Quick Trip to the River

An overnighter on the Foresthill Divide. It rained, and I did some trail work.

I carried a couple tools to do light trail maintenance while hiking. Gloves, a folding saw, and a machete. The machete proved to be completely useless against woody shrubs; the saw was very good. I'll have to experiment with this more in the future. Maybe a bow saw for bigger trees, or maybe a pair of loppers or hand pruning shears?

I spend more of my time these days running than backpacking, but I love going cross-country as well as trying to follow old, unmaintained trails. In Ventana Wilderness and in the part of the Tahoe NF on the American River shown below, some of the trails are in such bad shape, and the Forest Service so underfunded, that I fear they will be lost forever. So maybe I can run the open sections of trail, and brush out a mile or two by myself, adopt-a-trail style? On most of my real trail work volunteer trips, the emphasis has been on heavy work to make the trail suitable for horse travel. The trail was already up to my standards before we even got there, but then we piddle around with boulders and making drainage perfect, and meanwhile there's some completely overgrown trail somewhere else that's disappearing.

Friends are welcome to help any weekend this summer I'm not racing. It's only a 3,000 foot climb up from the river.

She was less excited on the way back up the canyon.

Would have been great in the rain, if it had a floor.

Brushing out the trail after a burn


The River

Camp


Words to live and melt glaciers by

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adze Picket Co. (I Love the PCT)

Image
Me at the Border I spent the weekend at the ADZPCTKO with Nitro , Tatu Joe, Ducky (the Wise) , Tomato, BearCan't , Mattress, Love Barge, Nano, Sly, Disco , WeatherCarrot, Too Obtuse, Nacho, Tall Paul, Mags , and Wildflower (AKA Icognito Cheeto Bandito). I got a ride down with Firefly. I'm tempted to just end my post there, as it would seem like complete gibberish to many of you. But I won't. The ADZPCTKO is the Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kickoff, held the last weekend in April (also known as NFL Draft weekend, where, miracle of miracles, the Redskins, despite Dan Snyder's best attempts to screw it up, actually managed to avoid throwing away multiple draft picks on Chad Johnson and instead traded for more picks. Hallelujah!) at Lake Morena campground, 20 miles north by trail from the Mexican border near Campo, CA. Conventional wisdom says that the weather window on the PCT is such that there's not much point to starting earlier thanks to snow in the S...
Read more

Hardrock 34:42

Image
It's Tuesday, I'm back in Berkeley, and I just ran my first Hardrock last Friday/Saturday in 34:42. I wanted to record thoughts immediately after the experience, because it was hard , and now that it's been a few days, I'm already forgetting the pain. [I don't want kids, so you'll have to insert your own reference to childbearing here if you so desire.] Start The race started at 6AM. I slept reasonably well the night before in my truck just behind the school gym where the race starts--Silverton is very low key, so it's easy to dirtbag inside the city limits. I did, however, have a bit of GI non-normality, but it didn't seem like a big deal. I started in shorts, T-shirt, and a windshirt. As expected, the windshirt soon became too warm, likely because of the clouds that were obviously going to bring rain sooner rather than later. First Climb I started maybe 30-40 deep in the field, going faster than I'd ever climbed in training, but not feel...
Read more

Should I run UTMB?

That's it, the title is the post. No, of course that's not the post, but I am wondering. My schedule has filled in a bit for the year. I'm now signed up for: Orcas 100 (Feb), Paiute Meadows 50K (May), Scout Mountain 100 (June), TRT 100 (July), and hope to run the fun runs Lupine Loopfest (Feb), Desolate Peaks (August), and Euchre Bar Massacre (October). But the big news is that I got selected in the UTMB lottery. I have until the 29th of January to confirm my registration. For the non-runners: UTMB is a 106-mile loop around Mont Blanc through France, Switzerland, and Italy, starting and ending in Chamonix. By all accounts it is spectacularly beautiful and very difficult, with about 33,000 feet of climbing. For most of my running life I haven't really cared about European races or followed European runners, but I got swept up in the spectacle of it last year. It was the race's 20th year, an American man finally won (Jim), and also finished second (Zack), and Courtney...
Read more