Trail in Expanded Butterfly Meadow by Rahul Sengupta Troop 111, Fremont

Hi, I’m Rahul Sengupta. Tule Ponds has been familiar to me ever since I first worked on my brother’s Eagle project three years ago. So naturally, when it was my turn to find an Eagle Project, I explored the possibilities I had in Tule Ponds as well as my school. I came to Dr. Blueford in search of a project on May 2009. I wanted to do a project that I had never seen done before, and therefore I chose trail building. My project was to build an 80-foot trail, demarcate the trail with logs on either side, and pack it down with chips. Sounds easy right? No way.

clearing the area	leveling trail

 Writing my plan took nearly 7 months until it finally got approved, and there was a moment I thought that was the hardest part. On my first workday on May 8, 2010, I come to my work site and I see a forest of weeds, each one of them 10 feet high. There were also the thorny blackberries that needed to be removed by the roots. Surprisingly it only took two 2.5 hour workdays get all of the weeds removed. It took 7 workdays total to finish. Each workday, we only had one thing to look forward to, and that was the ice cream after we finished. On July 3, when Dr. Blueford gave me the approval, I felt a sense of gratification and achievement, for never had I before lead a group of team members in achieving something as large scale as this.

taking a break	finishing touches on trail

Now I look back, and realize that I actually did a lot of work in really little time, considering each of my workdays were no more than 2.5 hours long. I owe it all to my friends, my family, and my troop for coming out and giving me help and support in my project. My thanks also go to Dr. Blueford for giving me the privilege of working on a project in Tule Ponds, my scout leaders, without whom my planning would have taken so much longer, and my parents for being there each and every day. I feel that it is necessary for me to name all the people that worked on my project, because without them nothing would have gotten done. Here are the people that helped me: Swaraj Sharma, Arthur Ho, Arjun Sarkar, Ellora Sengupta, Rajat Sengupta, Joe Chen, Rohan Gogoi, Brandon Gordon, Ronak Modi, Amal Nanavati, Sameer Nanavati, Anuj Nanavati, Jamie Crocker, Justin Juan, Calvin Chen, Adam Schaps, Ron Fong, Nicholas Fong, Ruchit Majumdar, Vineet Majumdar, Jonathan Leung,  Nabarun Sengupta, Haroon Rasheed, and Stuart Rosette. Overall, my time spent on this project has been rewarding!