About 40 volunteers are scheduled to make a mile of the Prairie Spirit Trail in Iola as clean as a whistle on Saturday. The group of Thrive Allen County volunteers and students in the Iola High School Leadership Class will start at 9 a.m. and expect to be finished by early afternoon.
(Rain would move the cleanup to May 7.)
The next local phase of trail cleanup will take much longer and require some heavy lifting.
Currently, the popular hiking and biking trail runs for 51 miles, from Ottawa to Iola, along the former bed of the Santa Fe Railroad. Saturday’s work will be on the trail three-quarters of a mile farther south, from Cofachique Park to Riverside Park.
One recent action that will improve the cleanup along the new stretch is the acquisition by the city of land previously owned by Jack McFadden, and leased by Thohoff Construction.
The city paid McFadden $60,000 and gave him 14 acres west of the Neosho River and south of the dam in exchange for the four-acre tract along the right of way. Commissioners completed the transaction in late March.
For years the parcel between West and Bruner streets has been strewn with heavy machinery and salvage construction materials owned by John Womack, who died Feb. 10. In early June, those items will be sold at auction and removed, facilitating the trail’s southward expansion.
DRAWINGS for construction of the trail for the three-quarters of a mile to Riverside Park are being checked and construction bids should be opened by late May, with work to start in June or July, said Cory Schinstock, assistant city administrator.
Estimated cost is $400,000, with a Kansas Department of Transportation grant paying 80 percent. Iola will pay about $80,000.
The magnitude of what could be isn’t lost on Schinstock.
If the trail were extended on to Humboldt, he said that it would give Iola an opportunity to consider a spur to the Gates Corporation plant, a mile south of Iola.
“Gates employees who like to ride bicycles to work then would have a good, safe route,” he noted.
Schinstock said another adjunct that would increase use of the trail would be to put a trail surface on the old Missouri Pacific right of way, which runs east across the center of Iola and intersects the Prairie Spirit Trail west of the 400 block of North State Street.
Schinstock said moving the trailhead, now in Cofachique Park, to near Riverside Park would seem appropriate, since the larger park offers a greater range of amenities.
Also, he said there had been discussions of constructing a trail covered in screenings — small diameter rock — along the top of the levee all around Riverside Park.
Proponents are eager for the trail to be developed down to Chanute, Fredonia and on to Wichita.
A hurdle is finding a way to extend the trail from Humboldt to Chanute. Rail service remains active in that stretch, carrying cement from Monarch Cement Company’s plant, at the south edge of Humboldt, and grain from a local elevator.
