Hitch #9 – Alturas 2 – McKabe Springs is Back with a Vengeance

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Our hitch started with a tour of some of the Alturas Wilderness Study Areas by our agency contact Claude Singleton. We were able to see beautiful Pit River Canyon from far above and we also visited Timbered Crater and Lava WSAs. This tour was intended to get us oriented for an upcoming project of signing the perimeter of these three WSAs with Wilderness Study and No Firewood Cutting signs. Much of the hitch, we spent continuing our work restoring McKabe Springs by creating burn piles with the limbs of downed juniper trees. The trunks of the downed junipers were bucked into smaller sections with a cross cut so that they can be carried down to the road and out of the WSA by a future work crew. Midway through the hitch, we took two days and headed out on the road to hang up the aforementioned signs. To reward the hardworking Wildcorps crew and to save drive time, after the first day of hanging signs, we stayed in the nicest accomodations available in Burney, California, and had a scrumptious pizza dinnner from a local restaurant. By the end of our hitch, snow had started to cover the higher elevations in the surrounding areas…and frost had set in on our work site at McKabe Springs. Our work at McKabe Springs was completed just in time. Here are the numbers: 5 more acres restored 25 WSA / No Firewood Cutting signs placed