Stephens park bike trails were officially approved by the moline park board on the 24th of April 2015! It took four months of discussion with the park board to make it happen, but thanks to Drew Hanson, Jordan Hanson, and Eric perry, and myself and Forc as a whole. the park board voted yes to the trails.
Since then trail layout for the upper west ravine has been ongoing. The layout of the trail IMO is very important to the quality of the ride experience ,so patients has been taken to achieve the best outcome. Once again Drew Hanson has been vital to the trail layout due to his experience in past trail building.
On may 2nd i went to the park to do some maintenance and found a huge group of volunteers at the park for a park clean up day. So I took that opportunity to grab a few volunteers and run thru the ravine picking up trash. We ended up pulling 8 tires, a tarp, and 4 giant trash bags of rubbish out of the woods. Very productive!
Lastly I've been going to city council meeting trying to get the city to approve the use a portion of the lot to the north of the park for trails. After two city council meetings the city administrator recommended not pursuing the project for various reasons. So I went to Russell construction and Joel Purcell to discuss the project. He made it sound promising to be able to use that land in the future as mtb trails. It will be a project in the future since there is plenty to do within the park boundaries. But a big thanks to Joel for support on that issue!