I work on the trail, or hike it, most days. Even as I’m hiking I’m inspecting it. I know the rockiest places, I know where there are roots. I’m even familiar with individual stones. Call me obsessed, but in the best possible way. But yes, still obsessed.

By now I’m sure you know (if you’ve ever read this blog in recent years) that as the Trail Maintenance Chair I’ve been focused on “trail smoothing” or “tread renewal.” Many of our recent monthly volunteer workdays have been mostly focused on this (see this time-lapse video of rebuilding a section for a taste). There’s a reason for that. For many years we volunteer stewards (including me) did not believe in tackling what I now call “rock work.” That is, taking out or chipping down rocks in the trail. And it started to show — often dramatically so. Entire stretches of trail became difficult to navigate, even for the nimble.

Eventually, as I learned more about trail work from volunteering at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park under the tutelage of the legendary Tim Mayer, I started to experiment with getting more serious about how we dealt with rocks in the trail. I started to use the rock bar that we had in our tool shed for levering out rocks in the trail (see pic). I had the stewards buy another one.

Then I went out on a limb, and spent several hundred dollars on a cordless rock chisel to experiment with it. I even videoed my first real use of it, where I declared it “a game changer.” Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind. Instead, I can’t believe we haven’t been doing this kind of thing for years. Given the evidence, I was reimbursed by the trail stewards for the purchase and we’ve been using it ever since.

Starting tomorrow, I will be taking this campaign of trail smoothing on to the Montini Preserve, which is showing some serious signs of trail wear that has exposed stretches of really rocky terrain that need to be fixed.

I’ve determined that there is a hierarchy of desires in rock mitigation which essentially goes like this:

1. Remove the rock entirely.
2. If you can’t remove it entirely, break it up to remove the parts of it that impinge on the trail surface.
3. If you can’t do the above, chip it down to the level of the trail or below.

Recently, in attempting to do number 1 above, we found a truly large rock that in trying to remove we had made into a greater problem. We couldn’t “put it back” and we couldn’t break it up or even chip it down (it was too hard), which left only removing it entirely. But it was somewhere around a quarter ton. That’s when I decided we had to get really serious, so I returned home, got 150′ of static rope, a handful of caribiners, three pulleys and some webbing. This is the gear I take on river trips to pull a boat off a rock if I need to. That day it served a very different purpose.

With that gear and a nearby tree, I was able to establish an anchor and a z-rig pulley system that provided us with a 5:1 mechanical advantage, thereby allowing us to pull that huge rock out of the hole and off to the side of the trail (see pic).

After we filled in the big hole with rocks and gravel, and layered on the top layer and packed it down, you would never have known that anything at all had been there. And as we left, and some hikers came up the trail toward that spot I realized that they, and all hikers thereafter, would never know that a rock had ever been there, sticking up in the tread ready to trip a hiker or a runner. And that’s just fine with me.