Maintenance hike on the Irish Hill section

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

As of last November I'm the steward of the mile and a half section of trail between Irish Hill Road and Damon Road. This was my first hike of the year through the whole thing, so I was excited at the prospect of doing some trail-clearing. I parked at the crook of Irish Hill Road and hit the trail at about 5:00. The first stream crossing was vastly easier than it was in March, when the water was twice as high from the spring melt.

Carrying two axes and a machete was awkward, but I soon discovered a way to make it less so. I remembered that my cheap little worn-out day pack had a carry loop on top. I stuck both axes in there and they stayed well enough for the purposes of this hike. I need to come up with a safer and more secure arrangement, though.

Red wintergreen berries provided the first cheerful wink of color along the trail. Withering trout lily leaves testified to yellow that had passed, and cinquefoil leaves promised more yellow to come.

I could hardly believe how soon I'd passed over the stream crossing that Grace and I helped redirect on July 4th. In March, when I was gingerly making my way through, over and around mud and runoff with a six-year-old, it seemed like a much longer hike!

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

I passed out of the woods and headed south on the wider section that parallels the hedgerow. I found that part more delightful, not just because I've spent less time on it, but because of the forget-me-nots sprinkled liberally along the verges. The way they grew partially obscured among the grasses and tiny maple trees made me think of faeries.

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

Along with the touch-me-nots I saw lots of dandelions, both blooming and seeding. Once again I was rewarded for taking the time to get some macro shots of a flower that I've seen hundreds of millions of times: when I looked at these pictures later, it was like seeing a dandelion for the first time.

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

I stopped to take pictures of violets, apple blossoms, and a bird's nest made of mud and straw that I found just a step off the trail, about six feet off the ground in an apple tree. Now I wish I'd have taken pictures of the wild mustard that stitched the trail with yellow. What new intricacies would a closeup have revealed? I'll make a point to find out next time.

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

Now that I've looked at the shots, I have to say that the most rewarding of all the photographic subjects on this hike were last year's burdock. I love the way the seeds were so clearly waiting to be shaken loose by an animal attempting to worry the burr free from its fur, and I'm fascinated by the golden yellow hooks that I never would have noticed if not for the macro shots.

Even more so than the forget-me-nots, the copses of myrtle made the trail magical. There are large patches of open, shady woods along the western edge of the trail that resemble nothing so much as a gently undulating sea of periwinkle. In one particularly dramatic spot, the remains of an old tree jut up from a mound so that the dark green sea seems to wash against a craggy island spire.

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

When I saw the treefall across the trail a few hundred yards north of Damon Road, my heart rejoiced. It's been far too long since I've had the opportunity for some real trail-clearing. This one was nothing compared to some of the monster blowdowns I cleared in the Adirondacks back around the early aughts, but then again I'm not in my best shape right now, so it was a good workout.

My father's words about always clearing the ground before swinging the axe echoed in my ears as I went to work with the machete. I got the little stuff cleared away and then went to work with the axe.

It's always much more challenging to chop through logs when they're suspended over the ground like these were: the position puts you at a muscular disadvantage, and the lack of bracing means that a lot of your striking force is dissipated. So naturally I place my first cut to bring down the entire length of log that needs to be cleared.

I tend to cut up logs so that the pieces are right at the upper limit of what I can move. This always feels a bit weird because I'm minimizing the time I spend chopping, an activity that I enjoy more than almost anything. But it also makes it as difficult as possible for me to wrestle the pieces off the trail. This is exactly what I want, because it gives me the best possible full-body workout.

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

So I got that big log up on the bank where it couldn't possibly jump out and bite anyone, and took some shots of my kill. I just looked back at the time stamps on the pictures, and found that fifty-nine minutes passed between the last shot of the treefall and the first shot of the cleared trail. Under an hour: not bad for someone so out of shape.

