Hitch three was different from the prior hitches for a couple reasons. It was our first full hitch without Jarrod Ball, the crew's original Project Leader and trail work guru, we were in a front-country camp and we were working with a new Forest Service contact, TJ Broom. This hitch also marks the half-way point of our trail season.
TJ came out on our first day to do a trail walk with Brendan and Alana, the Hitch Leader. By the end of the day, we had assessed the full 6 miles of trail, discovering that it was impassable to packing stock due to small landslides and ineffective fords. Last Fall's record flooding levels took a heavy toll on the Crane Creek Trail. We were tasked with fixing the fords and making the gullied out and wet trail passable again.
Fixing the fords meant getting our feet wet, really wet. We would walk around in the creek searching out large rocks (100+ lbs) for the ford's wall and then medium and small rocks for the crossing fill. The weather was generally warm and our spirits are always high when we can work together, so cold wet feet for days on end didn't phase us too much.
Over the next 8 days we built 4 ford crossings totalling 75 feet, rehabilitated 130 feet of trail including re-alligning the ford approaches. We also built a rock water bar to move water off the trail.
We had a lot of fun and got a lot of great work done. The Degenerates strike again.
