As the three girls strode purposefully around the one-kilometre Mike Weeks Trail that circles their Garibaldi Highlands Elementary School Friday afternoon, their pride was evident in the excitement of their hurried sentences, which overlapped each other. The girls raced to explain what part each had played in building the trail and how it all came together.
“We had these big piles of gravel, and then we got rakes and shovels and wheelbarrows and we spread it all around to make the trail,” said student Elly Trinh.
Her classmate Cassidy Butterworth explained there were about 10 piles of gravel at various locations around the trail. Emily Rice, her ponytail bobbing as she nodded vigorously, pointed out the location of the piles.
The girls are students in teacher Jan Galley’s Grade 6 leadership class who worked for two days on the project. Friday afternoon. The class of 26 was putting on the finishing touches, such as painting the letters of the trail’s sign and spreading the remains of the gravel.
The trail was actually originally built a decade ago by John Harvey. The students, with Harvey’s guidance, have updated the trail to make it wheelchair accessible. The project is called the Earth Day Project to recognize when the work got started on the trail, according to Harvey.
It is important that the trail was made wider and smoother to allow for wheelchairs, Butterworth said.
“There aren’t very many trails that are wheelchair-accessible in Squamish,” she said.
“There are quite a lot of people who live up here and this place, because it is a school, is a public area and it is nice for people to just have a trail they can go on that is like in the forest but it isn’t far away from anything.”
Harvey said the inspiration for the trail was Squamish resident Riun Blackwell, who lives near the trail and can no longer walk.
“He has suffered MS for so many years, and it has progressively gotten worse so he is now in a wheelchair,” said Harvey. “I ran into him at the pool and he said, ‘John, can we make [that trail] wheelchair accessible?’”
Harvey said he had assumed an accessible trail would have to be paved, but he soon learned gravel was fine.
The trail had to be widened to three and a half feet wide, have the roots removed and the gravel spread two inches thick, according to Harvey.
Asked what she would like people in Squamish to know about the refreshed trail, Rice, the young student, was quiet a moment.
“That we worked really hard on it,” she finally said with a big smile.
The trail was a collaborative effort, Harvey said. In addition to the work by the class and the school’s fundraising efforts, which contributed about $500 to the project, the Squamish Trail Society donated the gravel, the Sea to Sky School District helped with trucking in the materials, and the District of Squamish pitched in with a small culvert, he said.
