Monadnock Trails Heat (I mean... Week!)

 I'm not sure why, but Monadnock Trails Week (MTW) always seems to fall on the hottest week of the year.  Maybe it's because we schedule it in mid-July every year, hoping for a miraculous 75 degrees and 20% humidity...and instead getting the reality that is 92 degrees 99% humidity!   In any case, Monadnock Trails Week this year was HOT!  The 39 volunteers and 8 staff who participated sweated and suffered (and smiled!) like crazy while climbing the mountain each day.

Rock work on White Arrow Trail

Our first few days were spent near treeline on the White Arrow Trail, constructing a new stone walking surface over a 60' stretch of muddy trail.  We had originally planned to construct timber bog bridging over at least 20' of this stretch but in the end we had so much rock to work with that we decided to go with durability over speed and make the entire length in rock.  Many gigantic boulders were unearthed and moved  into place using the griphoist and rock bars, and we also had to create a lot of gravel "the old fashioned way"...using a sledge hammer to break larger rocks into smaller ones.  The gravel was used to raise the surface of the trail and set the large rocks into.  This project came out beautifully in the end, and we only hope that it will stay above water when the spring rains come next year.  

Coggins sisters operating the griphoist

Rock step project near completion

On days 3 and 4 we worked on the White Cross Trail, one of the most heavily used routes to the summit that leaves from Park headquarters.  The White Cross Trail is suffering from one of the most common problems on trails used as heavily as those on Monadnock- bootleg trails.  Bootleg trails are those created by hikers preferring to walk through the forest on the side of the trail, as opposed to walking on the rocky and compacted surface of the trail itself.  This practice ends up causing erosion and results in widening of the trails over time, as the old "bootleg" becomes a rocky surface just like the rest of the trail and a new bootleg is created.  Our job was to fill in all of the bootleg trails with forest debris (branches, rocks, fallen trees, leaves, etc.) in order to make them clearly uninviting to hikers.  We felled a lot of dead and dying spruce trees (extra pokey and unfriendly to walk through) to place in the bootlegs over these two days!

Gale Tobbe helps fill in bootleg trails on White Cross Trail

John and Lise Bigl taking a break from bootleg filling

The final day of Monadnock Trails Week found us on the Monta Rosa trail, a pretty little trail that leads to a secondary peak with the same name, Monta Rosa.  Here we constructed a new footbridge over a small drainage so that hikers will not have to get their feet wet in crossing.  This was a perfect closing project for MTW 2012, as it is always satisfying to build a bridge in a few hours and then watch hikers walking over it and appreciating your handiwork.

Fred Tobbe, Ray Jackson, and Bruce Richards work on pinning the Monta Rosa bridge with  rocks

Doug McKenna and Aaron Horner deck the Monta Rosa bridge

Crew on the last day, on the Monta Rosa bridge!

This year's MTW set a new record for number of person-hours worked - at 636, at least 100 hours over any previous trails week.  We also had 39 great volunteers and a number of Forest Society and State Parks staff participate, many for several days.  Thank you to everyone who helped out during the week- we wholeheartedly appreciate it!  (And sorry about the heat!)