Become A Friend of Horizon West Regional Park

Unpaved Trail  Maintenance

Since 2022, trail volunteers have been 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.

Our usual meetup time is 8:00 am on Saturdays, after the park gates open. 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.

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.

There are six species of invasive vines in the park, which we clip off at ground level when we find them. One of the Florida-native vine species (the one with thorny stems) is briar. Other invasive vines are native wild muscadine grapes and calusa grapes. 

English ivy and rosary peas are introduced species. Like briars and grapevines, they climb trees to find sunlight, but they usually choke out their host trees if they’re not kept in check. Mexican clover, a vine which usually climbs no higher than a couple of feet, is another “nuisance” species introduced as a pasture crop. Cows love it, but its strong tendrils trip up hikers who don’t step carefully over it.

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