Despite the official arrival of spring early in the week, another in a winter long series atmospheric river storms brought the usual down trees, down power lines and road closures, to the Santa Cruz Mountains just days before our March 25th workday. The only hopeful outlook was Caltrans and PG&E had three days to complete their work, but 24 hours before our workday the road into Big Basin was still closed.
Driving in from the SJ area for the workday, the magnitude of the Caltrans cleanup effort became clear as many of the turnouts along the road were piled high with debris that had been cleared from the roads. At Saratoga Gap there was a huge pile of down trees that had been hurriedly dumped as work to open the roads continued. On the way out at the end of the workday, the pile of debris had been reduced to an equally impressive pile of wood chips waiting for removal.
Even with all the uncertainty over how and if we would be able to get into the park, we had an excellent turnout of 25 as we started clearing work on the Creeping Forest Trail.
This would be our first day of work on Creeping Forest and the plan was for the BBVTC to start at the bottom of the trail (yellow trail marking) while a CCC crew would drive up Gazos Creek Fire Rd and then cross over to the trail about a half mile above us. We would work our way up, while the C's worked their way down.
After the thick understory regrowth we encountered on the Sunset Trail last fall, we weren't sure what to expect but fortunately the ceanothus regrowth wasn't as bad as feared. The task for this initial Creeping Forest work was to rough cut (bushwhack) a trail corridor so it became more clear where we should be working on future workdays.
Several sections of the old trail had also become prone to flooding and muddy during the wet season over the years, so we took the opportunity to cut in new trail segments above the old wet areas.
Overall we did initial clearing on about a quarter mile of trail and though we didn't meet the CCC crew, we saw them on the hillside above us just before we wrapped up for the day.
The crew put in 184 hours and thanks to Arnold Arcolio, Fremont Bainbridge, Jim Brooks, Rory Brooks, Julie Charles, John Collins, Denis DeCeuster, Peter Gelblum, Tommy Ha, Shyamal Kapadia, Andrea Lee, John Martin, Janette Mello, Sean Miller, Whitney Mitchell, Mike Peasland, Diane Shaw, Devdutt Sheth, Dale Stadelman, Bruce Washburn, Chris Young, Daniel Zichuhr, and new first timers Jodi and Rich Croce, and Eleanor Charles, for hanging in there through all the uncertainty.
The BBVTC Walking Up Middle Ridge Fire Road (Watercolor by Bruce Washburn)
by Mike and Jeff
photos by Mike, Fremont, and Bruce