“I’m sure there are faster mechanical ways to accomplish this”: Volunteers clear a path at Capital Area Greenbelt

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — Becky Schuchert didn’t like the way fallen leaves were covering the paved path along the Capital Area Greenbelt. So she did what anybody would’ve done.

Well, okay, maybe not — unless anybody would’ve spent their Sunday with a few long-time friends and a few new ones, taking it upon themselves to use snow shovels to move the leaves off the path.

“I’m sure there are faster mechanical ways to accomplish this,” Schuchert, a Harrisburg resident, said. “But getting people out and participating is a big part of today’s activity.”

Schuchert said she is a member of the Capital Area Greenbelt’s board of directors and has been volunteering with the organization since the early 1990s — the Greenbelt has no paid employees. She and another board member had wanted to meet some new volunteers, something they might normally do over breakfast at a diner. But not in the COVID-19 era. So on a sunny and seasonably warm day, they thought: Why not meet while doing this?

About a half-dozen people shoveled aside leaves while families with young children walked along the path’s Story Walk — that, too, is a volunteer project, in its case maintained by volunteers with the Dauphin County Library System. Pages of a children’s book are spaced out along a path stretching northeast from South Cameron Street; reading the whole book requires a leisurely walk. The current book? “When Winter Comes.”

Alas, the Greenbelt isn’t particularly green in mid-January. But thanks to the volunteers, it is — now — particularly clean.