Written by Chloe Ondracek, Wild Stew Field Crew Leader.
After welcoming a handful of new crew members in the past month, we’re back to having two full field crews. This exciting news will mean twice as much work done and twice as many blog posts!
Our crew, composed of Charlotte, Foster, Kile, Sage, Jonathan, and Chloe, stayed relatively close to home to work on the Old Baldy trail in the Mt. Wrightson Wilderness on the Coronado National Forest. This was Charlotte and Foster’s first hitch with us, so please extend a warm Arizona welcome to both of them. Sage rejoined the crew after taking some part of the summer off post-YCC to finish their thru-hike of the PCT—they have now hiked all 2,650 miles of it! Jonathan led the crew for the first half before leaving to join the other crew in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico; he put in his fair share of steps as well with hard hikes in and out of two different backcountry hitches in one week. Chloe returned to the field over the weekend to take over leading the crew as Jonathan left.
After spending much of the summer working farther away from Tucson, the crew was excited to return to the Coronado National Forest and the mountains we admire daily from our own backyards. While Mt. Lemmon in the Santa Catalina mountains to the north is almost as tall and more popular due to its accessibility via the Catalina Highway, Mt. Wrightson in the Santa Rita mountains to the south is actually the tallest peak in the Tucson area at 9,453 feet tall. The breathtaking, 360 degree views from its summit are well earned through hiking over 4000 feet up in elevation.
The shortest route to the top is to take Old Baldy Trail #372 from the trailhead in Madera Canyon to Baldy Saddle before completing the last .9 miles along the summit trail. The crew spent the week camped near Baldy Saddle for efficient access to the upper portion of this route. Throughout the week, the focus was on brushing the trail to remove often dense overgrowth of vegetation. The main culprits that needed to be removed were Oak and New Mexican Locust. In the end the crew cleared the entire upper 1.9 miles from the summit to the switchbacks below Bellows Spring. The crew also did some short sections of tread repair on sections of the trail that had slumped downslope. Such sections can be dangerous to walk on and will only continue to get worse if not fixed.
The amount of work we were able to get done was helped immensely by multiple volunteers who generously gave their time and effort to bring us water from the aforementioned Bellows Spring—which was more than a mile and a half round trip from our camp and 700′ of elevation loss/gain each trip to get water! In total we were brought over 25 gallons of water and only had to fetch water ourselves the first couple days of the hitch. Also much appreciated were the tasty treats including apples (fresh fruit in the backcountry is a rare delicacy), delicious pumpkin bread, bars, and coffee. These volunteers, as well as many other hikers we ran into, are regulars on the mountain—caring for and enjoying it with genuine passion, and a great reminder of why we do what we do.
