News

November 6, 2018

Laurentian Chapter Trail Maintenance Weekend 2018

Text and photos by John Barron except where noted

Seth Carr of SUNY Potsdam selects new trail maintenance tools inside the shed.

Students from SUNY Canton and SUNY Potsdam. Kneeling at center, organizer Mark Simon. Background, the Laurentian Chapter’s new tool shed.
Photo: Kathleen O’Rourke

The most important trail maintenance event of the Laurentian Chapter’s year took place October 18-21. Volunteers, mostly students from SUNY Canton and SUNY Potsdam assembled near the home of organizer Mark Simon. Prominent this year was the chapter’s new tool shed constructed over the summer using a grant from the Raquette River Advisory Council (RRAC). Besides the shed itself, the RRAC financed the purchase of many new tools for use on Brookfield property along the Raquette.

Stone Valley

This year the dominant requirement in Stone Valley was bench cutting. This involves using a specialized tool called a pulaski, originally developed for fighting forest fires, to pull down soil from the side of narrow points in the trail and to use the material excavated to improve both the smoothness and the gradient of the trail. The result is a pathway that is wider, smoother, and less prone to erosion. Crews worked on trails on both sides of the river over several days.

Bench cutting near East River Trailhead in Colton

Crew leader Erin Levesque

Julia Biondi

L-R, Alana Basso, Mark Simon

L-R, Tyler Deskins, Eric Nicotina improving a water bar

Rock Climbing Site

Several years’ work by volunteers on the access trail to the site in Snow Bowl State Forest in South Colton have paid off. The former badly eroded woods road is now a good trail with an effective drainage ditch alongside. This year some effort was spent in placing logs along the ditch to discourage ATV use.

Most of the effort this year occurred at the base of the climbing wall itself. The secondary goal was to create smooth trail along the base of the cliffs for people’s convenience; the primary goal was to improve the safety of the site. “Ankle breakers” - holes in the rocks where a foot could become wedged - were eliminated, and loose boulders on the cliffs above which could fall with catastrophic results were dislodged and removed.

Rock climbing site access trail

Base of rock face. L-R, Colleen Meisenzahl (SUNY Canton), Celeste Oppito (SUNY Potsdam), Annie Drake (SUNY Canton)

James King transporting sand

Crew leader and SUNY Potsdam alumnus Tom Macula

Red Sandstone Trail

by Blair Madore

Red Sandstone Trail Crew. L-R, Todd Demeres, Mari Robinson, Julia Biondi. Photo Blair Madore

It went quite well. We trimmed a lot of brush and identified a few projects to work on, too. Generally the trail is in good shape now except for a few items: two trees that will need a chainsaw to remove (one above Sugar Island Flow and one on Sugar Island), a bridge at the tip of Sugar Island that is functioning but in need of rebuilding, and repairs to the stairs in the gulch. We may get to one of these before winter, if not the spring will do fine.

We moved around some of the bog bridges on Sugar Island that were out of line. I think they floated off during high water. I have a plan for slowly replacing them with a raised boardwalk. The boardwalk would be anchored by boxes filled with rocks so water could flow under but the boardwalk would not move. This will take some time but it’s a nice project.