In order to earn the 50 miler award, the group has to complete 10 hours of service on projects to improve a trail, springs, campsite, portage or area. We were not able to complete the 10 hours of service at Northern Tier so we looked around the DFW area for a suitable project. I found a person who serves as a trails liaison with parks and oversees all of Grapevine's hike and bike trails. They had a need for trail signs along the Horseshoe trail near Grapevine Lake. We agreed to:
- Get the trail names routed vertically onto wood
- Attach the signs to metal pipe.
- Dig down 10 inches or so and put concrete around the pipe so that the vertical signs would be at a minimum 2 inches above the ground.
I met with the trails liaison in September to discuss various projects he would like done. Once we settled on this particular one, 8 foot 2" x 6" pieces of cedar were purchased. My first task was to find someone who could route the names into the wood vertically. It turned out this is no easy task. If we paid to have it done it would have been price prohibitive. After talking to several adults in our troop, I learned one of our assistant scoutmasters is highly skilled at working with wood and has a lot of woodworking tools in his workshop. He was able to make 14 of 18 signs with the amount of cedar boards he had to work with.
The finished product:
We put the word out and we had a large group of scouts and venture crew members show up to help with the installation of the signs
This is the map of where the 13 signs needed to be installed. There was a 14th installed not shown on the map.
The first task was to lay out the signs and attach the metal pipe.
We demonstrated the process of installing a sign
We broke into teams and each went off with signs, shovels, post hole diggers, concrete and water. |
| Installing each sign was a group effort |
Here is a group picture of all that helped install 14 signs
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Post Project Thoughts:
- I was pleasantly surprised at how many showed up. When I first committed to installing 18 signs, I realized this was going to be a bigger project than our 8 member Northern Tier crew could handle in a reasonable amount of time. We put the word out to the 4 Philmont crews that also needed service hours.
- The tools everyone brought with impressive. We had ample shovels, post hole diggers, wrenches and sockets available. I was concerned there would be a lot of standing around waiting to use a shovel or post hole digger.
- This project presented a lot of opportunities that tested my leadership capabilities. The first challenge was to find a way to get the names routed on the signs at little or no cost and to fulfill our promise to the trail group. The second challenge was on the day of installation to communicate what needed to be done, how it was to be done and keep everyone engaged. Also, it was important to coordinate efforts once teams started finishing installation in their assigned areas. Do we send teams to help other teams or as teams finish, do they go back to the rondevu point. It turned out everyone finished installing their signs around the same time so we were able to send every one back to home base roughly at the same time.
- I forgot about the camaraderie our Northern Tier Crew had. They laughed at my corny jokes on the trek and I had new ones to contribute at this project. One of our boys has a different sense of humor and it takes a minute or two to think about what he says because you don't know if it is meant to be humorous. The day of the project was no exception. The first time he said something, the adults looked at each other wondering if it was supposed to be serious then the boy chimed in it was in jest. That cracked us up and made it more humorous because we remembered his unique sense of humor.
- I was surprised and impressed we got everything accomplished in 4 hours. I fully expected to spend all day installing the signs.
- Overall the project was a satisfying success and relief to finally be over.
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