WTA Completes New Tiger Mountain Reroute

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in early November, a crew of volunteers hiked away from a brand-new trail on West Tiger 1. They were finishing up the last of 44 work parties. Volunteers had been working since October 2022 to build a new, 1-mile trail through logging slash and downed timber from the summit of West Tiger 1 to the junction with the Preston Trail. The remnants of a Weyerhauser timber sale that had closed the area since May 2021.

The view from the new WTA-built trail on Tiger Mountain. Photo by Emily Snyder

After the timber work ended, the last half mile of the old Preston Trail to the West Tiger 1 summit was totally obliterated by logging slash and large stumps. In addition to that, a quarter-mile section on the edge of the logging scar had more than 36 large hemlocks blown down across the trail in one large contiguous pile, further blocking access.

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Emily Snyder, WTA's central Puget Sound trails coordinator, remembers her first sight of the project area.

"It looked like an impossible task when we got it," she said. "We were logging slash through huge piles of root wads. That huge blowdown with 36 trees was going to need C-level sawyers with chainsaws. Even walking through it to flag the route was precarious."

Luckily, WTA's volunteer leadership team is full of seasoned trail workers. And we leaned on our trainings from Crew Leader College (CLC) to recruit volunteers.

"We took everyone who had taken that rigging class and used it as post-CLC training opportunity. They were all ACL's and started coming out to the project. They helped run the rigging and taught Green Hats how to use it."

Crew leader Emily Snyder works a chainsaw through one of the large sections of blowdowns. She is standing on what would eventually be the new trail. Photo courtesy Ben Mayberry.

• New Trails By the numbers
• 
• Total work parties - 44
• Total volunteer hours - 3,479
• Number of crew members - 429
• Length of trail built - 1 mile
  Stumps removed - 45

New Trail, Sweeping Views

Volunteers spent more than 6 days running rigging and removing 45 stumps (pictured to the right), while saw teams cleared countless trees.

Volunteer crew leader Jay Schram was there for much of this project, and he noted how difficult stump removal is.

"It's not so much the total number of stumps as it is the total effort that went into removing them and then dealing with the craters," he said. "There were many stumps that had multiple people working on them all day for multiple days."

All that sweat equity paid off. The new trail now climbs the north slope of Tiger Mountain toward the tower at West Tiger 1, crosses the road just below the back side of the tower and sweeps across the south side of the summit.

From it, hikers can enjoy stunning views of Mount Rainier before the trail dives briefly back into the woods to pop out at the Hiker Hut.