Hitch One: North Zone Engineering

Hitch lead: Stephanie Hanshaw, Member: Kenny Grilliot
This hitch was not located in one spot in particular, but all over the Salmon Challis! Kenny and I worked with the three members of the road crew of the Salmon Challis. Jim, Gary, and Pete showed us just how important it is to have a cleared and safe road. During our first week, Kenny and I did some lopping and brush clearing for the first 2 days along Ridge Road, Wallace Lake, and Moose Creek. Kenny also worked on cleaning out some culverts on these roads. On the third day we drove roughly three hours to help fix a bridge going over Antelope Creek. This involved tightening bolts that were loose and adding nuts and washers to those bolts that were missing them. We also saw a moose here while working on the bridge! On the last day of this week Kenny and I worked with what was basically a chain saw on stick, or a motorized pole saw. This made clearing the road happen much faster than it did using loppers! But we also found that this tool became extremely heavy after a while!
During the second week, Kenny and I worked roughly 4 miles of River Road along the Salmon river, roughly between Corn Creek, Spring Creek, and North Fork. We cut back a lot of brush and “pony-tailed” quite a few trees (“pony-tailed” meaning cutting limbs off all the way around the tree so that way there are still some branches at the top, but you can see around the tree and cars coming around the corner better). Our goal was to make the road easier for campers to get through. So we were asked to cut limbs up to 14ft. high in order to make this possible, and of course to only do so if we felt safe doing it. While here we were able to check out 2 very, very small towns: Shoup and North Fork. It was a great time and the people were always very friendly. After these two very tiring and labor intensive weeks, I can’t wait to go on this hitch and again have the feeling of a good, long, and hard days work when I crawl into my sleeping bag. It’s an amazing feeling.