Last Saturday was my first opportunity to get in a ride since the DINO No. Vernon race the Sunday before. So I loaded up my road bike and headed over to Iroquois Park for my longest ride of the year, about 2.5 hours.
After several loops around the lower ring road, I couldn't help but notice about 40 to 50 of what looked to be high school seniors working under several large trees that line the road. Upon closer inspection I notice that the Olmsted work truck is on-site, and everyone is working under the guidance of Olmsted Conservancy.
So just how did Olmsted decide to use an entire Saturday afternoon of around 50 volunteers? Shoveling bark and mulch from the road to the base of several large trees!
A job that could've been accomplished in about one hour using a small front loader (that Metro Parks maintains on-site) required well over 100 volunteer hours. It appears that the only thing Olmsted "conserved" that Saturday was one hour of wear and tear on one of Metro Parks pieces of heavy equipment; never mind the fatiguing task of shoveling all day for the poor volunteers.
While I tip my hat to all of those volunteers who basically wasted their entire Saturday spreading mulch, I hope they come away with a good understanding of just how poorly managed their days activities were and how with a little help of publicly owned equipment their efforts could've been much better spent in a more productive fashion.
Probably kids getting in
Probably kids getting in their service hours for school. When I joined in on one of the Olmstead trail days at Cherokee several years ago, there were a few MTBers from KyMBA, but most were from the Catholic high schools. Good for the kids to do community work, but like you said, a waste of their time when it could have been done with a front loader. At least they weren't working on horse trails. ;-)