Any size maintenance crew would have been appreciated, but Marty Weigel, the volunteer foreman from Metro Mountain Bikers, was pleasantly surprised by the turnout at 5 p.m. Aug. 17 on the west end of Hoyt Park's parking lot.
About 20 people, mostly adults and a few children, awaited Weigel's instructions, ready with pruners, loppers, rakes, saws and shovels to clear the nearby mountain bike trials of obstructions left the Menomonee River when it had flooded a week earlier. Metro Mountain Bikers maintains a broad network of county trails through an agreement with Milwaukee County Parks. This Sunday evening's effort would be a more intensive maintenance project of trail clearance — and it would likely require follow-up visits, here and at other county trails affected by the flooding.
"When you see what's happened — parts of the trail washed away," Weigel told Tosa Forward News before the trail work got underway at Hoyt Park. "This is the worst damage we had in our system."
While waiting for volunteers to arrive, he had placed three hand pruners in a row on the back of his pickup truck, next to a stack of volunteer waiver forms. The trails at Hoyt Park are also among the most popular in the system, he said, and with the Menomonee River running right next to the park, the trails here were hit particularly hard.
Wearing a yellow reflective vest with the words "trail volunteer" on the back, Weigel welcomed his recruits, a mix of regulars and newbies. "Read and sign a waver, you know the drill," he said.
One father-and-son duo brought a large two-person hand saw. Another gray-bearded man wore a yellow hard hat, his work gloved tucked for now into his back pocket. Others had stowed loppers, or long-handled pruners, into backpacks.
"We're going to try to make a big dent in the flood damage today," Weigel told the gathered volunteers before they split into two groups to tackle separate trail segments, one by the river and another to the south closer to the railroad tracks. This trail maintenance event was scheduled for three hours, until sundown (with an optional stop afterward at The Landing beer garden at the park).
Weigel, a Tosa East graduate who now lives in West Allis, led the group that attended to the river-side trail. After entering the woods near the Swan Boulevard bridge, they immediately ran into downed branches and logs and brush that had been flattened across the trail by the floodwaters. They got to work.
Metro Mountain Bikers' agreement with the county specifies the club can clear a trail corridor of 6-8 feet wide. To return the trail to those dimensions, out came the loppers and hand pruners. Volunteers cut back the wiry branches of ground shrubs and and vines and tossed them as far as they could into the overgrowth, where the trimmings will decompose naturally.
Larger obstructions required a bit more effort. A couple volunteers worked together to lift a log and heave it off the trail. What remained on the ground were the smaller scraps of river debris that could be cleared with a rake.
Gregg Van Dusen, a Menomonee Falls resident, used a saw to break down a branch about the width of his forearm. He said he had begun mountain biking regularly last year and enjoyed riding on the system maintained by Metro Mountain Bikers. This year, he started volunteering on trail maintenance crews as well.
"It's a pretty awesome resource, all these trails through here," he said.
Farther up the trail, with the Menomonee River still running high to their left, Griffin Ewald removed low-lying branches from the trail with his son, Davis, who is about to enter seventh-grade.
Davis has really gotten into mountain biking in the past year, so when his dad saw a Facebook post about this work crew, they decided to spend their evening helping out. They live in Tosa's Lowell Damon Woods neighborhood and felt fortunate that their home remained dry during the torrential rain that fell overnight Aug. 9.
Within an hour, the trail crew was making impressive progress, and Weigel looked back on their work. The trail had mostly been cleared of any evidence that it had fallen victim to a historic flood. It was ready to receive treaded tires and hiking books again.
"Look at this," he said. "This is beautiful, considering what it was when we got here."
