This  BBVTC workday included several things of note -  it happened to be Earth Day, we had a warm (too warm) spring like workday after four months of cold, wet, windy weather, and the District trail crew dropped off a new piece of equipment.

Things went well on Saturday, and 23 people show up for the APR 8 workday. Rory and I (Chris Young) managed to get the choke knob that Mike provided on the hedger-on-a-stick just before 9 am.  Jeanette and Jim took care of getting people signed in and I confirmed with Kile and Sam that we would be continuing work on Creeping Forest.

Each spring State Parks hosts a California Trails and Greenways Conference for trail professionals At the 2023 conference held in the last week of March the Santa Cruz District and Big Basin Volunteer Trail Crews were recognized for their work in preparing the trails for the park's reopening last July.

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.