01/Dec/07 - Soldier Creek Retaining Wall, Cedar Creek Work

Photographs are provided at the bottom of this web page. Video will be posted on Monday afternoon so check back then for video. Also other people may send in additional photographs so check back later for them.

01/Dec/07 - Soldier Creek Retaining Wall, Cedar Creek Work

It was a cold and foggy morning for the volunteers from a Buddhist Youth Group, Boy Scout Troop 1210, and Boy Scout Troop 636 who came out today to work on Solder Creek Trail and Cedar Creek Trail in the Crystal Lake Recreation Area of the Angeles National Forest. Many members of the San Gabriel Mountains Trailbuilders participated, providing the tools and materials which would be used today.

After gathering tools at Rincon Fire Station, we headed up to the Crystal Lake Visitor Center, climbing through heavy clouds and low visibility.

Breakfast and lunch was provided and since I was planning on staying over night somewhere very cold, I grabbed enough orange juice and bananas for dinner as well. (Since lunch was some kind of animal carcass on toast --ha!-- I brought some excellent corn chips, habenero chili salsa, and green Spanish olives for my own lunch! Joy!)

There were two deer watching us having lunch. They were a bit camera shy and, in any event, the hid in the fog.

Everything went very well. Ben and the Buddhist Youth Group took tools to go work on Cedar Canyon / Cedar Creek Trail, making the trail safer to hike along and, I expect, making sure that any hanging deadfall trees that might constitute a safety hazard got pulled down. I didn't get to see what that effort looked like since I stayed with the other group of volunteers.

The larger group of volunteers had breakfast and then headed down the road a short distance to the amphitheater parking lot where a huge sugar pine had fallen, killed probably by bark beetle infestation. It's a good thing no humans or cars where standing under that pine otherwise they would have been smashed flat.

Many of the volunteers started clearing up the parking area, moving dead limbs and bark and generally cleaning up around the fallen pine so that parking would be easier. While that was going on the tools were extracted from vehicles and assembled so that volunteers could grab a tool and head toward the second work site on Soldier Creek Nature Trail.

The words for today were "motion" and "commotion." A lot of activity took place with the trail being worked on above and below where the retaining wall was being put in. The section where the welded wire baskets were to be installed was dug flat, T-rails were pounded into the ground, and the wire and bars were wired in to place.

Rocks were carried up and down the trail to fill in the wire basket and then dirt was placed on top of the rocks. Toward the end of that part of the day's project, boulders were pulled down from the hillside to act as corner stones on both sides of the new retaining wall.

The retaining wall looks great! I didn't get to see what Ben and the other group -- mostly the Buddhists Youth Group -- had accomplished on the first work site, unfortunately, but maybe Ben or one of the other volunteers will send in photographs of that part of the project.

Two vehicles containing volunteers spent the night in the campgrounds, freezing a bit I would expect since I certainly froze last night! The laptop computer in my backpack froze so that the computer wouldn't turn on, not even when I set it out in sunlight.

In the morning I swung by a storage shed, picked up some supplies, and dropped them off at one of the old structures across from where the volunteers had spent the night, then I set my bicycle in the sun to warm things up, packed up my things, and headed down the mountain.

On there way down around marker 20 there's a water company facility and I observed two people in a huge white pickup truck behaving strangely. I see a lot of strange things up there (mostly at night) but I couldn't figure out what the man was doing until I squinted a bit.

People do a LOT of strange things in the canyons since many seem to think that the rules and laws which try to make people safer no longer apply once one starts climbing up into the mountains.

The man had carried a newspaper-wrapped bundle out of the cab of the pickup truck, carried it to the base of the water facility fence, and had laid the bundle there. He saw me watching him very closely, looked extremely guilty, then when I crossed the road to see what he was doing, he picked up the bundle, placed it back into his pickup truck, and he and the passenger climbed in and they sped away kicking up dirt.

When I examined what they were up to I found that they had been placing soiled newspaper on the ground, setting rocks on them so that they wouldn't blow away. "Soiled" as in they had a dog in the cabin of their pickup truck and they had been cleaned it out by dumping their shit on the side of the road, leaving it for Forest Service people to have to clean up later.

I was struck once again by the stark bifurcation: Buddhists and Boy Scouts working hard -- I mean really hard! -- making things safe and enjoyable for others who enjoy the wilderness, doing something good for the community and something great for the environment. On the other end are a few rotten people who come up and literally shit on our nation's wilderness, virtually slapping everyone else in the face.

Our national forests belong to us, the people -- I hear that refrain from the U. S. Forest Service employees all the time, reiterating their own love of the forest and their commitment to trying to ensure a safe and enjoyable recreation for everyone.

When I see kids and adults volunteering like this, it makes me very happy -- more so when it's dragging kids away from their televisions, game boxes, and the Internet, out where exercise and fresh air can be found, doing something meaningful for the good of the coming generation.

God gods, I love this job!