Written by Charlotte Boncella, Wild Stew Field Crew Member.
This hitch, one of our Wild Stew Field Crews returned to the Highline National Recreational Trail outside of Payson on the Tonto National Forest to continue renaturalizing abandoned parts of the trail. This was my second hitch and I was new to rock work, so it was cool to learn the various techniques, specifically those that can help in restoration work like this.
The Highline Trail has been visited many times over the past few years by the Wild Stew Field Crew. The trail was originally established in 1870 as a way for people to travel between homesteads and school, and now is enjoyed as a hiking, mountain biking, and equestrian trail. The trail has been getting a major glow-up in recent years with lots of new, more sustainable reroutes being put in, and will ultimately be approximately 60 miles of trail that is both awesome for the land and people. Our main goal was to go in and make sure the old segments of trail that were being closed off can eventually return back to their natural state. We also got the chance to install gates, barriers, and signs later in the week.
How do we make sure people use the new trail, and how do we help the old bits of trail that are no longer part of the route return to their pre-getting-stepped-on-by-humans state? Rock structures! Placing rocks in a special way helps efficiently slow down water and collect sediment in eroded areas. This allows the ground where the trail was slowly restore to its natural slope rather than a channel that water can just rapidly shoot down, and it allows vegetation to grow without being whisked away by that water.
The rock structures we spent the most time building were called one rock dams or media luna. These were built with a slight curve to them, and sometimes it felt like we were building little rainbows on the ground.
For the first 3 days, the crew built dam after dam. Some areas had more rocks than others. When we were low on rocks, we took our dirtbags and went shopping for rocks. Over the weekend, Jonathan Barba from the Forest Service came to help us install gates, barriers, and trail signs to help users stay on trail and make sure that fences still worked as intended.
After that, we went back to building more one rock dams. By the end of the week, the crew had created 200 one rock dams and 6 rock mulch rundowns along a 0.6 mile section of old, abandoned trail. That’s a lot of rocks. We also built 3 barriers and installed 2 signs and 2 gates. On our last day, we blocked off a couple areas with slash to help renaturalize them and disguise them from the new trail, and then said goodbye to the beautiful Highline, enjoying the beautiful fall colors on some of the deciduous trees as we drove back to Tucson.
