Hartley Trails Now Open to the Public

Thousands of trees were knocked down during the July storm

Friday marks three months since the July storm affected the Northland. This week, one of the areas hit the worst is now fully re–opened.

The Hartley Nature Center trails are finally cleaned up and accessible to the public. Volunteer crews, trail user groups, and paid companies have been working non–stop since the storm knocked down close to a thousand trees on the trails.

“Especially for us programmatically, it was so disheartening to lose some of our critical program space,” said Tom O’Rourke, Executive Director for the Hartley Nature Center. “The community response was just amazing, both in terms of financial donations to help us get back on our feet, and then volunteers coming out of the woodwork, lots of people saying ‘How can I help?’ We couldn’t have done it with the community support.”

An outdoor learning space was also destroyed in the storm but was just recently re–built for field trips to begin using next week.