Two Weeks in Bear Creek, But The Bears Are Only Legend...

We survived Bear Creek! And saw no bears... Whatayagonnado

For the past two weeks, we were working along and on the Bear Creek Trail in the Pike National Forest, trail 667 to be specific, cleaning out sediment detention structures that were built last year and building a few new ones in efforts to protect the habitat of the greenback cutthroat trout that live in the creek.   The trail is extremely popular for dirt bikers, mountain bikers, hikers, and horse riders. This extensive use coupled with the natural erosion of the mountain from annual rainy seasons results in a significant amount of sediment runoff which flows down the mountain and into the Bear Creek stream, disturbing the trout.  If nothing was done about the runoff, the trail would probably have to be closed to try and slow down the damage.

So, with that brief background, let's take a look at some structures!

 

These V-shaped structures are what we worked on for most of the first week.  The logs create the height and basically a wall that the sediment can build up against,  with freshly cut pine bows placed in the nooks and crannies in between for maximum protection! We also made our own stakes from straight sticks for support. We constructed a couple of new ones, including the one above, but for most we were doing maintenance, which means digging out all of the collected sediment, hauling it in buckets uphill, and distributing it over the hill and behind fallen logs and rocks that would ideally hold it back longer before it falls back down again... it was a lot of hard and monotonous work, but we kept our spirits up like we always do, quoting favorite movies... talking in strange accents... yelling and screaming...

Here's a shot of the beginning stages of our biggest project which we worked on for much of week 2.  Basically, we had to scout out, harvest, haul, and then strategically place about a bajillion huge rocks to make these steps/sediment dams.  We put in three stone dams, one giant log dam, re-cobbled and did some re-construction on a drainage, and installed some logs around the edge of the trail for extra support and as extra guidance for riders. Here's a look at part of the final product from the opposite angle.

One more fun and significantly less physically demanding thing we got to do for a bit this week was willow transplants on the creek banks around several bridges in the trail.  The extra foliage will add root support and hold back a bit of sediment as well as prevent bikes from crossing through the creek instead of over the bridges. We cut branches of willows in each area and cut them up more to make little bundles.  The bundles are buried in the creek bed and hopefully will sprout and grow in a year or two. THEY'RE LIKE A LITTLE CHRISTMAS BUNDLE OF JOY! Except they are just willow sticks...

Over the weekend Chris and Emily and I decided to have ourselves a real "Goonies" adventure and set out on a quest to explore several mines in the area! Our first cave was a real success, we traveled some 50 feet into it until we hit TWO WALLS, one of stone where the tunnel ended... THE OTHER A BUZZING AND ACTIVE KNAT/MOSQUITO WALL THAT THREATENED US WITH DISEASE AND DEATH AND  MORE!!

Please take note, this type of intense exploration is extremely dangerous and should not be attempted by anyone but REAL GOONIES... like us.

 Although we were unsuccessful in our quest for mine number two, we did get to explore an area with a bunch of abandoned, run down cabins called Nelson's Camp.  I feel like it was an old village for miners... but I haven't actually done the research yet so DON'T QUOTE ME. Minors liked Skippy Super Chunk right? We also found a shot up Jeep Cherokee on the side of a dirt road...  I'M PRETTY SURE THAT CRAZY LADY FROM THE GOONIES DROVE THIS CAR I'M JUST SAYING!

Adventure is out there...

Our camp set-up for this hitch was a bit more elaborate than usual as we had some assistance with our bear hangs from our RMFI supervisors, our need for the hangs was much more critical in this area as bears are said not to be uncommon. IT'S SO FASCINATING, LOOK!

HOW DID THOSE GET THERE!?!?!!!!

What a lovely kitchen WOOOOWWWWWW!

OH THOSE CRAZZZZZEEEE BOYZZZ!

 

This is Loud's Cabin, right next to our campsite, the former summer home for Professor Frank Herbert Loud and his family in the 1870'sish era!

This weekend we've been hanging out in the Springs mostly, gettin' some sun and coffee and flipping delicious food today. Grace and I watched Harry Potter last night on her laptop in our tent, so perfect!

