Crabtree Falls is close to our hq, and it’s an amazing place. We were lucky enough to do a bridge reconstruction, a cantilevered deck reconstruction, a couple of overlook benches, and some high level trail structure work. Doing a standard singletrack is great and all, and I love hiking on a 2 foot wide tread but the logistics, planning, and design for doing the ludicrous trail engineering work has always been something I’ve gotten into. We had a fantastic time throughout, and appreciate everything the GW-Jefferson NF does there.

One of the biggest elements was the bridge across the Tye River. It was a 10 foot tall double stringer that spanned 105 feet. From the trailhead it’s amazing to look at, but unfortunately closed. We were super stoked to be able to work on it. It wasn’t our first bridge construction, but it was our largest span that we’d worked on at the time. Both James and I thought for awhile about how to appropriately and safely remove the rotten blocking spans (we called them webs) and replace them. I’m not even sure which one of us came up with the idea of building an entire hanging scaffolding over the side of the main glu-lam. That allowed us to

1. prevent treated scrap inflow to the Tye River
2. cut the webs in half so they were easily removed
3. have a clean working space to put up the new webs

A normal scaffolding would have allowed a significant amount of treated sawdust to get kicked off into the water, but we were able to keep the working platform tight against the bottom of the stringer.

As we put in one web at a time, we’d use our comealong to pull the entire scaffolding along the handrail section. Part of our job was refreshing the entire bridge handrail area, and the top of the handrail was significantly rotted so any damage was incidental.

We were able to use a deep rot preservative and filler without sanding away significantly. Took a lot of hours of work on the rail, but end result looked sharp.

Every year we enjoy going back to the Frank Church and West Fork Ranger District to do logout. We’re a little larger than we were when we first went out there in 2006 and we have a couple employees, but it’s still the same. The Selway drainage is always amazing every year.

Working as a USFS contractor, especially doing maintenance the way we do it, is always a whirlwind.  We spend only a day or two in town if we can help it while doing a maintenance contract, and luckily enough we won a construction contract working for Nantahala National Forest in SW North Carolina while at the same time doing a wilderness maintenance contract in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho.  I’ve always wanted as much as possible to work closer to home (the east), so it was perfect.

It was building 3.5 miles of new construction very close to Franklin NC on a spur trail off the Appalachian, along with building 80,000 pounds of fieldstone steps at the beginning section using a private landowner’s right-of-way.  Logistically it was inventive getting our excavator up to the job site as there was a steep hillside and we weren’t able to build our way up to the start of construction.  We finished a spectacular construction section less than 2 hours from my home in the upstate, and both of us were incredibly proud we were able to get a hardened, erosion resistant class 3 trail installed throughout scenic areas overlooking Franklin.

All that lumber you see laid flat was our tracks while we were dragging up 4000 pound loads of rocks for the steps, we were trying as hard as possible to avoid scarifying the hillside.  All that inventive excavator movement at the beginning to get over those railroad tie steps without damaging them ended up not mattering as we replaced them all with the stone.