On Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Clark County students had many possibilities for how to spend that whole, extra day away from school.
“You get the day off and could just lay around, but it’s better to do something for the community,” said Sydney Brugman.
She was one of more than 100 Fort Vancouver High School students who showed up Monday morning to volunteer by pulling invasive ivy in Blandford Canyon, a natural area in central Vancouver. Volunteers from King Elementary School, Kaiser Permanente and Wells Fargo helped out, too.
“It’s just rewarding being able to give back to the community,” said Molly DeLeo, a senior at Fort Vancouver. She and Brugman are part of the National Honor Society, which requires a certain amount of service hours.
Marika Wilkerson, who works at the high school, has been volunteering with her children on the national service day for about six years, and every year offers something different.
“One year it was frozen. One year we were in the swamp,” Wilkerson said with a laugh. “It’s something fun we can do as a family.”
For many, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is seen as a “day on, not a day off” that recognizes King’s commitment to serving others.
The ivy pull was one of several service projects sprinkled throughout Vancouver on Monday. Volunteer groups spruced up Father Blanchet Park, the Old City Cemetery, the waterfront and Columbia Springs.
A good turnout
There were nearly 200 volunteers at the Blandford Canyon ivy pull.
“We’ve never done an ivy pull with this many people,” said Sunrise O’Mahoney, executive director of Vancouver Watersheds Alliance.
The nonprofit group, which does environmental restoration work, typically hosts a tree-planting project on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It seemed like a good year to mix things up and host an ivy pull, especially given how important ivy pulling is, O’Mahoney said.
Invasive species, such as ivy and blackberries, take over areas and stifle native plants. Ivy grows up trees, eventually causing the trees to fall down from the weight of the ivy, O’Mahoney said. If left alone, it creates a monoculture and thwarts the city’s efforts to increase Vancouver’s tree canopy. Blandford Canyon is about 80 acres, and most of it contains ivy, said Tim Esary, a supervisor with the city’s greenway and sensitive lands program.
The canyon should be full of sword ferns, Oregon grape and vine maple trees, but those plants are few and far between because of the ivy cover.
To get rid of ivy, it has to be raked and pulled downhill, cut and then rolled into piles; the ivy vines are strong, which makes the work tough. Some high-schoolers had more fun yanking the vines from the trees than from raking the ivy.
Ivy pulling can be satisfying work because you immediately can see the area improve, O’Mahoney said.
About four years ago, Henry Sessions, who lives in the Edgewood Park neighborhood, started organizing monthly work sessions in which small groups of neighbors would get together and pull ivy in the canyon. Pulling ivy was a big deal when Sessions lived in Southwest Portland in the late ’90s and lots of trees were dying. When he saw the same issue happening in Vancouver, he wanted to do something about it.
“It wasn’t being taken care of,” Sessions said. “This is really a special public green space that not a lot of people know about.”
Blandford Canyon runs between two neighborhood parks, Dubois and South Cliff, and locals have worn rough trails through the area. It’s muddy and steep in spots.
Employees with the greenway and sensitive lands program organized volunteers and taught them how to get rid of the ivy. They will return to Blandford Canyon to monitor the growth of native plants, whether they sprout naturally or have to be planted. The ivy has to be replaced with something, otherwise the canyon’s hillsides will erode.
