Staying Ahead of the Falling Leaves

The task of bagging all the leaves that fall in your yard may seem daunting, but compare that to gathering up all the leaves that fall at Grandfather Mountain!

Here at Grandfather, fallen leaves must be removed for safety reasons. When they get wet they become slick and are dangerous to walk or drive on. They also pile up in ditches and clog the culverts which can wash out the road and cause all kinds of erosion problems.

But mostly they create a fire danger, not only in autumn when they are falling but well into spring. As leaves accumulate into mounds of dry tinder, they become fuel for a stray cigarette butt or a spark from a muffler dragging along the pavement.

The process of gathering leaves at Grandfather Mountain is not quite like the one you follow in your own yard. Leaf litter is first collected into piles using rakes and leaf blowers, but then rather than stuffing the material into lawn bags, the Grandfather Mountain maintenance crew vacuums it up on a two-ton dump truck!

After the material has been blown into the ditch line alone the Grandfather Mountain summit road, the crew loads a 7-foot by 8-foot by 4-foot box equipped with a "Billy Goat" vacuum onto the back of the truck. It takes two men to direct traffic, one man to drive and a fourth to handle the hose as they move slowly along the road vacuuming up leaf litter.

Once the box is full of 224 cubic feet of leaf material, the truck is driven to one of the maintenance areas where the leaves are dumped into a big pile and left to rot. After a year or two some of the compost will make it into this reporter’s garden, but the pile has never been completely whittled away.

The autumn leaves were late in falling this year. So much so that the month of October was almost gone before the crew started gathering leaves. But now that the process has started, the team will be clearing the road sides and picnic areas for at least four weeks and adding as many as 40 truck loads of material to the compost pile.

"By the time we finish with that," said Maintenance Manager John Church, "it will be time to push snow."

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