Several employees from McElhanney Consulting Services in Terrace B.C. were out on Sunday clearing brush for what will be a new kilometre of trail on Ferry Island.
It’s just the preliminary work and though it’s walkable, it’s not really open, said McElhanney’s division manager Jonathan Lambert yesterday.
“We cleared the whole kilometre. It’s a rough trail, but it is walkable,” he said, adding that people shouldn’t use it quite yet.
“We don’t recommend anyone goes in there yet — it’s not open. We need to remove some danger trees still and there’s still piles of debris,” he said.
The employees, Rob Phillips, Jamie deVries, Chris Houston as well as Lambert, were armed with chainsaws and a tractor to clear brush and chop and remove logs and debris from the trail.
Lambert says the rest of the work will wait until after the river water is down, likely late in May.
Then they will smooth and gravel the trail to be up and ready for walkers and cyclists this summer.
The plan, first suggested last April by McElhanney, is to add an access trail connecting the Ferry Island trails with the Hwy 16 sidewalk by the Dudley Little Bridge near Walmart.
That way pedestrians won’t have to jaywalk across the highway to get to the trail.
The $100,000 trail is a legacy project donated to the community from McElhanney to celebrate its 50th anniversary of doing business in Terrace.
Besides the underpass, the trail will also have 700 metres of new trail on the north side of Ferry Island, as well as 300 metres on the south side to connect the new network to the rest of the island’s trails.
For more details, see this article published last December when the first phase of work was done.