The good news is that nearly everyone arrived by, or very
soon after, 9 a.m. While crew leader Don White waited for a couple more people,
everyone else headed to Little Calf Mountain, taking the existing AT. At the
top, the plan was to start building new trail to meet up with the trail we had
constructed previously.
This plan was disrupted by the absence of clear signs of
where the trail should go, something we had noted a month or so earlier while
hiking there in rain. Someone/thing had removed the pin flags and other flags
marking the route. Andy Willgruber, who was told to direct people to the trail
because of his familiarity with the area from his many hours of mowing, headed
down an old road to meet up with the new trail, and then at the urging of PATC
President John Hedrick, others followed and started digging along the flags
that remained, continuing from where we stopped several weeks ago. Later we
heard a weedeater, telling us that Don White had reached the top and was
removing vegetation from the planned path. He disturbed some yellowjackets and
received at least one sting.
At lunch, two veterans of this project offered
chocolate-chip cookies and lemon-blackberry cake.
The area where we dug was fairly free of rocks, but
enough large rocks to make the rock bar popular. As usual with this work, it is
easy to get tired of one section and move on, but another person, after tiring
of his own section, will see a need to make little tweaks to the someone else’s
work. Some people drifted off to tend to other PATC business, and when everyone
finished, we left hand tools near the trail for the next day.
At Beagle Gap, we met Don Davis who had spent the day
working for pay. Some people headed home, and others to Loft Mountain Wayside
for blackberry milkshakes, and then to Schairer Trail Center for dinner.
The next morning the weather was again perfect. Mark
Gatewood was his usual early self and was talking to a mother and her son who
looked ready for a hike. They turned out to be first-time trail builders. Iva
Gillet arrived with Bill Holman and Trish Newman. The crew chief had not yet
arrived, so John Shannon pulled a couple of hard hats from his car and headed
up the trail with a trail maintainer from Crozet. Later most of the crew
arrived but without the two Dons, who unsuccessfully attempted to drive up the
access road in Don Davis’s two-wheel-drive truck. Quite some time later, we
heard Don Davis arrive, with the sound of tools bouncing in a wheelbarrow that
he wheeled up from Beagle Gap.
An early task was neutralizing the nest of yellowjackets
as well as a wasp nest. John came armed with some stinging insect
countermeasures in the form of a spray can.
By now, people were in rather rocky ground, and thus
using the rock bar a lot. We again had lunch on top of Little Calf, and John
augmented lunches with cranberry oatmeal cake.
We still had no crew chief. Don White had injured his
knee the day before and could not climb to the summit, so he used a brushcutter
to clear shrubs from part of the trail lower down. Early in the afternoon, Mark
Gatewood directed people to head down to improve some sections where some
further work was needed. Don Davis cut some weeds while others improved some
previously constructed tread before we headed home, knowing that in July we
would return to finish the job.
On June 23, Don White and Mark Gatewood cut a route for
the last piece of trail with weedeaters after Andy Willgruber responded to a
request for his time and truck and drove equipment and people near to the
summit of Little Calf Mountain. Andy also did some mowing with the mower that
Don Davis resurrected, while Don Davis drove the new field mower to the top
along the newly built trail and then mowed some of the open area. Thanks to
these four giving up another day to the trail, and traveling some distance,
especially for Don White, the stage is set for completion of the new trail
No comments:
Post a Comment