Bruce Wolverton
Earlier this month, our Everett Branch Trail Maintenance folks celebrated National Trails Day with work on the White Chuck Bench Trail outside of Darrington.
We had an outstanding attendance with 40 volunteers, and together hiked in over two miles with shovels and tools in hand. Our objective this year was to create a new section of trail. Building a trail from scratch is always great fun and we built over 550 feet (by 10 feet-wide) of new trail through rough terrain and hillsides. We this work as a way to support and add capacity to the Forest Service, and their trail crew worked with us for the day. They were thrilled with the work we accomplished and shared that they were undertake only able to get 400feet of work done on the trail last year. And here we came along and put in 550 feet of new trail in one day!
A number of Basic Alpine students came out for the day and were “like gladiators” breaking new trail. At the end of the day, we met back at the Ranger Station to return tools, and then we moved on to the fairgrounds where people throughout Darrington had prepared a large potluck for our hard-working volunteers. All volunteers got specially-designed t-shirts in recognition of their day of stewardship. We all enjoyed an hour and a half of socializing and planning work on North Mountain Lookout tower.
