Oakland Pathways Volunteers

Given my involvement with Oakland Urban Paths, it's probably no great surprise that yesterday after church and some lunch, I rode over to Lakeshore to join other volunteers in cleaning up some stairs. The group is Oakland Pathways Volunteers, and was started by a guy named Howard who leads walks all around the Bay Area. After seeing the condition some of the stairs and pathways around Oakland are in, he was inspired to spend some tine and energy making them better.

Today we met up and worked on some stairs off of Balfour in Crocker Highlands that I've been on several times before. Once with OUP on the Lakeshore to Park Blvd. walk, and other time with Oakland Heritage Alliance on the Oakland's Walkways and Streetcar Heritage walk. It wasn't the first time the group has worked on the stairs, and they're in much better shape than they were in January. The set of stairs below these are in good shape, largely because the neighbors take care of them. While this set is now fairly clean, they need serious structural work to make them easily passable again.

January vs. now:

more photos from yesterday: