6/28/2009
Residents of Meadowood enjoy many ways to stay fit and get close to nature, thanks to the Worcester retirement community’s busy Woods and Trails Committee.
Spearheading the program is Paul Felton, an energetic 89-year-old resident who can draw on a half century of experience with organizations related to the outdoors as the committee carries out its mission “to protect, augment and encourage the use of Meadowood’s natural areas.”
Felton also plans eight two-mile wellness walks as residents go by bus to such areas as Valley Forge National Park, Evansburg State Park, the Gwynedd Valley Wildlife Preserve and the Schuylkill River Trail.
“Walking is a big thing for retirees. These wellness walks are the number-one thing that we have every year,” says Felton. “My job is to cook up where to go. My background makes it possible for me to find out where all the places are that you can go to walk. I enjoy doing it. For the last 10 years of my career, I did consulting forestry work in southeastern Pennsylvania, so I’ve gotten to know most of the parks and most of the trails.”
Felton and James Shaw, co-chairman of the Woods and Trails Committee, also plan seven wildflower walks annually in cooperation with the Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy.
When committee members are not walking, they are often at work on Meadowood’s own trail and various planting and maintenance projects.
Since Felton came to the community in 1996, the walking trail around the perimeter has expanded to more than a mile. “People use it all the time,” he notes. “There’s almost euphoria when you walk. You don’t just have trails for trails’ sake. They’re for people — to keep them as productive as possible as long as possible. The management mows what they can, but we have places where they can’t get in, so we carry mowers in. It’s a grass trail, and it goes through all the green area around the outside of Meadowood. At one place, it overlooks a cattle farm. A bench sits on a ridge so residents can look over the farm.”
The committee also maintains wildlife food and cover plots, a nursery for growing transplants, a bed with about 35 different wildflowers, a nut orchard for wildlife, 45 bluebird nest boxes, a butterfly garden and daffodil plantings.
“The walking trail is great,” Felton says, “but there’s also something to be liked about going into a rougher natural area. Of course, I just love it because I was in forestry. But even the people who never had any technical desire to go into the woods like to go into a place where it’s green. There’s something about the woods and the fields and the plants that are there. And the birds and everything that goes with it.”
Felton has long advocated conservation and preserving open space. He served as the first executive director of the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association and worked from 1963 to 1980 as technical director and executive director of the Water Resources Association of the Delaware Valley Basin.
“I don’t consider what we’ve done here at Meadowood as any great shakes,” he says. “But we’re pecking away at it, and somebody should do it. If somebody doesn’t think a little bit about the future, there isn’t going to be any open space.
“A lot of people are not prone to looking way ahead. In forestry that’s all you can do. It’s going to take 150 years [for trees to mature]. I won’t see it, but somebody will.”
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