[Volunteers_fosm] Ellis Trail Reroutes

Tue Oct 15 14:48:35 MDT 2024

What a great project! I've been away all summer but am now looking forward to checking out the new N. Ellis reroutes. Not only will this benefit MTB users, but XC skiers as well!Thanks to all involved.PaulSent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone
-------- Original message --------From: "Young, Canyon - FS, NM via Volunteers_fosm" <volunteers_fosm at mailman.swcp.com> Date: 10/15/24  12:25 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: volunteers_fosm at mailman.swcp.com Subject: [Volunteers_fosm] Ellis Trail Reroutes 

Hey there FOSM,

Another big thanks to everyone involved in what became one of the most major trail projects on the Sandia Ranger District this year.

As many of you are likely aware, the Ellis Trail historically followed an old road bed in the clearcut for what was originally going to become a spur road going north off the Crest Hwy decades ago. And thus, the trail had a lot of unnecessary,
 unsustainable, and rather unpleasant ups and downs.

Several years ago, Kerry Wood and the SRD Trails Crew, in conjunction with NM Volunteers for the Outdoors (and possibly FOSM, I don’t recall), completed a handful of reroutes that successfully bypassed some of these unnecessary steep sections.
 I and my old crew were a part of the construction of this first phase, back when I was the seasonal trails crew lead. However, I distinctly recall while hiking back and forth between the trailhead and those initial reroutes and realizing that more would likely
 be more necessary at some point in the future.

Fast forward to this year, I found “Ellis reroutes” on the Cibola National Forest’s Recreation Program of Work, and found out that the entire trail had a 30-meter archaeological clearance corridor as cleared through the 2018 Sandia Hazard
 Tree NEPA Project. With this knowledge, combined with knowing that other priority trails projects would be in limbo while awaiting approval from other resource areas, I saw a prime opportunity to keep my crew’s and FOSM’s Thursday trail construction crew’s
 momentum uninterrupted, all the while accomplishing meaningful work and continuing to whittle down Cibola Recreation’s currently-gigantic POW.

It can be difficult in many scenarios to successfully design sustainable, quality reroutes with the standard 30-m corridor that we as USFS trails staff often have to deal with, given the steepness of our local mountain terrain combined
 with sustainable trail design parameters. However, I knew that in this case, with the sections I would want to bypass and how Ellis was laid out, I essentially had a blank slate to get the entire remainder of Ellis where I wanted it, so long as I put in some
 careful effort with my design and flagging. Two of the nine total reroutes did have to dip a bit outside the 30-meter corridor in order to make sense and be sustainable; however, Sandia’s archaeology staff was able to quickly and painlessly write an addendum
 for these since there were no known cultural resources in the area.

In addition to my ever-present objective for all SRD trails of making the entire length of Ellis more sustainable for our mountain ecosystem and more enjoyable for all trail users, the big-picture outcome I had with this project was to
 make Ellis more mountain bike-able, and thereby aid in better dispersing mountain bike traffic around the district as a whole. By replacing the old, steep, eroded sections with quality reroutes that ride well both ways, this effort will combine with the reroutes
 done on 10K North over the past several years to create a quality loop opportunity on an area of the district that was largely avoided by many cyclists in the past. And, this will hopefully result in a bit less hiker/mountain bike conflict on Challenge and
 other nearby. Even if as little as 5% of the bike traffic on the district is diluted through this effort, that’s a victory in the grand scheme of building SRD’s trail system into a network that can handle the ABQ area’s ever-increasing, multi-use recreational
 demand with minimized future management input from both the USFS and volunteer groups.
Again, thank you to everyone involved for being a part of this major project, and thereby part of SRD’s big-picture mission!

Canyon Young
Trails and Wilderness Program Manager
US Forest Service
Sandia Ranger District
Cibola National Forest
11776 Hwy 337, Tijeras, NM 87059
505-546-7466
canyon.young at usda.gov

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