Saturday, September 21st at the BTC Annual General Meeting held in Hamilton, Ontario, Niagara Club was awarded the Philip & Jean Gosling Award for the re-routed trail east of the Louth Conservation Area. Rick Waters, NBTC Trail Development & Maintenance Director accepted this distinguished environment award.
The Philip and Jean Gosling Award recognizes projects that improve the environmental quality of the trail, reduces the impact on the environment, or helps hikers get across difficult areas such as streams and wetlands. Boardwalks and bridges often are contenders for this award.
The new trail came about because of a hand shake agreement with the land owner immediately east of Louth Conservation Area. The old trail went through a perennial wet area and across a section of open farmer’s field. Hikers had to be careful when crops were planted near and often on the trail.
The new section of trail is now part way up the escarpment and in a mature forested area. It is one kilometre long and uses a short section of the Louth Side Trail to connect to the new main trail
Hikers no longer need to deal with mud and water on the trail as the new section has great drainage.
The other feature of this new trail is a bridge over a stream that connects to Fifteen Mile Creek. This bridge was built with the help of a group of volunteers from PCL Construction. The extra labour meant the bridge could be completed 4-5 hours rather than a couple of days it normally takes to build such a structure. Most of the material for the bridge was wood repurposed from a boardwalk that was no longer required on the old wet section of the closed trail.