Become A Friend of Horizon West Regional Park

Unpaved Trail  Maintenance

Now that Horizon West Regional Park has re-opened, trail volunteers are working hard to maintain the trails and the space around them. Our efforts aid the growth of native grasses, shrubs, and trees, and they help to keep the trails in good condition.

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

One needs no special skills to be a trail volunteer. Trail work is much like landscaping a yard... except, of course, that this yard is 200 acres in size! Fortunately, the trails are only a small fraction of the park’s total acreage.

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

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. There are four species of invasive vines in the park, which we clip off at ground level when we find them. The only native vine species (the one with thorny stems) is briar.

Under these conditions, a properly-attired volunteer wears leather work gloves, full-length jeans, and leather hiking boots.

Other Ways To Help:

• We’ll soon the help of someone who’s willing to take on the job of updating this website (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, as well as 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 vines. The colored ribbons also help curious visitors 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.