Willrich’s conversation with show host Shawn Kenney covered a lot of details about the trail, including an update on the construction work underway on the new “North Loop,” as well as the possibilities of linking the RRVT to the High Trestle Trail.  They talked about how the RRVT Association works with communities along the trail to enhance economic opportunities by marketing to trail users.

KDLS gave permission for us to post the full interview here on this RRVT site on the Internet, and you can listen to it by clicking here.    Turn up your speakers, and enjoy the chat about one of our favorite topics!

The ride will again have an overnight stay in Jefferson, where that community’s 33rd annual Bell Tower Festival will be underway, with a full slate of activities.

The leisurely “Tour the Raccoon” ride will have participants leaving the Des Moines area and Waukee on Saturday morning, June 9.  There will be luggage drop-off before the weekend at the Bike World store in West Des Moines.  Saturday morning luggage drop-off will be at Easton Elementary School in Waukee.  Enroute to Jefferson, the cyclists will pass through Waukee, Adel, Redfield, Linden, Panora, Yale, Herndon and Cooper.

The camping in Jefferson will be in the new Trailhead Campground, adjacent to the Jefferson Depot and the Greene County Fairgrounds.  The campground features a new picnic shelter, as well full-service restrooms and showers.

On Sunday, the cyclists will reverse the route and ride from Jefferson back to Waukee and the Des Moines area.

Online registration for the ride will begin May 1 at www.dmcycleclub.com.

More details about the Bell Tower Festival in Jefferson are available at www.belltowerfestival.org.

In addition, there will be more stories published on this Internet site in the weeks preceding the “Tour the Raccoon.”

Sponsors of the event, besides the Des Moines Cycle Club and the RRVT Association, include Bike World and Dee Zee, Inc., the truck accessories company in Des Moines.

The ride will again have an overnight stay in Jefferson, where that community’s 33rd annual Bell Tower Festival will be underway, with a full slate of activities.

The leisurely “Tour the Raccoon” ride will have participants leaving the Des Moines area and Waukee on Saturday morning, June 9.  There will be luggage drop-off before the weekend at the Bike World store in West Des Moines.  Saturday morning luggage drop-off will be at Easton Elementary School in Waukee.  Enroute to Jefferson, the cyclists will pass through Waukee, Adel, Redfield, Linden, Panora, Yale, Herndon and Cooper.

The camping in Jefferson will be in the new Trailhead Campground, adjacent to the Jefferson Depot and the Greene County Fairgrounds.  The campground features a new picnic shelter, as well full-service restrooms and showers.

On Sunday, the cyclists will reverse the route and ride from Jefferson back to Waukee and the Des Moines area.

Online registration for the ride will begin May 1 at www.dmcycleclub.com.

More details about the Bell Tower Festival in Jefferson are available at www.belltowerfestival.org.

In addition, there will be more stories published on this Internet site in the weeks preceding the “Tour the Raccoon.”

Sponsors of the event, besides the Des Moines Cycle Club and the RRVT Association, include Bike World and Dee Zee, Inc., the truck accessories company in Des Moines.

The RRVT is clear and open all the way from Waukee to Jefferson, using the traditional south route.  In addition, there are two portions of the new north loop that are open — between Waukee and Dallas Center and between Perry and Dawson.

People will notice some additional progress underway on the north loop.  The new concrete surface is being poured and set between Minburn and Perry, although it is not open now for public use.   Work will be starting this spring or summer on the two other stretches of the north loop yet to be paved — between Dallas Center and Minburn and between Dawson and Herndon.

This weekend, trail users will discover that not all the public restrooms on the trail are open yet, since it is so early in the season.  The restrooms are open at the Dawson Depot, at the Cooper Way Station and on the south end of the Jefferson Depot.  No portable toilets are yet placed at the locations along the trail that usually have them.  In Jefferson, the Trailhead Campground just south of the Depot is available for camping, however the restrooms & showerhouse at the campground is not yet open.

Mike Wallace, conservation director and trail manager in Dallas County, said he’d like to remind people that permits are required for trail use for persons 18 and older, unless you are just using the portion of a trail within the city limits of the trail towns.   Those permits are available at tube dispensers at most of the trailheads, and also at the Conservation Board’s offices in Dallas, Guthrie and Greene Counties.  The permits cost $2 per day or $10 for the calendar year.   You can buy a trail permit online with a membership in the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association on this Internet site, making the purchase in the “RRVT Store.”

Wallace also urged people to “start out the biking season in a safe way.  Obey ’Stop’ and ’Yield’ signs and be courteous of others on the trail.”

At the group’s annual meeting held Friday, March 23, during its regular monthly board meeting, Daniel Willrich of Dallas Center was elected chairperson, succeeding the founding chairperson Carla Offenburger of Cooper.  In addition, Cindy Jensen of West Des Moines and Panora was elected to the position of vice-chairperson, which had previously never been filled.  Secretary Karen Sievers of Guthrie Center and treasurer Bob German of Dallas Center were re-elected to their positions.  All the officers’ terms are two years.

Offenburger was among a group of five or six people who began working on enhancing and marketing the Raccoon River Valley Trail in 2004.  She was elected chairman when the group formally organized in 2006 as the RRVT Association, and had headed the group ever since.  She seconded the nomination of the new officers on Friday, and said she was happy to step down from the chairmanship and continue as a board member. 

