Mountain Girl: Tales from the Trails

Taylor Creek, Kolob Canyons, Zion

Wow, can you believe that Labor Day Weekend is already here! I feel like it was just the 4th of July and I thought I would never make it to September, but here we are! And the best way to celebrate....a paid 4-day weekend courtesy of the U.S. Government- who doesn't love paid holidays?? Looking back at the summer I just cannot believe how fast it has flown by. There have been SO many ups, and a few downs, and overall I feel blessed to be living, working and recreating in this special place surrounded by some amazing folks. Some exciting news for me today is that I have officially logged over 600 miles of hiking and over 100 hours of climbing for 2013. SCORE!! I thought that for this post I would finally upload the pics I have been taking during the long work days at Zion and talk about some of the things we have been doing this season, so here goes....

West Northgate Peak & Pine Valley Peak, Zion Backcountry

The first month of working at Zion National Park was filled with activity and adventure. Our crew performed "drain runs" on a huge chunk of the trails in Zion including the West Rim Trail, Wildcat Trail, Hop Valley, East Mesa, East Rim, Cable Mountain, Deertrap Trail, Angels Landing, Kayenta, Chinle, Riverside Walk,
Watchman Trail, Hidden Canyon, LaVerkin Creek.....to name a few. Drain runs are a chance for the entire crew to get out and hike the trails in the park and perform general maintenance to clear the trails. This includes carrying loppers to remove obtrusive brush, hand saws to remove branches sticking into the trail, shovels for cleaning out water drainages, and cross-cut saws and pulaskis to extract larger trees that are blocking the trail. This may sound like a lot of tools and work, but with a large group covering desert-terrain trails (i.e. not forested trails where there are tons of trees, shrubs, etc.) the job moves pretty quickly as we leap-frog past one another on the trail and tackle individual projects. This was my favorite part of the season because we were logging some serious mileage in the more temperate weather of May before the heat-wave of summer hit and we were exposed to the variety of terrain and trails that Zion has to offer.

Example of CCC wall on upper Angels Landing Trail

Moving into the month of June our crew began a 3-month long project that we will (Finally!) be done with next week. The project is located on the Lower West Rim Trail just below Angels Landing, one of the most famously popular trails in the park. In fact, this trail receives 500-100 hikers on average every day from all over the world! I would take a stab at saying the only 1-4 out of every 10 tourists we interact with are Americans which is pretty cool because on any given day we are interacting with hundreds of people from all over the world!! Anyway, on this project our task was to build a sturdy retaining wall to address a section of trail that was being washed out by water and subsequently used as a social trail to access the river. Stone-work masonry is a historic and integral part of trail work in Zion National Park and if you have ever been or decide to go you will notice the amount of beautifully intricate stone-work masonry on display in the park. It is cool to hike up the Angels Landing Trail and see the work of the old Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930's still standing strong today. The CCC crews were established during the Great Depression as an outlet for young men to participate in meaningful service projects that helped bolster the economy while sending their paychecks home to their families. If you have been to any Federal park you have probably seen or heard of the legendary work of CCC crews. For more information about these interesting and amazing CCC crews that were the founding fathers of modern day conservation groups follow this link.

Zion Trails Crew Stone-Masonry Workshop @ Coal Pits

Stone-masonry is a surprisingly simple yet sometimes complex artisan skill and I am glad to have learned how to do this legendary trade. Stone-masonry is how the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, and the beautiful cathedrals of old Europe were built and it is that time and attention to detail that have made these world wonders last for thousands of years. While I don't think I am going to become a professional stone-mason it has certainly been an interesting, and sometimes difficult, undertaking. Let's talk about the process!!!

Shannon & Larson cutting rocks at Coal Pits

At Zion National Park we receive our material rock from outside quarries located in areas surrounding the park. The rock is harvested into huge chunks then placed on pallets and sent to our outside storage facility near the Coal Pits drainage on the southwest side of the park. After some detailed planning our crews drive out to Coal Pits to select rocks of all sizes and colors (pinks, whites, reds, browns) to cut and drill for our project site. We use power tools like Rock Saws and Rock Drills that cut through these large hunks of sandstone like butter and from there we use dolly's to wheel the rocks onto pallets. The pallets are loaded onto a trailer using a large Bobcat machine and from there we drive the trailer to the Grotto parking lot which is located at the Angels Landing Trailhead. Wow!! Our next step is to load the rocks from the trailer into our Cany-Com machines that are like little army tankers that you can actually drive on the trails. This is the fun part!! We have to drive through the parking lot, across the little bridge spanning the Virgin River and down the trail to our project site. Whew! Who knew so much machinery could be involved in trail work???

