Paula and I joined a strong crew of Arizona Trail volunteers, led by trail hero Zay Hartigan. The object of our wrath was a ~mile stretch of Canelo East that could be a case study on how NOT to design trail in the desert (no fault of Zay’s — he didn’t design it, he just volunteered to fix it!).
We met in the ‘town’ of Canelo, where Paula and I took off on foot and bike, respectively. It was a quick six mile jaunt on a 4×4 road to where we were working. I did get distracted talking to a pair of northbound thru-hikers on the way.
Wayne Coates works on a bench cut to bypass yet-another-fall-line-climb. Wayne is a TopoFusion user and just recently volunteered to be the segment steward for the Temporal Gulch segment.
Rich Corbett is segment steward for Canelo West. Thanks to him it’s not nearly the death-march it was in years past. Paula and Rich work on the lower part of a fall-line bypass.
That’s Zay and I, sanitizing the trail by removing a big rock. I’m usually against this kind of stuff, but not on Canelo East. I doubt there’ll be any threads on TucsonMTB complaining about the rock removal and sanitation. We turned unrideable to rideable on at least a half dozen stretches.
There’s still plenty of pain and suffering remaining for Arizona Trail 300 participants, but there should be some better flow to the trail and less dismounts / hiking.
Zay told me that he’s working on getting the NEPA clearance for a major reroute, cutting all of this trail out (and several miles of dirt road). So this piece is likely to be reclaimed by the desert soon enough.
For being smack in the middle of a nasty cold, Paula worked hard.
More of the crew, including trail dog Bernie Stalmann, on the hike back out.
After drinks and homemade fudge courtesy of Zay, I hopped back on the bike to ride the AZT to Canelo Pass. For some reason I was still bursting with energy, and that combined with all the work we did back in December made for a killer ride.
My favorite temperature — hot enough for sweat to cloud my eyes and cause imminent head explosion, trading off with cold breezes and aching knees on descending. For whatever reason I felt top out there, and the trail was fun, fun, fun.
It was one of those rides where you feel like you can ride to the ends of the earth. And you want to. But you’re still kind of glad that you don’t have to.
Yeah, I’m getting psyched for the AZT 300 in a little over a month.
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