After several days of the more tedious work clearing trail edges and doing 'QC' touch up work, the Trail Crew's July 25th workday saw a return to making forward progress on clearing the trail as we approach a hairpin turn that will lead to the last long stretch of trail to Buzzards Roost (see pin on map).
Hiking In
The major difference from previous clearing work was we needed to find off trail hiding areas for debris removed from the trail since our work had taken us well beyond the fire road where we had been leaving it previously. Even with steep hillsides on both sides of the trail, we were fortunate to find several areas to accommodate the new material and by the end of the day had finished prepping a large area that could be used for disposing debris on upcoming workdays.
The clearing work itself was pretty routine as a sawyer made the initial cuts to expose the trail while others followed behind to do additional clearing and begin moving the debris back to the off trail disposal areas.
The only unusual aspect of the day was a medium size boulder that somehow managed to come to a rest on an already narrow section of trail. Fortunately it was siting on a smaller rock embedded in the trail so it wobbled a little when we rocked it.
Since it blocked virtually the entire trail and created a safety issue when trying to pass, we decided to try and remove it. It took five crew members rocking the boulder back and forth, along with using a large branch and our weed wrench for leverage, to move the boulder off the trail and down the hillside.
About the only disappointing thing was we were hoping the boulder would make a dramatic roll down the steep hillside, but it came to rest next to a fallen tree just below the trail.
Buzzard’s Roost Approaches
The crew put in 148 hours and thanks to Fremont Bainbridge, Jeff Bowers, Jim Brooks, Rory Brooks, Karen Cheeniyil, Santhosh Cheeniyil, Dan Chen, John Collins, Tom Condy, Dale Elliott, Tommy Ha, Bill Lock, Jack Marshall, John Martin, Mike Peasland, Christian Rempis, Marc Shaw, Erinc Voelkel, Chris Young and Jill Zeng, for the support on what turned out to be warm workday.
by Mike and Jeff
photos by Jack and Mike