The BBVTC's May 18th workday brought us to the end of the line in our initial effort on the Sequoia Trail, which in the pre-fire days was one of the most popular trails for Big Basin visitors. Beginning the work in mid-January, the initial goal was to rough cut the trail to the old Huckleberry Campground area, which park staff wants to reopen to visitor camping in spring-summer 2025, but just before the 18th we received updated instructions saying push-on to Wastahi!
The work itself was the standard post fire effort of clearing regrowth from trail corridors and as with the past several workdays dropping it down to Sky Meadow Rd immediately below where it was staged until a wood chipper could be brought in for final removal.
Typically staff would flag the route beforehand so we knew where to start clearing, but they were tied up with CCC crews so we were instructed to just follow the old trail alignment, which proved harder than it sounds. Vegetation has become so thick since the 2020 fires that the work required someone wading into the brush, looking down, and seeing if they could find the old trail tread. See it and we knew we were going in the right direction and could start cutting. No trail tread meant we were off trail and had to try again.
By lunch the trail was taking us further from the road making staging brush more difficult, so afterwards we jumped ahead to Wastahi and worked back toward where we had left off before lunch, leaving the cut debris in the Wastahi parking area rather than on the road.
Of course the work isn't near finished. Next workday we'll backtrack to clear brush from the trail edges and remove trip hazard stubs from the trail tread, but it's looking like a trail.
End of the day at Wastahi Campground.
The crew put in 140 hours and thanks to Fremont Bainbridge, Daryn Bieri, John Bodley, Jim Brooks, Rory Brooks, Michele Gelblum, Peter Gelblum, Mimi Guiney, Marc Koenig, John Martin, Janette Mello, Whitney Mitchell, Mike Peasland, Dale Petersen, Devdutt Sheth, Brian Washburn, Bruce Washburn, Nico Wendell and Chris Young, for another great effort!
Part of making the park safe in the post fire era has required removing dead burned trees from roadways and visitor areas and park staff is taking the opportunity to reuse some of the wood. As we started work from the Wastahi area we came across a small Alaska mill operation which is turning logs into lumber that will be used not only in Big Basin but other Santa Cruz mountain state parks.
Nice finds were Dark-eyed Junco nestlings, Banana Slugs and Yerba Santa.
Douglas Iris, Wild Rose, Andrew's Clintonia (Clintonia andrewsiana), and California Wild Lilac (Ceanothus)
by Mike and Jeff
photos by Bruce, Fremont, Mike, Mimi, and Whitney