Hello all,

A little late getting this out, but last Thursday the trail construction crew was back at the Challenge Trail extension, continuing to build southwards and eastwards from Tree Spring to Bill Spring. The sideslope (the hillside that the trail contours) for the last few weeks has been incredibly steep. If you picture a cross-section of steep sideslope, and the "triangle" that needs to be hacked out when benching in tread, you'll see that this means moving a lot of dirt. The requisite stumps and rocks too... but mainly these people are moving SO MUCH DIRT. For an added challenge, the disturbed dirt gets dispersed downhill, far off the trail, to keep it from looking like part of the tread. We finally added some shovels to our tool selection on Thursdays, and now we wonder why we didn't start bringing them earlier. Finish-work often involves removing yet more dirt from the backslope (the uphill side of the tread), and can be just as labor-intensive as roughing in new tread.

See attached for photos from the 14th... though frankly they don't do it justice. :D

The volunteers were David Bernstein, Jenny Blackmore, Sim Cook, Phil Cromer, Luis Cuadros, Byron Garner, Larry Larrichio, Pat & Mike Madden, Eric Russell and Cleve Sharp.

Jenny Blackmore

FOSM Project Leader