If you’ve been reading our posts here for any length of time, you know that I’m somewhat obsessed with trail smoothing. That is, removing rocks from the trail so that hikers, and more importantly, runners, don’t trip (I’ve take a few bad falls while running myself, so this is quite personal). But it’s also more than that. 

The badly ditched trail

We also very much need to regain control of water on the trail, which means removing ditching and regaining ,at minimum, a 5-degree outslope on the tread. So I’ve been on a campaign to do just that, and recently I’ve become enabled to take this campaign to the very top of the trail.

Two key things recently happened to make this possible:

1. The City of Sonoma bought and delivered a pile of aggregate (Mayacama Red Pathway Fines Only, to be specific) to the top of the trail, going through a neighboring vineyard property with their very appreciated cooperation (thank you, Dan and Andrea Son!).
2. In cooperation with the same vineyard property as well as City of Sonoma Public Works  (thank you Terence Erickson!), who kindly donated a 120-gallon water tank that was subsequently filled by the vineyard property staff, we now have everything we need to get serious about fixing the entire Upper Loop of the Sonoma Overlook Trail.

A section of repaired trail

Even before all of this happened, we’d started on repairing about 75 feet of very rough and ditched trail with what we had on hand. This meant dragging five or six-gallon water jugs up the trail in our Gorilla wagon from the Toyon Trailhead and using what was left of the aggregate from the recent stairs project performed by American Conservation Experience (a multi-thousand-dollars job).

But now we have what we really need to go to town on some very badly ditched and rocky areas of trail, and going to town is what we’re now doing. A couple of monthly group trail workdays have been dedicated to this project already, but we have more to go. Beyond that, I go up there whenever I can and work on ten feet here, 20 feet there. My goal is to have the Upper Loop completely dialed in by Spring. I have no idea if that can happen, especially given likely weather challenges, but let’s just call it a goal. 

Watch our progress, day by day by hiking the trail. Perhaps we’ll see you there.