Rainy days are good for digging!

Well this rain is truly crazy!  But if you are a trail-builder, its a godsend.

 In many parts of the country you get rain all year (Northwest, Colorado, East Coast) so you can build trails all spring, summer and fall.  In California as you know NORMALLY it stops raining by late april and the soil bakes to rock hard clay by late June or early July at the latest. 

Obviously we are not having a normal spring/summer.  I watched it rain hard all day and I had time in the late afternoon so I started thinking, "man this is great conditions to fix something that needs a big dig."  Even if you have the power to try to dig in rock hard dirt, you just cant get the results you need for lots of detail work.  So when rain like this comes around I say, "how can we put this to good use."  

At the last minute I decided to go try and place a plank across a section that had a serious wash out in the big storm of the winter including that deluge on March 24 that flooded Harbor Blvd and rained about 8 inches in one day.  I put a text out to several friends and trailworkers to see if anybody happened to be around but no such luck.  I knew there was a plank that was likely to work up where Chaparral meets Ohlone and thats relatively near where I needed it which is where Rambler hits Lower Creek.  

That plank is not light so I brought some straps to make a shoulder strap.  That definitely helped but moving it was by far the hardest part of the venture and having just one accomplice would have been sweet.  The other challenge to carrying that thing was there's no way I'm carrying tools too.  Once I got the plank to the site I had to do the 1/2mile round trip to go get the tools I would need which I had stashed at the bottom of the trail.

By the way it was raining most of the time and the low hanging trees kept depositing their bounty of H2O as I was going so I  was pretty soaked.  On the upside, it wasn't too cold, I was working up a pretty serious sweat and I had recently watched Deadliest Catch so I knew I wasn't miserable as those guys!

Speaking of low hanging trees, as I was walking up the trail I came across a major low hanging branch that was not there the day before.  Rain loosens the soil and makes trees heavy so these Bays and Buckeyes can be a problem.  I really wasn't planning on doing other maintenance but this thing was a real widow maker so it had to go.  If you have a good folding saw, even pretty big stuff can get handled fairly quickly so 15 minutes on saving lives seemed reasonable.  

Once I got the beast, I mean plank to the site it was really just about taking a bit of a rest, deciding where it needed to go and then some medium effort with a Mattock to key it into place.  Boy now I was glad it had been raining all day.

Once I got it in place it seemed a shame not to hack away at a bunch of brush on the exit side if you were coming from Rambler and shape it a bit so you could do a nice roll over the bridge then make an sweeping left with a bit of a bank turn to head down Lower Creek.  Again with a folding saw, you don't mess around pruning sage, you just go to the base and cut it all out.  Then a bit of work with a Mattock and in this case several serious whacks with the axe side of a Pulaski to get one huge root stump out.

I have to say that was one seriously good session on a Tuesday afternoon.  Too bad it wasn't the regularly scheduled Tuesday cause then I could have supervised much of that work instead of grunting it out myself!  

GPS says it was:

3.2 miles of hiking

635ft of climbing

3.2 hours good solid work

Upcoming Trailwork Days! :

Tue July 5 6pm

Sat July 9 9AM

Tue July 19 6pm

Tue Aug 9 6pm

Tue Aug 23 6pm

Send me a note or comment here you want to help!