Life on the Antelope/Taylor Lake Trail

(field notes from SBTS Crew Leader, Henry O'Donnell)
This week was pretty normal at work there was no camping in the extreme cold or dealing with animals in the middle of the night. We all decided to commute for the week so we car pooled as much as possible. The drive from our tool barn in Graeagle to the job is three hours round trip so it made for a lot of driving. We had some cloudy weather and a little rain one day. We had to cancel work on Friday because there were 60 MPH winds forecasted which would make very hazardous conditions under 100 foot tall burnt dead trees.

The SBTS crew continued doing restoration work on the Antelope / Taylor Lake Trail from the Middle Creek Trail intersection back toward Antelope Lake. This entire trail system does not appear to get much use except from the mountain lions, deer and bears. When a trail doesn’t get much use it is difficult to keep Mother Nature from reclaiming it.

There are very few areas that have erosion threats, so our main focus is to fall hazard trees that will end up blocking the trail and extensive brush removal. In this area the brush grows extremely fast so we are cutting it back four to six feet away from the tread and chopping out all the root wads. If we simply cut the brush it will return in as little as one year.

For the weeks total we fell 78 hazard trees most of which fell in the trail so then we had to buck them out as well, we brushed and restored 992 feet of tread and reestablished the intersection of the Middle Creek trail.

~ Henry O'Donnell