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

From Link Trail Hike, Irish Ridge Road to south of Damon Road - May 15, 2010

When I reached Damon Road there was still plenty of sunlight, so I decided to continue south for a while. This section was even more delightfully forget-me-not-ridden, but another problem soon soured the experience: it was a mud pit, and it was obvious that ATVs were the reason. I made my winding way, avoiding the mud as best I could, but still wound up with wet feet by the time I turned around, probably less than a mile in.

On the way back I met a hiker with her dogs and had a pleasant conversation about the trail. When I reached my car and headed back toward Oneida, I was shocked to see that it was 8:30. I'd sure had a lot of fun on the trail for three and a half hours to have flown by so fast!

Work Hike Details (July 4)

For many more pictures from this hike, see the Picasa web album.

Grace and I met Steve, Mike, Carol, and Kathy at about 9:00 in Cazenovia. From there we carpooled to a section of trail a few miles south of Stone Quarry Art Park. We divvied up the pick mattocks, shovels, rakes, buckets, bow saws and sundry supplies and headed south. Grace and I talked to Steve as we followed the winding trail through the woods. He's a retired Air Force doctor who does volunteer work now, so he's an interesting person to talk to. Of course Grace, being a Columbia student, had more in the medical line to talk to him about.


These beautiful little flowers were all over the place. At the time, Grace and I thought they were wintergreen, but they turned out to be partridge berry.

We got to the site, dropped the gear, and followed Steve as he explained the whys and wherefores of the project. There was a beautiful view down to the stream on our left from along the top of the steep right bank. For a hundred yards or so the trail ran along that edge and then crossed near the ravine's downhill entrance. But the crossing itself had become a problem. The stream banks, along with the trail leading down to them, were steep enough to cause falls. Today's goal was to close off that section of trail and establish a crossing upstream.

Steve had chosen a point where the stream flowed over a broad, flat, level shelf of solid rock. We would be cutting a new trail that curved to the left off the existing one, forming a switchback with a gentle slope down to the crossing.


The main engineering task was to level off the trail and extend it out into the stream so that hikers will be able to take a single, short step down onto the stone. Since the edge of the stream was very muddy, this meant constructing a platform. Steve told us what size rocks we needed and sent us to gather them from the soon-to-be-ex-crossing. I started hauling buckets of these rocks up the trail while Steve went to work with his chainsaw.








By the time I'd formed a decent pile of rocks downstream of the crossing, Steve had returned with two sawed-off pine logs about six feet long and eight inches in diameter. He placed the logs about three feet apart on one end of a sheet of Eco-plastic fabric. He and Mike began carefully placing the rocks onto the fabric between the logs, fitting them together to form a solid foundation. I, Grace and Kathy kept hauling rocks while the platform slowly took shape. Soon Steve folded over the Eco-plastic and tucked it in, making a sort of rock sandwich.




Before we could start piling on the dirt, we had to have a dirt supply. Fortunately there was one forthcoming: the switchback trail we were about to carve into the slope. Steve spotted an adorable little salamander, and I got some shots of it while he explained about digging the trail. I also got some shots of a harvestman that was very anxious to be part of a photo op.







Per Steve's instructions, we used the mattocks to chop and slough off the top layer of organic material and roots, and then went to work with the shovels and rakes. The idea was to make a trail with a consistently gentle slope, and a slight outward slant so that rain wouldn't collect on it. We cut the upward edge with the mattocks, pulled back the organic layer, shoveled the underlying dirt downward, collected the dirt in buckets, and shuttled it down to the platform. Pretty soon we couldn't see where the trail ended and platform started: we were building a level terminus to the crossing. As we were finishing up, we met a pair of hikers with their dog. They were the last hikers to travel down the old trail.


