Oh I am so very sore this morning! And a little bit tired, even after a good night’s sleep. I spent the better part of five hours yesterday chopping up brush and stacking it in piles which towered over my head. It’s getting harder to recover from that kind of workout than I did when I was younger. Good thing I volunteer to do this only once a year. (I have only been doing this for five months, once at the tail end of 2025 and then yesterday, at the beginning of 2026. So, technically once a year. If I keep volunteering, it’s going to upset the average.)

Many parts of the Ice Age Trail are routed through wooded areas where invasive species of plants such as Buckthorn and Honeysuckle have been allowed to grow unchecked for years. This isn’t a problem if you don’t care what’s growing alongside the path, but Ed, the guy who manages this segment of the IAT, does care and wants to see new, young oak trees along the trail. They haven’t had a chance to take root and thrive because the Buckthorn and Honeysuckle compete with the oak seedlings for sunlight and water, crowding them out.

So Ed sends out a regular call to rally the troops every few months. Yesterday about fifteen volunteers converged on a couple acres of wooded land to cut out every stick of the invasive overgrowth and give the oaks some breathing space. Three or four (I think it was four) sawyers with chainsaws shoved their way into the undergrowth to cut out the thicker stuff, and the rest of us followed with hand saws and loppers to cut it all into smaller, more manageable pieces, then drag the pieces out into the open where we stacked them into colossal brush piles. We’ll set the piles on fire next winter after they have dried out.

It’s exhausting work but it’s immensely satisfying to see the progress we can make in just a few hours. I’ll bet we cleared the overgrowth from about an acre of land in just under five hours. In the morning we had to fight our way through the snarled branches of thick Honeysuckle, but as we cleaned up the last of the branches and twigs we could easily walk among the old, lofty oak trees.

“Easily walk” became harder to do as the unseasonably warm temperatures thawed the frozen ground. In the middle of February we were working in shirtsleeves as the temps climbed into the low 60s! By one o’clock — about the time we were all starting to feel tired and less attentive, an unfortunate combination — there was a layer of slick mud under the fallen leaves that was so slippery, one wrong step walking down a slope and you could easily end up on your butt, or sprawled across the ground, covered in mud. I slipped quite a few times, but managed to catch myself each time.

I was working in a part of the woods where the undergrowth was mostly Honeysuckle. That stuff is just the worst. It grows like a tumbleweed, stretching out in all directions from the root, then reaching up toward the sun and branching out in all directions, creating a tangled mess of wiry branches that seems almost impossible to pull apart. I usually don’t try, opting instead to chop it up with long-handled bypass shears called ‘loppers’ which easily turns the knot of brush into a neat pile of twigs fairly quickly.

Buckthorn is a softer wood than Honeysuckle and easier to cut up, but I like to drag all the cut brush close to the brush pile before I start lopping. The sawyers do us a favor by chopping it up into smaller pieces after they drop a big one — Buckthorn grows more up and out — but even so it seems to be heavier wood than Honeysuckle. A few hours of dragging that stuff across the forest floor tuckers a guy out.

In the last hour of the work day we were all moving much more slowly than we did at the start, and stumbling over the messy ground. Mark, the sawyer I worked with, was dripping sweat. The sawyers wear heavy chaps and helmets to protect them from accidental dismemberment as they chainsaw their way through the overgrowth. Mark was also wearing long sleeves, presumably so he could muscle his way through the prickly Buckthorn and tangled branches of Honeysuckle.

By two o’clock, when Ed called an end to the day, I was all in and ready to head home for a long, hot shower and a cold beer. I got the shower but fell asleep before the cold beer. Such is life.