This January found us in the midst of the closure by the Federal Government on portions of  The Cosumnes River Preserve.  In order to make the visitors experience at The Cosumnes possible during this time, the volunteers from The Nature Conservancy provided and maintained the PortaPotties outside of the visitor center.  The PortaPotties had to be moved to and from the parking lot of the VC so that the vendor could clean and service them.

We also cleaned the trail-head at Phase One and planted native forbes and grasses between the oaks.

On March 9th, even though half of our facilities were flooded, we held our annual herbicide training class (on high ground of course).

On March 23rd, HRT gave our staging platform,  The Barn, its annual sprucing up.

On April 13th, we cleared out the non-native thistles that sprang up around the ponds.

On April 27th, we removed thistles and knocked down vegetation around our Fire Protection staging area at the Oneto/Denier restoration property.

 On June 8th, HRT removed Sorghum, Hemlock and Tree of Heaven from the Castelo Forest. 

On June 22nd, HRT cooled off in the Cosumnes River removing Water Hyacinth.

While we were in the area, we constructed a barrier to discourage hikers from climbing up on the railroad trestle near the trail.  A visitor was injured last year by falling off of the trestle even though "keep Out signs" warned of the danger.

On two consecutive workdays,  July 28th and August 4th, HRT cleaned up an illegal encampment on a remote region of The Preserve.

On August 9th HRT prepared the water control devices and water inlet valves for the large ponds around The Barn. We do this every year before we flood the ponds before the winter migration.

On October 12th HRT joined up with Team Rubicon (and international disaster response team) to learn some of their forest fire cleanup techniques.  Harry McQuillen arranged that so we could improve our chainsaw skills.

On October 26th and November 2nd HRT went after the cherry plum trees in the Oneto/Denier restoration project.

All in all it was a very productive year for HRT.