“AmeriCorps team member Nick Pate rolls a wheelbarrow full of gravel uphill on a Possession Point trail while Sarah Boehm waits for him to dump it.Matt Johnson / staff photoBy the time they finish covering the entire length of the Dorothy Cleveland Memorial Trail with gravel this week, each member of the South Whidbey AmeriCorps team will have climbed the equivalent of 20,000 feet, a distance equal to a trek up Mount McKinley.To make the effort more difficult, the team members will be pushing about 700 wheelbarrows full of gravel. But, in spite of appearances, this is not an exercise in self torture, but the group’s latest effort to make the 4,000-foot long trail hikeable all year round.Charged by the Port of South Whidbey to give hikers better footing on sections of trail that have turned to a clay and mud slope during the spring rains, the AmeriCorps members are covering the trail with gravel. Will Black, one of the crew’s leaders, said his team will spread up to 25 yards of gravel on the steep, winding, woodland trail to make the traverse from Possession Point Road to the Possession Point Park safer.Monday was the first of two scheduled work days for the project. AmeriCorps tea members shoveled loads of gravel into wheelbarrows, then ran them up and down the trail. The work was some of the most physically demanding the team has done this year. Last year’s team built the trailbed, hacking it out of the dense forest. Both projects were funded by the Port, which paid $10,000 to build the trail and is putting out another $10,000 to cover it with gravel. In all, the completed trail is expected to cost about $25,000.An artist is working on a sign that will dedicate the trail to the late Dorothy Cleveland, who served on the port commission. “