Beaver Lake — Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2018

Our trail crew was initially supposed to do the Old Sauk trail, but we got moved to Beaver Lake at the last minute. Sadly, Mother Nature has not been kind to this trail over the winter. There are two signifcant blowdowns of large trees across the trail, requiring a crawl over/under down in the muck and a slick few steps to regain the trail. One blowdown has a very large trunk and long legged tall hikers can straddle it to get over. This old gal, however is short legged and I had to lay on my stomach and kinda roll to get my legs over. In addition, the trail has been eroded further and there is a visible crack down the mud in one section that, I'm sure will be another slide eventually.  The biggest dissappointment however was the large blowdown that took out a large section of the bridge over the ponds. This is unfixable and will require funding for a new bridge (in our dreams). You can now no longer access the other side of the ponds and the nice lunch spot at the end of the trail along the river. Our crew today left the blowdowns for the Forest Sevice, the damage being above  the pay grade of a volunteer group. We worked instead on clearing the minor blowdowns off the trail and worked on mucking out some drainage ditches and establishing better flows. This trail is still hikeable for experienced hikers, but I can no longer recommend it for small children, small dogs and as a recovery hike. When the blowdowns are cleared and the trail reestablished then it may be safe. Really sad about the bridge tho.