By PAMELA GRANT
Cove Leader-Press
After years of hard work by a group of dedicated volunteers, the Ogletree Gap Park hiking trails are officially open.
A ribbon cutting ceremony for the hiking trail was held Saturday at 9 a.m. The new trails are great for both hiking and biking (though some trails are marked as being for advanced mountain bikers only). There are approximately 4.7 miles of hiking trail, and the trail is all natural (not paved).
“The trails have been worked on for over seven years now by a completely volunteer group,” said Copperas Cove Parks and Recreation director Jeff Stoddard.
Stoddard said that he hopes many people will grow to love the trail as more and more people discover its existence. “This is one of the biggest hidden treasures that we have,” said Stoddard. “I think it’s going to get a lot of use. It’s something that we don’t see anywhere else in our park systems. This is all 100% natural.”
Keith Fields is one of the volunteers who worked on the project since close to its start. He said that he loves being outdoors and was happy to have been a part of the project.
“It’s beautiful out here,” said Fields. “I was looking at it this morning and just thinking about how long we’ve been out here putting in the work, and you don’t think about it until you look at it on the map. We put in a lot of work.”
Some of Field’s favorite sights on the trail are the Four Sisters tree group and seeing some of the moss growth on some of the oak trees.
Ray Payne was one of the main forces behind organizing a lot of the work, and, of course, put in a lot of hard work. He said that as of May 31, they put in 7 years of work. In addition to Payne and Fields, Payne also wanted to acknowledge some of the other volunteers who have worked on the trail since the beginning or nearly the beginning. Those volunteers are James and Svenja Atchley and Nora and Ed Munguia.
The volunteers first got permission to work on the trails from then Parks and Recreation director Joe Brown. To create the trails, volunteers first checked out the terrain and figured out which areas would make for the best trails before clearing the paths and cleaning it up. The group wanted to highlight as much of the natural beauty that the area had to offer with their various trails.
“My favorite is the Four Sisters Trail because when you come up, you can see the four trees and it’s nice and wooded, shaded, and when you come down, if you’re early enough at the bottom of that, right before it crosses Jeep Trail, there are a bunch of oak trees that are grown up and bent over. There’s moss on top, and when the sun comes through there it has a shire-ish kind of look and it’s really neat,” said Payne.
Payne said that they’ve been working on the trails for such a long time. They did it because they liked doing it, but getting acknowledgement for it did feel great.
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