Draft One

The First day out was a day trip to finish a re-lo (or relocation for all you non-trail workers:-) of the Austin Brook Trail. Seems some beaver had decided to move into the area and build a few dams here and there, the effect being to pretty much turn a section of the trail into a small mountain pond. Quite picturesque, but a wee bit tricky to hike through. Once upon a time someone would have probably just shot the little fella and broke up the dams. But in these enlightened times we left him be and decided to move the trail a bit.

 New trail cutting is rare up in the White Mountains, most of that work was finished long years ago. So it's kinda exciting to be working on a new stretch of trail. Most of the cutting of brush and such had been done by a previous crew of volunteers a few days earlier. We went in and did the final tidying up. Clipping away obstructing branches, painting blazes.  We also removed bog bridges from the old trail route and filled in the old trail with brush so that hikers wouldn't stray down the wrong path, the old blazes were scrubbed of the trees as well.

 The next day we headed out to Pinkam Notch to do a bit of work on a backwoods cross country ski trail. Over time lost of brush had grown up in the path and needed to be clipped back so that skiers could pass by, of course come winter there would be two or three feet of snow on the ground so this entailed a lot of use of clippers over our heads, as well as a lot of work on our knees. We learned all about hobble bush on this run...

 The last tree days we spent at a site farther from our base of operations at Camp Dodge, the Avalon Trail. So we loaded up our gear and spent the three days living and working in the backwoods. Here we cleaned out drained ditches. Work that has you thinking all about psychology and fluid mechanics. And a lot of swinging of my favorite tool, the pick-mattic.