Trail Blazed from Montessori to Valencia Park!

On Saturday morning Maurice Loridans, Charles Gerrard, Janine Demerath, Jeff Girrard, John Girrard, Feico Kempff, Loren Demerath, John Davenport and Cynthia Keith blazed a trail from Sevier St. by Montessori, through the forest along Anderson Bayou to Valencia Park.

It may be this trail that future generations of Magnet High School students use to bike or walk to school one day, and which many a Shreveporter may use to access the Clyde Fant bike path.

We felt quite productive and proud of ourselves, clearing the trail and marking the way. It may not end up being the exact route used by the greenway we're working towards, but it's a likely start. Next Saturday we plan to plot the route with GPS coordinates and use them to plot the route on a GIS map.

This spring, we will have our second annual Anderson Bayou / Coates Bluff clean up day, perhaps targetting "Tin Can Crossing" as Dr. John Davenport called it. The reason? There are probably several hundred of beer cans and other garbage not far from the bridge pictured here. Many hands will make light the work, as they did on a single day last spring when over 100 people contributed to removing over 3 tons of trash!

Much of the forest is not littered, though, and it is actually a picturesque stretch of woodland and bayou where we can experience nature's beauty in our own city. We plan to request that a gate be created in the fence of Valencia Park's southeastern corner to allow people access to the trail.