The Secret Wetlands Tour at Alley Pond was a great success, pulling in over a dozen cyclists and joggers from both from the Little Neck LIRR Station and from Jackson Heights.  The two groups traveled on a variety of trails and roads, exploring the street safety infrastructure in Eastern Queens.  Getting to the Alley Pond Environmental Center required traveling on Northern Boulevard and then back across it on foot to the Joe Michaels Mile.  If you’d like to help create infrastructure for a safer Northern Boulevard, you can add your name to this request to stand up for your community.

The tour of the wetland was amazing. Natural Areas Conservancy (NAC) taught us about how the sewage overflow is affecting the environment. We learned which plants were invasive species and how hard it is to get rid of them.  We saw where there are plans to bring back the marshland (providing funding can be found) and that the mosquitoes in salt water marshes (like this one) are normally not the ones that carry Zika and other illnesses.  Most importantly, we learned how important  this marshland is to local animals and how it helps absorb excess water so our basements don’t get flooded.

This was an amazing trip where we leaned a lot about our community with some great friends. Thank you to all of the great people at TA Queens Volunteer Committee, especially Angela, for organizing this event.  It was worth a few soggy shoes here and there.  Hope we can do this again next year.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.