Become A Friend of Horizon West Regional Park

HWRP’s Trail Volunteers

Since 2022, trail volunteers have been working hard to maintain HWRP’s trails and the space around them. Our efforts aid the growth of native grasses, flowers, shrubs, and trees. They also help keep the trails safe and enjoyable to use.

Our projects bring individual nature lovers together. We can accomplish much when we work as a team! Perhaps most importantly, our activities inspire other park visitors to appreciate nature as much as we do.

Our usual meetup time is 8:00 am on Saturdays, after the park gates open. Occasionally, we schedule volunteer activities on Sunday mornings. One needs no special skills to be a trail volunteer. Trail work is much like landscaping a yard... except, of course, that this yard covers many acres!

Friends of Horizon West Regional Park volunteers who wish to help us in the field on a regular basis must apply to join Orange County’s “Adopt-A-Park” program. The program is administered by Orange County Parks and Recreation, and “Adopt-A-Park” members commit to volunteering their services for a minimum of four hours per month.

Typical volunteers are people who have already spent time hiking or cycling the park’s unpaved trails.

Youth Volunteering:

Young adults of high school age can participate in the Adopt-a-Park program to receive volunteer credit hours for scholarships. Likewise, Scouting America members in the same age group can volunteer to earn merit badges and/or work toward becoming an Eagle Scout.

As noted above, we meet on weekend mornings. Nearly all of the adult team works Monday through Friday, so we don’t plan meetups during weekdays.

If you’re a parent of a young adult who enjoys outdoor work, we invite you to reach out to us with the “Volunteer Contact Form” on this page! We’ll be happy to provide more details about the youth volunteer program, and provide copies of the forms which Parks and Recreation requires parents to fill out.

Each of the adults currently enrolled in Horizon West’s Adopt-a-Park group have been background-checked, and are able to supervise minors. However, we encourage parents to share the HWRP volunteer experience with their children if they can!

Parents of young volunteers should also make note of the information provided below:

Recommended Protective Clothing:

Most of the work is done on the trail margins. Sooner or later, we brush up close to prickly pear cactus, which is easy to overlook when it’s growing amongst the grass. The only footwear which is resistant to cactus needles is mid-rise to high-rise leather hiking boots/work boots.

There are six species of invasive vines in the park, which we clip off at ground level when we find them. Three are native to Florida. One of these is briar, which is notorious for its thorny stems. It often grows with other FL-native aggressive vines: Wild muscadine grapes and calusa grapes. 

Two of the introduced nuisance vines are English ivy and rosary peas. Like briars and grapevines, they climb trees and can choke out their “host” trees if they’re not kept in check. Mexican clover, which usually climbs no higher than a couple of feet, is another “nuisance” species which was introduced to the southern USA as a pasture crop. Its strong tendrils choke out native grasses, and trip up hikers who don’t step carefully over the vines.

Under these conditions, a properly-attired volunteer wears leather work gloves , full-length jeans, and leather hiking boots. Briars poke right through rubberized yardwork gloves, and can mess up one’s ankles unless they’re protected by boots.

Other Ways To Help:

• If you have basic website publishing skills, we currently need a volunteer who’s willing to take on the job of updating this website (www.hwrp.info), as well as the park trail map.

• We’d love to have one or more team members who can do “welfare checks” on pine seedlings, perennial wildflowers, and colorful shrubs such as beautyberries and lantana. When we find a new pine seedling or flowering shrub, we typically mark them with short stakes and colored satin ribbons. The colored markers help trail volunteers to spot the “friendlies” in the winter, so we don’t mistake them for invasive species. The colored ribbons also help nature-loving visitors to identify the park’s flowering plants.

• The park has nearly 200 active gopher tortoise burrows, which are shown on the trail map by small red diamond symbols (◆). We keep track of burrows as they’re created or abandoned, and update the trail map accordingly. In past years, we’ve had the assistance of professional botanists, but nearly any adult can be a volunteer “tortoise tracker”. The job involves walking carefully off-trail in tortoise habitat, which is often a habitat for briars and cactus as well! Hiking boots and full-length jeans, therefore, are the recommended uniform.