Students help rehabilitate woodyard

About 40 Grade 7 and 8 students from Cayley School proved that many hands make light work on Thurs, June 4 when they helped Alan Westhaver, Parks Canada vegetation specialist, and his ten person crew to rehabilitate the old Jasper woodyard.

Using compost from the Jasper transfer station, students, teachers, parents and grandparent, gave a helping hand as part of their week-long stay at the Palisades Centre.

Three-quarters of a hectare’s worth of land had silt laid down on it last fall, and was ready for a good hoe-down and some compost to help the wild vegetation grow back.

Westhaver said it was a great opportunity for visitors to contribute to the park. 

“They like to leave something behind, they take a lot with them when they leave the park but they like to leave something behind and this was very, very, very helpful to the park and it’s subjective, he said.

 Thanks to the help, the work that would have taken Westhaver and his crew more than a week was done in about half a day, enabling the native grass seeds to be planted the following day.

“It’s a tremendous boast for our program when we can accomplish that much work in a day and we’re actually looking for other groups that are interested in similar projects like that,” said Westhaver adding that he hoped to continue to work with James Bartram from the Palisades so it could become a regular part of his programming.

To complete the project a fence surrounding the two hectare perimeter will soon be erected to keep the elk from pulling out the new growth in the next week or so, according to Westhaver.

With the sun beating down, the children from were heading down Athabasca River for some rafting to cool off after their morning of hard work.

The students had tailored their time in Jasper to meet all of their dreams and had spent the week canoeing, biking, rafting and much more, said Cayley School principal Bill Holmes.