On Wednesday the Wood River Bicycle Coalition hosted a successful volunteer trail maintenance night on the Bullion Connector Trail. The event was attended by 13 volunteers and one crew leader. After a safety briefing and a discussion about the work to be performed the crew got to work.

The tone of the evening was not all work, work, work. Lively trailside conversations ran from the rules of International League Soccer to a discussion about perennial grain crops as a new hardware for agriculture. Wow, what a wide variety of interests a group like this brings to a night-out.

Working out of the BLM Croy Trailhead, the volunteers repaired a section of fall-line trail-tread that had become “U”- shaped. First, to remedy the source of the problem, they installed two drains on the section of trail. Then the volunteers bucketed in soil, filling the “U”-shaped tread and compacting the soil into place. Another team of volunteers used loppers and folding handsaws to brush back vegetation that was growing into the travel-way. Another task was cleaning out and improving the trail’s existing drains. Many of the trail’s drains had become clogged with soils and vigorous plant growth, so they needed to be cleaned out and expanded.

 

Other areas of the trail had developed ruts where travel on the open trail had included an area that is always slow to dry out. At the time of the volunteer work, the soil in the area was still moist, but not squishy, so it was a good time to fashion repairs. For the repairs, we used our grubbing tools (Pulaskis, Rogue hoes, McLeods, pick-mattocks) to knock the high areas into the ruts, and then ramming the loose soil into the ruts to facilitate the repairs. Ruts channel water, which can lead to erosion of the trail tread, so we like to get rid of them when conditions are prime for doing so.

The WRBC treated everyone to beverages and pizza following the work session. Thanks for the work and food and drink WRBC!