Written by Kile Stumbo, Assistant Crew Leader.
Our courageous crew trekked out to the Gila Wilderness again this past week to continue cross cutting and brushing work on Whitewater trail. We hiked the 4.5 miles to our camp at Redstone Park with Julie, an Arizona Wilderness Coalition alumni, joining us as an awesome addition to our field crew this summer! Over our first few days, we broke up into two saw teams and got to work crosscutting, with two of our crew mostly brushing along the trail corridor and doing some occasional treading and scouting ahead.
We celebrated both Jonathan’s birthday and the summer solstice on this hitch. On Sunday, we found an epic elk skull, providing a fascinating reminder of how big elk antlers can be. What a wonderful wilderness to be in for such momentous occasions!
Jonathan headed out on Monday to scout the Chiricahuas for an upcoming hitch. On Tuesday, we got some light rain on and off as we cut more logs and then brushed and cleaned up several tent pads for a future spike camp located between Redstone Park and Hummingbird Saddle. Joe brushed up a storm and single-bucked logs with our D-handle crosscut while our saw teams of Eric & Foster and Julie & Kile finished up strong, cutting the last few logs we could get our saw teeth into before heading back to camp.
On Wednesday, we cleared a few straggler logs on the Redstone Trail on the way out before getting back to our work truck, awaiting us with a dead battery. Luckily, a good Samaritan with great timing stopped and gave us a jump for which we’re very grateful. And to top it all off a beautiful horny toad (desert horned lizard) stopped by briefly to wish us a fond farewell. It seemed to be communicating something along the lines of, “I’m just a rock, don’t mind me.”
We worked on 2.21 miles of trail over the hitch, brushing dense and thorny vegetation from much of it, cut around 260 logs, touched up tread in several spots, and built a few dozen cairns near easy to miss switchbacks and creek crossings.
