what we had planned to.