Workday Report: February 2026

This covers the regularly scheduled workday for February. We were able to finish the horse steps on the north side of the Hardage Mill Trail. We had 10 crew leaders for the workday.

The 36 volunteers were from Hillgrove JROTC (28), the Atlanta Outdoor Club (8, Kirsten and I are part of that number or 6 volunteers), and 2 individuals that signed up on the Friends website.

I welcomed the volunteers, explained the workplan, did a safety brief, talked about Crew Leader Volunteer opportunities, and we walked to the intersection of the Noses Creek Trail and the north side of the Hardage Mill Trail where we issued tools and walked to the worksite.

Thanks to Zoe and Issaic for staging the GAB by the bottom step we were able to start filling in the forms immediately. We formed a bucket brigade with our volunteers filling the buckets passing them up the hill on one side of the steps to the step that needed filled than passing the empty buckets back down to other side to be refilled with Tom and Robert ensuring everything was done safely. This worked so well that we had moved two thirds of the GAB staged in the first hour. I sent half the Hillgrove kids and Kirsten and Curt back to the other pile of GAB on the Noses Creek Trail and had them fill buckets with GAB from that pile. At the same time, I called Michael Christman and asked him if he could drive a Gator over so that we could load it with GAB and take it to the worksite. About 30 minutes later he arrived as we finished the staged pile of GAB. With the trips Michael made by driving the Gator and the hard work of our volunteers we not only finished filling in the remaining step, we were also able to add GAB to steps started in January filling them to the proper level. As we were finishing the step Aaron and Aashrith took a group of volunteers to trash out the trail creep on one side of the trail created by those going around the unfinished steps and address erosion concerns on the other side caused by the building of the steps.

Overall, this workday could not have gone any better. Thanks to Michael not only driving the Gator to the worksite but also driving loads of GAB over to the worksite.

Our next workday is Saturday, March 14th. We will be performing either cyclic maintenance on the back side of Little Kennesaw Mountain from the saddle of Pigeon Hill to the top of Little Kennesaw or we will be repairing and replacing the fencing in the same area. We will meet at the Pigeon Hill parking lot. This may change based on the needs of the park. Regardless we will still meet at the Pigeon Hill parking lot

Mike Collett

Trails Director