Moments in Dirt and Ink

Six Rivers National Forest interactive map link Fish Lake has an island of trails that exists in a section of forest that is a tangle of roads. Some details of these trails as marked on the Forest Service topo seemed suspicious to me, but no one had bothered to place them on OpenStreetMap to help suggest what reality might be. Why are there two routes up to Red Mountain Lake? Why does the loop around Blue Lake extend well past the road? The only trail I was really certain would exist is the loop around Fish Lake. The lake has a campground and is stocked which suggests there would be plenty of users for a lake looping trail. So, for the public good of improving the map, I headed out to the campground area! Not to mention that the whole collection of trails looked like a good day's hike in a place I haven't been. (I have been to nearby Bluff Creek Historic Trail .) Although the seasonal Port Orford cedar disease closure listed for the whole of Bluff Creek Road (NF 13) goes...

Shasta-Trinity National Forest interactive map link Birthday hike! I thought I signed up for birthday work, but it's birthday hike instead. The crew had breakfast and headed up to the trailhead generally aiming to get to North Yolla Bolly Spring where the Yolla Bolly Guard Station once stood. The CCCs would be off somewhere else, it was just volunteers for the hike. Back at the West Low Gap Trailhead, but there's been a change in the weather. The low clouds are just about this high. Back to our "oasis" with trees and water. Once we passed the familiar, we were off to find Cedar Basin. There were lots of dips with incense cedars in them. Is this the one? How about this? There weren't many patches of whitethorn as encroaching as the one we'd been working on and none nearly as long. The trail is capturing water along one old forest now meadow. Rocking needed!

Shasta-Trinity National Forest interactive map link I signed up for two volunteer trips with the Bigfoot Trail Alliance , one at either end of the Bigfoot Trail as it crosses the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness. At this north end of the wilderness, it follows the Humboldt Trail, one of the emigrant trails of the late 1800s, before a few miles of road and connecting with the South Fork Trinity River Trail . This first is a "frontcountry" trip that only lasts a long weekend and where we stay at the trailhead. Or, in this case, at a well established dispersed camp site a couple miles short of the trailhead that happens to have actual shade. The trailhead has a corral instead, which wasn't really a feature for us. It also still had a couple logs down on the road as we arrived Thursday evening. Friday: 1 May 2025 There was a California Conservation Corps group coming in the morning to get those logs and then clean up what we had passed, which was to car passable s...