Duckabush River — Saturday, May. 13, 2023

Hi all,

I realized I've gotten out of the routine of writing a trip report after doing volunteer maintenance on a trail. I'll try to get back in the habit - the last one I posted was last August, yikes! I've led a lot of BCH (Backcountry Horsemen) and Graywolf crews since then and we've done so much incredible work on trails in the ONF and the ONP!

Anyhoo, the trees above Five Mile camp on the Duckabush. This ended up being a 4 day BCH project that culminated yesterday.

Day 1 was for the sawyers to hike in and analyze the project (go / no-go decision and cut plan).

Days 2 and 3 were to hike in and prep the site.

Day 4 was to go back in with pack stock carrying our saw and rigging equipment, and tackle the prepped project. 

Murphy's law - the cut day ended up being beastly hot!! But we got it done. The trail is opened back up, and stock will be able to get through again once WTA goes in and does some badly-needed tread repair - plus they will take one more round off the smaller of the two logs to create a little more clearance (it's actually fine right now, but we go wider for stock trails) - we ran out of time and energy since it was getting late and it was soooooooo hot. 

This was a big project. We are glad that we made all the right calls - the logs reacted as we thought they would (that isn't always a guarantee). But we had rigging with us just in case we were wrong and the rootball moved (it didn't). 

This project was fully supported by some amazing packers from Backcountry Horsemen. We **could not** have done this without them and their incredibly strong, willing animals! Okay, I might have bribed them with a Costco-sized bag of carrots ... 

And, for those who are wondering, the Forest Service issued a chainsaw waiver for the Wilderness area due to the immense difficulty of doing this project with crosscut saws.