Jon Crimmins can understand how people could get a little confused at times while hiking the Kettles Trails.
Crimmins grew up in Coupeville and now oversees a wide swath of the expansive, heavily-forested trail system that weaves through Fort Ebey State Park and beyond.
About half the Kettles Trails are on state parks property while the other half is on Island County land, providing hikers with about 30 miles to get their outdoors fix.
Over the years, many of the trail signs nailed to trees on state parks land have faded or dropped out of out sight completely, leaving some hikers scratching their heads.
“You can totally get lost out there,” said Crimmins, area manager of Central Whidbey State Parks.
But thanks to a collaborative volunteer effort, and a company’s generosity, Crimmins doesn’t expect to hear any more complaints of that nature very soon.
Members from two communities have teamed up on a community service project to replace old or lost trail signs with new ones on the state parks portion of the Kettles Trails.
Shop students from Oak Harbor High School built the new trail signs while a few members of Coupeville High School’s football team volunteered their time to dig holes and install the new signs, which are now mounted on posts.
Other regular trail users helped with the project, which also was aided by Oak Harbor’s Home Depot, which donated the lumber.
The hope is to finish the project, which includes nearly 50 new trail signs, in time for the re-opening of the Fort Ebey State Park campground March 1.
“It’s been one of the real nice gestures from the community,” Crimmins said.
Park volunteer Larry Doles from Oak Harbor set the project in motion. He said he noticed the signs were in bad shape a couple of years ago during his regular walks along the Kettles Trails. Doles gets out on the trails a few times per week to help maintain them and informs park staff when there is a downed tree too large for him to handle.
“I saw a need for it,” Doles said. “I thought it would be best to do it during the offseason so it would be less disruptive for those people who use the park system.”
“It’s safer for trail walkers,” said Barb Adams, another regular trail walker who helped with the project. “It enhances the experience of walking in those parks.”
Last fall, Doles got in touch with Tom Mueller, a shop teacher at Oak Harbor High School whose students had helped with past state park projects.
Freshman Paxton Brown stepped forward to tackle the first phase of the project as community service, taking on about half of the signs. He used a computer-controlled CNC routing machine to carve out the trail names in the wood, then sanded the signs and painted them.
Other students in Mueller’s wood technology and cabinetry class also pitched in.
“We try to take on some kind of community project mostly with advanced kids,” Mueller said. “We try to do something every year.”
The work continues on building the rest of the signs. Meanwhile, Coupeville football coach Brett Smedley and three of his players joined Doles in the woods last weekend to begin installing those that had been completed.
The work also counts as community service for sophomore Julian Welling and freshmen Christopher Battaglia and Shane Losey, just like it did for Brown.
Teresa Wollas, a career tech education instructional assistant at Oak Harbor, asked Brown if he would be interested in the project.
“It seemed like a fun project,” he said.
“I think it gives them a little bit of community pride and a sense of accomplishment,” Mueller said.
Brown said he’d never been to Fort Ebey State Park but planned to go soon to see for himself the sort of purpose his craftsmanship will serve in the woods for many years to come.
“I want to go out and see them,” he said.
