Heavy rains two weeks ago, and then high water on the Raccoon River system, resulted in some spectacular log jams under bridges, most notably under the Raccoon River Valley Trail’s trestle bridge over the North Raccoon River, two miles south of Jefferson. In addition, an 80-foot-tall cottonwood tree was carved from the south bank of the river there, fell on the superstructure of the bridge and lodged. James Carman, who has a tree service in Jefferson, was hired by Greene County Conservation to clear the tree from the bridge, dropping the major trunks into the river. Some will eventually float on downstream, others will help provide a “rip rap” effect to slow down erosion on the river’s south bank. Some big tree branches were up on top of the bridge’s super structure, and Carman had to negotiate the boom from his truck up through the girders to get them cut. In these two photos, he’s shown working on the last of the limbs that were lodged on the side of the bridge.

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Here are three views from the annual “Trails & Trills” bicycle ride held between Jefferson and Cooper on Saturday, August 14. Amy Milligan, of Jefferson, shows off her colorful new orange “Townie” bicycle. Katy and Dan Rasmussen, college students from Jefferson, are shown on the tandem bicycle they shared for the first time. The Rasmussens, who two of the best singers Jefferson-Scranton High School ever produced, said they were providing some of their own music on the ride, which has area musicians scattered along the trail for performances as the cyclists pass. “I’ve been teaching Katy to sing barbershop quartet music as we are biking,” said Dan. And Katy added, “That’s real different when you only have two people!” The other view shows other cyclists as they arrived in Cooper, where lunch awaited. The event is sponsored by the Greene County Chamber & Development.

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There were all kinds of groups using the Raccoon River Valley Trail on Saturday, August 14, including these members and leaders of Boy Scout Troop 98, based in Urbandale.  They were just ready to leave their lunch stop along the trail in Cooper when we caught up with them for this photo.  The scouts camped Friday and Saturday nights at Spring Lake County Park northeast of Jefferson, and on Saturday morning were riding the trail from Jefferson through Cooper to Herndon, then back.  Several of the boys set personal records for the farthest they’d ever ridden a bicycle.  Also on Saturday, there was the annual “Trails & Trills” ride, sponsored by the Greene County Chamber & Development, between Jefferson and Cooper.  Plus, we saw members of three RAGBRAI bike teams – Checker, Joker and Wind – using the trail for group rides, too.  And many people used the RRVT to ride bicycles to and from the annual Sweet Corn Festival in Adel.

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Trail users are now exploring the six miles of new concrete surface on the Raccoon River Valley Trail between Panora and Yale. The section is not officially open yet, as the contractors still have some minor finishing work to do, but the barricades are down and people are now having their first experiences on it. Our own experience there? It’s so smooth and nice, you’ll swear it’s a mile shorter now between the two towns! In these three photos, you see the beautifully landscaped new trailhead sign in Panora, right on Iowa Highway 44; you see the fantastic canopy of trees over the new concrete trail between Panora and Yale, and then we show you the spot on the south edge of Yale where the new concrete meets the asphalt. The new surface is a $945,000 nearly-completed project paid for by the federal government’s economic stimulus program.

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People are arriving now in Sioux City for Sunday’s start of RAGBRAI – the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa – and lots of them have ridden the Raccoon River Valley Trail for part of their trip. Shown here at mid-morning Thursday, July 22, are 16 members of the Tall Dog bicycle club from around the Des Moines area who had reached Panora on their ride to Sioux City. Former Carlisle teachers Dwayne Barton and Mike Leo, who are both in this group, are the co-founders of the Tall Dogs, who did their first RAGBRAI in 1975. The name came after then-Carlisle High athletic director Dick Armstrong invited Barton and Leo to go water-skiing on an early April weekend in ’75. Noting the temperature, Barton said, “Well, it’d take a tall dog to do that!” They started calling themselves that a few months later when they dared to ride RAGBRAI the first time. One club member, Jon Cook, of Urbandale, who is also shown in this photo, has ridden every year since the founding; the other originals have missed a year or two along the way. This group camped Thursday night at Swan Lake State Park near Carroll and Friday night at Little Sioux Lake south of Correctionville, enroute to Sioux City. There, they are being joined by about 130 other Tall Dog club members who are coming to Sioux City on charter buses or private vehicles. On Sunday, RAGBRAI starts its seven-day adventure to Dubuque.

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“We’ve been working on this for several months now, trying to make it as easily usable as possible on all the different kinds of cell phones that have Internet connectivity,” said Chuck Offenburger, of Cooper, a member of the board of directors of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association and the lead writer on the RRVT’s sites on the Internet. “We’ve got more fine tuning to do on the mobile site, but we’ve got it to a point where we want to go ahead and make it public, and start getting feedback from the users of the site.”

Doing the technical work on the mobile application are Lori and Chris Brocka, who are partners in G.Rafics, Inc., a company in Adel that does Website design, building and hosting, as well as some online publishing.  G.Rafics has been the RRVT Association’s Web manager since late in 2007, and did the design and development of the www.raccoonrivervalleytrail.org site, activating it in February 2008.

Chris Brocka started the company 23 years ago as a graphic design firm, producing logos, design for print publications and signage.  Eventually he also began designing “intra-company” Websites for large banking institutions.  Then Lori Brocka became more involved as a tech person for the growing design company.  In recent years, when the roll-out of high-speed Internet service helped make Websites an essential tool for nearly all businesses, the Brockas have taken on more and more clients.

The couple was not surprised early this year, when the RRVT Associatioin asked if G.Rafics would go to work on a mobile Web application that would be more user-friendly on cell phones.

