I drove north for four hours on Friday evening. Kevin Steffens said there would be a brat waiting for me when I came. So I arrived at Copper Falls State Park and claimed my brat. It was good, Thank you Kevin. After spending some time talking in this mosquito shelter Tent, Lisa and Payton arrived. Kevin, Mike Stafford and I helped them put up their tents but mainly we held the flashlight for them because it was already dark. After some more chatting in the screen tent. It was time for bed.
Saturday morning I woke up and Kevin Steffens was boiling water so people could have breakfast. I made my usual oatmeal and hot chocolate. Then we went up to the state park garage where the Heritage Chapter stores our trailer and got the tools that we would be needing for the day. Then we met at the park rangers parking lot with Joe and Bethany. At that time I found out that I would be operating the chainsaw all day. In fact we would have several people operating chainsaws.
Then we drove to the county line road and started hiking in. The hike just to get to the trail crossing is 1.7 miles. It is all on an old Forest Road and it’s relatively easy hiking. We finally got to the trail crossing at the west end of the Porcupine Hill. Then we started sawing. Each Chainsaw operator walked in a ways to spread ourselves out. Each chainsaw operator had a person grabbing the brush and taking it away. These people are called brushers. I had Lisa and Payton helping me. They were doing the lopping of smaller branches, too.
This was Peyton’s first work weekend. Welcome. She is friends of Lisa’s. We also had two other new people at the work weekend. They were a couple named Tom and Coleen. Both of them work for the DNR, and Tom is a forestry person. So we let him cut down the more difficult trees. Since I am a beginning chainsaw operator I did the easy stuff. Bethany would assigned me little clusters of trees on the ground to clear. This worked well.
Everything was working well and I cut up a lot of trees. Eventually we got a Rocky spot on top of the hill where we took our lunch break. Just a few feet away was a spot that was almost like an overlook but the view wasn’t very far. Nevertheless it was a nice spot. After lunch We continued working down a hill and we crossed a two track forest road. Eventually my chainsaw started acting up. It wouldn’t stay running. I tried it several times and it would putter out right after I started it. So eventually I just gave up and started clearing the trail and debri by hand. Near the end of the day I took a hike forward following the ribbons and I found a boardwalk that Bill Menke’s crew had done. Just to be clear, we just stayed chainsawing, We didn’t do any treadwork or building a trail other than that. But what we did was over a mile, so that was really good. And we may have a work crew come in and work on the tread coming up in September. Still not sure about that.
Since it was almost 3 miles to walk out, Bethany wanted us to start walking out around 3 PM.So we started walking out and Lisa use the program on her watch to confirm the mileage.
Then we went out for dinner at the Copper Ridge restaurant in Mellen. We Finished off Three big pizzas. We went back to camp and I took a shower, then I sat around the campfire for just a little bit and I was ready for bed. I went to sleep before 9 PM, that’s how Bushed I was
The next morning I woke up to the fact that it had been raining all night. We decided this was not a good day to do mowing. So we decided to walk in and install some signs. Plus Kevin and Mike would be putting some white blazes up along the Upson Lake Side Trail. Bethany Joe and I did get the signs installed at the Upson Junction before the battery on Joe’s electric screwdriver went dead. Then we took a photo and hiked out.
It was a very productive work weekend