Adventures in Onionism

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 ho...

Like I said in my last post, I went down to San Jacinto to a trail work training session. I puked on the drive down (bad gas station deli hard boiled eggs or just really windy dirt Black Mountain Road), then spent Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday learning to work a griphoist . Basically this is a fancy winch device capable of controlled tension and release of a wire rope under up to 4,000 pounds of pressure. Anchor the griphoist on a tree, attach the wire rope to a big rock, crank the handle, and the rock moves. If the rock is really heavy, put a block (pulley) on the rock, thread the wire rope through the block and anchor it back on the same tree in order to get a 2:1 mechanical advantage. Or instead of doing a direct or directional pull, you can set up a high line or high lead and fly (a very generous term, they're not actually flying or even moving that fast if you're being remotely safe) big granite boulders down a slope. Anyway, I had a pretty good time. The training...