Don't worry, we work off all of our weekend indulgences in the first couple days of work... yummm!

This week we're back at the South Platte for a couple of days, which is where we did our first 3 weeks of work.  We'll be wrapping things up there Monday and Tuesday and then heading over to Signal Butte to put in stone steps on the trail there for the rest of the week. Then next weekend we're headed to Denver to hang out and sleep in our beds for 4th of July weekend! And then it's on to Pikes Peak for our FINAL hitch and last three weeks of work and then to Denver for one week with everyone in Americorps! And then to BOISSSSSEEE and beyond... all over the next five weeks of course, but it might just fly by real fast... Gahhhh craziness. Our parking is about to expire and I didn't have time to proofread so please excuse any grammatical nonsense. Goodbye for now friends!

South Colony Lakes Basin and the Journey to Humboldt's Peak!

It's really happening, two consecutive weeks of blog posts.  Hopefully you're not too overwhelmed... here we goooooooooo!

This past week the team and I were working and camping in the BEAUUUUTIFUL South Colony Lakes Basin at a campground near the base of Humboldt Peak.  Let's have a look around and get acquainted with the site shall we!?


First, we must venture over the great bridge that crosses the creek running alongside our site!

Ah, yes, and just on the other side is the kitchen! Here we find Emily and Mr. Tri slaving over a delightful  mixed potato cheese soup

And a bit farther down the path, a charming and spacious tent village!

Yup, just the typical scenery in a day in the life of Water 2... but wait something's missing.  We've completely forgotten about the WAG system, the teams bucket bathroom!  We really can't pass over something so critical soooo...

Here she is! (Thanks Emily for the photo!) It's interesting to think back before this project began and how all of Water 2's fellow Americorpsians just couldn't get past one simple detail of our project, "You have to poop in bags!?!?" Yes, yes it's true, during our stays in areas without toilets or porta potties, we have to use the WAG system (I don't remember what it stands for?) of buckets and bags as part of efforts to fulfill "Leave No Trace" camping requirements.  It isn't always an enjoyable process, but we gotta save all of the animals and all of the woods and all of nature so, you know, no big deal.  But seriously people, get past the poo.  There's a lot of great things happening on this project, let's take a look at this weeks highlights!

Our work this week was on several of the campsites in the Basin, finishing them up from work in years past so that they can be ready to go for this summer's season. We're told that at times the area can have over 500 people camping and hiking at once.  It's a popular spot with trails to several 14,000 ft peaks and a prime camping spot anyway with a variety of gorgeous trees and vegetation and the creek that rushes right through the site.  It was a week of hard work for sure, harvesting dirt, wheel-barrowing up to sites, lifting and transporting large rocks and boulders, picking at rocks and roots and dirts and things, but we finished what we came to do and had some excellent results! Let's take a look!

 A few people put in these beautiful steps and the retaining/guiding rock wall on either side of them to direct future campers to the proper trail up to the site!

We completed two tent pads. One we filled with dirt and a layer of woodchips on top.  Jeff, Dani, and Brandon completely installed another, from laying the timbers, digging up boulders in their way, and finally filling and leveling the finished tent pad!

Check out THIS camp hair!!

My favorite project this week was installing timber stairs to complete a staircase that was started previously and never finished.  Here's a nice shot of the whole gang on the finished steps!

We got pretty lucky this week and ended up being able to take an afternoon off work to go and try to hike Mt. Humboldt, one of the 14ers in the area!  It was like 10 miles round trip or something like that and a huuuuge elevation gain and ended up taking forever and being incredibly challenging.  There is still snow at that altitude and we lost the trail in several places making our journey a truly epic one.  I kind of felt like I was going to die on the mountain and started hearing the cawing of the vultures and crows that were congregating in hopes of snatching just a taste of my decomposing body before it turned to ash and dust... but I suppose that's a bit dramatic. It was so worth it! So beautiful!

Here's where we make the mistake of going straight toward the peak through the never ending boulder field!

