Since the Trail Crew began its post fire work in Big Basin, a standard workday has been to clear brush from a trail corridor, deposit it into burn piles and then repeat the process over and over and over again.
Having to build burn piles slows progress as sites need to be identified and cleared, debris needs to be carried to the location and then assembled into a burn pile like a giant jigsaw puzzle. On a good day only about 150 yards of trail could be cleared, but the April 6th workday brought about a BIG change!
The day brought us to a stretch of Sequoia Trail that runs parallel to closed Sky Meadow Rd immediately below and with new instructions from the District staff - No need to build burn piles, just stage the debris on the edge of the road and a wood chipper would be brought in at some point to finish the job.
With a crew of 22 for the day, we split into three groups with one focused on cutting the brush from the trail corridor, others gathering it and tossing it down the hill to the road and the final group carrying it to staging areas along the road edge where it could be left until a chipper was brought in.
At the end of the workday, one of the crew walked the length of the work area with a GPS which showed we had covered just under one-third of a mile, or about 500 yards of trail cleared.
Eliminating the burn pile work allowed us to clear about three times the usual distance as we approached our initial goal of Huckleberry Campground on this first phase of clearing Sequoia Trail.
The crew put in 161 hours and thanks to Arnie Arcolio, Fremont Bainbridge, Nan Bowman, Jim Brooks, Rory Brooks, Cecil Coe, John Collins, Michele Gelblum, Peter Gelblum, Tom Ha, Steve Kennedy, Andrea Lee, Joe Mitchell, Whitney Mitchell, Mike Peasland, Corrie Potter, Evan Rebesque, Devdutt Sheth, Bruce Washburn, Chris Young and Mikey Zedan, for jumping in and getting the work done and especially Dale Stadelman who drives down from the Redding area for workdays!
by Mike and Jeff
photos by Mike and Corrie