The joys of a small trail crew - June 11, 2011

After I gave up waiting for people from Charlottesville to join me cutting summer growth along a few miles of Appalachian Trail, I realized that people were reading electronic notifications of chapter activities. Also I was keeping only one person from helping cleanup at Dunlodge, and management of the group would be easy.

Michael Seth joined me at Rockfish Gap, where we spoke with a few people on their way to Maine. One of them is an AT maintainer in Tennessee. As we started, there seemed sufficiently few garlic mustard at McCormick Gap seeds to make it worthwhile pulling them; I attributed the small number to the efforts of Marian Styles in May when she removed plants. We also removed some oriental lady’s thumb because at times we thought we were in a small patch or edge of a patch which could be cleared, but this was not the case. Somewhat ominous was the sight of scattered bittersweet plants, meaning it has been spread along the trail. Now I hope that pulling solitary plants early in their life will stop them regrowing. We stopped at a couple of large patches of bittersweet, one where last year I had dreams of major suppression, but there is sufficient regrowth that it would have taken an hour or two to remove this year’s growth.

However, the main reason for the trip was cutting back regular summer growth of native plants which crowd the trail corridor. The growth was not thick but it was good to reduce it for the comfort of hikers. The many rocks lining the trail make this clearing tricky at times. Michael said this section of trail is quite lush, but part of the lushness is from a large amount of poison ivy some of which I cut. However, it will be back

We also questioned north bound hikers about trees across the trail. I had numbers of 0 to 5 and a universal comment that they were not an obstacle. My count was 2, roughly where I expected from one description two weeks earlier. At one we removed a large branch across the trail, but because of equipment, personnel and heat constraints, did not try to cut the 16 inch diameter trunk which requires walking around. Another needed only one cut to get out of the trail.

Then Michael said he needed to get home so we did not stop to pull any plants, and simply cut as we walked.