October 2019 FCOHC Newsletter

Right up front I'm going to tell you this will be a short newsletter. I've got a lot of irons in the fire and find myself stretched a little thin to sit still and be creative. I promise better thing in the future.

As mentioned at the September meeting and newsletter, we did host a club ride at Paddle  Creek (Wayne National Forest) the second weekend of September. The ride was well attended, but numerous individual plans kept the number lower than in years past. I have mentioned in the past how well I like this area. If any of you get the chance to attend a future club ride or go on your own, I strongly suggest you give this park a try. The scenery and camp area are beautiful. The trails have always been well maintained and this trip was no exception.

At the last meeting I mentioned our club was committed to a couple work projects that had to be done in September. Good news, both have been accomplished. About a year and a half ago, Great Seat State Park in Chillicothe agreed to add a new 5 mile horse trail on the northwest end of the park. Part of that agreement was that we as a club were required to keep it maintained. The wet spring and early summer kept us from honoring that pledge. Finally the ground dried out enough to allow us to do our job. On Thursday the 19^th a small crew met up and cleared the downed trees and mowed the entire 5 miles of trail. Thanks to Craig and Charlene Santee for bring the state ohc ODR Mower as well as their own DR Mower to mow a major portion of the trail. Tom McGuire brought his ATV plus a pull behind brush hog to mow the section south of the creek crossing. Margaret Hite, Sandy Sexton, Julie McGuire, Keith and Donna White  pulled brush, trimmed vines, moved downed trees and provide labor where needed. I drove one of the mowers part of the way, then Charlene took over for me and I took over cutting downed trees off off the trail ahead of the mowers. Tom broke down due to a limb ripping the fuel line off of his ATV but we were able to complete the task at hand and pull him back to the parking lot. All total, the job took about 4 hours to complete. This is now a nice trail to ride. If you are in the Chillicothe area, give it a try.

The other major project our club committed to was repainting the trails at Hocking so they matched the new map published earlier this summer. For those not familiar, on the previous map, there were three major trails at Hocking, red, purple and orange. The other trails were marked with white paint. This was confusing to the first responders in the event of an accident as they do not ride the trails and were not familiar with the specific locations within the park. To address this issue, the majority of the trails were assigned a color, which required that the previous white or what ever color needed to be  painted over to match the new map. There are still white trails, but they are short trails that are basically side trips and attach back to one of the major trails. Dave Glass, the Hocking manager, asked that we limit this painting task to people completely familiar with the park in order to eliminate any chance of error. I went a step further and took this job on myself. Tom McGuire did help one day when we took on the Goat trail. I spent 5 days over the course of 3 weeks walking the trails and applying the new paint. As of last Wednesday, the new map and trails all match. There is still a little bit of painting to do on the orange trail. That paint has been ordered but not yet received.

Tom and I had met with Dave Lane, Steven Rist and Dave Glass about a month ago. The purpose of the meeting was to share concerns over lack of trail maintenance. Steven took charge of this list of concerns and last week the Hocking forestry crew spent 3 days running a dozer to repair the trails. June and I camped at Hocking last weekend. On Saturday we ran into riders from 5 states outside of Ohio. Most of these riders had never been to Hocking. We got nothing but positive feed back on how nice the trails were and how well marked and easy they were to navigate. In the minds of us locals who go to Hocking, we have always felt Hocking should be considered the flag ship of Ohio horse trails. Until you travel many miles away from home to ride a horse, you don't realize how good we have it in our back yard. Today, Hocking is truly a bucket list destination.

Speaking of Hocking, mark your calendars for the last weekend of October. Our club has the special use area reserved for our annual Halloween ride. The park should be in full color at that point so come join us.

We will have a meeting in November, but there will not be a meeting in December. Our annual Christmas party is scheduled for the first Sunday in December at the Pleasantville Fire Department community room. More on this later. At the November meeting we will be electing the new officer for 2020.

Hope to see a large crowd at the October 13^th meeting. If anyone is interested, I still have 4 tee shirts available, 2 large, 2 x large. Three of them are blue, one of the x large is gray.

That is a wrap as they say in the news business.

Chris