Community Walking Track Day—Sunday, 27 May 2012

Back in March, we finished building a 600 metre walking track along the gully stream. The last stage of the work involved putting down a layer of gravel on the track to protect it and to make it safer to walk on.

Because the track goes through dense bush and has 134 steps, it was not possible to use machines to bring in the gravel.  We couldn’t even use wheelbarrows because of the steps.  The only solution was to do the job by hand.  It would have taken Mahrukh and myself years to do it ourselves, but today we had a group of enthusiastic friends who volunteered for the task and managed to cover a little over half the track with a morning’s effort.

Winstone Aggregates is one of CUE Haven’s supporters and sponsored some gravel and it was delivered earlier in the week. First thing this morning Peter Hopkins of Helensville Diggers came up and hauled truckloads of the gravel up to the start of the track.

The volunteers arrived a short time later and we hiked up to the start of the track. Resene Paints had generously provided us with a supply of empty ten litre paint cans and that was how the volunteers would deliver the gravel to the track.

Two people with spades filled buckets at the start of the track:

The volunteers then spread out along the track and carried two buckets a time from one person to the next until they reached the last person in line who dumped the gravel on the track. One person was stationed at the end with a rake to level to surface.

The challenge was that as we moved forward the line got longer and longer and the buckets had to be carried farther. But the volunteers moved around and shared the efforts and that made the work easy.

One of the challenges was handing off the buckets to the next person—especially when full buckets were coming from one direction and empty buckets were coming back from the front.

To keep the work interesting, the group took turns doing different jobs.

But most of the time, the volunteers spent on the track passing buckets back and forth!

Our friend John, who has experience building tracks, supervised the efforts of the group.

After a couple of hours more than half the track had been gravelled.

And the team broke for a well deserved lunch.

We couldn’t be happier about the way the track is coming together and we look forward to having everyone back to enjoy a peaceful walk in the woods in the years to come.

We’d like to thank Winstone Aggregates for supporting CUE Haven. And also thanks to Resene Paints–the paint buckets proved to be perfect for hauling the gravel!

And a big thank you to Peter Hopkins of Helensville Diggers for helping us move the gravel up to the site and also for all his help and advice on track work.

And many thanks to our friends – Aarabi, Asmita, Aspy, Avinash, Behroz, Bharathy, Deeksha, Dharma, Diane, Doug, Gabi, Gopi, Hormuz, Ian, Janfrie, Jay, John, Kairus, Kashmira, Meera, Michael, Minoo,  Prashant, Ravi, Rendell, Shobi, Shruthi, Stephen, Suman, Tanaz, Tenaz and Vibha who joined us today and worked hard to help on the track and to make it so good. Come back and see us again!