Activity Report Explorer

Rio Grande Valley Broadband • Entered by Susan Ostlie on September 22, 2020

Scouting trip to Shining River Trail to look for activity opportunities

September 17, 2020

Key Issue: Public Lands Health & Protection
Activity Type: Stewardship (monitoring, sampling, planting, etc.)
Key Partners: Open Space Volunteer Coordinator

Short Description of Activity

I met with the volunteer coordinator to look at needed work on the Shining River Trail, which was adopted by the RGVBB in 2012 or so. See report attached below.

Reflection/Evaluation

Great! See attached:
A quick update on work projects available on the Shining River Trail from Susan Ostlie
On Thursday, 9/17/2020, I met Open Space education and volunteer coordinator Kyle Bality at the trailhead for the Shining River Trail, which was adopted by the RGVBB as a trail maintenance project in around 2012. We had planned to look for invasive plants needing to be removed with our NM Native Plant Society mentor, but Tom couldn’t be there. So it was just Kyle and myself that ambled the whole trail. (Kyle is very tall, with long legs, so it was kind of him to match my slow pace.) My observations are that the bosque looked pretty healthy, with lots of desert willows, instead of tamarisk (although there were some of those too…) along the trails. There were plenty of wildflowers – one that Kyle called a gumdrop, but which might be also known as a curly cup gumweed? This photo with Kyle for perspective is a native bush that I can’t figure out the name for, but it’s beautiful!
The results of our inspection are that there are at least two or three workdays worth of work for our group, depending on how many of us show up. The chores we can do include:
•Replacing and adding chicken wire around the cottonwoods so the beavers don’t chew them down – we saw a beautiful young cottonwood chewed down right across the trail by the bridge!
•Trail maintenance – much of the trail is very overgrown by the desert willows, which will need to be trimmed with loppers. Some of it is only about a foot wide, but lopping branches will probably do the job for the most part. •Removing invasives – there are patches of Ravenna grass in the middle of the silvery minnow breeding area that are small enough to be dug out with a shovel. The roots of the smaller ones are not that deep, so it would be good to get
them out while they are still small.
• Of course, there can be some trash pickup mostly around the Paseo del Norte bridge,
but there is really almost none on the rest of the trail.
So let’s plan to do a couple of days of socially distanced activities. The group size for Open Space is 10, but we can separate into a few different groups – a group for fencing, one for trail clearing, and one for digging out the Ravenna grass. It’ll be fun! Susan
RIO GRANDE VALLEY BROADBAND Mini newsletter 9-18-2020

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Photo Captions

Open Space Education and Volunteer Coordinator, and a native bush flourishing in the Shining River Open Space.