Cutting rocks at our project site on Lower Angels Landing Trail

After we secure our rocks at our project site is when things start to get ugly...or fun...whichever way you look at it. We begin the task of playing Tetras to figure out which rocks are going where and how they need to be chiseled. Yes, I said chiseled. While machinery is heavily involved in the beginning processes of our masonry, it is somewhat lacking during the final stages. We are building a "dry-stone" wall instead of the typical "wet-stone" where you would use a mortar or cement to hold the rocks together. Why?? Ask the tourists?? Why are you doing it this way?? The answer: history! The Trails program at Zion is headed in the direction of keeping with the "like and kind" of the old-school methods and wants these walls to last forever! Plus in a climate like Zion where flash-flooding is an integral part of life, wet-stone walls get washed out quicker because the mortar creates a solid barrier whereas a dry-stone wall is more porous and allows water to flow through. The simple answer, though, is that we are just bad-asses. So away we go with 2-pound single-jack hammers and carbide-head chisels sculpting and molding the rocks into each-other. We work every single side of the rocks until they are perfectly flat and locked into the rocks surrounding them linking them like legos, and crushing in filler rocks behind to keep everything sturdy. More and more we have also been chiseling notches into the rocks so they really link in together. CRAZY right??!!

Example of a rock the I notched

Lower Tier of our Retaining Wall

And so, for 12 weeks now it has been a song and dance of chiseling, lifting, chiseling, lugging, chiseling, sawing, some more chiseling, some heaving & ho-ing....toss in a little lower back pain, some sore wrists, and the "chink-chinking" of rocks lulling you to sleep at night and you (almost) have yourself a super legit, authentic Zion Retaining Wall! Pretty wild if I do say so myself.

We have also done a fair amount of "re-veg" on the Lower West Rim Trail near our project site as a means of escaping the rock-wall project every so often. This entails playing Landscaper and rehabilitating the dozens of social trails down to the river which are very destructive to native plant and animal life. We have worked to establish several official paths to the water (because man it is hot and who doesn't want to jump in the river after peaking Angels Landing on a 100+ day) by choosing the best access points and closing the winding, destructive ones. We rehab the trail by transplanting prickly-pear cactus (watch-out these will stick you every time!), planting bunch-grass plugs, vertical mulching (placing dead trees in the ground sticking up as a vertical barrier) and placing rocks and other brush on the ground trying to make it look natural as if humans had never walked there.

Throughout the season we have had some days of other trail work to break up the tediousness of being "on-project" for weeks on end. Monsoon season brought rain and sand gushing into the main canyon and on days following a massive storm we got out to perform more drain-runs on popular canyon trails. Every now and then a storm would blow a tree into a trail and we got a call to go and remove it which is probably our FAVORITE thing to do. Using cross cuts and axes is very authentic and we love getting out and showing off our sweet muscles by axing out a tree. These days have been my saving grace and are always the days where you stop and look and up realize that you are getting paid to work in one of the most geologically unique and beautifully spectacular places in the world. The deep, winding canyons, the lush vegetation, the expansiveness of the wilderness and the clear blue water of the Virgin River all come together to remind you to feel blessed to live and work in Zion. My absolute favorite moments of the summer, however, have been swim breaks in the Virgin which runs right along our work site. During monsoon season the river got mucky and full of sand but any other day you better believe we were headed full-speed, pulling off uniforms, and plunging into that river like it was going to grant us entry into heaven. And it did, in its own way. As soon as my head plunged under that cool water and I came back up, clean and dust-free, I always had that moment where I looked up at the megalith of Angels Landing floating right in front of me and felt like there was no where in the world I would rather be than floating in the river next to good friends feeling the warm

breeze blowing through my hair.