Volunteering for the local trails

I've been volunteering with the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District for several years now, mostly doing trail patrol with an occasional day spent working on the trails.  A couple of months ago, they needed people for a video project, including a couple of mountain bikers -- so I rode up from home to meet them at Russian Ridge on the designated day.  Sort of entertaining, though I was glad I had ridden up since there was predictably quite a bit of standing around once I got there.

The result is here, if you are interested (click to watch the video titled "Room to Breathe".  There's a brief snippet of me being semi-coherent about why I like the preserves about 8 seconds in, and I'm also the the one in the green shirt riding in front under the title about 30 seconds in.

In other volunteer news, I got my Anvil Award last weekend, for patrolling every last trail in the district.  Even though you merely needed to do all the trails eventually to qualify, I thought it would be better to do them all in one year.  Silly me.  Despite my best efforts to stay on track with a spreadsheet and marked-up maps, I fell behind schedule and a last big binge was necessary back in July while Nim was in camp (racked up more than 36,000 feet of elevation gain and many many miles in 11 days!) They gave me a cute teeny-tiny little anvil and a gift certificate to REI, which I totally wasn't expecting.

There's a good comprehensive map of all the official trails here.  Note that most of the trails are quite nice, but there are also quite a number of steep, evil, dead-end stubs heading up ridges and down canyons. Those were the ones procrastinated until the end.