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.

This year's series of wind and rain related issues impacting our workdays was upped a notch for the Feb. 25th workday with enough snow dumped on the Santa Cruz mountains the day before to create chaos on pretty much every road leading to Big Basin. 

Big Basin continues its recovery from the heavy rainfall that pounded the area the first three weeks of the year with the highway running through the park reopening to through traffic the day before our Feb. 11th workday and the park now scheduled to reopen to the public on Feb. 21st though only the Redwood Loop Trail (RWL) will initially be accessible. 

Our end of the year Holiday season break lasted longer than expected as a series of 'atmospheric river' storms brought heavy rain to the area, closed Big Basin for most of January, and scrubbed our scheduled Jan 14th workday, so everyone was excited about the prospect of getting back to work for our Jan. 28th workday.

2022 was a year with 80 new people that stared following BBVTC by joining our Google Group. We had numerous people wanting to join the crew on our 25 workdays. We had 2-4 new people join the crew each work day for a total of 52 in 2022 with over half returning another workday and 3 even putting in over 100 hours along with 8 more established crew members. The crew volunteer time was a record 3673 hours, which surpassed the estimated 2430 hours put in to completed the Schultz Bridge and Kirsch Trail before the 2002 Centennial celebration.

Ever since the Trail Crew started its work on the lower section of the Sunset Trail on Labor Day weekend we've accessed the area not from the trailhead but through a nearby drainage so we didn't bring attention to this still closed section of the park. 

Planning for the December 3rd workday included something we haven't encountered often the past several years - rain! Two days before the Boulder Creek area received 2+ inches and more was forecasted for Saturday.

As we've worked on the lower stretch of the Sunset Trail between Dool and Middle Ridge Fire Rd. we've been careful not to make it obvious the trail is being cleared so to prevent visitors from wandering into the area before it is ready.

The Trail Crew continues to get excellent support from a mix of long time veterans, recent additions and first time folks, and for the Oct. 29th workday we tied a single day headcount record of 26 as we moved closer to finishing clearing work on the lower section of the Sunset Trail.

The Oct. 15th workday was only our fourth on the lower section of Sunset Trail (red dots) and we continued making good progress with three different tasks accomplished during the day.