LYNN — Groups of volunteers from General Electric spent Thursday afternoon helping Park Ranger Dan Small clean and update areas of Lynn Woods, improving access and usability for the general public.
Small said workers from GE have been coming to volunteer at Lynn Woods for about 20 years now, but the pandemic briefly halted their activities.
“These guys used to come all the time, but this is the first volunteer thing I’ve had in about 18 months,” Small said. “Different teams (from GE) — usually three in the spring and three in the fall — will come and help me with a list of things they can do.”
A group of volunteers from GE Aviation chose to assist Small with repainting parking lines, replacing old signs and rebuilding the bulletin board located near the softball field on Great Woods Road. New directional signs throughout the woods were also installed to identify the trails.
Two other GE groups chose to work deeper in the woods, where they widened trails, cut back branches and cleaned up the areas around the trails.
“It works out really well,” Small said. “I’m happy to see these guys back.”
Small said that, besides him and volunteering regular Tom Wall, there hasn’t been much help maintaining the woods, so the support from the crews at GE is “huge.”
With the pandemic pausing the partnership between Lynn Woods and GE, Small said visitors could tell there hadn’t been as much assistance in maintaining the woods; he noted the trails had not been “in the best shape” recently.
Wall, who is in his 70s, said he comes to Lynn Woods every day to walk about 12 miles, picking up trash as he goes. He also frequently lets Small know which trails need maintenance and where. He said he has been coming to Lynn Woods since he was 10 years old.
Since he is colorblind, Wall said his friend Laurie Bollen hikes with him and points out trash in the woods.
“She points it out and then I pick it up, because I have the gloves on,” Wall said. “We find masks more than anything else up here now.”
Wall said there’s not a day that goes by where he doesn’t find a mask; usually, there will be more than two. He said that, even though he picks up whatever he can find each day, there are always more the next day.
Wall said he loves walking in the woods with Bollen, usually notching between 25,000 and 30,000 steps per day, cleaning up the woods as he goes.
Jennifer Prugnarola, a member of the women’s network organization at GE, said volunteer events at Lynn Woods were organized at GE for different departments before COVID-19, including partnerships with the schools and shelters.
She said she enjoys volunteering as much as she can through GE’s partnerships and is happy to see that these events are slowly starting to return.
“Different departments will come and help Dan (Small) at different times, and it’s kind of a team bonding thing while helping the community,” Prugnarola said. “There’s a lot of different volunteer opportunities at GE, so it’s nice to be able to do things like that.”
