Greetings, everyone, and I must say that it's great to be back writing about
our adventures once again. Though the Trailbuilders continued to work in the
Angeles
National Forest on scheduled days (and on many extra days) during the
past two months, I have not shared our adventures very often, despite
considerable drama and excitement happening to us in the field during that
time span.
We just had the Fourth Of July which ended up being a week-long adventure for
myself, Trailbuilder Bryan, and many other volunteers with the
West Fork
Conservancy, the
Angeles
Volunteer Association,
Fisheries Volunteer Conservation Corps, and a
volunteer or two from the High Country Riders, just to name some of the
volunteer groups who lend a hand in the
San Gabriel River Ranger District of the
San Gabriel
Mountains.
Mixed in with the regular forest volunteers we also had the famous
San Dimas Mountain Rescue Team get called
out to lend a hand in search and rescue efforts during the week, then on
Sunday the SDMRT got called out again for the same wrecked vehicle over the
side which they had previously searched and marked as a known wreck but kept
getting calls about. That gives them good training, of course, and it's
always a good excuse to run with lights and sirens all the way up to Adam's
world-famous chili beans!
When Saturday and Sunday came along, some of the volunteers in the field had
expressed some exhaustion (not to mention sunburn!) even before the
regularly-scheduled Saturday morning efforts could launch off in to full
swing, but that general tiredness from the long week was nothing compared
to challenges that the surviving employees of the
Forest
Service experienced during the week -- which I watched from a distance
and heard much about over the radio.
The USFS and the local law enforcement crews were kept hopping pretty much
from Sun-up to Sun-down and beyond, responding to "cliff hangers" who had
climbed up a West Fork canyon and got stuck, responding to possible firearm
target practice and/or poaching, motorcycle crashes, vehicle-over-the-side
calls, medical call-outs for probable heat exhaustion, vehicles blocking
fire road access, and that was on top of the over-flowing trash containers
and straining toilets which the USFS attempted to keep emptied (despite
being buried three deep behind vehicles in some places) during the week.
During the week the
Trailbuilders
re-painted the hand railing and rest benches along the stairs going down to
the lake, removing spray paint. An endless number of illegal fire rings were
busted apart and the ash scattered, vehicle assistance was offered a number
of times for disabled vehicles, and a very long list of questions were
answered during the week while the Trailbuilders went from task to task
between
Coldbrook
Campground and the
Crystal
Lake Recreation Area.
And of course there were endless numbers of unattended fires, people who had
spent the night and kept their fires burning, driving away in the morning
with their fires still burning.
Among one of the worse things we saw being done with fire this week was
Tiki Torches set on
fire and shoved in to the ground where-after campers would go to bed leaving
them burning, even after they topple over and fall to the ground. Some of
the Trailbuilders spent the night in the campgrounds and collected fallen
torches, extinguishing them and, well, confiscating them quietly for later
safe disposal.
So when our regularly-scheduled Saturday morning work effort came upon us,
it was something of a relief to leave the more-populated recreation area
and head toward Tototngna to survey the extent of trail work that needed
to be done, and to ensure that the trail definition was solid in addition
to the usual effort of removing dead tree obstructions and clipping back
encroaching brush.
We had a good crew working today on Tototngna, a
chainsaw team that bucked
up and removed a two-foot-wide dead tree that had fallen on the upper (left
hand) side of the trail loop, and other teams working with
loppers and
McLeod tools,
working through the moist meadow areas below and the drier, exposed areas
of the trail at higher elevation.
During the lunch break there was a call over the radio by a Forest Service
crew who was reporting a tree limb down at
Heaton Flats
trail, and though the report was somewhat vague, I offered the Trailbuilder
services to go and remove the obstruction how ever far it might be up the
Heaton Flats Trail. At that point the Trailbuilders split up, two of us
heading toward Heaton and the rest to continue on at Tototngna. Since I was
the one that volunteered us to go get the obstruction removed, I went to
that effort.
Getting to Heaton Flats was rather difficult, in part because the number
of cars parked along East Fork Road all the way to the trailhead was
staggering. Cars were parked doubled-up, and where
Glendora Mountain Road
meets East Fork, the cars were literally packed in illegally at the
junction three deep.
There are a number of Forest Service fire-access roads along the way,
also, every one of which were blocked by vehicles for which the local
police were ticketing, trying to find vehicle drivers, and getting towed
out of there.
After navigating safely among the cars, joggers, bicycle riders, and
[politely unmentionable] people racing motorcycles along the canyons, we
got to the dirt road and traveled along it with our vehicle at
less-than-walking pace, working to ensure we did not raise dust since there
were a lot of people getting exercise around the Heaton area. It's no fun
choking down dust in the heat, after all, so we took a long time to cross
that quarter mile.
Well, the tree limb was found right there at the campgrounds, right next to
the toilet facility, no hiking up the mountain was needed. The tree is
healthy, and so was the limb, but it had broken off because the main trunk
leans and the limb itself just finally got too heavy and broke, else someone
was climbing on it and it broke.
Regardless it took 2.5 hours to remove the green branches and then carefully
buck up the broken limb,
collecting the debris and piling the pine needles and small branches out of
the way while cutting the broken limb in to sections suitable for the Forest
Service to send a truck to haul out the wood (since ground fires are illegal
at Heaton.)
The other Trailbuilders completed the effort along Tototngna and returned to the
Rincon
Fire Station to finish out the day. Bryan and I lingered in the canyons
a bit listening to the law enforcement officers and Forest Service working,
and were glad that we don't have to work nearly so hard, being volunteers
who can sit down and rest any time we want to.
The following morning Bryan and I returned to Tototngna with a metal rock
bar to lever a dead tree section off of the trail, a section that was way
too heavy to move just by hand. At the same time we once again checked our
brown paint effort along the stairs going down to the lake and we found more
unattended fires, one of which was just feet from two spots where the campers
of the night previously had set illegal ground fires.
AVA member Koo who staffs the
Visitor Center loaned
water buckets to us so we could extinguish the fires, then Koo joined us
in busting apart the illegal fire rings and scattering the extensive ash
in an effort to discourage any further illegal fires in those spots. There
seems to be people who think that the fire bans and safety laws don't apply
to them, and volunteers and USFS employees are kept very busy cleaning up
after them.
So it was an exhausting week, complete with sunburn, but it was also highly
rewarding. There is no better opportunity to get exercise while enjoying
the outdoors than there is volunteering with the Forest Service's
Volunteer
Program.
The Tototngna trailhead sign
The only serious obstruction along the trail gets safety inspected
The tree limb down at Heaton Flats get safety inspected
A better look at the tree limb down at Heaton Flats
After Heaton Flats gets bucked up and cleaned up
Some of the log sections can not be lifted, they are very heavy!
Back at Tototngna the obstruction gets carefully de-limbed
Tototngna obstruction de-limbing
A look at one of the sections of trail -- we have grand views from here!
Another look at the trail's condition, well defined
There is a Sutter Wall along the trail which I had forgotten about
Trailbuilders Carl and Steve pause to catch their breath!
This web site is not operated or maintained by the US Forest Service, and
the USFS does not have any responsibility for the contents of any page
provided on the http://CrystalLake.Name/ web site. Also this web site is
not connected in any way with any of the volunteer organizations that are
mentioned in various web pages, including the
San Gabriel Mountains
Trailbuilders (SGMTBs) or the
Angeles Volunteers Association
(AVA.) This web site is privately owned and operated.
Please note that information on this web page may be inaccurate.