Adopt-A-Trail Reports

Dams, stakes, and crossings

    by | April 26th, 2014

    On April 26, 2014, four AAT crew members -Kurt, Roger, Steve, and Ryan met to do AAT work on Holcomb Creek. After a quickly moving snow storm dropped 4-6″ of snow over night, the morning met us with sunny skies and cool weather.

    After conducting our safety meeting near the Fawnsking Fire station, we headed to Holcomb Creek. Not sure of what the conditions were like on the trail, we aimed at completing a few simple tasks on the Road Maintenance Plan.

    The trail presented us with about 4″ of fresh snow, which was melting away under the warming weather. As we came to the main creek crossing we found the creek was dammed by several large logs and rocks. Our crew spent about an hour hauling the logs away and dispersing the rocks. It seems the logs were pulled from our blockage of the illegal bypass we made several months ago. Looks like someone put a lot of time and effort pulling the logs to block the stream. The rocks were also much larger then usual too.

    The next item we worked on was removing old pickets/steaks on “porcupine hill.” With a few tugs from Kurts jeep and some shoveling by Roger and Steve, we managed to yank the pickets out.

    We broke for lunch at the main rock garden and saw only a few other jeepers traveling the trail.

    After lunch we stopped to harden two creek crossings. One is just before mougal hill #2. We spent about 30minutes there tossing good size rocks into the stream. The second crossing was just after you come down from the shelf road. This area by far is getting worse and worse. We spent some time tossing rocks into the stream crossing but it certainly needs more attention. I feel we should spend an entire day there just reinforcing the shelf with more gabion baskets and hardening the stream with very large boulders. It seems that as people drive west to east and climb onto the self, it crumbles away. With El NIno predicted we may want to work on this soon.

    We exited the trail around 4pm. Thanks for those who attended. I hope you managed to get all the mud off the jeep.