I melted down my battery cables and a 8 gauge stranded wire I had running under the dash for Aux power. Just finished fixing all of that and putting on a new coil. Good news is I'm loaded and hooked up all but tying down. the bad news is I'm 3.5 hours behind schedule and beat down......was planning on 0330-0400 departure after 5 hours sleep. Passing out right now!
03-15-2014, 09:53 PM (This post was last modified: 03-15-2014, 10:17 PM by broncosbybart.)
Got a lot done. Almost all of the tail ditches are cleaned out. We blocked off the bypasses we saw as well. We went in from the Wolf Den side and worked our way down the trail up to the big hill climb. The pictures are kind of in that order. Please forgive the crappy cell phone pics.
03-15-2014, 10:12 PM (This post was last modified: 03-15-2014, 10:25 PM by broncosbybart.)
We probably spent most of our time re-working the rock stream crossings. The idea was to create a narrow channel for the water to go through instead of creating a wide section of rocks. It seems as though the rocks were creating a dam, resulting in a ponding effect that created more problems than doing good.
So far, I like the net effect of this plan. The 'trout ponds' on the upstream side of our rock crossings were reduced significantly. No before shots, but here are some after shots of our progress.
The last few pics are of the biggest water crossing. It was amazing how much rock we moved into it on the previous work days. Just had to get the water level down far enough to see it. It was incredible to see how much water drained out once we revised the crossing.
Oh, and we picked up all the trash and moved any downed timber. The trail is ready for opening day. A few groups were supposed to be riding around dropping hay bales off in the tail ditches, but I didn't see anyone on our trail...
Future jobs will include probably doing that and then working on the log bridges. We tightened the big one up some more. The little one right after it is getting to the point where it will need some work though.
We had four of us out there today. Huge thanks to Biff for making the long trek for a few hours of work!!!!!
These stream crossings will be an ongoing hassle. I'd love to have metal culverts put in to fix it for good, but it sounds like the forest service is not wanting to do that at all for some reason.
Big surprise, the archaeologist didn't show up today to talk about the future of Kodak Rock/Rocky Mtn loop....
Stole some pics from the NC4x4 site. Here is (was) the 2nd ledge. I'm sure it will come back in due time. Those boys did a ton of work out there today!
....or as I have always said for when you are DEAD!!
I just got up from a good nights slumber and I'll tell ya what, nothing beats taking a nice shower washing the Uwharrie dust and dirt off and jumping into bed!