This week, we continued our construction of the trail that brushes the edge of the newly restored Farm property. The new trail is marked on this map with the red dots; older trails are in blue-black:
We left off with a sketch of the trail to come, a narrow, ungraded footpath across crushed brush and bare earth. A view of the new trailhead near Canyon House as of last week:
One of the first steps was stabilizing the new slope with native species such as sword fern, snowberry, and thimbleberry, many of which we had previously removed from the trail-to-be as they would have otherwise gotten squished in the construction process:
After this picture was taken, we later added wood chips (made from on-campus plant material) to the base of these plants to keep them from drying out further in the hot summer sun. We’ll be watering these plants intermittently for the remainder of the summer to make sure they take.
To prevent the trail from simply wearing away into the hillside, we put in logs – primarily from non-native Norway maples we felled nearby – which we then fastened with rebar and sledgehammers. Of course, a flat trail free of tripping hazards like potholes and roots is always a plus, especially for those who’d much rather avoid twisting an ankle on their morning run, so we also graded the trail flat. We then added in wood chips to surface the trail for the finishing touch.
The trail, as you might remember, initially ended at a small log bench that overlooked the Farm property. With the trail now continuing on, we instead carved out an inset for the bench just above the trail. We’ve also widened the original trail considerably, which was once narrow and frequently overgrown.
This new trail has some lovely views of the Farm property, so make sure to check it out!
There are still one major step left in this process – putting in native dogwood and willow stakes into the newly built up slope to grow as a thick, stable hedge to keep the trail from slumping away in the long term. This is a task, however, left to another week.
