The Trust, set up in 1993, has been working to secure funding for the trail since as far back as 2003 when they began work on their Bamboo Conversion Utilisation Project with US$79,000 in funding from Japan. That project has since borne fruit, with several local community members involved in bamboo craft, including furniture.

Typically, a hiking trial would not be built within a protected area, but Paula Hurlock, the Trust's executive director, said the effort was being undertaken as part of a new approach to environment management that they were taking, in light of the peculiarities of the parish in which they operate.

The reality, she said, was that faced with limited employment prospects due to their limited education many Hanoverians had resorted to exploiting the environment in an unsustainable way to eke out a living. Projects such as the hiking trail, she said, were thus designed to show residents that there was a way to utilise the environment in a sustainable way while they ensured their survival.

The trail is to run over two kilometres along already degraded sections of the Dolphin Head Mountains where there are footpaths. Work, in the meantime, will be done to restore some of the vegetation in the degraded sections, while the Trust moves to set up a live botanical museum.

"By the time we finish the construction, we will have the orientation and training of the locals to handle this thing (the museum) and to handle the other complementary initiatives to go along with the trail," Hurlock told the Observer.

The planned museum is to feature endemic plants as well as ferns, orchids and shrubs. Already Hurlock and her team have approached the Global Environment Facility Small Grant Project for funding to support its establishment.

Another project set to get underway is their $800,000 Forestry Conversion Project, which is geared at training 10 men who were previously destroyers of forest to become forest protectors while engage their neighbours and friends to join the effort to save the existing bio-diversity of the Dolphin Head Mountains.

It is being funded through the Food and Agriculture Organisation's forestry facility and is to begin at the end of the month.