Written by Rebekah Sutherland, Assistant Crew Leader.
This past week, the Wild Stew Field Crew returned to the Gila National Forest for a high elevation hitch in the burn scar of the Black Fire. The Black Fire burned over 300,000 acres of forest in 2022. Today, 4 years later, the trails impacted by this fire are in a stage of regrowth where lots of locust (and other thorny plants) have encroached on the corridor, and burned trees have fallen across the trail. With the goal to open up a section of the Black Range Crest Trail #79, we made our way up an impressive, long, and bumpy road to McKnight Cabin where we set up camp amongst a pocket of live trees and soft grass.
We headed north along the Crest Trail from McKnight Cabin with a crosscut saw, loppers, and tread tools, and began clearing fallen trees and sharp plants from the trail. Along with locust, we were faced with dense brambles of raspberry growing into the trail. Hand pulling proved to be a good tactic to clear back the raspberry, although the small thorns often found their way through our gloves. Luckily, we were gifted with ripe sweet berries to incentivize us to continue. At the end of the hitch, we had brushed 1.9 miles of trail, logged out 79 trees, and built 2 drains and 2 cairns. With a small crew of 4, we were quite proud of these accomplishments!
Throughout the week, it was amazing to see the trail unfold before us. This section of the trail follows along the ridge line, and eventually put us at the top of McKnight Mountain, the highest point of the Black Range at 10,144 feet. The views were vast and beautiful, but staying along the crest posed potential hazard as we are still in monsoon season, and a lightning storm at that elevation can be very dangerous. Each day we watched the clouds closely, and only had to retreat to camp once! Instead of scary daytime storms, we mostly received gentle nighttime showers to lull us to sleep in our tents.
Raspberries.Photo by Rebekah Sutherland.
Kile’s broken chair. Photo by Max Skolnick-Schur.
With beautiful views, a great campsite, and good weather, there’s not much we could complain about. Some days, the task of brushing a trail can get monotonous, but we keep our minds busy with riveting questions such as “if you could only have 5 sauces for the rest of your life, what would they be?” or “how would this world enforce such sauce restrictions?” We have some ideas about answers to these questions, but overall our actual reality where we get to eat wild raspberries, work outside, and daydream about silly alternate worlds is a pretty good one. We left feeling grateful for that, and returned home to Tucson to eat all the sauces we could ever want.
