Volunteer Day: Guidebook App Team Heads for the Hills!

This past Monday, Guidebookers headed for the hills — Coyote Hills Park, that is.  The park is one of 65 regional parks in the East Bay that relies on volunteer efforts for maintenance and restoration.  The parklands conserve and protect over 100,000 acres of natural habitats for local wildlife, including endangered species like presidio clarkia and western snowy plovers.  They also contain 1,200 miles of trails and open space for less endangered species like mountain bikers, trail hikers and woven-basket picnickers.

The Guidebook app team worked in the Coyote Hills nectar garden pulling “Poor Man’s Orchid” weeds, potting milkweed plants, organizing trays of cosmos (the flower, not the cocktail), and laying down chicken… eh hem… fertilizing waste.   A few lucky volunteers got to patrol the trails, wrangling in delinquent straw wrappers and cigarette butts, while others got down and dirty in the garden slopes, suffering prickly spines and ravenous mosquitoes in order to remove every last trace of invasive blackberry vine — from the root.   If you visit the park and notice even a trace of blackberry vine, then you must be reading this in the very distant future.

Only when the green recycle truck bin finally overflowed with the weeds we had brought to justice did we consider our mission accomplished.  Cheeks glowing with sunburn and fingernails filled with dirt (and, hopefully, not the fertilizer), we headed back to the office to work on a different kind of environmental mission.  

The Guidebook app helps event organizers go green by eliminating the need for paper materials.  While our day-to-day work isn’t usually quite so environmentally hands-on, we consider waste reduction one of the primary values of our product.  We’re proud to provide a service that saves trees, and grateful to Coyote Hills Park for the opportunity to show our love for the earth in another way!