2025 Season Update

Column for 10-29-30

     We finished up our Trail Guard season last Saturday with a fun trip to Prairie Woods Environmental Learning Center for team building, wall climbing, trip presentations, medallion awards, and good food. It was a nice celebration of another successful year - our 34th.  

     Prairie Woods is such a treasure!  If you haven’t been there, I highly recommend that you find a reason to go.  They have an incredible group of facilities and activities scattered throughout their beautiful 500-acre campus and host an endless list of events and activities.  A quick internet search will take you to all kinds of reasons to visit.

     It’s always a reassuring delight to know we’ve successfully made our way through another accident-and-incident-free year of Trail Guards.  Despite the seemingly unending rains and flooded park conditions this summer, we were finally able to patch things up on the trails by the end of this month, and the Crow River Nature Park should be more than ready for February’s Moonlight Meander – our winter luminary walk event that has become so popular.  (Date Pending)

     We also completed all of our normal Trail Guard outings throughout the year.  We had kids biking to Willmar and back, participating in the parade, whitewater rafting on the St. Louis River near Duluth, bicycling through the Lapland area of Norway above the Arctic Circle, paddling canoes on Lake Koronis, wilderness camping in the BWCA, participating in fun Fall Fishing Day activities, digging out an old and large truck frame along the Nature Park trails for our Fall Cleanup Day, and wrapping up our year in great fashion at Prairie Woods.

     Thanks especially to our great staff:  Beth Schlangen, Randi Woodford, Adrianna Schlangen, Hailey Ruhl, Joe Kustritz, and Emily Monnens.  They are the well-oiled machine that keeps it all happening!