Green: Cleared
Red: Keyhole to Fire Road
Yellow: Work in Progress
The Trail Crew has been extremely fortunate to have good turnouts for most workdays and we needed it for May 30th as we split into two crews with most everyone continuing on Pine Mtn Trail while a small group split off at the request for the District crew for more touch-up on the recently opened Sequoia Trail.
PINE MOUNTAIN CREW
For the Pine Mtn work and a crew of 17, we were stretched to the limit as forward progress on clearing the trail had moved about 100 yards beyond the last keyhole (red box on map) so there was a lot of ground to cover.
To make everything come together smoothly required four work stations of 3-5 people each ranging from clearing new trail up front to moving debris back along the trail to the keyhole, loading it onto the highline and then moving it up to the fire road where it was unloaded and moved to the road edge where it was left for later chipping.
About mid-morning we came across a couple of uphill areas where new debris could be hidden off trail, but this required a couple more people to prep the area on what was already looking like a skeleton crew.
By late morning the new hiding locations were in operation which slowed the amount of new material that needed to be moved further back to the keyhole.
Despite modest crew size, needing to cover a lot of ground to make things happen and almost no time for breaks other than lunch, everyone rose to the challenge and we continued moving futher ahead on the trail (yellow highlight on map).
SEQUOIA TRAIL CREW
As for the crew of three that headed over to Sequoia Trail, it looked like it might an easier day. There were reports of five small-medium diameter trees that recently fell across the section between N. Escape Rd and 236, but they appeared easy to clear in scouting photos and a hole in the middle of the trail on the other side of Sequoia just needed to be filled.
So perhaps everything could be completed by lunch and they would be able join up with the Pine Mtn crew afterwards? But things were complicated than anticipated.
The five fallen trees were as expected and easily cut up and moved off the trail, but the hole in the middle of the trail tread on the section of Sequoia near Sempervirens Falls was more of a challenge than ' just ' a small hole!
It was actually a burned out tree root from the 2020 CZU fires and not only went straight down, but also laterally under the trail from the hole opening. The initial expectation was it would take several buckets of dirt to fill the hole, but after filling the hole and tamping the dirt down each time, the hole just swallowed everything and they would have to start over again. By the end it took 17 five-gallon buckets of dirt and four buckets of gravel to completely fill the hole, but the crew got it done! For anyone walking by afterwards it would be impossible to tell where the hole had been.
The crew put in 148 hours and thanks to Fremont Bainbridge, Karen Cheeniyil, Santhosh Cheeniyil, John Collins, Tom Condy, Andrew Fiatal, Tommy Ha, Vlad Kuznetsov, Jack Marshall, John Martin, Joe Mitchell, Mike Peasland, Christian Rempis, Angelina Thomas, Kenna Wang, Kris Kiefer-Woolery, Chris Young, Jill Zeng, Daniel Zichuhr, and newcomer Suzie Farrell, for help on a harder than expected workday.
by Mike and Jeff
photos by Chris, Fremont, and Mike