Larrabee State Park - Rock Trail — Saturday, Dec. 28, 2013

Puget Sound and Islands > Bellingham Area

Today's excursion was a WTA work party to continue building the Rock Trail to Lost Lake in Larrabee State Park. The crew leader was Arlen "Bridgemaster" Bogaards, with ACL Richard. We started the day, as always, with the safety lecture, and we proceeded downtrail to continue making improvements to the trail. The newly built hiker-only trail leads from the Cyrus Gates Overlook down to a gate junction with the existing Lost Lake trail. A few sections require trail building, whereas others need tweaking. Our two major projects were widening the "Bogaards Bridge" over a small creek and improving tread on the lower part of the new trail. Most of the work party removed roots, dug up mineral soil for new tread, and filled in pits with rock and soil. I joined Richard and John to continue the development of the bridge to a more-user friendly crossing. Before today, the bridge was a half-log stringer (bridge beam) bolted down on sills (e.g. pylons) on either side of the creek. Yesterday, a cedar log was laboriously pulled up from the lake for use in the bridge. We cut slots in the sill and the new stringer and drove in steel spikes to fasten the stringer in place. We used a chainsaw to score the top half of the log with cuts every 3 inches, followed by chopping away the top half with Pulaskis to reveal a walking surface. It took all day, because our source material was a 600-pound log. Next agenda item: handrails! We finished with hot apple cider, cookies, and trailmix. Also of note, during lunchtime two of us went AWOL and hiked down to the junction with the Lost Lake trail to enjoy peek-a-boo views of the new trail's ultimate destination.