The Trail Crew has been making good progress on Pine Mountain Trail and as the end of the year approaches we were hoping to punch through to the fire road crossing before the holidays settle in.  There was another record tying turnout of 29 so we were able to reach the fire road on the Nov. 15th workday!

With a large crew we initially split into two groups with one doing minor cleanup work as they hiked into where we left off on Oct. 18.  Nothing major, largely cutting back additional vegetation along the trail edge.  Meanwhile the second group hiked straight through to the work area and resumed new clearing work and by 11 the entire crew was back together.

The day started with a little cleanup on the top section of Pine Mtn Trail just before reaching the junction with East Ridge Trail, but the bulk of the work was spent opening the next section of trail between the intersection and Pine Mtn Fire Rd 0.6 miles ahead.

With large crews it is sometimes easy to relax and lose focus on the work thinking that we'll automatically make good progress while smaller crews require continual attention in order to make headway. 

There was another great turn out of 22 with a few new members and a mix of new and older members.  Most of our workdays go more or less according to plan with an occasional tweak needed if we encounter something unexpected, but our Sept. 20th work included a number of issues that resulted in one adjustment after another. 

The Sept. 6th workday was another modest turnout of 15 but with BIG results as we finished most of the work on the section of Pine Mtn Trail (PMT) coming up from the old Blooms Creek campground and we were able to send two sawyers over to the Hihn Hammond trailhead to continue work from that side as well.

There were 15 people out for the work day on Saturday as we continued clearing and connecting the East Ridge and Pine Mountain trails from the Hinh Hammond fire road. We gathered at 8 AM to get ahead of another warm summer day and were on the trail working by 8:30.  

The last several days have been spent trying to come up with the proper way to mark this Monday's fifth year after the CZU fires that tore through Big Basin.  With the pandemic, 2020 seemed to get harder by the week and it bottomed out on the night of Tuesday August 18th when fire burned through the main visitor area. 

The Trail Crew typically schedules a mid-summer lunch for August in the hope it'll be a warm day that will make wrapping up work early even nicer. Our August 9th workday was just that day.

One of the lessons learned as we did the final work on Sequoia Trail was not to put off for too long the final detail work. We sometimes focus too much on the initial clearing effort since it provides the greatest sense of accomplishment, but it can result in long periods of detail trail work that becomes tedious after a while.