Michael Wanzenried
SBFC Board Member
Warm Springs Trail | Jerry Johnson Hot Springs
Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest
This July the SBFC Board (and family) worked with the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest to improve parts of the popular Warm Springs Trail into Jerry Johnson Hot Springs. Our trail crew volunteers included Board Chair Nancy Feldman and son Jonah, Executive Director Sally Ferguson, Vice Chair Jim Heidelberger, Board Secretary Carlos and Diane Diaz, Jerry Randolph, Michael Wanzenried, Deb and Gil Gale, Phil Jahn, and John and Carolyn Lloyd.
SBFC Board members and family posing in their roadside pickup PPE.
Tasked with four projects for the weekend, we met on Friday to check the first project off the list: cleaning up our adopted stretch of road along scenic Highway 12. From milepost 114 to milepost 116, volunteers bagged hub caps, beer cans, cigarette butts, bits of plastic, and the metal-infused rubbery parts of exploded truck tires. Of course, only after returning to the pullout did we realize we should have set ground rules for how to assess which groups had the most littered stretch of road. In a slight mutation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: How shall we compare our littered bags? By the weight of worlds held therein? Cold road unburdened of soiled print and oily rags. Or measure each, length by height by width?
The communal dinner that night consisted of charcuterie, chicken salad, cucumber salad and chips. As people finished up, Nancy described the bridge and retaining walls the United States Forest Service needed built on the Warm Springs Trail. The lack of exact details plus a number of cold beverages provided fuel for some on-and-off discussion, analyzing alternate scenarios, but always with the same successful outcome.
Prepping in the parking lot.
Day two started at 9 a.m. with our Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest Wilderness/Trails Forestry Technician and leader Alex Totoiu who clarified the day’s activities and showed us the tools and materials we would use. Our goals were to repair a step, replace a retaining wall and build a bog bridge. Some of us would carry two long pieces of 6x6 up trail to where existing walls had failed. The boards for the bog bridge, Alex said, measured at about 9 feet long. Construction workers had cached them a mile beyond the bog beneath the stringers of a suspension bridge. Eight volunteers would hike in the two plus miles to the bridge and carry the boards back a mile to the bog.
Taking a break on the suspension bridge.
At the trailhead, John fired up Alex’s gas-powered drill to bore holes into one of the 6x6’s. I stepped a few feet back to get away from the noise and wondered how different Jerry Johnson hot springs would be after fifteen years. I watched two mothers, open hard seltzers in hand, waving their flip-flopped children over across the highway to walk into the hot springs. Probably not much.
Volunteers dropped the first 6x6 at a damaged step about a mile from the trailhead. A few hundred feet from there, they set down the second 6x6. Eight volunteers continued up the trail for another mile to the suspension bridge. The 9-foot long boards were big the way we think everyday objects must look to ants. Comical. Absurd. Somehow moveable. Two of the boards topped 16-feet and weighed 150 pounds. The third was 20-feet long and significantly heavier.
One of the many boards carried throughout the weekend.
All smiles as we carried the comically sized boards through the bog.
Every 50-100 yards back to the bog we stopped to rest and check-in with each other about our hands, arms, and level of suffering. Over the course of this short and intense journey, the story Jim and I began telling each other about work done on the Warm Springs Trail in ’21 had graduated from self-effacing but heroic, to self-sacrificing and epic.
A handful of volunteers repaired the step by using the Pulaski to dig out an area to place the new step and then pound it in with rebar and back filled it with rocks. At the new retaining wall, the Pulaski was used again to place the longer 6x6. Rock backfill and more rebar helped secure the 6x6 in place. Volunteers then dug out part of the hillside to widen the trail and used the loose earth to back fill the rocks. Further up trail, the exhausted volunteers took a few moments before switching from hauling boards to digging out saturated bog mud and vegetation. A cedar snag Alex took down and then cut into lengths would serve as bridge supports for the boards.
The heat and work of the day had settled into our tired bodies and dinner was quieter than the night before. Pulled pork, coleslaw and chips sated us and the glasses of wine or cans of beer sent us off to our tents early.
Laying down planks in the bog.
Rock work.
Day two started at 9 a.m. and the step set just the day before worked perfectly. A few volunteers applied the finishing touches to the retaining wall while bog workers crushed rock and notched the logs. A tricky spot required more digging than anyone expected. Finally, the boards were nailed down and volunteers took turns walking across it.
On the way out, we reflected on what the SBFC staff and Wilderness Fellows do on a daily basis for three months a year. Not a lot of us really appreciate the work that goes into repairing a trail where the results are obvious but the labor is all but invisible. The effort they put into projects like this go a long way towards improving public safety and strengthening the relationship SBFC has with our national forest partners, like the Nez Perce-Clearwater.
Bog “Board” work!
MICHAEL WANZENRIED, BOARD MEMBER - BOISE, ID
Michael Wanzenried lives in Boise but is originally from western Montana. Although he spent the first twenty-some years of his life as ‘outdoorsy,’ it was two seasons with a youth conservation corps that instilled in him a greater appreciation for being outside that went beyond recreational hiking and camping. These experiences led him to pursue a career in archaeology. Since graduating from the University of Montana, Missoula, with an MA in anthropology/archaeology in 2010, he has been conducting cultural resource investigations for private, state, and federal outfits in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. He is currently working in the sage-steppe desert of eastern Oregon and loving every moment