“We’ve seen some studies recently that, worldwide, 62 percent of the people who are accessing the Internet are doing that from a mobile device,” Lori Brocka said.  “So now, companies are wanting to go one of two ways with their sites.  They either want to redesign their full Websites so they’re more easily downloadable on mobile applications, or they are wanting separate sites created that are specifically for mobile applications.”

The RRVT Association chose the latter course, so the organization will have its full site accessible on normal computers, and the new mobile application available on cell phones.  You’ll notice that the mobile application will have less content and fewer photographs.   Our goal is to make the information on that mobile application be the kind of quick-hitting facts that you want if you are out riding your bicycle, walking or running on the RRVT.  That information includes the current weather in all the trail towns, news bulletins (especially about trail conditions), special events happening in the communities or businesses along the trail, contact information for medical or law enforcement help, and maps.

“When you are designing a Website specifically for use on cell phones or other mobile devices, there’s a huge challenge because there are significant differences in what one kind of phone can do compared to another kind,” Lori Brocka said.  “So there’s a difference in what the site looks like on, say, a BlackBerry from the way it looks on an iPhone or Motorola Q Phone.  We’ve tried to make it look at least acceptable on all kinds of phones.  And now that we’ve activated it, we’ll start refining it so it works better for everybody.”

That’s where we’re counting on you readers here.

“One thing we’ve learned is that trail users tend to be very tech-savvy people,” Lori Brocka said.  “We’re hoping the RRVT site users will spend some time trying out the new site on their phones, and then give us their feedback and suggestions.”

You can direct that to chuck@Offenburger.com and to lori@graficsinc.com.

We will appreciate your input and assistance!

“It’s not officially open yet,” said Joe Hanner, the Guthrie County Conservation director and thus the trail manager in that county, “but it’s close enough that quite a few bikers have been using it.”

That’s great news for the many cyclists who were already planning to use the RRVT this week as the first leg of their rides to Sioux City.  That’s where on Sunday the 38th annual RAGBRAI begins.

The stretch of trail between Panora and Yale had been the last part of the RRVT that still had the original asphalt, which was badly deteriorated in its 21st year of use.  A $945,000 grant last year from the federal government’s economic stimulus program provided the funding to build the new concrete surface.  Construction started in late April, but workers were delayed again and again by heavy rains in the spring and early summer.

In fact, just this past weekend, the Panora-Yale area “received anywhere from 3.6 to 5 inches of rain about 3 a.m. on Sunday,” Hanner said on Tuesday.  “I’ll tell you what, we’re still backstroking from that big rain.”

But last Saturday, the construction workers were able to sweep the trail to removet a lot of dirt and other debris.  As they did so, they removed the barricades that had blocked entrance to the trail at both Panora and at Yale, and they put back up the trail signage.

Before an official trail opening can happen, Hanner said the contractor will be doing more work on the trail’s shoulders, preparing the surface and then putting in gravel.   There will be an inspection of the new surface, probably some minor repairs made and then a ceremony will be schedule.

RRVT users had also been dealing with another construction closure this spring and summer — on the Clive Greenbelt Trail where it passes under the bridges on Interstate Highways 80 & 35 on the west edge of the Des Moines metro area.  That was reopened to trail users just last Friday, July 16.

The “beaded-bicycle artist” continues to baffle regular users of the Raccoon River Valley Trail in Greene County. In the past four weeks, four bicycles have been found hanging in trees along the trail, all decorated with colorful beads. These two are the most recently, having gone up in days just before the July 17-18 weekend. As with the others, there is no note, no sign and no signature on the “sculptures” to tell us who the artist is. But we like his or her work!

To see photos of the two beaded-bicycles found earlier, see the story in the “Top Stories” below here.

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The first of these “bike sculptures” was discovered about three weeks ago, the second about two weeks ago, and the two most recent apparently were hung in the days just before the weekend of July 17-18.

There is no sign, explanation or signature on any of the four installations to give any indication who the artist is.   They are being carefully hung on limbs that are being trimmed to best showcase the bikes.  The beads are hung with some thought, because the longer you look at the bike, the more beads you seem to see.

The artwork is proving to be a hit with people using the RRVT.   The beaded-bicycles are the talk of Jefferson and Cooper.

You can get a look at the hanging beaded bicycles in the photos below here.

Here’s a photo of the bicycle hanging in a dead tree alongside the Raccoon River Valley Trail, just north of 310th Street in southern Greene County, about a mile south of the town of Cooper. Note the bicycle is accented with long strings of colorful beads.

This photo shows the perspective of how the bicycle art looks when you’re riding along on the trail.

This was the first of the beaded bicycles to appear hanging in another dead tree trailside, just north of 320th Street.

This neon green bike is hanging in a trailside tree just north of 290th Street in Greene County, on the east side of the RRVT. It is not as obvious to you when you are using the trail, since it is hanging in a live tree with plenty of foliage around it.

This little pink huffy is hanging in a beautiful evergreen tree on the west side of the RRVT, just north of the so-called “Graffiti Bridge.” This is in a very wooded area in the southeast corner of the town of Jefferson.

The Raccoon River Valley Trail Association served lunch to  about 80 members, special guests and other trail users on Saturday, July 10, at the trailhead in Redfield.  It was the organization’s third annual membership picnic, and it drew its biggest crowd ever.  The first two years, the picnic was held at Hanging Rock Park on the southwest edge of Redfield, reachable on a spur trail off the RRVT.  Moving this year’s event to the Redfield Depot trailside helped attract more association members and others.  Ideal weather also helped.  It appeared that Saturday may have been the biggest RRVT usage day so far in 2010.  More photos and a story about the picnic are posted in the RRVT news stories below here.

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