The new trail was taking shape, so we branched out into new jobs. Grace and Carrol took hammers and went to work removing old blazes and nailing up new ones. The rest of us piled branches onto the trail just beyond the new bend so that people would know to take a left. I spied a medium-sized pine tree lying uprooted about forty feet north of the old path, so I grabbed a bow saw, cut if off at the base, and wrestled it back through the woods. This would have been a lot easier if the base hadn't been pointing away from the trail to begin with; I had to turn it around before I could start dragging. By the time I'd hauled it onto the newly closed section of trail, I felt very close to my father. I'd had an excuse to do something egregiously manly, which was just his style.

By the time I got this done, everyone but Kathy was at the other end of the new section, clearing trail and blocking off the old stream crossing. Steve was just about ready to wrap things up when Grace and I said our goodbyes a little before 1:00. We had a date with my nephew for another Link Trail hike!




As we walked back through the woods to the car we marveled at the dramatic change we'd wrought in just a few hours. I agreed with Grace that it was a shame to close off such a beautiful section of trail, but I pointed out that people will still make their way around our little jumble of brush to have a quiet lunch off the trail. And besides, the new, improved trail looks fantastic!

Work Hike Video

It may take me a while to prepare my entry for the July 4th work hike; there was a lot of great strategy and leadership and hard work, not to mention fungus and flowers and arachnids and a beautiful little orange salamander. But for now, here's the video I took. It shows the results of about eighteen person-hours of work.

A Blaze of Glory

I assumed that this work hike would involve trail-clearing so I loaded my trunk with axes and machetes. I left Oneida at 8:30, driving west through Clockville and south on Nelson Road. Other than the guy in the Saturn who passed me and the car ahead on a double line, it was a gorgeous, crisp, sunny morning. The valley was filling with more yellows and reds than I've seen around Oneida in years.

Just before 9:00 I pulled into the designated meeting spot: the parking area at the southwest tip of Cazenovia Lake. Then I found out that Kathy Eisele had sent me an e-mail telling me that all we'd be doing was marking trail. It turned out that Yahoo had put her message in my spam folder, so here I was with a trunk full of blades instead of the one thing I needed: a hammer. Thankfully Kathy had at least one extra.

Once everyone was gathered we formed a caravan and drove to the Dugway Road trailhead. Coordinator Kathy Eisele handed out the new blazes to the group: me, Margaret Maloney, George Zacharek, Kiley Barr, Ron and Linda Wallace, Patrick Dermody, Bill Zimmerman, Jonathan Bienes, Kurt Wheeler and his three young daughters, Chanda Vincent, and Al Larmann. The youngsters went ahead to clear some brush near the far end of the trail while the rest of us who weren't supervising them paired off. Each pair got a stack of yellow plastic rectangles with two holes for nails. Our job was to replace the old blue blazes with these new yellow ones.

Kathy instructed us to skip about a dozen markers ahead of the foremost pair and begin blazing from there. This leapfrog pattern would allow us to efficiently cover the whole trail. My partner Margaret and I started working on our section and I soon learned that there's more to trail marking than I'd expected. The basic rules turned out to be as follows.

• Blaze on the right side of the trail.


• Leave the nails sticking out so the tree has room to grow before it swallows the marker.


• To indicate direction change use two blazes, the one on top offset in the direction of the turn.


• Don't overblaze; if the old marker was unnecessary, don't replace it.


• Don't blaze cherry trees; the wood is valuable.

It seemed to me that many of the previously marked trees were so young that a nail might kill them within a few years. I tried finding larger trees, but in many cases the bark was so spongy and thick that I would have had to bury the nail. Sometimes there were no suitable trees on the right side of the trail, so we had to use a cherry or a tree on the left. All the rules seemed made to be broken.

Margaret and I alternated friendly chatting with scratching our heads over which blazes not to replace (the trail was seriously overblazed) and which rules to break when there was no satisfactory tree to the right of the trail. Per our instructions we turned around when we ran into the group of youngsters and started working on the other side. I didn't count how many blazes we replaced but when I got back to the
trailhead at about 1:10 I was amazed at the enormous stack of blue markers filling my cargo pocket. We'd done more work than I'd realized.