Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship

• Epics

The spring Mountain Epic is presented by our friends at Santa Cruz Bicycles. Thanks SCB!

Join us for our Mountain Epic weekend in beautiful Indian Valley, located 10 miles downstream of Downieville on the sandy banks of the North Yuba River. In typical Mountain Epic fashion, we’re gearing up for a fun-filled, family-friendly weekend of recreating, relaxing, BBQ-ing, camping under the stars, and restoring sweet Sierra singletrack.  Read More »

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Hope you're not afraid of heights!

Recently I had the opportunity to go and tour Grizzly Ranch, which is home to Sierra Nevada Journeys. This is a year round camp that sees approx. 6000 kids during the year within their multiple programs. The Campus is surrounded by magnificent vistas, valleys, and meadows and is situated on 1,500 acres of pristine Yellow Pine forest on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Located just 45 minutes from Reno and Lake Tahoe, and 2.5 hours from Sacramento. As you can see from the picture, they have an amazing ropes course! Their goal this year is to do programs all 12 months. This is possible because of the positive feedback of their returning kids each year! We are partnering with them this year for 4 trail workdays on the Lake Davis Trail. We will see 14 + students at each of these 4 trail workdays. The kid’s ages will range from 7-14. We will work on drainage; trail maintenance and educating the kids about stewardship. The Lake Davis Trail is a very special and is just outside of Portola, CA. This trail is easily accessible to all in Plumas County and especially those in Portola.

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• Tara Stone's blog
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The weather was beautiful on Saturday and we had 34 volunteers turn up to dig on the North Yuba Trail with the SBTS. We split up into four groups and headed in from the Downieville trailhead. Our front group went out almost four miles to widen tread and back slope several narrow sections. We had the second group do some drainage work, brushing and widening as they headed up Slug canyon. The third group rebuilt a rock wall just bellow the bridge in slug canyon. The creek had come up high enough to run down the trail and take out part of a really old retaining wall. The fourth group was our trail kids; is a very exciting and new program for kids. Trail Kids is offered to youth ages 5-11 and aimed at playing games, learning about trails and using tools that are just the right size.

By the end of the day we created some beautiful sections of trail ready to be enjoyed for the 2012 season!

We want to thank our local sponsor, Undercover Ale Works for quenching the thirst of our many volunteers and helping cap the day off with a cold brew and some sunshine! Undercover is a new sponsor to us, and we are very excited to share their wonderful beer with our volunteers and members this upcoming year at many of our other events!

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• Tara Stone's blog
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Life on the Trail
(field notes from SBTS Crew Leader, Henry O'Donnell. week of Feb 20-24)
This last week we had some pretty nice weather out at Antelope Lake, highs in the low 60s. I decided to camp out again since we have enough light after work to at least ride all the fresh work. There is a little snow left in the shady spots and some frozen ground making us have to skip short sections until it thaws out. We have rebuilt a few switchbacks, making them wider and more sustainable to mountain bike use. Once our work sees some use and gets packed in there will be some really fun trails to ride.

Our most challenging task has been getting the excavator through the frozen sections where we can’t dig. We came to a rock shelf that wouldn’t have been to bad to cross if we could have done a bit of digging, but the ground was frozen, we went for it anyway. While Troy was operating Coz was guiding him and I hung off the side of the excavator to keep weight on the uphill track. We made it with no problems but it was very slow and tricky.   

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• Greg Williams's blog
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(field notes from SBTS Crew Leader, Henry O'Donnell. week of Feb 6-10)
The crew keeps digging away at 5500’ even though we are going into the middle of February. We have been missing days here and there but not enough weather to keep us off the trail yet. The most exciting thing happening on the job is driving the few miles of dirt road to the work site. Most of it was staying frozen but now that it’s thawing out it feels like driving in six inches of peanut butter on a tile floor. Our excavator is going to be on the trail until the road freezes back up or dries out a lot. This last week was so warm Troy wore shorts and we have been thinking about camping again. The trails are starting to look really good and there is enough light to ride after work now, so I’ll probably be back in my tent unless winter decides to show up.
If anyone has time and would like to volunteer with the SBTS crew please contact us. We have currently been working Monday through Friday but if people would like to camp out, enjoy the riding, fishing and do a bit of work with us we can accommodate for weekends. Food and beer will be provided for volunteers.        Read More »

• Greg Williams's blog
• 2 comments

• race

Join us for our world-class endurance run through the Lakes Basin Recreation Area on September 29th. The "Lost Sierra" is a 50 kilometer (32- mile) long foot race that starts and ends in the town of Graeagle in the Plumas National Forest.

Offical Race Website is under construction:

www.lostsierraendurancerun.com/

The race course has been hand-picked by our friend, Dave. Dave likes to run really far, really fast, has competed in a bunch of 50k races and is quite familiar with the Lakes Basin trail system. The mostly singletrack route ascends from beautiful Mohawk Valley to the crest of the Sierra, summits two mountain peaks, skirts the edges of more than a dozen alpine lakes and finishes with a 4000' descent back into town.

Here’s the GIS data from one of Dave’s journeys through the Lost Sierra. Like we said, Dave likes to run really far, really fast.

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Phil Kaznowski

SBTS Volunteer of the Month

January 2012

Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship member and local Clio resident Phil Kaznowski is shown here having fun at Susanville Ranch Park.  Besides being a killer rider and skier, Phil knows how to build sweet singletrack.   Phil volunteered frequently when we built the Mills Peak Trail and he jumped at the chance to play a part in the new 1.4 mile lower loop off the main Mills Peak Trail.  After the trail was scratched in on a volunteer day, Phil took over and has been out there ever since slaving away.  The trail rides great now thanks to his hard work.  Besides presenting Phil with a nifty SBTS Hoodie sweatshirt, we are officially naming the new trail “Phil’s Loop”.  Way to go Phil!

• Tara Stone's blog
• 2 comments

(field notes from SBTS Crew Leader, Henry O'Donnell)
For the most part it was a pretty normal week on the trail. The job site is 1.5 hours away from our tool shed in Graeagle and nobody is camping because of the cold, so we have been taking turns driving and car-pooling as much as possible. We have been falling trees just as much or more than we have been digging. This entire trail system was burnt several years ago and the dead trees are rotting out and falling on the trail everywhere. There were so many down trees when we first got to this job that the trails were virtually closed.

There is no maintenance plan for this trail system once we leave so we are doing everything we can to make our work last as long as possible. There are so many dead standing trees lining the trail we will never be able to cut all the ones that can reach the trail, but we are trying to get everything that will obviously land in the trail.  Read More »

• Greg Williams's blog
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(field notes from SBTS Crew Leader, Henry O'Donnell)
This week was pretty normal at work there was no camping in the extreme cold or dealing with animals in the middle of the night. We all decided to commute for the week so we car pooled as much as possible. The drive from our tool barn in Graeagle to the job is three hours round trip so it made for a lot of driving. We had some cloudy weather and a little rain one day. We had to cancel work on Friday because there were 60 MPH winds forecasted which would make very hazardous conditions under 100 foot tall burnt dead trees.

The SBTS crew continued doing restoration work on the Antelope / Taylor Lake Trail from the Middle Creek Trail intersection back toward Antelope Lake. This entire trail system does not appear to get much use except from the mountain lions, deer and bears. When a trail doesn’t get much use it is difficult to keep Mother Nature from reclaiming it.  Read More »

• Greg Williams's blog
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