A Meandering Orange Trail…for everyone!
What’s orange, offers resilience and traction, and winds around beneath the lovely sheltering trees throughout our own Stephen Decatur Park for six-tenths of a mile? Give up?
It’s the newly completed “tire path”! A paved-surface trail made from old tires (recycled) ground up, combined with a polymer and dyed a bright pinky-orange! This new feature offers both casual strollers and serious runners a perfect place to exercise on our most level, well-landscaped, park grounds. It is comfortable!
With funding and installation supplied 
through the Maryland Environmental Service, an independent State Agency that aims to protect and enhance the state’s air, land and water resources, the path was given to the Town at no cost to the taxpayers! According to Mary Bohlen, Town staff liaison to our hard working, citizen based Berlin MD Parks Commission; signs have recently been ordered which will mark distances throughout. The path is fun, having several distinct sections allowing the walker to “choose his own path” making any routine exercise more interesting! It is hoped also that through a grant application from Program Open Space (a Maryland State based environmental group) several workout or exercise stations will be erected 
along the path by Spring 2009 making this project complete – giving many more of us the opportunity for some much needed, complete outdoor exercise! Recently overheard from one regular “tire path” user – “I like it a lot – and others are quickly discovering it too…and path traffic in the morning is becoming heavy”!
The Stephen Decatur Park serving all of Berlin is located on Tripoli Street beside Rt. 113 here in town. Amenities in the nearly six acre park facility include tennis courts, several well-equipped tot playgrounds, picnic tables with adjacent grills, comfortable benches, a large covered pavilion, and a nature trail surrounding a mini lake (it’s got fish, frogs and ducks!). Convenient parking is available. Visit your park today and see the new orange trail!
For more information contact Mary Bohlen at 410-641-2770.