“It’s great to have a younger member of this board like Daniel Willrich step up to be chairperson,” she said.  “He’s been on the board for four years, has learned what the organization is all about and will do well heading it.  Fresh ideas are always good for any organization.  I’ve served, and served well, I think, as chairperson for six years, and that’s long enough for anybody. I’m ready to start using the trail more and working a little less on it.”

Newly-elected officers of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association are (left to right) chairperson Daniel Willrich, of Dallas Center; vice-chairperson Cindy Jensen, of West Des Moines and Panora; treasurer Karen Sievers, of Guthrie Center, and treasurer Bob German, of Dallas Center.  Willrich and Jensen are new in their positions, while Sievers and German were re-elected.  Their new terms extend until March of 2014.

As the new vice-chairperson, Jensen will likely succeed Willrich eventually.  Board member Jim Miller, of rural Waukee, who nominated the new officers, said his thinking was to continue developing new leadership on the board of directors and formalize the succession procedures.

Willrich is assistant director of store architecture for Hy-Vee, Inc.  He is a graduate of Dallas Center-Grimes High School and earned his architecture degree from Iowa State University in 1997.  He was a good football player in high school and was on the ISU Cyclones team for a year.

For the past six years, Willrich has served on the city council in Dallas Center and is now in the middle of his second term there.  He and his wife Heather have three sons, Levi, 8, Ben, 4, and Seth, 2.

The new RRVT Association chairman has been a trail user since his early boyhood.  He grew up in Grimes, and said ”when I was a kid, I used to ride my Huffy bike over to the Neal Smith Trail and ride it.  Then when Heather and I moved to Dallas Center 10 years ago, that’s when I started riding on the RRVT.  It was when I was on the city council and heard that the RRVT was going to be coming through Dallas Center that I decided that I wanted to get more involved in the trail, something more than just being a trail user.”

The RRVT is 23 years old.  For most of that time, it’s been a 56-mile paved trail stretching from Waukee, just west of the Des Moines metro area, to Jefferson.  The towns along the way are Adel, Redfield, Linden, Panora, Yale, Herndon and Cooper.  But the last three years, a new 33-mile “North Loop” of the RRVT has been under development, and it is scheduled to be completed this year.  It runs from Waukee to Dallas Center, Minburn, Perry, Dawson and Jamaica before re-joining the existing trail in Herndon.  When that project is completed, it will create a 72-mile interior loop, the longest such loop on a trail in the U.S.

“We’ve got a real opportunity to do something big when the trail loop is completed,” Willrich said. “We should have a gigantic party, something that will attract attention of trail users across the nation.”

Offenburger agreed the completion of the new loop is a big moment for the board, and one that will require extra effort.

“The RRVT Association as an organization has done all the marketing and promotion of the trail, and since we started up, that’s included nine communities and we’ve worked for all of them,” she said.  “Now, we’re going to be adding five more communities to our marketing mix.  I think it’s good that Daniel is from one of those new communities, Dallas Center.  He has a good feel for what we need to do in each of those towns.

Offenburger reflected on the growth of the association during her six years heading it.

“Back in 2006, the three Conservation Boards that own the trail — Dallas, Guthrie and Greene Counties — each donated $1,000 to get us started,” she said. “Now we funnel money back to them.  And we’ve grown to the point that we raise and spend $40,000 to $60,000 a year on marketing and promoting the trail.  Our association membership gets up around 400 every year, we help sponsor several events on the trail that bring people to all the communities, and we have our annual banquet in February that has sold out every year.  As a group that markets and promotes one trail, I think we’re the envy of a lot of other trails around the state and nation.  There aren’t many other groups like ours.

“But for a trail advocacy group, I think there’s always room for improvement,” she continued.  “We’ve always said the RRVT is ‘becoming one of America’s best recreational trails,’ and I think that’s true.  But we need to do more to go to the wider market, beyond Iowa and the immediate Midwest, to get our message out.  And, of course, it takes a lot of money to do that — more funding than we’ve had.  But the more we can do that, the more people we’ll have coming to use the RRVT.”

Another challenge for the group is figuring out ways to help the conservation boards with the costs of maintaining and enhancing the RRVT.

Willrich said that in recent years, “the weaker economy has forced governments to modify their budgets, and trails probably aren’t going to get as much attention as they’ve had.  We’ve started talking about how it’s time for our organization to make another evolution — to go from just marketing and promotion to helping raise money to pay for trail maintenance.  We can help with that, and we should help.”

The board is working on ways to facilitate small and large donations to the association that would be turned over to the conservation boards, specifically for trail maintenance and enhancements.

In another organizational matter at the RRVT Association’s annual meeting, three members of the board of directors were re-elected to three-year terms — Willrich, Chuck Offenburger of Cooper and Mark Vukovich of Panora.  Another of the founders of the association, Butch Niebuhr, of Perry, decided not to seek re-election to the board.  He is city administrator in Perry and is involved in other groups that are taking more of his time.  Elected to replace him on the RRVT Association board is Bob Wilson, the executive at the Perry Chamber of Commerce and a native of that community.

The members of the board whose terms continue are Carla Offenburger, Jensen, Sievers, German, Kevin Wilbeck of Rippey, Allan Sieck of Rippey, Jon Doll of Waukee, Dan Juffer of Adel and Mike Wallace of Perry.  Wallace, who is conservation director in Dallas County, also serves in an ex-officio position on the board, as do the other two conservation directors, Joe Hanner of Guthrie County and Dan Towers of Greene County.