Sagebrush personal hiking blog
The route goes along a ridge, with view of a moly mine.
After several miles on ridge, the ATV trail descends to Cabresto Creek
Departing my friends at the NMVFO, I walk up the road to Taos Ski Valley resort.
Wheeler Peak likely has too much snow for a fun ascent, so the bypass route is up Long Canyon.
Gary, the cook for this project, is up early preparing breakfast. I had not been on one of Gary’s projects before, but he has much experience cooking for CDT and NMVFO projects, and he has also adopted a section of CDT trail, which I also plan to do this year.
He has a custom chuck-wagon rig and all his own kitchen equipment.
The trail we are working on today is Manzanitas, which goes between Hondo Canyon and the ridge, parallel to Gavilan and other trails in this system. We do lopping, sawing downed trees, fixing drainage to the creek we are hiking along, and repairing tread.
A team of two bring a long crosscut saw up near the ridge and work down, while the rest of us use smaller saws to clear what trees we can manage.
After a full day, Gary presents lasagna and peach cobbler from dutch ovens.
It has been a challenging day of physical effort, rewarding to fix trail and spend time with old friends and new. I can only spare this one day working on trail, but the rest of the group will be here several days. Courtney, Dave, Todd, Lynn, Mark, Jenny, Charlie R, Gary, and Ed are awesome volunteers and made my day here a happy one.