Northwest Chapter Meets Goals, Sets New Ones

In May 2009 the Northwest Arkansas Chapter (NWAMN) celebrated the graduation of its first class of 36 Master Naturalists. Starting a new chapter of the Arkansas Master Naturalists is sort of like starting a new business. You have to decide what to focus on. You have to decide who will do what and make sure that it gets done. You need to account for the money coming in and going out. Fortunately, the chapter has an abundance of hard-working, enthusiastic members who contributed greatly to the chapter’s success in its first seven months.

NWAMN set several short-term goals after its formation:

• Get organized – not a trivial task!
• Help to clear the estimated 3,000-4,000 trees that fell on the approximately 34 miles of trails at Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area as a result of the January 29, 2009 ice storm;
• Help at the Dedication Ceremony of the new Visitor Center at Hobbs;
• Get our Stream Teams up and running;
• Start to plan for our next training class in 2010;

Members participated in all of these activities and, I’m happy to say, they all got done.

As summer passed into autumn, the Board of Directors revised these goals and added new ones.

We wanted to maintain the trails at Hobbs; something always needs to be done somewhere on the trails. The chapter has “adopted” the 5-mile War Eagle Loop trail as its permanent project.

Since trail building and maintenance isn’t for everybody, we wanted find more volunteer opportunities that didn’t involve hard labor, such (1) as preparing descriptions of trails at Hobbs, with GPS coordinates of worthy sights and landmarks, (2) planting native plants around the Visitor Center – this will be done in spring 2010 in conjunction with a native plant workshop; (3) help to maintain the ponds around the Visitor Center; (4) if Park funding allows, build a greenhouse for native plants. And we continue to look for other non-trail-related projects for our members to be involved in.

To the extent that our resources allow, we want to start to volunteer at other parks in the area, in particular Withrow Springs State Park near Huntsville and Devil’s Den State Park south of Fayetteville. Both parks – and others in Northwest Arkansas – need volunteer help.

The chapter has an excellent 2010 Naturalist-in-Training class, currently numbering 29 people, who will start training on January 23rd. With the members from the original class and these new members, the NWA Chapter looks to be in an excellent position to fulfill its mission in 2010 and beyond.