Written by Eric Fiorvante, Wild Stew Field Crew Member.
For the last hitch of September, the Wild Stew Field Crew headed back to the Gila Wilderness, camping out of Hummingbird Saddle along the Crest Trail and working on several nearby trails. The views were beautiful, the mountains painted with patches of aspen trees in various stages of turning yellow.
Work began on the Whitewater Trail, which we’ve spent a lot of time on this year, cutting a combination of newly-fallen logs as well as cutting back “pack bumps”, logs that had either been cut too close to the trail previously or slid back downhill after cutting, interfering with pack stock clearance on the trail. We also built two retaining walls to widen the tread on a particularly tight turn. The first half of the hitch brought us some challenges, especially the fact that there were multiple thunderstorms rolling through, intermittently soaking us or forcing us to bail out of more exposed locations. Nonetheless, we persevered and fine-tuned the trail all the way to Redstone Park, 5 miles below our campsite, while also getting some brushing done on the Crest Trail near Hummingbird Saddle.
Mid-hitch, we turned our attention to the Iron Creek Trail, which we and other crews have also been working on the last couple of years. The trail was dense with aspen and locust sprouts that we started brushing through, and there were 36 logs that we cut out. We managed to get about 2.5 miles down-trail in total, most of the way through a pretty dense thicket of locust. Wednesday morning, we got word that the government had shut down, and on our hike out after packing up camp, we finished off the hitch by removing one last log on the Crest Trail that had come down since we came in.
