Trail Work on Rockjock 18jun09

18jun2009
Trail: Rockjock 
Workers: Ken Crump
Time Spent: 10.5 hours including travel time

Work done:

I met Jim at the south end of Rockjock at about 8:15 this morning. Our tentative
plan was to hike to the Crevasse Creek area where I had worked to earlier in the
spring and try to work back to Mossy Falls where we had worked to from the south
last time.  Well, you know what they say about the "best laid plans".  We found
that with all the recent rain and warm weather, that the vegetation had grown heavily,
and in spots the trail was becoming almost overgrown again.  So, we ended up doing
some work as we descended to the cliff line, and then really picked up the pace in
Mossy Canyon.  Jim was using his sling, and I was working with shears. 

It was hot and sweaty work, but with a couple of short breaks, we made it to
the point known as Tshirt, and declared that our turn around point at around 2pm
or a little later. Tshirt is not quite as far as we'd talked about making it, but if
we'd continued I'm afraid we'd have become buzzard bait and we were both
drained of energy.  So, we turned around and started making our way back, doing
some clipping on the return trip also.  We took a good break at Mossy Falls, using
bandannas soaked in the cool water to refresh ourselves.  That and sitting in the
shade for a while seemed to help a lot.  After that it was navigate the slick wet rocks
in the back of the canyon and then make our way up the hill to the road.  We did
that in the only gear left SLOW-LOW. There is a short section near the road that
still needs some attention, but the rest of the area we covered today is now in pretty
good shape.  Who knows what will grow over the next few weeks though.

I have a trailwork map here:

http://www.linvillegorge.net/trailwork.html

Give it 20 seconds or so to load and the trails will be visible with some waypoints.
You can zoom in and out and move around.  A list of tracks will show up.  The
last two are Sunday's, and today's work areas. Clicking the track name will turn
them on and off. Today's track measured about 1.2 miles.  Sunday's about 0.6.

We didn't see a soul today, but the buzzards were watching us closely.
Thanks for another great day in the Gorge, Jim, and thanks for all your help.

Ken