This week, some students from Flims High School helped the Biketrails Team and Flims Trin Forestry with bike trail maintenance and forest care.
We fondly remember the snowy winter, which also left its mark. The large amounts of snow meant a lot of work for the bike trail team and the Flims Trin Forestry team. The masses of snow and avalanches destroyed parts of the bike trails, which now need to be repaired. Further work is also required around the trails to ensure that guests find perfect trails when the season starts on June 30, 2018. "Signs and fences are being reinstalled, as we always take them down in the fall. We also reshape the trails every spring to make them more attractive for bikers," says Lars Flütsch, foreman of the Biketrail Team. To accomplish all this, six employees of the Weisse Arena Group have been working tirelessly on the various bike trails since the end of the 2017/2018 winter season, in collaboration with the employees of Flims Trin Forst, who have various forestry tasks to complete in the spring.
From June 18 to 20, 2018, they received active support from around 30 high school students in Flims, who were divided into two groups and did a great job. Half of the students worked with the Weisse Arena Group team to clean up the TREK Runcatrail, one of the longest flow country trails in Europe. Using brooms and shovels, they cleared stones and gravel from the entire 7.6 kilometers of the trail within two and a half days, creating a perfect surface for riding. "The collaboration with the Flims school is very important to us! With their help, we were able to get a lot of work done in a short time," said Lars Flütsch. The second group of students supported the forestry group with forest maintenance. For example, they were allowed to fence in young trees to protect them from wildlife and cut out beech and hazel trees so that young spruce trees could grow better.
The collaboration between the forestry group and the school in Flims has a long history. "I remember going to the forest with my school when I was a child," says Lars Flütsch, who grew up in Flims. Thomas Voneschen, who has been working as a forester in Flims for three years and has been operations manager of the new Flims Trin Forst company since January 2018, says: "The collaboration is already a tradition. The students develop a connection to the forest and learn what it takes to care for it. We foresters are often like elves who do their work hidden away. This collaboration makes it a little more visible."
The collaboration between the Weisse Arena Group's bike trail team, Flims Trin Forest, and the Flims school came about last spring. "Last year, we worked with the bike trails and the Flims school for the first time. This year, we have optimized the whole endeavor. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved. We benefit from the additional workforce, and the students get to do manual work and learn about nature," says Thomas Voneschen.
Teamwork is also a top priority for the Biketrail Team and Flims Trin Forst in other areas. "We benefit greatly from each other, whether it's in the use of machinery, personnel, or PR campaigns, such as this blog post," says Thomas Voneschen. Lars Flütsch adds: "The collaboration is invaluable, and we are very grateful that everything works so smoothly and easily!"
