The Sunday edition of the Redding Record-Searchlight featured an article on the Mount Shasta Trail Association and its trail maintenance and creation efforts:
But the association persevered, went on to build a seven-mile loop trail along Squaw Valley Creek near McCloud and a three-quarter-mile Box Canyon trail along the Sacramento River just south of Lake Siskiyou.
To build these trails, the association’s members are out there working with hand tools: large clippers to cut brush, heavy rakes and pickaxes to forge the trail. They can’t do it all by themselves, though. The U.S. Forest Service had to dynamite rock outcroppings along Squaw Valley Creek to complete that trail.
Trail Association volunteers spent a total of eight years with their rakes and pickaxes building a seven-mile trail around Lake Siskiyou. Siskiyou County’s Public Works Department will help complete that trail by building a $1.2 million bridge across an arm of the lake at its north end.
I’m on the Board of Directors of the Mount Shasta Trail Association, and Dunsmuir writer Tim Holt also wrote about me, my two hiking guides, and my work with the MSTA. The Searchlight even sent Nathan Morgan, a Searchlight photographer, to take a picture of me on the Bear Trail at the College of the Siskiyous Weed campus. I haven’t been in the media much, so the whole thing was an interesting experience.
The MSTA has been especially active lately. We recently did major trail work on the Box Canyon Trail near Lake Siskiyou and the Castle Crags State Park Nature Trail. And we’re involved with planning for new trails in and near the town of Mount Shasta, especially from downtown to the city park, and to the top of Spring Hill, just across from the city park.
We always want new members, and we’d love to have you join the Mount Shasta Trail Association.
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Wow – that sounds like a lot of work! What’s the process for building a new trail? There must be some surveying that goes on and then somebody figures out if rock needs to be cut, or bridges have to go in?
It is definitely a major engineering process. I’m not the one in our group that knows the most about that, though, since I came on board at the Mount Shasta Trail Association after the major trails were already constructed.
There was some final blasting on the Squaw Valley Creek Trail last spring, but it was done (and done very well) by Shasta-Trinity National Forest.