Saturday, June 7, was National Trails Day. We spent it working on the Picture Rock Trail that is going to connect the trails at Heil Ranch with the trails at Hall Ranch. The day started at 8 am in Lyons with yummy breakfast provided by the Boulder County Horse Association. After breakfast we stuffed a paper bag lunch from Boulder County Parks and Open Space in our packs and headed out to the section we had been assigned to work on. It was an impressive sight seeing +200 volunteers heading out to work.
Jen and I were in a work group with Tracy, Kim and Dan and we were assigned section 5. It was an effective group and we made good progress quickly. It definitely helped that the soil was still somewhat wet and loose from all the rain we had gotten earlier in the week. Perfect timing for a trail work day.
Our section mostly contained a meandering trail through grassy sections but it also had an interesting rock feature that we built up under the guidance of Kristin, IMBA trail builder extraordinaire. I sure hope the rock feature remains after Boulder County’s “fine tuning” of the trail.
The picture below shows part of the trail that we built; super smooth and curvy. I can’t wait to ride it!
The natural grade of our section was close to the grade you want the trail to have for water runoff so we didn’t have to do much bench cutting. The section up from ours, however, was a different story. They had a very steep section that needed quite the bench cut!
Each work section was 400 linear feet of trail and by the end of the day an impressive 8,400 ft of new trail had been built. A result that was celebrated with a huge BBQ party hosted by Oskar Blues, complete with succulent beer can chicken and hamburgers grilled by Dale himself. Good times!