Written by Max Skolnick-schur, Wild Stew Field Crew Member.
This hitch took the Wild Stew Field Crew to revisit two projects that we’ve been previously working on for some time outside of Superior, Arizona. We started our first day hiking down Arnett Creek to Telegraph Canyon and worked on retreating Tree of Heaven, an aggressively invasive tree that is difficult to manage and responds to many treatment methods with more spreading. This is within our Arnett Creek project area we have been working on since 2016, and while most of the target species in Arnett and Telegraph remain under control, we did expand our targets to include Tree of Heaven more recently.
From there, we moved over one drainage to Queen Creek, our newer project in the area, where we started working earlier this year. Our first priority here was doing a second round of treatment on the several thousand stems of Tree of Heaven mostly in the upper extent of the project area. Once that was completed, we transitioned over to retreatment of African Sumac, Mexican Palo Verde, Oleander, and Tamarisk. We had some wonderful views and some nice off trail bushwhacking. In total we traversed the entirety of the project area on Queen Creek and in Telegraph Canyon, retreating along the way. Plenty more initial treatment remains in Queen Creek, however, and we’ll be returning to the area in January!
The last two days of our hitch were spent joining up with our other crew in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson for a rock work training led by Eric Ruljancich from Outslope Trail Solutions. We learned how to make trails more sustainable and easier to walk on using crib steps and check steps.
