Eldorado Park Resource Technician

Wow.

This week I helped run a pretty intense event. Members of the Jeffco Open Space trail crew, the Boulder Climbing Community trail crew, the Access Fund Conservation Team, and I collaborated/taught/learned for four days. The workshop focused on:

• Servicing/using Griphoists
• Rock shaping
• Placing anchors
• Trail design considerations for climbing access trails
• Rock movement with highlines/dragging/rock nets
• Climbing access considerations

Some of the major takeaways for me:

• Trails should “flow”. In particular – any time you cut a sharp switchback in a trail, you’re asking trail users to make an abrupt turn. I’ve noticed that most of the sharp turns are where hikers shortcut.

  I have totally lost interest in trying to obscure/make obstacles/use fences to force trail users to travel to the farthest end of a switchback, execute a 160° turn, and continue onwards. I’m going to expend the energy in building more flowing, natural turns.

• Climbing access trail design should be at least as much top-down as bottom-up. Some examples to elucidate:
  • A steep section of trail is built with small stones and irregular treads. Going up, a hiker can comfortably place the front half of their foot on the steps and can see what’s coming next. Ascent is fairly easy. When coming down, those stairs only accommodate a hiker’s heel, and it’s difficult (especially with a 30+ pound pack of “lightweight” climbing gear) to see what the next step entails.
  • Climbers usually head up in great weather and frequently return down in icky weather. Treads that slope downwards are horrible – especially with a layer of ice or snow.
  • There are climbing trails that are mostly for descent. Climbers start at one place on a cliff, top out and rappel/traverse/scramble to a different section of the crag. The adrenaline and focus that climbers had on the approach has been replaced with hunger, dehydration, and exhaustion (with a hint of bliss on great days). Descending climbers may not be in the best state of mind to pick out and follow a trail.

    Personally, I’d like to see a barrista and an alpaca when I alight on a descent trail. (On a tangent – I’m generally against GMOs, but if someone can engineer a pack animal that can make a nice bitter macchiato, I’ll pay)

    Until land managers see things my way, a solution is to design descent-only trails to be easily visible, have very regular and flat treads, and flow in the extreme. Lots of gentle curves, lots of trailside “gargoyles” (big rocks) to provide guidance.

• Shaping, shaping, shaping. Besides being more fun than a six year-old with a puppy, shaping is critical to good stone work. Heretofore, my shaping has been limited to smashing off corners with a sledge OR hammer/chisel work to remove high spots. This week we used boulder blasters (epic fun), rifters, feathers and wedges, and such to make rock behave.

A minimal photo collection (I was having too much fun to take a lot of pictures):

Highlining a perfectly shaped step onto the trail. Mark is using a 5:1 system to move the step up the highline.

Drilling for 3/8″ feathers and wedges. I think the Jeffco crew is sold on the portable hammer drill.

Hand chiseling to match steps

Feathers/wedges cross grain didn’t work too well. The slice at the top was with the grain, and looks great. The piece in the foreground turned into four or five separate irregular pieces.

Driving feathers/wedges

Giving feathers/wedges time to work

Beautiful split

Rifting

Tags: Climbing Access Trails, Trail Design

This entry was posted on February 2, 2013 at 8:09 am and is filed under Trails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.