The rock shelter at the peak was perfection! It provided an exceptional barrier from the fierce winds and we found a Geo-Cache!

Yaaaaaaayyyyy!

After the work in the Basin was completed Friday, we came back down to Colorado Springs to do our Day of Service at Garden of the Gods on Saturday.  Day of Service is where we, as a team, are supposed to organize an event where community members can come out and volunteer with a local non-profit.  We had an exceptional turnout with 10 or 11 non-Americorpsians, mostly teenagers, and got some seeding and matting done to "naturalize" and eliminate a  large social trail in the park.

Today, we got to relax a bit in the morning and hang out downtown in the Springs and enjoy the lovvvvvvely day and then this evening had a huge feast at the home of our Americorps Deputy Director.  We just got done packing up and organizing all of or stuff for our departure for our next hitch in the southern Bear Creek area tomorrow morning.  This is our back country project so we'll be hiking about 3 miles into our campsite and staying there for 12 days straight.  Our work is supposed to be some trail maintenance and construction and possibly some more erosion mitigation work like we did our first hitch.  Hopefully I'll have a plethora of extraordinary photos of wild bears in action for you in two weeks! Don't get your hopes up though.... because I probably won't. Until then!

"That's not camping!!"

Well hello, again. As promised, here is the post about the current happenings in the Ameri-life of Katie Bertram.  We have officially reached and begun the 4th and final round of Americorps NCCC, Class 17. It's a big deal.

During transition week a few weeks back, Rachel and Steve and I made the trek to Boulder to see Jessica Lea Mayfield play. It was a fun night and I ended up really enjoying the opening band, Nathaniel Rateliff and Fairchildren.

We also got to do a fun ISP at Red Rocks park our final weekend in Denver.  We slashed up a social trail, put up a little fence, and helped put in a few trail structures to help protect the trails from water and sediment runoff.

This round I'm back with my original pals on Water 2 and we're doing various environmental and conservation projects with an organization called the Rocky Mountain Field Institute, which is located in Colorado Springs.  Throughout this round, we will be completing several projects with RMFI, moving locations at least every 3 weeks, sometimes more frequently.  Another important detail, our housing this round is.... cammmmmping! In tents. In the wilderness. No showers. 10 weeks. Yup. Well I suppose that's not entirely true, we do get some occasional weekend perks as you will see in the tales to follow.

For the first 3 weeks of our project, we have been working, and camping, in the South Platte Watershed in the Pike National Forest, about an hour outside of Colorado Springs.  Our main goal in this area is to help re-stabilize drainage channels that feed the water supply for this area of Colorado.  The South Platte was part of the area destroyed by the Hayman Burn back in 2002, the largest forest fire in Colorado's history.  The fire has essentially wiped out the root and support system of the hills, having burned up all trees and vegetation.  This weakness in the soil and structure has resulted in the formation of deep and widening gullies and what are called head cuts, where water and sediment runoff build up so much intensity and speed that they begin to cut backward into the hill and remove more and more sediment.  Our job has been to treat these head cuts and deep gullies by constructing and installing erosion mitigation structures, using found logs, fallen trees, branches, and large rocks and boulders.  To give you an idea of what this looks like, let's take a look at the cycle of a rather large head cut from pre to post treatment.

The dark and shadowy areas in this photo are an example of a rather large and lengthy head cut and gully that have been carved over time as sediment is washed downhill.

 Here we see the same area, mid treatment.  The lower portion of the gully has been treated with a layering system of logs and branches and then filled in with dirt.

 

Here is another portion of that same gully, further up where the main head cut formed.  This is what the strategy for laying the logs in ends up looking like, with longer, larger logs in the base layer and then having the following layers grow gradually shorter while building height.  This method creates a gradual slope in the treatment which follows the natural slope of the hill.

Finally, we see the end result.  The log structure from the previous photo has been completely filled in with dirt (taken and hauled from other areas with an abundance) and the treatment is complete!

This is the basic strategy for head cut treatment structures, but we have also done a few other structures as well.

