When I was reporting to the Pumpkinvine Advisory Committee recently about a rails-to-trails conference I attended, I was reminded of the first national rails-to-trails conference I attended in Baltimore in 1991. It was a fateful conference because it put our new Friends group in touch with the right person at Penn Central, the owner of the Pumpkinvine corridor. The conference …
One of the obvious features of the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail is that it has both shaded and unshaded areas. The shaded areas are where the trail is on the former railroad corridor. The railroad was built on a strip of land that was either 66 or 80 feet wide, and the railroad bed was only 10 feet wide in the …
Today I took a ride on the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail from Goshen to Shipshewana. I left Goshen around 8:30 a.m. after eating a pancake and sausage breakfast at the MCC Relief Sale at the Elkhart County fairgrounds. I took the Monroe Street Trail to the Abshire Trail to the Pumpkinvine. It was a cool 50 degrees, a hint of fall. …
The Heign family with memorial stone: Greg, Bob, Mary Lou, Randy and Jeff. The memorial is located along the Pumpkinvine, 100 yards south of Sun Rise Lane. Members of the Heign family gathered on Sept. 19 to dedicate a section the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail in Middlebury to Ike Heign. Jim Smith, former executive director of the Friends who negotiated the …
When I became interested in rails-to-trails in the early 1990s, the closest trail to when I lived was the Kal-Haven Trail, formally known as the Kal-Haven Sesquicentennial State Park: https://www.traillink.com/trail/kal-haven-trail-sesquicentennial-state-park/ The trail runs 34 miles from west of Kalamazoo to South Haven Michigan with a crushed stone surface. Whenever I needed inspiration and a renewed vision of what the Pumpkinvine corridor …
Read Rachel Shenk’s recent article in the Goshen News about bicycling on the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail. Download the article as a pdf file.
I’ve spent the last two weeks of my internship frantically trying to wrap up my different projects (with this blog post being the last of them). I finished up my management plan which clocked in at 27 pages, made a new home page for the website (check it out at pumpkinvine.org) emailed approximately 5 billion people, and got bit by …
The summer is wrapping up as GCS begins the 2018-19 school year on Wednesday, and with it so wraps up my summer internship. There are only two weeks left and yet it feels like there is so much left to do! I still have to make significant edits to my long term management plan before submitting it to the different …
The Bontrager Family Foundation has awarded the Friends of the Pumpkinvine a $25,000 matching grant toward the cost of construction of the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail between County Road 20 and County Road 35. In other words, the Family Foundation will match other trail-development donations – dollar for dollar – up to a total of $25,000. “Via this grant, the Bontrager …
The 2018 Pumpkinvine Bike Ride was a success, according to the feedback we received from 300 participants. Over 1,000 riders signed up and 856 showed up for the ride. The weather forecast for morning rain, which we had for about an hour, wasn’t enough to deter most riders. The afternoon warmed up, but it was not as hot as …
Last summer the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands at Indiana University’s School of Public Health conducted a survey on the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail to collect data on trail usage, health factors relating to trail usage and the economic impact the trail has on surrounding communities. The Pumpkinvine was one of eight trail systems in Indiana that participated in …
