Boy Scouts and Trailbuilders On Lake Road Trail

Greetings, everyone!

It was another fantastic day volunteering in the Angeles National Forest, working on building up a new rock bridge crossing across a gully within the Crystal Lake Recreation Area, mixing hard work with the wonderful fog and light rain.

Oh man, this is truly the best of days, enjoying the Great Outdoors (always capitalize that!) getting exercise as the gentle clouds come and go, caressing us volunteers, keeping us cool and comfortable.

Four tasks were successfully completed. (1) Build up a stair steps, (2) take down a hanging tree off of Soldier Creek Trail, (3) build up the retaining wall against the rock bridge, and (4) clean up the area surrounding the work site.

Overwhelmingly the new stair steps leading down on to the bridge crossing was a success (see the photographs offered below.) Moderately large boulders were dragged in to place after being collected from the surrounding area, and a considerable effort went in to fashioning the rocks in to perfectly flat stairs.

Hikers who walk along Lake Road Trail in the Recreation Area will start out with their very first steps walking down these stairs. Hikers will see and appreciate the sand a gravel walk across the gully, step from boulder to boulder across the water channel, and then continue on along the trail that is lined with rocks to confirm the trail's continued path as coming years work to obscure the trail.

The effort that went in to the steps was well worth it, it seems to me. It shows that tremendous human effort goes in to building and maintaining trails, something that a lot of hikers tend to believe are created using machines. Hot and sweaty human effort coupled to commitment and years of hard work is the reality, and strong, perfectly aligned stairs like this one shows the reality of the human element involved.

Ben, Tom, and myself took one of the three grip hoists that the crew brought with us, and we went up to Soldier Creek Trail where a tree was hung up over the hiking trail posing a serious safety hazard (also shown in the enclosed photographs.)

Normally I would have expected that the heavy wire and chain be positioned to apply pressure at right angles of the primary pressure holding the tree up however after we examined the lay of the tree, we decided to attach the chain and position our stanchion point so that the pull from the grip hoist was 180 degrees from the main pressure point, in effect pulling the tree directly off of the other tree it was pinned against.

It only took something like 4 or 5 pulls on the grip hoist handle after the slack had been taken up, and the hung up tree came crashing down, lots of limbs breaking off and flying all over the place.

While Tom stayed behind to cut that up and set it along side of the trail (we didn't push it all off of the trail because we didn't want to drop it all in to Soldier Creek) Ben and I walked further down the trail to look at another hanging tree that I have been wanting to pull down for over a year. That hanging tree is just as dangerous but would require half a day of careful effort to pull down safely so we decided against even trying.

Back at the gully crossing we joined the effort, Tom and I removing a hump of gravel and rock in the stream bed and moving it in buckets, dumping the fill up against the rock bridge so act as a retention wall in an effort to stop water from flowing over the bridge in the event of a really heavy rain.

For the most part it was the Boy Scouts that hunted down the boulders, tied baskets of heavy chain on to them, then used the hook and cable with the two grip hoists to move the boulders over to the area where they would be fitted in to the water channel crossing point where the adults got to decide how to position them.

Everyone, I believe, got an opportunity to work with the heavy rock bars to pry and position the huge boulders. One of the Boy Scouts came up with the excellent suggestion of using the metal bars as skids to slide boulders on -- and it worked well. We usually grunt and lean and sweat boulders in to place, forgetting that bars can be used to slide heavy things along.

As the effort was winding down, the Scouts took McLouds and shovels in to the hillsides and the surrounding rock plane and filled in the holes and tracks they had made, returning the area to a natural condition so that one could not see any effects of the boulder collection that took place.

Back down at the Rincon Fire Station the tools and equipment were sorted out, the Boy Scouts hauling things to the local water pipe to wash the tools and equipment that had gotten dirty or muddy in the day's efforts, then the tools were stored away in the newly reorganized tool shed -- and we were finished!

The bicycle that I had had to abandon up there (after crashing and injuring my clumsy self two weeks ago) was checked out and carried to a vehicle, joy! Now I have my bicycle back and all is once again right with the world.

These are the kinds of work efforts that seem to come off so well, have just the right number of volunteers that I was once again very happy that I had stumbled across the San Gabriel Mountains Trailbuilders and to be privileged enough to participate in the forest among friends. I have learned a great deal about how tools and equipment is used and how to use them safely.