Trail Tales Grant Renewed!

By Betty Carteret, Friends of Skagit Beaches Board President

The Department of Ecology’s Public Participation Grant program has awarded a two year extension of the Trail Tales project grant to Friends of Skagit Beaches.  The grant extension runs from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2015.  Trail Tales and its volunteers were highly praised by state agency representatives that attended the recent sign dedication.  Ecology’s Lands and Aquatic Lands Section Manager, Barry Rogowski (photo), called Trail Tales “awesome” and expressed his appreciation for our support of Ecology’s Anacortes Baywide Cleanup project. 

In a recent Anacortes American article, grant program manager, Jason Alberich, described Trail Tales as “one of the better programs receiving a Public Participation Grant . . . A second grant of $116,000 has been approved to continue the program because the need is still here and because of the project’s demonstrated success.”  

What’s continuing . . .

During the next grant period, we will continue:

• training new and returning volunteers interested in being involved with Trail Tales,
• offering docent-led interpretive walks and bike rides,
• sponsoring special events and presentations,
• Anacortes Middle School 8^th Grade “Down to the Sea” classes,
• adding new content to the Friends of Skagit Beaches Trail Tales web pages, and
• designing and installing additional interpretive signs between 34^th Street and Guemes Channel.

What’s new . . .

We will be working with Western Washington University (WWU) students to develop some short videos for our website.  Under an Ecology grant, WWU offers the Science and Management of Contaminated Sites class, which teams students from environmental sciences, journalism, and visual arts programs to develop special outreach projects.  Several of the projects completed in the spring of 2013 were video documentaries related to Ecology cleanup work.  Based on the impressive quality of these videos, we have decided to provide additional funding for interns to work on products specific to our Trail Tales project.  You can view one of last year’s video projects at the Trail Tales “Cleaning Up” webpage or by clicking here.