So somewhere in there is a trail. I guess the pics do not show that really well.
Scrounging Firewood (and other stuff)
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So somewhere in there is a trail. I guess the pics do not show that really well.
All you need is a bonfire now
These are a few of the messes I cleaned up last summer.
The first photo is in an area with recurring problems from beavers... As I recall I put 6 trees on the ground that time.
In the second one a maple uprooted and took out 4 other trees. The third photo shows those trees mostly bucked... MS261 and MS461, cant hook, wedges, 3 lb hammer, and Yeti water bottle. Note the nice big chips... l keep my chains sharp... hand filed. That day I punched a hole through the mess so trail users could get through. My felling partner came the next day and we finished up that job. I took some of the lone ash and some of the maple for firewood.
The forth photo is of 8 guys touring from the NYC area on the Empire State Trail and heading to Albany. They climbed through the mess... A walnut uprooted and took out 6 other trees. That walnut was the one mentioned in my previous post... the main leader and large branch on the bottom were heavily loaded.
It was so wet last year that the ground was saturated and quite a number of large tree uprooted in the wind as they didn't have stable roots. There are a lot cut and fill benches and berms on rail trails which can make it challenging to work... My broken ankle in 2019 as the result of an embankment giving way pays witness to that.
The first photo is in an area with recurring problems from beavers... As I recall I put 6 trees on the ground that time.
In the second one a maple uprooted and took out 4 other trees. The third photo shows those trees mostly bucked... MS261 and MS461, cant hook, wedges, 3 lb hammer, and Yeti water bottle. Note the nice big chips... l keep my chains sharp... hand filed. That day I punched a hole through the mess so trail users could get through. My felling partner came the next day and we finished up that job. I took some of the lone ash and some of the maple for firewood.
The forth photo is of 8 guys touring from the NYC area on the Empire State Trail and heading to Albany. They climbed through the mess... A walnut uprooted and took out 6 other trees. That walnut was the one mentioned in my previous post... the main leader and large branch on the bottom were heavily loaded.
It was so wet last year that the ground was saturated and quite a number of large tree uprooted in the wind as they didn't have stable roots. There are a lot cut and fill benches and berms on rail trails which can make it challenging to work... My broken ankle in 2019 as the result of an embankment giving way pays witness to that.
You can see it in pics 5 - 8. We don’t have after shots of the recent stuff yet. We‘ll get through the brush, then work on the tread.
Here both have been done, but will still be improved.
Here are good before and after, another spot you don’t see a trail I assume.
I improved this area myself, pulling the slash and throwing it well away from the trail (I think there’s a pic somewhere).
Lunch time. This tread had to be dug out, and the twenty feet on the right was solid brush.
There are long stretches that we have to dig out the tread, there was little or none.
The beaver's chips beat yours...just sayin'.
All you need is a bonfire now
One of our new guys thinks we need to do something with the slash. I relayed that to the retired wilderness ranger, I said the only way would be to bring in a chipper, or clear vegetation and make burn piles. The first one obviously isn’t going to happen, we’re not dragging a chipper up to 6-3/4 miles up a foot trail. And she shook her head at doing burn piles, I don’t know if that would even be allowed. Her and I agreed that we don’t want to add more work to an already enormous amount of work, she just keeps stressing that we get the slash (cut branches) well away from the trail. The trail is still a work in progress, we work on what’s the worst first.
It's been years since I grubbed out any single track mountain bike trails... Very tough work! I work in mostly forested areas but those segments that have powerlines on them now do have a lot of brush...
For the past decade or so the development and expansion of the rail trail network in my county officially took off. Prior to that I'd quietly keep segments of trails open with a bow saw and machete and that was mostly to keep from being torn up by the thorns. By next year another 15 miles or so of trail will be fully developed. Then there is about another 20 miles to tackle but that may take a couple decades due to the conditions--translation is very expensive repairs are needed on the rail corridor.
The M.O. for our group is to "compost in place." We cut the brush up relatively small so it lays close to the ground. Most of it is unnoticeable within 1-2 years... but we have rain and snow to help the rotting along. When the ash died in mass we had to relax our standards and just lay the chunked up trunks along the sides of the trails and not worry too much about the appearances... Fortunately ash rots quickly.
One of our guys does this, I didn’t understand why at first, he explained it. It’s more work too, but still the best way to do something about it.
One of our people brings in a mountain bike sometimes, these are from last weekend. He’s experimenting with ways to get big rocks out of the way.
...and it provides cover for wildlife! Throwing that in gets more people to buy into the notion of "composting in place."
It's amazing what you can do with feathers and wedges in the field. The advent of battery powered tools helps those efforts along. I've got some old star chisels from the days of using a drilling hammer and chisel to make the holes. OMG... I did that once as a kid and don't care to try that again!
Our crew has built three rock retaining walls this year.
The section of the Rail Trail down here is maintained by Putnam County workers, or contracted pros.
No one else is allowed near it!
No one else is allowed near it!
I've ridden that trail... Sounds like it's owned or at least controlled by the county. Where I am there are rail trail segments owned by land trusts, local municipalities, and the county on lands owned in fee or via a contractual relationship (usually permanent easements). It gets tricky when a municipality or the county owns the trail as union contracts with municipal workers may dictate that union labor do the maintenance. Capital projects are typically contracted out but not all... Overall, rail and canalway trails can be very complicated behind the scenes!
This is a National Recreation Trail, it’s hard to believe that it’s so neglected with that title. It wasn’t on the Forest Service’s things to do list, I approached them about working on it. It had major maintenance in 1989. And supposedly again in 2008, but we’re not buying that. Not with what we found growing in the trail.
Sounds familiar... Similar to NYS slapping "Bike Route" signs up on highways and printing maps of them... Great if you are an experienced cyclist who is not intimidated by traffic. Absolutely horrible if you wanted to take your family for a bicycle trip. Paying lip service is cheap and gains some brownie points but that's about it... I know some elected officials who jump in front of the press to announce great things and then the execution falls flat due to no, or inadequate funding. It takes people like us to make things happen!
Yes.
When you read about our trail online, nothing tells you the back half is impassable and largely indiscernible. They find out in person, or come away thinking they went to the destination because there was no more trail. I’ve had people tell me they went to Garlic Falls (the destination), I ask them if they were crawling through brush for three miles. They look confused and say “No, it was a good trail”. Then you didn’t go to Garlic Falls. We want to put a sign at what use to be the end of cleared trail, with the name of that creek and distance to Garlic Falls (with arrows). That creek has a tiny falls visible from the trail, Garlic Falls drops about 600 feet.
This picture shows most of this falls, it’s only a little bit longer on the bottom.
There are four cataracts of this falls.
Well done!
Do you get any snow in the area? Maybe make piles for when it snows next? Any brushpiles are also good habitat for small animals
