Photographs are offered in the links at the bottom of this page.

Today the San Gabriel Mountains Trailbuilders continued working on the North Fork access trail from the main highway down to the San Gabriel River below. At the same time a second crew of volunteers resumed work on the new bridge going in next to the Environmental Education Center across from the Rincon Station.

The new access trail is located at:

North 34 degrees 14.982 by West 117 degrees, 51.773 at 1754 feet.

Three or four first-time volunteers joined the effort, all of whom were able to work well with the rising heat of the day and also with the at-times strenuous effort of the job at hand: Two guys who do a lot of lengthy bicycle trips up and down these canyons, a guy named Aggie (spelling?) who works just as hard in real life, and another first-timer who worked hard on the first leg of the new trail.

This particular trail building in the Angeles National Forest is part of a larger effort to reduce pollution, improve safety, and increase the water quality in and along the San Gabriel River. (Traditionally the San Gabriel Mountains Trailbuilders work on nature and hiking trails but these access trails are an important aspect of improving conditions in the canyons.)

The morning started on time though there was some paper work to attend to and there was a dead Forest Service radio that needed to be evaluated and sent in for repairs (the PTT switch was intermittent and I suspect there were other problems. These radios are extremely rugged and (I'm convinced, any way) will work under mud, water, and rock slides but occasionally something breaks when a pickax is driven through one.)

The mountain bikers, the other guy (sorry I didn't get your name) and Jannet (will I ever be able to spell her name correctly?) worked on legs one and two of the trail with particular attention to the rock retaining wall along the first switchback. While I didn't get photographs of the work they did, it looks great.

Aggie and I used pick mattox tools on the second leg of the trail, working around the boulders in the path to get them to the point where the rock drilling could be done. Mike, Ben and Bron did the boulder busting using the drill, wedges, and hammers. Tom and Lou did the bridge foundation building South of us at the Environmental Education Center. Bernie worked on the tred of the trail and also worked on busting up rocks with the drill.

This is the first time I've volunteered for this work while wearing earphones connected to an MP3 player. Usually playing music (actually I wasn't playing music, I had Aerosmith loaded in my player instead) might not be exactly a safe idea since usually one wants to be able to hear boulders, rocks, mud slides, flying shovels wicking through the air, and avalanches coming down on you, but I got into the groove, chopping into the embankment in time with Aerosmith, pausing in the middle of "Living on the Edge" when the music stops, then resuming when it did.

Lunch was four cans of tea, drunk while standing shoeless and shirtless in the river (in the Summer I'd be down to a loin cloth if not for the loud objections of the more civilized members of our team.) Getting into the shade and cooling off was good. Climbing back up to the road and sleeping in the shade of an ancient oak tree for about 15 minutes was also good -- while drivers in cars slowed down to stare at my possibly unsightly remains. Once they saw that forestry work was taking place, they assumed I wasn't some dead homeless guy in the road and sped back up again.

All of the boulders on legs one and two that needed to be removed or shifted got moved. As you can see from the photographs, long sections of the trail were worked to the point where they are three and four feet wide. With the boulders out of the way the trail widening effort sweeping up and down the trail will be a bit easier.

It may be that this access trail will be completed in time for the large numbers of visitors expected this Summer.

On the way back down the mountain, we drove past the dead skunk that someone had peeled off of the highway and piled along the side of the road. I asked Ben to pull over and stop so I could add it to my collection but he wouldn't stop.