The first structure we built involved selecting, moving, and placing about a bajillion huge boulders into a gully.  The idea was to construct them in a sort of V-shape to add support to the banks while providing a guided path away from the edges, channeling water to the center of the path.

 

A more frequent structure we deal with is the tow-bank stabilizer, in which we excavate (smooth out)  areas where deep edges have formed and fit and stack large logs to prevent further erosion of the bank walls. We've also done a couple other structures,  Rock-and-Roll and what I am deciding to call the Baby Rock...and Roll which, ironically, have nothing to do with rocks.  With these, logs are installed and overlapped in the base of the stream paths at diagonal angles to encourage the movement of sediment and water one way or another (no photo, sorry!)

The overall process of constructing any of these structures goes something like this: 

1. Excavate, smooth out and prepare work area

2. Locate appropriately sized logs and branches

3. Saw

4. Saw

5. Maybe you'll get lucky if Shaina is around with the chainsaw, but if not saw some more

6. Place logs, branches, and rocks

7. Locate dirt supply that can be extracted without potentially causing further damage

8. Shovel dirt

9. Haul dirt

10. Fill in structure with dirt until it looks evenly sloped and part of the hill

 There you go, ten easy steps...

As you can see, a trusty hand-saw would be an essential tool and resource during this process.  Lucky for me, I have formed a special bond with this guy, complete with a ninja strap for convenience and style.

And just for fun, here's another example of a head cut from the opposite angle, also a bit smaller than the previous one.

In the midst of all this amazing productivity, we've also received quite an interesting array of weather, especially the first week.  Nearly daily, we were experiencing some kind of rain, sprinkling, or graupeling during work, hence the stunning rain protection outfit seen here.

The most interesting weather by far came to us during work on Thursday our first week as a thunder storm rolled in. With lighting continuously flashing all around, we were forced to drop our tools and book it back to camp.  We drove down to town to get away from the madness for awhile and upon our return later that evening, we were greeted by a world of white... in May.

There was one advantage to this inclement weather though, we got to spend the next day working in Garden of the Gods in the Springs, installing a couple of stone staircases on a climbing trail.  

It was overall a lovely day, though the mysterious weather did make an appearance by the time we were wrapping up...

Our first weekend, we bailed on our campsite and the crappy weather and stayed a night with another team in the area.  They took Grace and I on a cool hike Saturday right outside their house.  Another extraordinary view discovered in the hills of Colorado.

Near our campsite and work area, there is another mysterious and tempting rocky peak called Sheeps Nose. A few of us did our best to get near the peak.  We didn't quite make it as things get pretty vertical near the top, but we did reach the top of its sister, which we've named Sheeps Tail, and had some amazing views of the Hayman Burn area and layers and layers of glorious mountains.

The Nose

This week we finished up some more work in South Platte and helped RMFI lead a group of about a hundred volunteers who came out from Vail for a volunteer day treating a couple of very large head cuts and doing some seeding and matting in another area of the Pike Forest.  It was an extra short week for me as I took Friday off to come back to Denver and see Cotton Jones and David Bazan play at the High Dive Thursday night and to work on job applications and my blog and other fun things this weekend! Woohooooo!

Cotton Jones, 6 big men on a very small stage!

 

Plus a tuba!

"Hi David!"

Tomorrow we depart from the Springs for the South Colony Lakes Basin, which we are told is extraordinarily beautiful! There we will be starting a new phase of work at some campgrounds in progress.  We will be building tent pads, installing fire rings (though we won't be allowed to use them as there is a fire ban and it's against RMFI policy anyway :/), and constructing access trails throughout the campground. I'm very excited for this change in scenery and work! And for no cell phone service! We're really getting rugged now! Next weekend we'll be back in the Springs doing our Day of Service at Garden of the Gods and maybe showering... and transitioning to our next project phase, two weeks in the back country! Thus far, this project is proving to be quite exceptional!

Love and light to our dearly loved Michelle Warren, we miss you and think of you constantly.

To all of the teams on disaster, keep it up and stay strong! You guys are amazing!

Until next time, friends!