Trail Building - Potomac Heritage Trail
We were all gathered in a playground parking lot, about twenty of us, and we were listening to a brief welcome talk and an introduction to what we were about to do. Then we sorted through the tools: pruners, saws, pick-axes and McLeods. I’d brought some tools, but my chainsaw wasn’t required and my other tools seemed a little toy-like compared to these serious heavy-duty trail-building implements.
We were all volunteers today to help build a section of the Potomac Heritage Trail. Some of us were first timers, or practically so, others were members of the PHTA - the association building the trail. They were the leaders. There also was a county official there, and an REI employee. Many of us were there because we heard about today through REI.
After the intro, the group split into three: one hard-core group to make switchbacks for the trail through a ravine, and two other groups to work on the trail from either end. I joined the group for the far end and off we went. My group is a collection of first-timers led by a PHTA member who’d helped mark this trail. Most of my group worked for the government in one capacity or another and drove out from Washington DC or the immediate suburbs. I work for a government contractor, but we didn’t talk much about our day jobs until later.
The leader explained more, “We want a 3-4 foot corridor through the woods. Right now before the growth has happened the trail is clear. Later on it’ll be overgrown and not very visible. We’re going to prune back brush and tree branches, and use the McLeods to scrape away grass and weeds from trail.”
We found the use of the pick-axes later for side-cutting a trail into a slope. But first a word about the McLeod. This is the hoe that the Terminator would use if he was into gardening. It is a heavy-duty flat hoe with a sharpened edge, but rotate the handle 180 degrees and the other side has tines cut into the metal. Basically it is a small garden rake on that side. Since the end is flat, so it can also be used to pound down loose soil as well. It’s the consummate all-around trail building tool.
The trail was flagged, so the trail-building was a matter of following the flags first with pruners to clip off anything to trip over or that might hit you in the face. I’m tall, so if I could cross under a branch then pretty much everyone else will be fine. Then others with McLeods would hack away at weeds and grass and scrape out a trail. This isn’t very fast work.
As we got closer to the ravine, our leader got a cell call from the ravine’s group leader asking for more trash bags (which we all carried) and someone to help with the trash pickup. I went ahead and spent the next hour picking up bottles, cans, rotted chairs and rugs, plastic, and several dozen syringes from the path of the trail. Apparently this ravine had been used as a dumping ground off and on for many years. (Some later internet research shows that the coke bottles I found were probably around 30 or more years old. The syringes looked much newer.)
I continued on down the trail with my group after that. We got our lesson in using the pick-axe in that second stretch when the trail cut across a slope. To provide a more level surface that hikers wouldn’t slip on, we had to “side cut” the trail into the slope and flatten the sideways tilt of the trail.
The ground was frozen below the surface. Depending on the amount of sun that slope got, the frost line was between 1-3 inches down. We got pretty good at distinguishing the feeling and sound of the pick-axe hitting a stone (a higher and sharper noise and more of a sudden jar on the handle) vs the ice which wasn’t quite as hard. We would use the pick-axe, then follow up with the McLeod to level and tamp the now-loose dirt. The key lesson in the pick-axe is to keep your mouth shut when using it. The frozen dirt tends to spray in your face and shirt and it doesn’t taste good.
This harder work was interspersed with working together to clear vines and cut back briars, pickup trash from the woods (one in my group found three quarts of oil, unopened), and toss cut branches off the trail. Although there was a fair amount of rotation between jobs, we fell into favorite tasks.
We took breaks to catch our breath, have some water, or eat lunch. We talked more of day jobs then. Some discussion was of work, some of the change in administrations and how that affected each person’s department or agency. As we worked down the trail, we had to periodically go back and pick up our backpacks, jackets, or tools we’d left behind and hopscotch them forward of where we were currently working.
One of the last big tasks we did was to side-cut a section of trail and three of us rotated on the pick-axe. I finally got my rhythm down on that, treating it like a big pendulum. I would swing it out to my back and side while rotating my torso, this lifted it and then I guiding its fall. It took me a while, but I found the rhythm that the tool wanted. I said that we needed a good work song. But all we could remember was “I’ve been working on the railroad…”, one guy started to re-word it, “I’ve been working on the keyboard…”.
It was pretty clear at the end of the day that our usual work - which for all of us involved mostly looking at patterns of pixels on a flat screen and wiggling our fingers on the keyboard - didn’t really prepare us for this. But, besides learning the lesson of closing my mouth when using a pick-axe, it did teach us several things.
First, we should appreciate the trails we use. There were twenty of us working for 4-5 hours to make about a mile of trail. And that trail was already flagged. Second, any junk you either throw out the car window, or worse dump in a ravine, doesn’t disappear. It gets found and has to be cleaned up by someone. Third, at the end of the day it is pretty satisfying to build something.