Pre-dawn on Day 4!
After coffee and breakfast, the herd of cats gathers for a pre-work meeting. The plan today, Tim and Cody are headed back up the Waterfall Trail to finish the last half mile of our project area and the rest of us are headed up the Southfork Waterfall Trail to brush and clear.
With a fairly early start, it was nice to work in the shade on this relatively open slope.
The Southfork Trail steady climbs above Waterfall Creek. Again, we found a well built trail with a nice trail corridor.
There were not many saw cuts but the brush was thick.
Loppity Lop Lop!
Above us, the relatively tall mountains of the Bighorn Crags.
After using all my persuasive powers as a crew leader to keep the group together and lop motivated. Scott and Carl cracked and could not take it anymore. They graciously volunteered to work quickly up the trail to cut downfall and do some trail reconnoissance. Given that there was virtually no downfall….. translation: “We are sick of lopping and need a hike!”
Tom, Art, and I continued lopping up the trail.
Lop, leapfrog, lop, rinse, repeat.!
We started to work our way out of the burn area as we moved up the mountain.
An office with a view!
It was at this point that Art, Tom, and I entered a tick hatch and we found it seemed hundreds of ticks crawling on us. As fast as we could pick them off, more crawled on! We pulled the pin on the work and fell back about a quarter of a mile. We spent about 15 minutes at our fall back position pulling off thicks then we retreated back to camp! Luckily, this was the end of our project area so mission accomplished!
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