With our work on the Creeping Forest Trail ended, the Nov. 18th workday was a quick stop on the Blooms Creek Connector Trail. This is a short section between the Redwood Loop and the old Blooms Creek Campground and it will provide access to Middle Ridge via the Hihn Hammond fire road.  So more clearing, felling of trees, and creating burn piles.

After seven months of work, the 1.2 mile Creeping Forest Trail is nearing completion and the final segment should be ready to open in early December. (The lower stretch of the trail opened to the public just before Labor Day).

Trail work requires flexibility as you never know what you will find out there, even when there are plans going into the job. In the pre-CZU fire era we would have days we couldn't find trail issues that had been reported by park visitors while other days we would come across multiple unexpected problems to deal with before getting to what we were looking for in the beginning.

The Oct. 7th workday was our first fall outing with the expectation of cooler days, but the weather forecast said otherwise with the prediction of temperatures of 'about 90' in the park. Despite the hot weather, we still had a good turnout of 18 which included two newcomers. 

One of the objectives in rebuilding the Big Basin trail system after the 2020 fires has been to move sections that were in low lying areas or otherwise subject to high waterflow volumes during winter storms and relocate them to adjacent areas that were not as wet or muddy and easier to maintain.

With the initial stretch of the 1.2 mile Creeping Forest Trail finished and reopened to the public on Sept. 1st (map below), the Trail Crew has been a holding pattern as we wait for the park staff to finish flagging the next section of Creeping Forest to be worked.

The past several months we've had sub-20 turnouts for Trail Crew workdays because of vacation plans for many of our regulars along with a lull in recruitment of newcomers, but the promise of a short workday and a mid-summer group lunch after our August 12th outing quickly resolved the issue!

Our work on the Creeping Forest Trail since late March has largely revolved around making rough cut trails through the understory vegetation that has grown in over the past three years since the CZU fires. While the effort to this point has provided a sense of accomplishment, we still had a ways to go before things started looking like a real hiking trail. This would require 'tread work' or simply digging in the dirt.

Bull thistles are one of the most recognized weeds in Big Basin and last summer the BBVTC worked with the park's resource management group to remove the fast spreading plant from the Redwood Loop Trail. When we asked about plans for this summer, staff said the work still needed to be done but they wouldn't be able to get to it due to staffing, so the BBVTC stepped forward.

A couple of key numbers from our July 1st workday are 17 and 103.

17 - Despite weather forecasts and news stories beforehand of a heat wave with temps into the 90's-100's, 17 Trail Crew folks were out for the July 1st workday.

103 - Was the temperature at the Saddle Mountain station at 1:30 as we began wrapping up work for the day. And the south facing Creeping Forest hillside we were on may have been even warmer.