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.
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.