The American Alpine Club hosts a number of Craggin’ Classic events across the country. These events focus on bringing the climbing community together and they always build in a stewardship project – all things we are totally in love with!
The Fall Highball in Bishop is a great event and excuse to get some Eastern Sierras crushing in while also making some time to help out with stewardship projects at the Buttermilks, The Happys, and The Sads. These climbing areas are very popular and get a lot of traffic during a very short season so the more that the climbing community can do to support and maintain these areas, the better.
Three of our board members – Allyson, Caden, and Matt – all made it out to this event and did some great work on the approach trail to The Sads.
The trail from the Chalk Bluff Road side of The Sads ascends a fairly steep hill and with all the traffic this trail sees it is in fairly good condition. Our team lead a smaller team of volunteers to make some improvements to this trail. With only 3 hours of work and 8 total volunteers, we were able to get a lot of work done.
Ally did some amazing work higher up on the trail where some of the existing stairs had come loose and were being washed out from heavy traffic. Stairs were fixed and cleared off to help better define the correct trail to use.
Caden and Matt added an extra stone stair about 1/4 of the way up – there was a big gap between the existing stairs and the outside edge of the trail was blowing out from folks walking on the outside edge. They also added some rocks on the edge of the trail to provide a visual marker for folks.
We also had some help from local crusher – PAULA!!!!!
There was also another area where folks were side-stepping the stone stairs. This side-stepping was causing the outside edge of the trail to blow out and knocking rocks down the hillside. To stop the erosion issues and keep folks on the correct part of the trail we added a rubble wall. Here is the before photo:
Here is the after photo – note the wall on the left side of the trail and the better defined stairs.
You must log in to post a comment.