Sagebrush personal hiking blog
The NMVFO held a trail building project from Friday July 26 to Monday in the Sandia Mountains, car camping (after two changes of venue in planning) at Capulin Snow Play Area and working on the nearby Ellis Trail.
The Play Area had a shelter that proved useful to hide from rain the first evening.
Trail work involved several small re-routes on heavily traveled path, so extra care was taken to engineer a maintainable tread.
Much rock work happened.
I went with Cairn to a section of CDT trail outside of Pie Town to see if this would be a good section to adopt. Cairn likes 4WD, and I like trails, so this seemed to be a good overlap.
From Mangas Road south, we took a series of two-tracks with high center, not really suitable for normal cars, and arrived at the northern terminus to “Segment 86”, where BLM land ends and USFS land begins. A trailhead sign was here, unexpectedly, since the road access seemed pretty challenging to me.
The trail here is single track, real constructed trail headed south over a rise of low mountains, among juniper and pinon. Water bars and a rolling dip show that someone is caring for the trail and trying to keep erosion in check.
Cairn stands next to a cairn near the trailhead that needs work.
A class was held at the Grants NM USFS field office for volunteers interested in adopting sections of the CDT— visiting at least twice a calendar year and willing to do trail work on their section, clearing corridor of brush, fixing tread, and sawing small fallen trees blocking pathway. The class was led by Gabe from the CDTC, who was a co-leader on the Gila River project.
At least 18 people attended the class, including Alvin from the Grants USFS office, Kerry from the Sandia office, many enthusiastic members of the Cibola Trail Alliance, and several Backcountry Horsemen, Zuni Mountain Chapter. Some people from Las Cruces were present, planning to adopt trail in the Silver City area.
